Under his care, that year, not a single child among the more than twenty households in the entire village miraculously passed away. This miracle made Henry Clark famous, to the extent that the title of “miracle doctor” spread throughout the surrounding villages. Young mothers from nearby villages would often carry their children and trek dozens of miles through the mountains—whether their children were sick or not—just to have the “miracle doctor” of Chengjia’ao check on their child’s development.

That autumn, Henry Clark was melancholic. Although the villagers had never failed to provide for him, and he relied on his dual roles as “teacher” and “doctor” to fill his house with all sorts of harvests, he, accustomed to modern life, always felt a sense of loneliness. So, he found something to occupy himself—with his guidance, the villagers began to learn how to “package” their game and mountain goods—this could be considered a form of “deep processing of agricultural products.”

The main force behind the “deep processing of agricultural products” was the children, because Henry Clark could only direct the children. The children were weak and couldn’t do heavy labor, so Henry Clark instructed them to make various auxiliary tools—fixing blades onto wooden tables for slicing bamboo strips; steaming the cut bamboo strips in a steamer, then weaving them into all kinds of exquisite bamboo wares after shaping them with high heat...

These mountain goods and delicacies, packed in finely crafted bamboo baskets and wares, brought the villagers a bountiful and prosperous year. Meanwhile, the children also learned to read and write three hundred characters.

When word got out, parents from nearby villages, drawn by his reputation, sent their children to be fostered with Henry Clark, along with a huge amount of “tuition and miscellaneous fees”—in the Song Dynasty, this was called “shuxiu.” Of course, these were all mountain goods, the best the villagers could find—wild mushrooms, wind-dried chicken, wild boar, and so on. All these were packed by Henry Clark into baskets and sold at high prices.

By the end of the year, Henry Clark’s fame in the mountains had spread even further, and the amount of shuxiu he received kept increasing, to the point that his simple wooden house could no longer hold it all. So, he recruited several potters from the nearby county, dug a large kiln near Chengjia’ao, fired bricks, and built himself a brick house to shield against wind and rain...

Thus, after mastering bamboo craft, his students learned how to fire kilns, ushering Chengjia’ao into an era of major transformation.

The more than twenty households in the village all renovated their homes into brick houses, which meant about twenty new houses needed to be built. To save on bricks, Henry Clark designed the houses to be adjacent to each other, so that most residents only needed to build the front and back walls, borrowing the side walls from their neighbors’ brickwork... As a result, almost by accident, they ended up building a fortress-like village reminiscent of the Tujia houses in southern Hunan.

By the twelfth lunar month of the following year, everyone in Chengjia’ao was living in new, modern brick houses. On New Year’s Day, when mountain folk from nearby villages came to pay their respects and saw the changes in Chengjia’ao, they simply moved their entire villages nearby. The adults found odd jobs in the village, their game was sold directly to Chengjia’ao, and their children were taught by Henry Clark and treated by him when ill.

In just one New Year’s Day, Chengjia’ao doubled in size and gradually developed into a village of a hundred households.

Fortunately, the area around Chengjia’ao was rich in clay resources, so the surplus labor was quickly absorbed, and the brick kiln was rapidly upgraded to a pottery kiln.

With more labor, Henry Clark’s management methods also improved. Under his planning, the village children were divided into six cooperative groups (in the Song Dynasty, these were called “she”), each responsible for digging clay, firing bricks, firing pottery, hunting, weaving, bookkeeping, and external sales.

By the spring of the third year, the entire Chengjia’ao had become a fully bricked fortress village of 200 households. The whole village was built along the mountainside, with six Tujia-style buildings—some square, some round—forming a large architectural complex. The village was surrounded by a wall of bluestone, and every household lived in a spacious brick and stone house.

But even with this rate of expansion, the village still seemed short of labor. The villagers had already begun to invite friends and relatives, preparing to merge several more distant mountain villages into Chengjia’ao.

And so, time slowly passed until the Qingming Festival, the annual day in the Song Dynasty for the ritual of “renewing the new fire.” On this day, people had to extinguish their household fires and observe the “Cold Food Festival.” At midnight on Qingming, the village elders would distribute the “new fire” to each household and announce the farming plan for the year.

At dawn, the newly purchased village bronze bell rang out melodiously. The villagers began to extinguish their kitchen fires one after another and walked in a line to the ancestral hall to pay respects to their ancestors. After the bell fell silent, Henry Clark did not extinguish his fire, but continued to sit by his own hearth, flipping through a book by the firelight.

The door creaked open, and his student Ethan Brooks walked in respectfully.

Ethan Brooks’s original name was David Brooks—“Seven” denoting his birth order. Because he was born in summer, Henry Clark finally named him Ethan Brooks. He first knelt on the ground and saluted his teacher, then said respectfully, “Teacher, Big John asks you to come to the ancestral hall for a meeting.”

The “Big John” that Ethan Brooks referred to was his father—the clan leader Adam Brooks.

Hearing Ethan Brooks’s summons, Henry Clark lifted his eyelids, turned a page of his book, and calmly asked, “Me? That’s not appropriate!”

Ethan Brooks neither saluted nor spoke, but kowtowed as he replied, “Big John says: This year, we need to hear the teacher’s plan, so we invite the teacher to the ancestral hall.”

The fire in the hearth gradually dimmed. Henry Clark stopped flipping through his book, looked at the hearth, and hesitated, saying, “The Cheng family’s plans... I have no right to interfere, but...”

Ethan Brooks kowtowed again: “Big John says: If the teacher comes, you will sit at the head of the table!”

This was significant. It meant that Henry Clark was not being summoned to the ancestral hall to be questioned by the Cheng clan, but to appear as a decision-maker, with a seat at the table, and to sit at the head.