Chapter 3: The Old Lame Man and the Little Pockmarked Boy

Yes, this question had perplexed Shu Guan for four years.

Because, neither from a biological nor a sociological perspective, such a village should not exist.

Taoyuan Village is an ordinary-looking small mountain village, and the villagers living there also seem very ordinary.

They eat with their mouths, walk with their legs, till the land with plows, catch fish with nets, can get sick, and will panic if they miss a meal.

Shu Guan has observed and confirmed this matter silently for a long time.

Especially in regard to himself being adopted by the lame old man, initially, Shu Guan had really fantasized that the old man might be a hidden expert who had secluded himself in the deep mountains.

The protagonist was adopted by a hidden expert, then trained to become an unparalleled strongman, and later emerged from the mountain to dominate the world.

This template often appears in many online novels, and Shu Guan thought that it would be nice for himself, as a transcender, to spend his life this way.

Especially before he was three years old, Shu Guan harbored such fantasies.

For this, he used many methods to test the old lame man, including the most ruthless one where he deliberately broke his own leg.

That day, the old lame man was napping in the courtyard. Shu Guan secretly climbed the old gui tree in the courtyard, pretended to accidentally lose his footing, and fell from a branch more than four meters above the ground.

He wanted to test whether the old lame man was indeed just an ordinary person.

At the time of doing this, Shu Guan was two years and eight months old. He had been living in this isolated mountain village for nearly three years, and he felt like he was going mad. In order to leave, he wasn't afraid of doing anything crazy.

Shu Guan also predicted that the soft soil under the gui tree would prevent any fatal injuries from the fall, so he took this risk.

Unfortunately, the result was not as Shu Guan expected. Instead of the old lame man leaping up and catching him before he fell, exposing his true identity as a hidden expert...

However, that's not how things happened.

The old lame man was woken up by Shu Guan's crying from the pain.

So that day, Shu Guan broke his leg.

Fortunately, the old lame man later set Shu Guan's broken leg properly, and no sequela was left behind.

In this matter, the only thing that made Shu Guan somewhat puzzled later on was that if the old lame man could cure his leg, why couldn't he cure his own disability.

Anyway, before he was three years old, Shu Guan made many such attempts to see if there were any hidden experts in the village.

Eventually, all of his attempts failed, and the inhabitants turned out to be completely normal people.

So the question remains: where did the earliest settlers of Taoyuan Village come from?

Because ordinary people could not have crossed those towering cliffs to come to this valley!

At the same time, the villagers of Taoyuan Village were not wild people who lived on raw meat and blood. Their clothing, food, and habits all bore remarkable characteristics of a highly developed agricultural civilization.

But Taoyuan Village, a small valley, could not have given birth to a mature civilization or evolved an intelligent group.

So the villagers of Taoyuan Village could not have been living in this valley from the beginning.

In fact, from what Shu Guan has learned now, the people of Taoyuan Village came here just over two hundred years ago.

According to the old people in the village and some written records from the past.

At that time, the world was in chaos, and their ancestors were displaced refugees who had lost their homes in the chaos. They fled to the edge of the mountains, hoping to find refuge in the forests, but still encountered roving troops. Just as everyone's lives were in danger, an immortal appeared and saved them, and used his immortal arts to send them to this place.

In Shu Guan's view, this is naturally a very absurd story.

The reason he doesn't believe it comes from a conclusion he has gradually deduced through his observations over the past four years.

Shu Guan has spent four years observing every single person in the village and everything in this mountain village because he has never given up his hope of leaving this valley.

To leave, the first thing to determine is where he has ended up after his time travel.

And now, he has basically made a clear judgment.

This should still be Earth, and still within his Huaxia Country.

The simplest and most powerful evidence is that the people in Taoyuan Village speak Huaxia Language.

Of course, it's not Mandarin, but a heavy dialect that sounds a bit like the Cantonese from Shu Guan's past life and a bit like the dialect from the Xiangxi region.

At the beginning, Shu Guan could only understand a general idea, but he was able to fully understand it not too long after.

After confirming that he hasn't left Earth, Shu Guan needs to determine which period he has traveled to.

The first time the old lame man carried him into Taoyuan Village, and saw the clothes the villagers were wearing, Shu Guan judged that he had traveled to ancient times.

However, it was difficult to determine a more specific period just by the style of clothes.

Unless it was a noble's clothing with various etiquette rules, or the clothes of common people in a big city, their clothes would have some details reflecting the characteristics of a period's attire.

As for rural mountain residents, their clothing has always been simple for the convenience of labor, and it wouldn't change much over the course of a few hundred years. For example, there wouldn't be much difference between the clothes worn by Han farmers and hunters during the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty.