When Grace Bennett's son led a group of youths to attack Ethan Brooks, he looked exactly as he does now—smiling cheerfully, but with a cold glint in his eyes sharp enough to kill.

If Charles Bennett hadn’t stopped him at the time, Ethan Brooks might have killed Grace Bennett's son.

Everyone in the tribe knows that one day Ethan Brooks will definitely kill Grace Bennett; they say it with absolute certainty.

If it weren’t for Ethan Brooks’s skill in selecting and raising the best breeding rams, which allowed the tribe’s lambs to increase year after year and earned him the favor of Bi Suteqin, Grace Bennett would have long since used every opportunity to kill Ethan Brooks.

Sarah Miller had seen Ethan Brooks wielding a blade under the tutelage of the tribe’s warrior Charles Bennett, never stopping, whether in winter or summer.

She had also seen Ethan Brooks practicing archery under Charles Bennett’s guidance, and likewise, he never took a moment’s rest.

This child is now already a qualified Uighur warrior, able to leap and tumble on horseback as nimbly as a hawk circling above a horse’s back.

Now, Sarah Miller feels that Ethan Brooks really wants to kill that pig-like Grace Bennett!

------------

Chapter Five

Ethan Brooks Was Born from a Stone

Sarah Miller took a sip of wild vegetable soup from a wooden bowl, looked into Ethan Brooks’s eyes, and said, “I saw a giant baby, a baby as big as a mountain. At that time, the baby was lying on the ground sleeping, so pitiful, so lonely. I wanted to bring him home, but I just couldn’t move him... The baby was huge, and not soft at all, hard as a rock.”

Ethan Brooks’s body stiffened for a moment. He ladled a spoonful of wild vegetable soup from the clay pot to refill her bowl, and smiled, “So, that baby suddenly shrank with a whoosh, crawled into your belly, and nine months later, you gave birth to me?

Alright, you’ve told this story countless times already.”

Sarah Miller’s gaze at Ethan Brooks began to flicker, as if she had something very important to say. Her expression made it clear that whatever she wanted to say was extremely difficult to get out.

Of course, Ethan Brooks knew what she wanted to say!

The fact that he suddenly turned into a baby and appeared at the foot of the Child of the Earth statue is something no one would believe even if it were told, let alone that when Sarah Miller sneakily picked him up and held him to her chest, the huge Child of the Earth statue simply vanished without a trace.

Rather than telling it that way, it was better to say he was the result of Sarah Miller carrying him for nine months.

The reason Sarah Miller found it so hard to talk about was simply because she was afraid that if Ethan Brooks found out he wasn’t her biological child, he would leave her to look for his real parents.

She couldn’t bear to lose such a good son... What parent could bear to give up such a wonderful child?

At dawn, Emily Clark was still sleeping, sniffling with a bubble at her nose, while Sarah Miller had already gotten up and taken the flock of breeding sheep to drink water.

Ethan Brooks went to a nearby hill to chop firewood.

Although last night’s conversation was brief, they had already reached an understanding.

Uighurs accustomed to life on the grasslands actually don’t like to use firewood much.

In the tribe, theirs was the only family that used firewood for heating all year round; other families preferred cow dung or camel dung.

If they were on a grassland where firewood couldn’t be found, Ethan Brooks could understand, but here at the foot of the Tianshan Mountains, firewood was not hard to come by.

They preferred to collect dry, broken, or even damp cow dung, mix it with water, shape it into patties, and carefully stick them one by one onto the walls or rock faces to dry.

When sticking them to the wall, they had to be uniform in size and neatly arranged.

Their attitude toward cow dung was not like ordinary people’s attitude toward fuel; they had a special affection for cow dung and cow dung fires. When making butter tea or cooking, the dry cow dung was easy to ignite, and the scent of burning cow dung carried the fragrance of grass. Watching the orange flames lick the clay or iron pot, the dancing flames and the bubbling sounds from the pot would bring them joy, good fortune, safety, and warmth.

Since Ethan Brooks was six and could gather firewood and make charcoal himself, his family stopped using cow dung.

It wasn’t that they disliked the so-called fragrance of grass, but they hated the parasites inside. Sun-drying wasn’t enough to kill the parasites in cow dung; as soon as they touched a bit of water, they would hatch and crawl all over the tent. With charcoal and dry wood, there was no such worry.

Because of this, Sarah Miller felt aggrieved for a long time, because their tent wasn’t decorated with dry cow dung, and people laughed at them for being poor!

And that wasn’t the only difference—Ethan Brooks’s family was also fanatical about bathing!

Most herder families only bathed three times in their entire lives, but Ethan Brooks’s family basically bathed every three days, and had to wash their feet every day!

If Sarah Miller was unwilling, Ethan Brooks would pour precious hot water into the big wooden tub they’d traded two breeding sheep for, and force Sarah Miller to bathe with a stubborn look. As for Emily Clark, who hated bathing, Ethan Brooks would usually strip her by force and throw her into the tub, then scrub her hair and body vigorously with wood ash while she wailed.