59 From the Alphabet to Exorcisms

Ming Cheng ducked his head down to look at the wooden floor boards below him, trying to hide his face away and supress a smile.

He was going to school.

He was going to learn how to read!

One he was proficient enough, Ming Cheng would be able to understand and read through enough texts to be able to learn how to exorcise the ghost that was haunting him without even needing to be able to be able to scrounge up money for the priests and cultivators.

He would be able to keep all this a secret and completely under wraps to keep everybody around him safe, and as soon as the ghost vanished, then he would be able to stop hearing her voices and everybody thought that the commotion that he caused was only a temporary lapse into insanity.

Everything would work out and Ming Cheng would be fine again.

The last time that he felt this all encompassing warmth and excitement was when he had found himself a new shelter from when he had managed to escape one of the biggest groups in the city, after he had unwittingly been framed for a theft that had been done by another boy, after the bag of one of the older children had been found within his tiny sleeping corner, in the big, abandoned blacksmithing workshop that everybody congregated in to escape the oncoming winter.

Seeing the tiny nook between two houses with one of them having a hole in their fence just large enough for a child to fit through, to find a tiny secret passage between two larger homes was something akin to a miracle for Ming Cheng.

It had only been too easy to hide the hole that he had crawled through with a large rock, and the small passage way had it's floor carpeted in grass and a canopy of leaves that reached over and looked, from the outside, that the space did not even exist.

Small berries grew on those branches, and even if Ming Cheng couldn't reach them from the floor with his tiny, meagre height, it was only two easy to brace oneself against the two edges of the hide out to shuffle all the way up to try and reach them on days that there had been no food received from begging, or unsuspecting stall owners.

The tiny spot truly had been a miracle with it's only drawbacks being the more affluent neighbourhood with far fewer street stalls and people walking around willing to take pity on a poor street child and the fact that there was only one entrance, in and out of the space, with both walls blocked off by fences, making the area easily sieged if ever somebody wanted to starve Ming Cheng to death.

But it was also because of this place that Ming Cheng had met Lan Chang.

If he had never set himself up in this area, then he would have never have met her, and he would still be starving, shivering, and dying.