7 Chapter Three: The Old Lame Man and the Little Pockmarked Boy

Yes, this question has puzzled Shu Guan for four years already.

Because from either a biological or sociological perspective, such a village could not possibly exist.

Taoyuan Village looks like a normal small mountain village, and the villagers living here seem quite ordinary as well.

They eat using their mouths, walk using their legs, plough fields with a plow, use nets for fishing, get sick, and feel hungry if they miss a meal.

Shu Guan has been silently observing and confirming this for quite a while.

Particularly with regard to the old limping man who adopted him, in the beginning, Shu Guan fantasized that the old man might be a hidden expert secluded in the mountains.

The main character is adopted by a hidden expert, then trained to become an unrivalled strong man, who later leaves the mountains and wreaks havoc elegantly.

This is the template used in many Web novels, Shu Guan thought that if his life as a transcender could be spent in this way, it wouldn't be too bad.

Particularly before Shu Guan was three years old, he held on to this fantasy.

For this, he used many methods to test the old man; the most ruthless time, he intentionally broke his own leg.

The situation that day went like this: at that time, the old limping man was resting in the courtyard. Shu Guan secretly climbed the old Osmanthus tree in the courtyard, pretending to accidentally lose footing and fell from a tree branch more than four meters above the ground.

He wanted to test whether the old limping man was truly just an ordinary limping man.

While doing this, Shu Guan was two years and eight months old. Living in this isolated small mountain village for almost three years, he was really going mad and, in order to get out, he was not afraid of doing any crazy things.

Furthermore, Shu Guan had predicted that underneath the Osmanthus tree there was relatively soft soil, falling down shouldn't kill him, he needed to risk once.

Unfortunately, the final outcome did not turn out as Shu Guan expected. The sleeping, old limping man jumped to his feet, catching him securely before he landed, revealing his true identity as a hidden expert.

However, things didn't transpire like that.

The old limping man was awakened by his loud crying.

So that day, Shu Guan broke his leg.

Fortunately, the old limping man later set Shu Guan's broken leg properly, leaving no sequelae.

The only thing that puzzled Shu Guan later about this incident was, if the old limping man was able to cure his leg, why couldn't he cure his own limp?

In any case, before he was three years old, Shu Guan made a lot of such attempts to investigate whether there were hidden experts living in this village.

Ultimately all his attempts failed, those living here were completely normal human beings.

Then the question came: where did the earliest villagers of Taoyuan Village come from?

Because normal human beings absolutely could not cross those towering dangerous cliffs to reach this valley!

Meanwhile, the villagers of Taoyuan Village were not savage and primitive people. Their food, clothing, and habits all had the distinct characteristics of a fairly developed agricultural civilization.

But in such a narrow valley as Taoyuan Village, a mature civilization would never emerge, nor would there be the necessary conditions to evolve an intelligent group of people.

Therefore, the villagers of Taoyuan Village were definitely not originally living in this valley.

In fact, based on what Shu Guan currently knows, the villagers of Taoyuan Village had only come here two hundred years ago.

According to what the elders in the village say, as well as some written records supposedly left from the past.

At that time, the country was in chaos , their ancestors were refugees who had lost their homes in the wars, fleeing to the edges of these mountains hoping to take refuge in the forest, but still encountered lawless troops, and when everyone's life was in danger, an Immortal appeared and saved them, using Immortal Arts to send them here.

To Shu Guan, this naturally sounded like an absurd legend.

The reason for his disbelief stemmed from a conclusion Shu Guan gradually deduced through the observations he made over these four years.

Shu Guan spent four years observing every person in the village and everything in the mountain village, because he never" gave up the hope of leaving the valley.

To leave, the first thing to determine would be where he had travelled to.

But now, he basically had a clear judgment.

This should still be Earth, and he should still be in his own Huaxia Country.

The most straightforward and convincing evidence of this was that Taoyuan Village's villagers all spoke Huaxia Language.

Of course, they didn't speak Mandarin, but rather a heavily accented dialect that sounded a bit like the Cantonese Shu Guan spoke in his previous life, as well as dialects from the Xiangxi region.

In the beginning, Shu Guan could only understand the general meaning of what they said, but it wasn't long before he could understand all of it.

Having confirmed that he hadn't left Earth, Shu Guan then needed to determine the era he had travelled to.

The first time the old limping man carried him into Taoyuan Village, seeing the clothes the villagers wore, at that moment Shu Guan guessed he had travelled to ancient times.

But solely based on the styles of the clothing, it was really hard to determine a more specific period.

Unless they were clothes worn by nobles, which followed various ceremonial rules, or those of commoners in a big city, their clothes would present some distinctive features of that era's fashion.

For the rural and mountain people, for the sake of convenient labour, the style of clothing has always been simple, without much change over several hundreds of years. For example, farmers and hunters of the Han ethnicity during the Song and Ming Dynasties, there wouldn't be any major differences in the clothes they normally wore.