The Village Chief stood in front of the castle gates, watching as the figure of the child disappeared into the distance.
His gaze became incredibly profound.
In a trance, he seemed to see the shadow of himself as a child.
As a child,
born into a family of peasants at the bottom tier, childhood memories were dominated by hunger, the theme of an eternally empty house, with nothing but a thin layer of food in the jar. Every time his father and mother cooked, they meticulously picked out a small handful of beans, and boiled them with bark and wild vegetables collected from the wilderness to make a green paste.
Every few days, his mother would take out a cloth bag filled with yellowish-brown bitter salt from beneath the carefully hidden bed frame and lovingly sprinkle this precious bitter salt.
That was considered a feast one could eat once every few days.
