On New Year's Eve at noon, Tang Ning made dumplings. They had pork and scallion filling, and she added a bit of sesame oil—they were out of this world.
Later, she used the address that person had given her to go to the courtyard house and exchanged some oil and meat. The previous day, when the village slaughtered a pig, she had bought two catties of meat as well. Replenishing carbohydrates and fat gave people strength. Look at that—once her diet improved, she had energy and her hands and feet stopped freezing all the time.
As for her current goods, she had the scalpers buy some items from the supply and marketing cooperative for her. Although her earnings weren't much, it still amounted to a few catties of flour.
Her Space was almost empty, having traded everything away, but a full stomach brought peace of mind, so Tang Ning wasn't worried.
Just as she finished wrapping the dumplings, she heard someone calling her from outside.
"Xiao Tang! Xiao Tang!"
Lin Shengwen came over carrying some things.
Tang Ning opened the low door and invited him in.
"This is a little something from the brothers and sisters at the bureau who know you. It's New Year's, and you're all by yourself. Here, take it."
Tang Ning took it and looked—well now, there was even a catty of creamy white rabbit candies.
Two catties of pastries. One catty of brown sugar.
It was tightly wrapped in kraft paper. This could be considered a very heavy gift.
"Brother Lin, I—"
"Enough chatting. I've long heard that the back mountain around here has good stuff. Hurry up, take me for a walk up there."
Lin Shengwen interrupted her refusal, looked left and right at the bare mountain, and hastily changed the subject.
Tang Ning wasn't one to put on airs. Since he gave it with sincere intentions, she would accept it and find a chance to repay him later. She smiled at Lin Shengwen.
"Alright, thank you so much, Brother Lin, and thank the brothers and sisters at the Public Security Bureau."
She put the things away, acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary, picked up a stick, and began leading Lin Shengwen up the mountain.
"Don't laugh at me, Brother Lin, but sometimes I set two traps, and once a pheasant actually crawled right in, giving me a hearty meal."
Tang Ning walked in front, making small talk with Lin Shengwen as she went to check her traps.
"Is that so? Well, you're quite lucky then. Anything edible on this mountain has pretty much been picked clean by now."
Times were tough; even though county towns and major cities had rationed grain supplies, people could still clearly feel the shortages, and whatever goods arrived were snatched up the moment news spread.
"Maybe it was just because it had just snowed, and the pheasants came out looking for food, not realizing they would become food themselves."
Further ahead, the path became difficult to walk, and few villagers ventured this deep into the mountain.
Tang Ning poked around with her stick, thinking the stick had hit something hard, perhaps a stone covered by snow.
She poked again, breaking through the thick, crusty snow to reveal a few clues.
"You could say these beasts are sometimes foolish, sometimes clever—" She lowered her head and instantly fell silent.
"Yeah, have you ever seen a roe deer? They say silly roe deer are just foolish, not even knowing to run when a hunter gets close—Xiao Tang?"
Lin Shengwen looked at Tang Ning, who had frozen in place, feeling a sense of strangeness. Her posture was too odd, as if she had been instantly paralyzed right as she was about to move.
"What do you see? Tang Ning!"
Realizing something was wrong, he took two quick steps forward and cast his gaze downward in the direction Tang Ning was staring.
"Damn it! Get back!"
He grabbed Tang Ning, pulled her behind him, and gave her a couple of shoves to push her back out of the way. "Don't be scared. Don't look. I'm here."
Tang Ning was like a poplar tree standing anywhere on the mountain; she almost fell from the tug.
Snow fell on the branches of the poplar tree, melting and turning to ice. When the wind blew, chunks of ice came crashing down, or entire branches snapped and plummeted.
Lin Shengwen looked again and remained silent for a long time. The mountain was dead quiet, and no one spoke.
"It's a little girl."
Tang Ning broke the deathly silence, saying it with certainty.
She could tell at a glance that it was a baby girl, thrown out into the back mountain to freeze to death the moment she was born, without even a piece of clothing—she probably hadn't even had the chance to cry.
In this day and age, adults couldn't even fill their own stomachs, let alone a child.
Yet the villagers had no effective means of contraception, nor any entertainment. Once night fell, making babies was the only pastime left.
Children born under such conditions lacked nutrition and required money and food, so some would secretly throw them away in the back mountain right after birth.
Among them, boys were preserved to the maximum extent, while most baby girls were taken away by some grandmother figure—some were pinched to death, some drowned, and others simply left to freeze like this.
Such things had existed in Tang Niuniu's original memories.
What Tang Ning could think of, Lin Shengwen naturally thought of as well.
His expression looked terrible as he pulled Tang Ning to head down the mountain, but Tang Ning violently shook him off.
"What are you doing?"
he asked.
Tang Ning bypassed him and continued forward.
She dropped the stick in her hand and picked up a sharper one along the way.
"Xiao Tang, be a good girl, come back." Lin Shengwen felt a wave of a headache. He was pierced by the chill in Tang Ning's gaze and gave a start; this girl had a fierce temper, which could be seen from back when she resisted the forced marriage.
"Let's go down the mountain. I will report this immediately, hold a meeting, and thoroughly investigate the abandonment of children across the entire Zhu Family Village—no, the entire Daxing County."
"It's murder," Tang Ning said softly. "It's not just abandoning a child; it's murder. It's killing people."
She used her stick to probe incessantly, checking every spot that looked suspicious.
"And there's definitely more than just this one little girl. There are so many baby girls left exposed to the wilderness on this mountain." Tang Ning looked around; the surroundings were gloomy, the wind was cold, and not even a bird was in sight. Her voice carried a quiet, bone-deep sorrow. "Did they ever cry? How did they all die? Can those murderers eat and sleep in peace?"
Lin Shengwen broke out in goosebumps for no reason. This girl truly had an unyielding spirit.
Normally she spoke and acted quite reasonably, but whenever it came to something like this, she would stick stubbornly to her own convictions.
Seeing that he couldn't stop her, he had no choice but to search along with her.
You wouldn't know until you looked: after just an hour of searching, the two of them found six infant corpses in this large area!
Tang Ning had guessed right—they were all baby girls.
"It's getting dark. Today is New Year's Eve." Lin Shengwen took a deep breath, feeling as though he had lived his life in vain, having truly never seen a girl like Tang Ning. He closed his eyes and took another deep breath.
"Do whatever you want. I won't stop you. But there's one condition: you cannot get blood on your hands like last time."
He simply couldn't stop her, and if he tried to force it and drove her mad instead, Zhu Goudan's family from last time was a bloody lesson.
Tang Ning loaded all six tiny corpses into her back basket and hoisted it onto her back.
She showed no sign of taboo; instead, she let out a sigh of relief.
"It's New Year's Eve, a time for family reunion. These children should also spend a joyful, reunited New Year together with their parents and family."
Every household in Zhu Family Village had smoke rising from their chimneys. No matter how poor they were, they would tighten their belts to eat a meal of dumplings. No matter how bad relationships were, people wouldn't fight during these few days—that was what the New Year was about.
To be called out by someone banging frantically on a worn-out iron basin at a time like this—one could only imagine their mood.