If Huanglong Mountain was a place where men learned how to die properly,
then Gao Village had quietly become a place where people learned how to live.
Morning arrived gently here.
Chickens argued with each other over nothing. Dogs pretended to guard gates they'd slept through all night. Smoke rose from kitchen chimneys with the confidence of people who expected to eat today—and tomorrow.
That alone was already rare in these times.
Old Chief squatted under the jujube tree, sipping hot porridge, watching children run past him with wooden swords far too big for their arms.
"Slow down," he muttered. "You'll grow up too fast."
The children ignored him. Naturally.
At the village entrance, the Gaojia Militia rotated shifts.
Not tense.
Not nervous.
Just alert enough.
The guards leaned on their spears the way men do when they know the world is dangerous—but not right now. One of them yawned, another counted clouds, a third quietly practiced loading and unloading his musket with the patience of someone polishing a habit.
Fear had once ruled this gate.
Now it only visited occasionally, like a bad memory that forgot why it came.
The Workshop was already awake.
Hammers rang. Wood cracked. Someone cursed because he'd measured wrong again.
Inside, Shansier stood with a ledger tucked under one arm, calmly reminding three grown men that numbers did not improve when shouted at.
"You cut it short," he said.
"I cut it efficient," the carpenter argued.
Shansier flipped the ledger open.
"Efficiently wrong," he replied.
The argument ended there.
Nearby, new farm tools lay neatly arranged—plows with reinforced blades, hoes that didn't snap after two weeks. Someone had even carved decorative patterns into the handles.
Luxury, in this era, was durability.
At the well, women chatted while drawing water.
Not whispering.
Not scanning the road every five breaths.
They spoke about grain prices, cloth colors, whose child had stolen whose steamed bun.
One woman laughed and said, "If bandits come now, they'll starve. We've eaten everything already."
Another replied, "Good. Let them know what civilization looks like."
They laughed harder than the joke deserved.
People who had survived fear often laughed like this—too loudly, too honestly—as if testing whether joy still worked.
It did.
Near the ancestral hall, Gao Yiye sat on the steps, sleeves rolled up, helping an old woman mend a basket.
"Pull tighter," Yiye said.
"If I pull tighter, it breaks."
"Then it was never loyal to begin with."
The old woman snorted. "You speak like someone who's been betrayed by rope."
Yiye smiled faintly. She didn't explain.
She rarely did.
Children gathered nearby, pretending not to watch her while watching her very carefully. To them, Yiye was both familiar and mysterious—the kind of person who looked gentle but never needed rescuing.
One boy finally asked, "Sister Yiye, are we safe now?"
Yiye tied the knot, tested it once, and handed the basket back.
"Safe?" she said. "No."
The boy's face fell.
"But alive," she continued. "Fed. Armed. Awake."
She met his eyes.
"That's better than safe."
The boy nodded, not fully understanding—but remembering.
At noon, food smells flooded the village.
Porridge thick enough to argue with. Flatbread hot enough to burn careless fingers. Pickled vegetables sharp enough to wake the dead.
People ate together.
Not because they had to—but because eating alone had once meant you might not eat tomorrow.
Someone mentioned Chengcheng County.
Someone else mentioned soldiers.
A pause passed through the tables like a breeze.
Then bowls lifted again.
If danger wanted attention, it would have to work harder than that.
From the second floor of a quiet villa far away, Li Daoxuan watched Gao Village through the expanded box.
He saw no battles.
No plots.
No heroic speeches.
Just people doing ordinary things with unusual confidence.
He leaned back slightly.
A society, he knew, wasn't defined by how fiercely it fought—but by how casually it lived once it could.
Outside the box, the modern world hummed with electricity and deadlines.
Inside it, Gao Village hummed with something rarer.
Continuity.
Li Daoxuan reached out, adjusted nothing, and let the scene play.
For now, this village deserved a chapter without blood.
Trivia:
In late Ming rural China, villages that rebuilt communal eating and shared workshops recovered faster than those that focused only on walls.
Public laughter returning was historically considered a sign of real stability—more reliable than tax records.
Tools with decorative carvings weren't vanity; they marked ownership in an era without serial numbers, discouraging theft quietly.