Death did not come to the tofu shop in Cangqian as a thief in the night, but rather as a lingering, unwanted guest who refused to leave until he had eaten the house bare.
When Yu Jingtian and his wife, Mrs. Wang, arrived at the Ge household, the air was already thick with the iron tang of fever and the dust of neglect. They found Madam Yu standing in the center of the room, her hands covered in soot, weeping with a sound that was less like a cry and more like the tearing of cloth.
On the narrow wooden bed, Ge the Eldest was no longer a man; he was a site of devastation. The fever had burned the humanity out of him, leaving only a husk that shuddered and gasped. His eyes, once sharp enough to spot a bad bean from ten paces, were now glazed marbles rolling aimlessly in their sockets. His hands, calloused from forty years at the millstone, clawed at the air, grasping for a leverage that did not exist.
Yu Jingtian stood by the door, the collar of his robe turned up against the chill. He exchanged a glance with his wife—a look of grim calculation. They had arrived too late for doctors, but just in time for the accountants.
Madam Yu saw them and collapsed against the doorframe. "Brother," she choked out, her voice raw. "Look at him. He is already walking the Yellow Road. But there is a terror greater than his death gnawing at me."
She wiped her face with a dirty sleeve. "If he goes tonight, he goes naked. We have stripped this house to the bone to pay the physicians. There is no wood for a coffin. No cotton for a shroud. Must I wrap my husband in straw like a beggar? Must I throw him into a ditch? I would rather die myself than let his ghost wander the underworld in shame."
Yu Jingtian paced the small, damp room. The request hung in the air, heavy and unspoken. A funeral in Cangqian was not merely a ritual; it was the final audit of a man's life. To bury Ge without dignity would be a stain that would outlast them all. Yet, Yu knew his own pockets were shallow.
"Sister," he said, his voice low. "You speak the truth. To be caught unprepared by death is a tragedy; to be caught without silver is a catastrophe."
"We have pawned the winter coats," Madam Yu sobbed. "The cooking pots are gone. All that remains is the shop itself—the millstones, the vats, the drying racks. But who buys the tools of a dead man? And if we sell them, how do we eat?"
It was Mrs. Wang, standing quietly in the shadows, who cut the knot. "Sister," she said, her voice practical and devoid of sentiment. "Listen to me. If he dies, the shop dies. You are a woman alone. Pinlian is a boy of fourteen, weak as a kitten. He cannot turn the great stone. The trade is finished. Why keep the tools? They are anchors, not sails. Let your brother pledge them."
The brutal logic of poverty settled over the room.
"She is right," Yu Jingtian said. "I know the Shanxi moneylenders. They are sharks who swim in ink, but they have silver. I will pledge the equipment as collateral. We borrow what we need to bury him with honor. Later, when I find a buyer for the tools, we will settle the debt. The interest will be blood money—three percent a month—but it is the only path."
Madam Yu nodded, a gesture of absolute defeat. "Do it. He will thank you from the Nine Springs."
Yu Jingtian did not hesitate. He placed fifty dollars of his own on the table—a gesture of family loyalty that pained him visibly—and rushed out into the twilight to barter with the sharks.
In the dim bedroom, the vigil continued. The only sound was the ragged, wet tearing of Ge's breath.
Madam Yu motioned to the girl huddled in the corner. "Little Cabbage," she whispered. "Water."
The girl, pale and trembling, brought a chipped cup. Ge the Eldest was fading. The unnatural flush on his cheeks was darkening to the color of a bruise. Suddenly, his eyes snapped open. The fog seemed to clear for a terrifying second. He looked at his wife, at his stunted son Pinlian, and finally at the beautiful child-bride he had bought for nothing.
He raised a trembling hand, pointing toward the table where the accounts were kept. His mouth opened, working silently, trying to impart some final instruction, some warning about the debts or the beans. But the only sound was a dry rattle.
Then, his jaw clamped shut with a violence that made the women jump. His head fell back. The light left his eyes, replaced by the flat, dull stare of the dead. A trickle of white foam escaped the corner of his mouth.
"Master!" Madam Yu screamed, shaking the stillness of the corpse.
Pinlian threw himself onto his father's chest, wailing. Even Third Girl, the "Ugly Fool," stopped her aimless rocking and stared, sensing the sudden vacuum in the room.
The tofu maker was gone. The millstone had stopped turning.
When Yu Jingtian returned, flushed with the success of his loan, he found the house already dressed in the sounds of mourning. "I was too late," he murmured, looking at the silent figure on the bed.
But silver has a magic of its own. It turned the chaos of grief into the orderly pageantry of death. The undertakers arrived, smelling of sawdust and formaldehyde. They washed the wasted body and dressed Ge in the "longevity clothes"—stiff, embroidered robes that mocked the rags he had worn in life. They laid him in a coffin of unpainted pine, smelling of the forest.
For three days, the house was a theater of sorrow. Five Buddhist monks, their heads shaved and shiny in the lamplight, chanted sutras to guide Ge's soul through the bureaucracy of hell. The rhythmic wooden clacking of their instruments filled the alleyway, announcing to the neighbors that the Ge family, though poor, knew how to die.
But when the earth was shoveled over the coffin and the monks had been paid, the silence that descended on the shop was deafening.
Madam Yu sat with her brother at the scarred table. Of the one hundred and fifty dollars borrowed, twenty remained.
"Brother," she said, pushing the small pile of coins across the wood. "Count it. This is all that stands between us and the street. I have three mouths to feed. I have no husband. I have no trade."
Yu Jingtian sighed, the weight of his sister's life pressing on his own. He stayed for a few days, offering hollow platitudes, but eventually, he returned to his own affairs. Madam Yu was left alone to face the winter, a widow standing in the ruins of her life.
Time is a relentless river, indifferent to those struggling in its current.
Weeks turned into months. Yu Jingtian managed to sell the tofu equipment to a friend for two hundred dollars, clearing the debt with the Shanxi lenders and leaving Madam Yu with a pittance of forty-five dollars. It was a lifeline, but a fraying one.
Madam Yu became a creature of the needle. She stitched until her eyes burned, repairing the clothes of neighbors, turning collars, patching elbows. She stretched every copper coin until it screamed, mixing sawdust with the rice, boiling vegetable scraps into thin, watery soups. They did not die, but they did not truly live.
Then, the world outside cracked open.
The Taiping Rebellion—the army of the "Heavenly Kingdom"—swept into Zhejiang province like a plague wind. These "Long-Haired Rebels" brought fire and fanaticism, clashing with the Imperial Green Standard Army. The roads became rivers of refugees; the fields became graveyards.
In the chaos, Pinlian vanished.
He was eighteen now, but still small, still simple. One day he went out to buy millet and simply did not return. The gossip in the teahouses was grim: he had been pressed into service as a coolie for the rebels, or perhaps he had been swept up in a raid. To Madam Yu, it mattered little whether he was dead or stolen; the result was the same. Her son was gone.
Now she was truly besieged. Her husband dead, her son lost, her money gone. She looked at her household: the beautiful, useless Little Cabbage, and the gibbering Third Girl.
Survival began to look like a sin.
Yu Jingtian came to her, his face grave. "Sister," he said, sitting in the cold shop. "You cannot eat pride. Pinlian is gone. Third Girl needs a keeper. If you stay here, clinging to the memory of a dead man, you will all starve. The Ge line will end in a pauper's grave."
He leaned forward. "There is a way. It is not the way of the virtuous widows in the stories, but it is the way of the living. You must remarry."
Madam Yu stiffened. In the Confucian code, a woman did not drink from two wells. To remarry was a humiliation, an admission that her husband's ghost could not sustain her.
"I cannot," she whispered. "What will the neighbors say?"
"The neighbors will not feed you," Yu snapped. "I have found a man. His name is Shen Tiren. He is a clerk, a man of xiaokang—moderate comfort. His wife has died. He has three sons and a house full of chaos. He needs a manager. He needs you."
He softened his tone. "He is a decent man, Sister. He has agreed to take Third Girl. And he has sworn that if Pinlian ever walks out of the mist, he will be welcomed as a son. It is not betrayal. It is a lifeboat."
Madam Yu looked at the empty rice jar. She looked at Third Girl, who was chewing on a piece of straw. She wept for her lost virtue, and then she agreed.
The move was swift and quiet. Madam Yu packed her few belongings, bowed one last time to Ge's spirit tablet, and walked to the house of Shen Tiren. She became a stepmother to three strangers and a wife to a man she did not love.
Little Cabbage, bereft of a fiancé and a home, was sent back to her mother, Mrs. Bi. But the contract remained: she was pledged to the ghost of Pinlian, should he ever return from the dead.
Five years bled away. The rebellion raged and waned, leaving scars across the land. The seasons turned the green hills of Yuhang to brown and back to green again.
Then, the impossible happened.
A figure limped into Cangqian. He was twenty-five years old, gaunt, filthy, his eyes hollowed by sights no man should see. It was Pinlian.
He had not been a hero. He had been a porter, a beast of burden for the rebel armies, carrying rice sacks until his spine nearly snapped. In the confusion of a retreat, he had slipped away, walking hundreds of miles on bleeding feet to find home.
He found the shop sold, the house empty. He found his uncle, Yu Jingtian, who looked at him as if seeing a ghost, then wept with relief and led him to the Shen household.
The reunion was a scene of hysteria and disbelief. Madam Yu fell to her knees, clutching the legs of her returned son, sobbing prayers of gratitude to ancestors she thought had abandoned her. Shen Tiren, a man of his word, ordered water for washing and food for the starving soldier. He gave Pinlian a bed and a name in his house.
Word flew to Mrs. Bi. The contract was summoned from the dust. Little Cabbage was brought to the Shen house to meet the husband fate had returned to her.
But the girl who walked through the door was not the child Pinlian remembered.
Time plays cruel tricks. While Pinlian had been stunted by war, starved into a gnarled root of a man, Bi Xiugu had been touched by a strange, luminous alchemy.
She was eighteen. And she was dangerous.
She was petite, her body curved like a willow branch in a spring breeze. Her skin, despite her poverty, was the color of fresh cream. Her eyes held a liquid brightness that seemed to catch every flicker of light in the room. She wore a simple tunic of cheap green cloth and a white apron, but on her, the rags looked like silk.
The town had called her "Little Cabbage" for her dress, but now the name took on a lush, earthy double meaning. She was fresh. She was succulent. She was a "heavenly immortal" dropped into a pigsty.
The contrast was grotesque.
There stood Pinlian: short, bow-legged, his face a map of confusion and hardship. The town, with its unerring instinct for cruelty, had already branded him "Ge the Little," or worse, "The Dwarf."
There stood his sister, Third Girl: twenty years old now, darker than ever, her features chaotic and terrifying, drooling and laughing at nothing. They called her "The Withered Vegetable."
And between them stood the Little Cabbage, glowing with a beauty that could—as the poets said—sink fish and drop geese from the sky.
A Dwarf. A Monster. And a Beauty.
It was a tableau painted by a madman.
Pinlian, emboldened by his survival and perhaps stung by the charity of his stepfather, demanded his birthright. He would not live as a stepson. He wanted his own home. He wanted his wife.
Madam Yu, guilt-ridden and overjoyed, agreed. Pinlian and Little Cabbage would marry. They would rent a small space. They would start again.
But as the wedding preparations began, a quiet dread settled over the observant. For beauty in a house of poverty is not a blessing; it is a beacon. It draws the eyes of powerful men. It draws envy. It draws disaster.
Little Cabbage was too beautiful for a tofu maker's son. And in the shadows of the town, eyes were already watching. The tragedy of the millstone had ended, but the tragedy of the bedchamber was about to begin.