Chapter 1

Once I learned I had been born into a poor family, I accepted my lot.

I was only a baby, after all. There was nothing I could do.

Mother had little milk, so I drifted through my days eating and sleeping, sleeping and eating.

The next time I woke, the bed was shaking.

Half asleep, I thought it was an earthquake and was about to cry out a warning. Then I saw that my parents, who had gone to work in the fields, had somehow returned and were eagerly making love beside me.

The sight horrified me, but I soon calmed down.

Eat, sleep, stay alive. That would have to do. I could not change anything anyway.

My parents were always busy. Before dawn they got up to work the fields. Mother would nurse me first, and then Father’s impatient calls would begin.

I had to put all my strength into drinking as fast as I could. Otherwise, I would go hungry until they came home at sunset.

Sure enough, as always, I had barely swallowed a few mouthfuls when Mother hurried into her clothes and left with Father.

I did not cry or fuss. It would do no good. There was no one to listen.

From then on, they had one more thing to do whenever they came home.

Until the day I could not get a single mouthful of milk.

Knowing I would starve if this continued, I opened my mouth and wailed.

Mother held me and tried again and again to soothe me. At last she realized I was hungry because there was not a drop of milk to be had.

All that exercise had left her pregnant again. I was weaned at barely three or four months old.

I lived on rice water. Most of what I remembered was hunger, but somehow I stumbled through childhood and reached the age of twelve.

All those years, I behaved myself and never said anything out of turn, terrified of being mistaken for an evil spirit and burned alive.

My parents worked hard at everything: two babies in three years, three in five.

As far as I could remember, Mother scarcely stopped being pregnant or giving birth.

By the time I was twelve, she had borne nine children.

But we were poor. Only four of us were still alive, myself included.

My youngest sister could not yet walk. As for me, my parents had put me to work as soon as I was old enough to understand instructions.

Now I went out early and came home late alongside them.

The soil was poor. No matter how long we toiled, the grain we harvested could not feed us all.

We were allowed to keep only a small portion. The rest went to the government and the local gentry.

The ambitions I had brought to this world were gone. Little by little, I stopped dreaming altogether.

There were no powerful nobles around, after all, and no peerless martial masters arriving out of nowhere.

Only tenant farmers who could not get enough to eat.

Worse still, Mother was pregnant again.

It was another burden on a life already steeped in poverty. My parents could only hope the rest of my younger siblings would grow quickly and join them in the fields.

The dull, exhausting days slowly numbed me. By the time I roused myself, Mother’s belly was round as a ball, and she was about to give birth.