From that day on, Ya’nan Village had two more madwomen.
During the day, the village’s bachelors and riffraff habitually came wandering toward the school, sizing up the city teachers with greasy, disgusting looks.
The men who came up to speak lewdly didn’t even finish their sentences before Fu Songcheng kicked their kneecaps apart.
“Ah—! You bitch, you dare hit me!”
The man screamed on the ground.
Fu Songcheng didn’t waste words. He walked up and pressed the mud-stained sole of his shoe directly onto the man’s other, intact leg, grinding down hard.
He looked down at the face twisted in pain. “Let me hear one more filthy word out of your mouth, or see you set half a step into this school again, and it won’t be your legs I crush—it’ll be your windpipe. Scram.”
Gradually, no one dared approach them easily anymore.
They didn’t live with the others.
The villagers cursed them privately as madwomen possessed by ghosts. Even the male players who’d been almost fully assimilated, seeing the dagger Fu Songcheng toyed with, could only awkwardly take a detour.
This fear was exactly what Fu Songcheng and Shen Ning wanted.
Only by making this pack of bullies who feared the strong and preyed on the weak feel terror could they free up enough space and time, instead of being busy fending off endless harassment.
The daytime classroom was filled with an eerie calm.
The boys below sat crookedly, their eyes carrying the same malice and numbness as their fathers’ generation.
They were Ya’nan Village’s future—the next batch of buyers and abusers.
“Teacher Zhang,”
A boy of eleven or twelve propped his foot on the desk and spoke with a thuggish air. “My dad says studying’s useless. Women who study still end up at home popping out sons in the end. You’re so fierce, you’ll definitely never find a husband. Why not be my stepmom instead?”
The whole class burst into raucous laughter.
Fu Songcheng walked down from the podium expressionlessly.
He wasn’t angry—he didn’t even change the rhythm of his breathing.
He walked up to the boy, and the wooden teaching rod in his hand swung down hard.
Crack!
A crisp sound. The boy’s instep was struck viciously, and he screamed and fell to the floor.
“I’m here to teach you how to be human,” Fu Songcheng looked coldly at the boy on the ground, his voice carrying through the whole classroom, “not how to be animals. In my class, if there’s a next time, this rod lands on your face. Now, open your books.”
…
Late at night, Fu Songcheng followed Shen Ning, using the cover of darkness to make their way to Li Guoping’s house.
As village chief and principal, Li Guoping’s courtyard was one of the few brick-and-tile houses in the village. The gate wasn’t locked. After Li Guoping’s death, the place exuded an eerie dead silence.
Pushing open the main hall’s door, by the faint moonlight, Fu Songcheng saw Shen Ning’s mother—Shen Ming.
She was kneeling on the ground, a rag in her hand, mechanically wiping the chair Li Guoping used to sit in, over and over.
She had been thoroughly tamed.
Decades of discipline had her instinctively maintaining a posture of obedience even after the abuser had vanished. Her clothes weren’t exactly ragged, but her whole person exuded the numbness of a soul drained dry.
“Mom…” Shen Ning’s voice shook beyond recognition. She hurried over, wanting to pull her up.
Shen Ming’s whole body jerked violently, as if electrocuted. She flung off Shen Ning’s hand and even shuffled back two steps on her knees, her head bowed so low it nearly touched the ground.
Shen Ming’s voice was light and drifting, thick with terror. “Ningning? Why did you come back? Go, quick—he’ll beat you to death.”
“He’s dead!” Shen Ning grabbed her mother by the shoulders, forcing her to look up. “Wake up! Li Guoping is dead! He was killed!”
Shen Ming stared blankly at Shen Ning, her murky eyeballs slowly shifting.
A few seconds later, she didn’t show any expression of release. Instead, she erupted in enormous panic.
“Dead? He’s dead? The village secretary won’t let us off!”
Shen Ming struggled to cover Shen Ning’s mouth. “A woman who brings death to her man—she gets hung up and set on fire as a sky lantern! Run, quick! Mom will take the blame for you, Mom will go tell them I did it…”
Watching this woman who couldn’t even muster the thought of resistance, Shen Ning sobbed in despair.
The cage of the body was easy to break. But the prison of the mind was indestructible.
Fu Songcheng stepped forward and pulled Shen Ning behind him. He looked down at Shen Ming kneeling on the ground.
“Shen Ming.” Fu Songcheng’s voice was cold as he called her by her full name.
Shen Ming flinched. She felt the same oppressive authority that Li Guoping had carried—and this “young woman” before her carried it too.
“You were once an educated youth sent down to the countryside. Do you remember?” Fu Songcheng crouched down and firmly gripped Shen Ming’s hands, covered in calluses and cracks. “Li Guoping is dead. You’re free. Your daughter escaped. Now she’s come back to get you.”
“Free?” Shen Ming murmured the word, her eyes still hollow. “What freedom do women have? Marry a rooster, follow the rooster; marry a dog, follow the dog…”
Fu Songcheng drew the dagger stained with Li Guoping’s blood and slapped it down on the chair in front of Shen Ming. “This blade cut Li Guoping’s throat. Look at it.”
Shen Ming’s eyes were stung by the faintly visible dark red bloodstains on the blade, and her body trembled violently.
“He bleeds. He dies. He’s just flesh and blood. He can be beaten to death—and so can the other men in this village.” Fu Songcheng stared into Shen Ming’s eyes, telling her that those men were no different from women.
It wasn’t because they were brutal and vile that they were invulnerable, impervious to blade and fire.
“They” were no different from them. Whoever raised the blade first was the hunter.
That night, Shen Ming knelt before the chair for a long time. Only when dawn was approaching did she brace herself on the chair’s armrest and rise, bit by bit, extremely slowly.
With Shen Ming’s cooperation, Fu Songcheng and Shen Ning’s “night school” finally raised its curtain.
Using the daytime opportunities to wash clothes by the river and fetch water from the well, Shen Ming avoided the men’s line of sight and quietly contacted the other bought women in the village.
Most of them were in situations similar to Shen Ming’s.
They weren’t locked up with iron chains, because they had already been locked down by these mountains, by worldly judgment, by beating after beating.
By day they did heavy farm work; by night they endured the men’s venting—living like walking corpses.
Every late night, Fu Songcheng and Shen Ning would slip into different courtyards, or meet these women in an abandoned ruined temple.
“I’m not leaving.”
A woman named Wang Xiu huddled in the corner, shaking her head desperately. “My man hits me, but at least he gives me a bite to eat every day. If I run and get caught, my legs will be broken. Didn’t the Li family’s wife who ran the year before last get beaten to death?”
“Giving you a bite to eat is so you’ll have the strength to work the fields.” Shen Ning counseled earnestly. “In his eyes, you’re not a person—you’re livestock he bought with money.”
“No… that’s not…”
Wang Xiu covered her ears, tears falling in large drops.
“Yes!”
Shen Ning walked over, her eyes full of grief. “Auntie Wang, have you forgotten how you were tricked into coming here? Have you forgotten the child you miscarried from the beatings?!”
Conversations like this happened every day.
The women’s numbness was chipped away bit by bit, their bloody scars reopened.
It was an extremely cruel yet necessary process.
These past few days, Shen Ming seemed ten years younger. Her body was still bent, but there was already light in her eyes.
She picked up a tree branch and, in crooked strokes, wrote two characters in the mud.
“Person.”
“Kill.”
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