The next morning, Xiao Nanzhu overslept. Given how bizarre the events of the previous night were, he hadn’t been able to get a good night’s sleep on his first night back in his hometown.

All night long, he had tossed and turned in bed, unable to sleep. After much thought, he finally got up, took down the old almanac from the wall, and carefully examined it for a while. To his surprise, upon closer inspection, he discovered many things in this old almanac that had been hanging in his home for many years that he had never noticed before.

First, in terms of appearance, this old almanac didn’t seem much different from typical Hong Kong-style almanacs. It had the same bright red cover with gold embossed characters, filled with various traditional elements symbolizing good fortune and celebration on these ancient pages that recorded the changes of the seasons, carrying thousands of years of time, repeating over and over in an endless cycle. In the old days, people had no phones or computers, and their way of determining when to sow and harvest, when spring departed and autumn arrived, was to rely on the almanac. Legend has it that the almanac was created by the Yellow Emperor and evolved into its current form through thousands of years of wisdom from ancient Chinese laborers. Nowadays, such old things seem to be gradually phased out due to continuous progress, but at this moment, as Xiao Nanzhu smoked a cigarette while leaning against the headboard and opening it, he couldn’t help but be immediately captivated.

As far as his eyes could see, 365 dates were arranged in sequence in the form of beautifully detailed paintings of people and animals, from traditional festivals to some international holidays that only appeared in modern times, from the twenty-four solar terms to the most ordinary first and fifteenth days of the lunar month—not a single day was missed. This originally didn’t seem particularly strange, but what was odd was that when Xiao Nanzhu leaned in to carefully examine these beautifully drawn, rather classical illustrations, he puzzlingly discovered that each calendar page had, to varying degrees, some peculiarities he couldn’t quite put into words. For instance, the page he was currently looking at… March 8th, Women’s Day.

A woman looking at herself in the mirror, her face unclear, yet her figure graceful and elegant. That silhouette had an indescribable sensuality, just looking at it stirred the imagination. The phoenix hairpin in her hair looked incredibly lifelike, and her pearl and jade earrings paired with her cinnabar red patterned dress looked exceptionally beautiful. By all accounts, this should have been a perfectly normal painting of a lady at her dressing table, but the sharp-eyed Xiao Nanzhu immediately spotted several bottles that resembled modern cosmetics on the lady’s pear wood dressing table.

Of course, one couldn’t say that ancient women didn’t wear makeup—after all, they also applied powder, colored their lips, and used adornments—and besides, as a man, Xiao Nanzhu couldn’t really judge whether his eyesight was playing tricks on him. But what was even stranger was that when the frowning Xiao Nanzhu moved his gaze to the mandarin duck screen on the side, he suddenly discovered a package of… Whisper sanitary pads that had accidentally fallen behind the screen, with only a corner showing.

Xiao Nanzhu: “…………”

He immediately closed the almanac in embarrassment. Feeling somewhat like a pervert, Xiao Nanzhu rubbed his nose, momentarily losing the desire to continue investigating. If the sudden appearance and disappearance of the little chubby carp boy had left him puzzled, then this shocking discovery was enough to make him believe that his grandmother, who had been an almanac master for decades, must have been hiding something from him all along.

An almanac that, in his memory, had been hanging in his home for at least fifteen years was still keeping up with the current time. If he hadn’t rarely stayed at home, he probably would have discovered this sooner. But what about those mysteriously appearing and disappearing things hidden deep within the almanac?

Thinking about this, Xiao Nanzhu spent the night with heightened nerves, eyes wide open. When he was in the military, his sleep schedule had always been very regular, but now his mind was completely disturbed. He inexplicably recalled what Si Tu Zhang had told him earlier, and with this thought, half the night had already passed. He had thrown that mysterious old almanac onto the coffee table in the living room, but later, out of some inexplicable sense of crisis, Xiao Nanzhu got up again and stuffed it into the refrigerator.

The refrigerator, unused for half a year, contained nothing but two rotten eggs. The old almanac thrown inside, illuminated by the blue light of the refrigerator, looked somewhat like a suppressed demon or monster.

Xiao Nanzhu narrowed his eyes and pushed it further in, not entirely at ease. Only after confirming that this thing probably couldn’t escape the refrigerator did he return to his bedroom to sleep. Once he fell asleep, his chaotic mind sank into rare tranquility, and in his dream, he surprisingly dreamed of events from his childhood that he had almost forgotten.

……

As a child, Xiao Nanzhu wasn’t considered an obedient child. Except for being somewhat docile with his grandmother, he maintained a rebellious and wild demeanor towards everyone else. He went to school and studied, but the local hooligans around the school were always looking to test his fighting skills. Back then, Xiao Nanzhu didn’t know his own strength when he got into fights, often beating up the kids who provoked him until they ran home crying. Every so often, his grandmother, Old Lady Xiao, would face a stack of medical bills delivered to their home, sighing heavily.

“I say, Ah Nan, why… why did you break another child’s head again?”

“If I didn’t break their heads, grandson’s head would be broken instead.”

Tightly pressing his bruised and swollen lips, the eleven or twelve-year-old brat dared to talk back to his elder this way. Grandmother Xiao was at a loss with this child whom she couldn’t control, and could only personally make time to pick him up from school every day.

This treatment was unique among the children at that time, as everyone considered themselves big kids and didn’t want their grandparents to hold their hands and escort them to and from school. Naturally, Xiao Nanzhu wasn’t happy about it either, but his grandmother’s temper wasn’t much better than his, so no matter how much he objected, he had to endure. Si Tu Zhang would often tease him about this. This strict supervision continued for a semester, during which Xiao Nanzhu couldn’t interact with those children. But on one occasion when Grandmother Xiao couldn’t come due to some business, and Xiao Nanzhu was cornered by several older kids at the back gate of the school and, for once, was beaten quite badly, an event that would stay in Xiao Nanzhu’s mind for many years took place.

For a long time afterward, Xiao Nanzhu remembered everything that happened that evening. Already in a bad mood, he was pinned down with his face pressed against several pairs of dirty sneakers that hadn’t been washed in days, his face covered in grime. He gritted his teeth, refusing to beg for mercy, but the other two children kept pressing down on his arms and legs. They kept calling him a motherless bastard in his ear, the sound almost piercing his eardrums, and just then, a strange woman suddenly appeared.

“What are you little brats doing?! Do you want me to call your parents over?! Hey! Don’t run!! You dare to run?! You beat my son and think you can just run away?! Tell me! Which middle school are you from?! Oh, Zhang Da, I know your mother, the one who sells vegetables at the market, Little Liu, right? Just you wait, I’ll tell your mother when I go to buy vegetables tomorrow… And you, are you Peng Jiajia? What were you doing just now? You’ve grown so tall and now you’re beating people up?”

With a terribly loud voice, the woman who scolded people like a machine gun chased away those big kids, then gently picked him up from the ground. With eyes swollen from the beating, Xiao Nanzhu blinked at this completely unfamiliar woman. After dusting off his clothes and nagging for a while, seeing that Xiao Nanzhu still wouldn’t speak, she finally sighed, then pinched his cheek and said helplessly:

“What are you looking at? You didn’t listen to adults, so you got what you deserved. Come on, let’s go home.”

Xiao Nanzhu didn’t know her at all.

But that voice, both unfamiliar and gentle, warmed half his heart. He was dumbfounded as this woman held his hand and took him home, unable to say a word for a long time. He had actually wondered if she might be one of those bad people who kidnapped children, but then thought that since he was already so big, he probably wouldn’t fetch much money, so he wasn’t too worried. The woman didn’t seem to mind Xiao Nanzhu’s cautious attitude; she just kept admonishing him in a tone that was both concerned and angry, like any ordinary mother, and Xiao Nanzhu, who had never heard such words since birth, didn’t even know how he had followed her all the way.

That day, just as they were about to reach his house, Xiao Nanzhu finally saw his grandmother hurrying out to meet them. His grandmother immediately relaxed when she saw this woman holding his hand.

“Oh, today’s matter… thank you for your trouble.”

“It’s nothing, nothing, I’ll be going now.”

The woman exchanged a few simple words with his grandmother and then walked into the house and disappeared. That day, Xiao Nanzhu was again lectured by his grandmother, but he didn’t talk back. He had tentatively asked his grandmother who that woman was, but when Old Lady Xiao didn’t want to talk about something, no one could force her. Fortunately, Xiao Nanzhu wasn’t a particularly curious person, and even if he didn’t know, he couldn’t be bothered to investigate further. But that evening, when he opened his schoolbag to do his homework, he suddenly saw the homework that their Chinese teacher had assigned in class.

“Students, today is Mother’s Day. Please go home and write a short essay with the theme ‘My Mother.’ You can write about things that happen in daily life, or you can talk about things you’ve done for your mother. Please turn it in tomorrow morning, okay?”