The Taihang Mountain Range spans a vast area, with Kaoshan Village and Daliu Village separated by a mountain, and just crossing this mountain on foot takes at least two days and two nights.
On the other side of the mountain, there’s a village called Daliu Village.
The most famous wealthy household in Daliu Village was that of a hunter with the surna Dong. Madam Dong, whose na was Dong Feiyan, beca an orphan when her parents died of illness, leaving her without any stable inco or good farmland. However, she was an excellent hunter, and later she married and had two daughters and a son.
Her eldest daughter was the apple of her eye, and as a new mother, she nad the child Da Bao, which showed her deep affection for this child.
Nevertheless, in the year her eldest daughter was born, she had mistakenly consud a poisonous fruit, which left her severely ill for seven days and seven nights. Once recovered, her stomach started to grow at an alarming rate.
A normal pregnancy lasts around nine and a half months, nearing ten months. But while Da Bao was still in utero, her mother’s belly swelled up as big as a pot. By the sixth month, the fetus was fully developed, and after so labor pains, she was prematurely born.
The villagers said that since the child had spent only six months in the womb, she was bound to have a short life. But the truth was otherwise; although the child was small and developed slowly, looking like a two- or three-year-old child at the age of five or six, she was very healthy.
Sohow, as ti went by, Dong Feiyan slowly realized her eldest daughter had Innate Divine Strength. The little girl, with just a small fist, could smash a hundred-pound mountain boar into a pile of mush.
Because of this, the villagers began to avoid them, saying the child was a monster, possibly a Mountain Demon disguised in human form. Lending credibility to this superstition, the mountains had suffered hardships during those years—drought, floods, plagues—all one after another, which caused the death of many people.
So said this was surely the work of a Mountain Demon who had offended the Heavenly Lord, so the Heavenly Lord had unleashed such disasters on the mountain.
Though Dong Feiyan was capable in her youth and had a good temperant, she was amiable and therefore well-liked in Daliu Village.
Maybe she was just simple and honest, as she had heard those baseless rumors but still believed that her Baobao only had more strength than other children, and she didn’t see anything wrong with that. After all, mountain families like hers relied on physical strength to survive. But she never imagined that once the human heart turned vile nothing could stop it.
That year, when Baobao had just turned six, Dong Feiyan went hunting in the mountains as usual.
She was in luck, having hunted a two-hundred-pound mountain pig. She planned to sell the pig and buy so cloth to make new clothes for the children with her husband.
But when she returned to the village dragging the mountain pig, she found that her eldest daughter had gone missing.
She hadn’t been seen since morning. Her husband had searched the entire village and even the nearby villages, but the child seed to have evaporated from the earth.
Dong Feiyan was so anxious she was blistering at the mouth. In the days that followed, she stopped hunting and focused solely on searching for her daughter, only to accidentally discover that her daughter, her Baobao, had been regarded as a harbinger of disaster and secretly sold to traffickers by an old woman in the village!
She was truly enraged, exploding with fury. That ignorant old woman had treated her Baobao as a bringer of disaster, just because Baobao was on the small side, growing slowly compared to other children of the sa age, and was stronger. This led the village to demonize her, and they even blad natural disasters and epidemics on Baobao.
Yet how innocent was her Baobao?
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