Chapter 173: Education

Hao Yuan smiled. “Besides Nanxiawa, there are thousands upon thousands of poor people in the world. How can there be so many lucky stars?” He placed the large bowl on the table. “I have some income now. After feeding myself, I have a little left over, so naturally, I help where I can.”

“I saved your father’s life and helped many people here. But outside of this Nanxiawa, who knows how many more Nanxiawas there are, how many more poor and suffering people? Can we just hope for more people to perform good deeds and accumulate merit?”

“When we poor people face a crisis, what can we hope for other than the kindness of others?” The girl sighed with a sense of helplessness. “If you’re lucky, you get saved by a noble person like you. If you’re unlucky, what’s meant to be will be: a life can be snuffed out just like that.” As she spoke, she wiped her eyes. “I used to have an older brother. He doted on me since we were little. Three years ago, he became an apprentice at a carpenter’s shop. I went into the city and even spoke to him at the shop’s entrance. But that same night, he was carried back dead. They said he was out delivering goods for the shop, caught the plague on the road, and was gone. If he had just had a packet of plague-preventing powder to blow into his nose, he would have lived. The powder only cost four cash, but he didn’t even have four cash!”

By this point, tears were streaming down her face. Hao Yuan silently patted her head.

She wiped her tears. “Mr. Hao, in Nanxiawa, this kind of thing is nothing. When someone dies, you don’t even hear a sound. They’re just wrapped in a reed mat and buried in the public graveyard behind us, and that’s the end of it. It’s just that today, for some reason, I thought of him again. Do you know how many fewer people have died here since you arrived, how many fewer have been taken away by the human traffickers?”

Hao Yuan nodded. “So you say I’m a lucky star—” He took out a handkerchief and handed it to the girl. “Wipe your tears. You’re a big girl now, still wiping tears and snot on your sleeve.”

The girl took the handkerchief and glanced at him shyly. “I knew you came from a rich family… looking down on a poor girl like me.”

Hao Yuan smiled. “Let’s not talk about that anymore.” His expression became very serious. “I am not a young master from a rich family. And I didn’t come here to be a nobleman or a philanthropist.”

The girl blinked her bright eyes, looking somewhat puzzled. After a moment’s hesitation, she asked, “Then what did you come here for?”

Hao Yuan avoided the question, his face both solemn and cheerful. The girl was confused, then she suddenly clapped her hands and smiled. “I know! Mr. Hao, you came here to help the poor.”

Hao Yuan smiled and nodded. “Tell me, why are all the poor people so poor?”

“Bad fate. They weren’t born into a good family.”

“So you’re saying the rich people just have good fate?”

“Then tell me, why is their fate so good?”

“Because… because…” The girl couldn’t think of an answer. “The master at the temple said it comes from accumulating good deeds and virtue.”

“But look at those rich people. How many of them accumulate good deeds and virtue?” Hao Yuan asked. “Even if there are a few among the rich, are they the majority or the minority?”

“The minority,” the girl said hesitantly. “But the master at the temple also said that the merits from a past life are very important.”

“Accumulating virtue in a past life only to do evil in this one? Isn’t that too strange?”

The girl was speechless, her eyes filled with confusion.

“Then why do you think it is?”

“Because this world belongs to them, the rich, not to us, the common poor,” Hao Yuan said. “Your father goes out every day with his carrying pole to do his small business, and the Shui Gen family next door works as day laborers growing vegetables… The grain and vegetables from the fields, the silk and cotton we wear, the houses and tools—which of these is not made from the blood and sweat of us common people? Your family makes lotus root starch balls every day, yet you can’t even afford to give me a bowl. Where did all the things we work so hard to make go?”

The girl was somewhat bewildered. She had never thought about these things before. She only knew her family was poor; she had never considered why they were so poor.

Hao Yuan continued, “Because this world is theirs. With a single word, they can take away the things we worked so hard to create.”

“Isn’t this world Emperor Zhu’s?”

“Emperor Zhu also seized the world from the Yuan Dynasty emperor. He was originally just a poor monk who had to go out and beg for food during a famine to avoid starving to death,” Hao Yuan said. “Tell me, was his fate good or bad? Why could a man who was originally going to starve to death end up becoming an emperor?”

“Umm…” This reasoning was a bit difficult for a teenage girl to grasp. But it was as if a ray of light had suddenly pierced the darkness of her mind, instantly illuminating something.

Hao Yuan said firmly, “So there is no such thing as ‘fate’ in this world. Even if there is, we can change it.”

“Really?” The girl’s face showed a mixture of doubt and excitement.

“That’s right. If you feel the fate given by heaven is unfair,” Hao Yuan said, “you can only rely on yourself to change it.”

“How do we change it, how do we change it?” the girl pressed. “Sir, you must know how to change one’s destiny. I’ve long wanted to change my own—or changing my parents’ destiny would be fine too. I don’t ask for fish and meat, or silk and satin, just to have a decent meal of fine grain and a few proper clothes to wear.”

Hao Yuan was amused by her words. “I’m not a fortune-teller, how would I change destiny? Even those who claim they can are liars—they don’t understand the great truth, they only play with a few mystical tricks. That’s not the right path.”

The girl was confused. “Then what is the great truth?”

Hao Yuan didn’t continue, instead asking, “Do you want to know?”

“Yes!”

“Have you ever studied?”

“Of course not…” The girl shook her head.

“To understand the great truth, you must first learn to read. Otherwise, you’ll be an illiterate, and the rich will bully you even more,” Hao Yuan said. “I teach children to read here every night. You should come too.” He looked at the oil lamp. “It’s getting late, you should go back to sleep. You have to wake up early tomorrow.”

“Okay!” The girl stood up in agreement, then added, “Mr. Hao, please don’t mind me for being nosy, but the two men who came today don’t seem like good people. The one with scars all over his face looks like a highwayman.”

Hao Yuan nodded. “They are indeed not good people. But their wickedness hasn’t reached the root…”

“If he’s a highwayman who kills and burns, how has it not reached the root?”

“A highwayman, he kills and burns for wealth.”

“But the power of one person or a few people is ultimately limited. The damage they can do is to take a few lives, steal some property for their own use. But once word gets out and they’re caught by the authorities, or intercepted by the militia during a robbery, death is inevitable. They live by the sword, and whether they do well or not, there’s no good end for them.”

“The truly great villains are all sanctimonious hypocrites, respectable men who are usually called ‘Master’. During a famine, they might even donate money and rice to help the masses. But when they do evil, countless families are broken and destroyed, and people don’t even know they were the cause. Not only that, they steal everything from the common people, then give back a few scraps as charity, and the people are still moved to tears of gratitude. It’s truly killing and destroying families without a trace.”

“Ah, there are such evil people?!” the girl said angrily, then became worried again. “Then doesn’t that mean no one can do anything about them?”

“That’s right. Because this world is their world. We common people are deceived by them, unable to see who the real villains are, and we see a few highwaymen as the most heinous criminals,” Hao Yuan said. “But as long as more and more people see their true faces, they won’t be able to deceive and bully people like this anymore. Not only that, we will also take back what originally belonged to us.”

Hao Yuan felt he had said too much. The other person was just a young girl, after all. She might not fully understand his words, and giving her too much at once might lead to indigestion.

“I understand now,” the girl said. “To change the poor fate of everyone, we must first understand the great truth. Once we know the great truth, those bad people can no longer deceive us.”

“Correct. You are very smart,” Hao Yuan said with a smiling nod. “Hurry back to sleep now.”

“Uncle Hao, you have to be careful…”

“It’s alright,” Hao Yuan said. “I am here, together with everyone. I’m not afraid of anyone.”

After seeing the girl off, Hao Yuan checked the straw mat covering the window again, then straightened the mat that served as a door, pressing down the corners with bricks and stones to prevent as much light as possible from leaking out.

Having done all this, he brightened the wick of the oil lamp, added two more wicks, and sat down at the wooden board that served as his desk. He spread out a few thin sheets of white paper and began to draft a poster. He also took out a worn-out book of contemporary essays and a half-filled practice booklet and placed them beside him.

If someone were to walk in suddenly, they would only see a poor scholar studying diligently.

Hao Yuan ground the ink while considering the content of the poster. This one was intended to expose Zhao Yigong’s collusion with the government to manipulate silk prices. He had been thinking for several days about how to write it in a way that was both easy to understand and used the fewest words possible.

The posters were to be printed in large quantities. If they were too long and complex, carving the printing blocks would take too long—and time was short.

Hao Yuan thought as he wrote on the thin paper. His calligraphy was the most common Yan style, not beautiful, but written with great force.

After finishing the poster, he revised it once, then copied it out neatly again. Once the ink was dry, he carefully placed the draft in a bamboo tube and tucked it into a hole in the corner of the wall. Then he took out a letter he had just collected from the Qiwei Minxin Postal Service, extracted the paper from within, and carefully heated it over the lamp flame.

Under the heat of the flame, brown characters gradually appeared on the blank parts of the paper. Hao Yuan read it carefully several times, then brought both the letter and the poster draft to the flame, lighting them and watching them burn to ashes.

After finishing all this, he washed his hands, poured himself a bowl of cold boiled water, sat at the table, took a bite of the coarse grain cake, and began to eat it with a sip of cold water.