Chapter 5 Section five

Yan Guxing and Lan Yue'er brought the sheep and followed Zhi Zuizui to the outside of a gray tent. "Go in by yourselves, and sleep when you have a bed." Zhizui said in a rough voice, his face was like a running dog of the master. They entered the tent, and the sheep with eight hooves jumped in after them.There is only a dark light inside, and a few hammocks are placed there.The three-headed and six-armed woman, the swing girl who can tell other people's names, the giant in the magic lamp, and the jugglers just now, all sleep here.The three-headed and six-armed woman was talking nonsense, with one arm hanging by the bed.The giant snorted and held the magic lamp tightly in his arms.

Yan Guxing and Lan Yueer groped in the dark to find their bed.There was a smell in the tent.Lan Yue'er had already smelled the smell of dead people during the plague in her hometown mountain city, but this smell is even more desolate and hopeless than that. They found two side-by-side hammocks behind the swing girl and lay down, letting the sheep sleep on the ground. "They are very pitiful." Lan Yueer lowered her voice and said to Yan Guxing. "Maybe they are like us, fatherless and motherless," he said. Lan Yueer thought of the young monk in her hometown, she used to wipe his tears with her bed sheet and bed cover.

"The monks say that every child is holy at birth," she said. "Then why didn't their parents want them?" he asked her, with precocious melancholy on his face. It was a question she didn't know how to answer. "The monks said that when a person suffers enough, God takes him back," she said. The swing girl, sleeping in the hammock behind her, rolled over, her thin, dry, scarred legs arched, her sleepless eyes open in the dark. Yan Guxing put his hands behind his head, looked at the stars leaking from the hole in the roof, and said, "Little one, look, it's a star!"

"It's flowers," she replied. He turned his face away and saw her figure in the dark, and suddenly, he didn't want to be separated from her anymore. Until the days when the past was like smoke, he never forgot that that night when she was watching the stars in the tent, she was lying on a hammock and said in a singing voice: "The stars in the sky are the shadows of flowers."