Village Girl comes to the Imperial Capital

The morning mist laid like a thin gauze across the ground of the forest and the morning sun was slowly rising above the distant mountains, spreading its warm golden light across the tree tops.

Xiao Li was crouching down beside a medicinal plant and skillfully extracting it from the ground before she casually threw it into the rattan basket she was carrying on her back.

She was 18 years old this year and was rather pretty with fair skin and a pair of expressive, clear eyes, however most people would perceive her as a little dense the first time they saw her. As to why she had this dense look was difficult to pin point. But it often made people treat her as if she was a little slow the first time they met her, though she rarely met other people besides her grandfather.

She was wearing a dark blue shirt and pants that hung loosely around her skinny body; it was the kind of clothes the poor village grandmas typically wore. On her feet she had a pair of pink rain boots that shined like a pair of neon signs in contrast with the dark green colors of the forest.

She spent the entire morning and worked a little past noon foraging medicinal plants and now her rattan basket was completely full.

This was how her every morning was spent, even the days it rained.

She lived a simple life together with her grandfather in a bamboo house far away from the modern and hectic civilization. Nearest town was a four hour walk, since there were no roads nearby, plus a two hour drive by car. Of course they weren't completely alone, about a two hour walk was the closest village, however it was poor and had no electricity. She had been there a few times in her life but she didn't like it there. When she was young she didn't know how to play with the village children and they pretty much either ignored her or teased her so she always felt more alone in the village than out here in the forest where there were no one. Then there were the rumors and stories about her, everyone thought she must be a strange person living alone with her grandfather so far away from everyone else. However, her grandfather had a great reputation and was well-liked in the village as he was an ancient Chinese medicine doctor who'd visit them once a month to give them medicine and treatments. The village elders had wanted them to move into the village, or at least closer to them, but her grandfather had refused because then they'd live too far away from the medicinal plants that only grew this far into the mountains.

After putting the last medicinal plant into the basket she stood up and wiped the sweat from her brow and took a moment to appreciate the view from where she stood.

She stood by the side of the mountain and had a great view over the forest ceiling that stretched toward the horizon where other mountains rolled softly behind a faint blue mist.

She hung her "claw" which was the tool she used to dig out the medicinal plants on the rope that acted as a belt around her waist and then began her journey back home.

It took her two hours before she finally reached the small bamboo gate of the front yard.

Once home, she walked into a shed and unloaded the basket onto a table and began sorting and preparing the medicinal plants before hanging them up to dry on strings that were tied across the ceiling.

When she was finished, she finally went out into the garden and then walked into the house.

She hanged the "claw" on a hook beside the door and was then preparing to head to the large ceramic pot where they stored their rice, but was interrupted when she noticed a note lying on the dinner table.

She walked over and picked up the note and read it. It was a short message from her grandfather that he'd gone away on one of his yearly excursion across the many remote villages. He did two of these trips every year and each trip would last about a month before he returned.

She sighed helplessly at the note. He was always like this, never mentioning anything beforehand and just vanishing mysteriously. She walked over to the trash bin to throw the note away when she noticed the door to her grandfather's bedroom was slightly ajar.

Thinking he might not have left yet, she walked over and pulled the door open, only to find the room empty. But she noticed a brown paper envelope lying on his desk.

Not knowing why, she grew curious and walked over and picked it up and untied the string in the back before opening it and pulling out the papers inside.

To her surprise the first paper she saw had a small black and white photograph of a handsome man in the top left corner and then there were several rows of writing, mentioning the man's name, birth date, living situation and other miscellaneous information. And then at the bottom were several rows of text mentioning his career, beginning at which university he graduated from and how he had been promoted four or five times until he was now working as a captain for a small team within the police force, called Specialist Crime Investigation Unit, or SCIU for short.

As a person who had grown up far away from civilization she didn't understand most of the information, but she knew what the police was and what they did.

Then she flipped to the next paper and got a bit of a headache as she read it through, there was a lot of legal speech and written with a very formal style with a bunch of Chinese characters she hadn't seen before. And at the bottom of the paper where two red stamps, out of which she recognized one was her grandfather's. But after reading through it a few times she began to piece together the puzzle and understood that it was a marriage contract between herself and the man on previous paper.

Realizing this, she flipped back to the previous paper and looked at the photo more carefully. She didn't know much about marriage, besides that when a man and woman became of age they would live together for the rest of their lives and start a new family. She had seen these types of families in the village.

Later that night as Xiao Li was lying in bed she couldn't fall asleep. Her mind was so occupied on the marriage contract and the person she was supposed to marry. She realized she had never really thought about her living with another person besides her grandfather. In fact, she had just assumed they would always live together. She hadn't even really thought about the fact her grandfather was growing old and would one day pass away. So there was a lot of new thoughts in her mind which she hadn't thought about before. And every thought she carried had the meaning that her life was about to change, in big ways.