Part One: County Town

Chapter One: Opening

April 15, 1977, an ordinary day as ordinary as can be on the lunar calendar.

That day, the weather was fine and sunny, not a cloud in the sky, the heavens blue as still porcelain, all of southern China laid bare under the gentle sunlight.

At 3:30 in the afternoon, a column of white vapor condensed in the sky, slashing a long, strange scar diagonally across the heavens. A white rainbow piercing the sky? But it was not a rainbow, rather a somewhat odd column of vapor. Some people on the ground had already noticed the phenomenon overhead, raising their heads to look, and soon a self-proclaimed know-it-all shouted, "What are you looking at? It's just a jet plane."

People on the ground could not see the source of the white vapor column. So they had no idea how long it was, nor that it originated from across the strait, a thousand miles away.

In the half hour after the vapor column formed, a sudden gale swept through the streets of Taipei, leaves tumbling off branches, raindrops pouring down, and motorcycles struggling along the slippery roads.

In this month of this year, the island began implementing the detailed rules for the Equalization of Land Rights Act. Those in real estate and those who owned land each had their own worries and joys.

Outside the city, on Yangming Mountain, the wild grass all bent northward, their tips like swords, exuding a murderous aura. Even the hot springs in the mountains seemed to be drawn by some force, their temperature slowly rising. A half-bald, slightly chubby middle-aged man suddenly cried out and hurried out of the hot spring. Luckily, there were few people bathing at the time, but seeing the bubbles in the spring rapidly bursting through the water, the attendant nearby was left wide-eyed.

The white vapor column streaked across the sky over China, but the strange phenomena below only appeared after some time. Thus, along the mysterious trajectory from Taipei, Fuzhou, Nanping, Nanchang, Jiujiang, to Wuhan... torrential rain and thunder erupted.

The blue waters of the strait began to grow restless, waves rising out of nowhere, tossing fishing boats about, but no one noticed a stowaway in the water, struggling to stay afloat while clutching a wooden box.

Edward Brooks was a math teacher at Jiujiang No. 2 High School, one of those who had just been rehabilitated. At this moment, he was leading students in volunteer labor, listening to the loudspeaker broadcasting "Chairman Hua...", thinking about the endless articles on the "Two Whatevers" in last month's People's Daily and Red Flag, and this ordinary teacher couldn't help but smile. He stood on the river embankment, looking up at the strange sight overhead, his thick glasses reflecting his puzzled gaze. Suddenly, a raindrop quietly fell, landing right between his brows.

……

Meteorological experts would surely be dumbfounded, unable to figure out how this column of cloud had appeared so abruptly in the sky.

Fortunately, the cloud column gradually dissipated into the blue sky, and everything on the ground slowly returned to normal.

And at the very moment the white cloud column finally vanished, outside a small city in the western Hubei mountains, an explosion occurred.

The explosion site was a large pit, three meters deep and three meters wide. Nothing was found in the pit, only a large patch of granite at the bottom, scorched black. Later, a militia officer arrived, circled the pit three times, and then reported to his superiors: ball lightning had detonated the blasting caps used by fishermen.

Thus, another vigorous campaign against dangerous fishing was launched locally, and all sorts of blasting caps and explosives were confiscated, piled into a small mountain on the playground of the county high school.

No one noticed that, two hundred meters from the pit, there was an old scavenger, simmering plain porridge in a blackened, battered pot, his face full of affection as he looked at the filthy, smelly bed.

On the bed lay a baby, with rosy cheeks and bright, lively eyes, looking pure and adorable.

Chapter Two: Yi Tianxing's Affairs

In the early summer of 1994, the small city of Gaoyang in western Hubei was being baked by endless heat. This year, David Foster, a senior in high school, was already seventeen years old, 1.7 meters tall, with an ordinary face—neither fat nor thin—undoubtedly the kind of person who, if thrown into a crowd, wouldn't even make a ripple.

However, he was something of a minor celebrity at the county high school. His fame was rather unusual, an outlier's reputation, because his life was so different from that of most children. He had no parents, but couldn't really be called an orphan, as he was raised by the old scavenger at the west end of town.

From a young age, David Foster had followed the old man he called Grandpa, rummaging through trash heaps to find things to sell. He always called this "scraping for food"—and that's exactly what it was: digging out things from the garbage that could be exchanged for food.

Even many years later, people around the county seat still remembered that in the early 1980s, there was a clever, adorable little boy, always filthy, and that as soon as he learned to crawl, he was already picking up cigarette butts from the ground for his grandpa.