The house was a two-story building of a very ordinary rural style, a simple square structure. The main house stood in the middle of the property, with courtyards in both the front and the back. A concrete driveway wide enough for vehicles ran through the center of the front yard, with vegetable plots on either side. The back yard contained the kitchen, woodshed, storage room, and bathhouse, with several walnut trees growing nearby. Both courtyards were enclosed by walls. 

Jing Lin opened the iron gate in the wall and stood by the roadside, looking around. 

Although the village was surrounded by mountains on all sides, the land outside the mountains was very flat, allowing him to see far into the distance. The concrete roads in the village had been funded collectively by the villagers themselves, and rice paddies stretched along both sides of the roads. It was now July, the growing season for rice. Jing Lin saw several elderly men carrying pesticide sprayers on their backs as they sprayed the rice fields. 

The people still farming in the village were mostly elderly residents and a few women whose families remained there. The younger and middle-aged adults had largely gone elsewhere to work. Although farming subsidies existed, growing crops alone did not bring in much money over the course of a year. 

When Jing Lin’s grandfather was still alive, he farmed the land and had also leased two ponds in the village, where he raised fish and cultivated lotus roots. That was how he managed to raise Jing Lin and his sister. After his grandfather passed away, there were still fifteen years remaining on the pond lease. After discussing it with his sister, Jing Lin transferred the lease to a family in the village that had always been on good terms with them. The farmland was rented to that family as well. The pond lease fees and land rent were both settled once at the end of each year. 

Now Jing Lin was completely out of money, and there was not even a grain of rice left in the house. He could only go and collect this year’s payments in advance. At the same time, he needed to find the village’s elderly doctor and ask about Le Le’s condition. 

Jing Lin did not know where the old doctor had worked before. Ever since he could remember, the doctor had run a small clinic in the village. Later, he had been hired as the director of the township health center and usually did not return home until evening. 

Villagers usually sprayed pesticides either early in the morning or in the late afternoon. Judging by the time, it clearly was not morning, so Jing Lin estimated it was already late afternoon. No wonder hunger had woken him up. 

After returning home, Jing Lin cleaned the kitchen and used the traditional earthen stove to boil a kettle of water. He mixed a packet of children’s milk powder in a bowl, cooled it with well water until it was suitable to drink, and carried it upstairs, intending to feed it to Le Le.