"You're here, dear — wait just a moment." The old woman clearly recognized the young woman. She hobbled to her feet, fished out a grease-stained paper parcel from beside her, and pressed it into her hands.
Inside the parcel were glutinous rice dumplings — seven or eight of them, by the look of it.
The young woman waved her hands frantically. "There's too many — I don't need that much!"
The old woman wouldn't hear of it. She stuffed the parcel firmly into the woman's grasp, gave the back of her hand a gentle pat, and said, "Take it. Don't be polite with me. Besides, everyone's gone off to the Seven Star Workshop, so I've got more than I can sell anyway. It'll spoil overnight. You've got a little one on the way — you need to eat well so the baby comes out healthy."
The young woman lowered her head and pressed her lips together, her eyes glistening faintly red. In the end, she gave a small curtsey and murmured her thanks before hurrying away.
The old woman watched her retreating figure and let out a quiet sigh. "Poor girl."
Yang Kai asked, as if the thought had just occurred to him, "Are there really people who can't afford to eat these days?"
The old woman settled back down and said, "Well, not exactly. You're probably too young to know, but this continent is a far cry better than the one us old folks grew up on. As long as you've got two hands and two legs, putting food on the table isn't hard. She used to run a little tavern with her husband — business was decent, actually. But a few months back, the man got drunk and tumbled down the stairs. Broke his neck, dead on the spot. She was already expecting by then, couldn't very well work, and the savings ran dry quick. Now it's one meal, then none."
Yang Kai nodded. "You're a kind soul, Granny."
The old woman chuckled. "We're neighbors, aren't we? Help where you can. I wanted to have her come work for me, but the way she looks — you saw for yourself. She's not cut out for dealing with the public. There's always a few men out there who don't know how to behave around a pretty face."
"You can never be too careful about people," Yang Kai agreed readily.
He finished his tea, stood, and set down eleven copper coins on the counter. "Granny, I'm heading to the Seven Star Workshop."
"Go on, go on — the recruitment assembly's already started. It's a real spectacle! If I were seventy or eighty years younger, I'd be there myself." The old woman waved him off, then added, "And don't lose heart if you don't get picked. Things are a lot better now than they used to be. The world won't let you starve."
Yang Kai smiled. "If I don't get picked, I'll come back and help you sell dumplings."
"Well, that'd be lovely — I could pass the craft on. But getting picked would be even better. If you can cultivate, you'll be worth a sight more than us common folk."
The Seven Star Workshop's recruitment assembly was indeed a grand affair. The crowd outside the mountain gate was a sea of people. The entry requirements weren't terribly steep, but they weren't exactly lax either — particularly when it came to age, where the cutoff was absolute.
Yang Kai went through the motions, and sure enough, he was eliminated at the registration stage. There was no mystery about it: he was too old. The bone-age testing artifact showed a man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. If his cultivation had been high enough, the Workshop might have bent the rules — but Yang Kai had only displayed Zhenyuan Realm strength.
At that age, with that level of cultivation, the Seven Star Workshop naturally had no use for him.
By evening, Yang Kai was ambling back into the settlement. The old woman took one look at him and didn't seem particularly surprised. She offered a few comforting words — the living don't let themselves be done in by a full bladder, as the saying went — and told him to stick with her selling dumplings and grow the business.
Yang Kai nodded along without hesitation.
As the sun sank toward the horizon, Yang Kai pushed the wooden cart loaded with the old woman's cooking pots, bowls, and selling gear, and they made their way together toward a district on the eastern edge of town.
This area had once been a small village that the settlement had expanded to absorb. No one had bothered to maintain it, though, so it still looked rather ramshackle — within the broader Seven Star Market, it had something of the flavor of a slum.
Yang Kai unloaded the cart with brisk efficiency, then fetched water from the nearby well and scrubbed the equipment clean.
The old woman watched from the side with a satisfied smile. "Keep your hands busy and you'll never go hungry."
From that day on, a young figure joined the old woman's glutinous rice dumpling stall at the Seven Star Market. During the day, they pushed the cart out together and sold cheap tea and dumplings. At night, the old woman taught him, step by step, how to prepare the simple fare. Business was decent — on a good day, they could earn twenty or thirty coins.
The pregnant woman lived in a house not far from the old woman's place. Sometimes, after they returned in the evening, the old woman would have Yang Kai bring the leftover dumplings over to her.
The first time he knocked on her door, the woman absolutely refused to open it. Left with no choice, Yang Kai set the parcel of dumplings on the doorstep and left.
Over time, as familiarity grew, the woman became less guarded around Yang Kai — especially after she saw with her own eyes that the old woman and he went out to sell together. Still, she never had much to say to him. Whenever he delivered the dumplings, she would simply accept them with a stiff nod and a quiet "thank you."
From the old woman, he learned her name was Yu Lu.
Yang Kai had originally sent a divine sense avatar to wander through his own Small Universe, intending it as a form of relaxation. Typically, he would recall it after ten days or so.
But after discovering Yu Lu, he had to adjust his plans.
The avatar was never recalled. Meanwhile, his true self didn't slack off in the slightest — he continued to study the mysteries of the fractured space. Progress had been painfully slow over the past thirty years, and there was no telling how long full comprehension would take.
Yang Kai wasn't in any rush. There was no danger in being trapped in this fractured space, and there was plenty to occupy him in the Small Universe.
Discovering Yu Lu had been an unexpected windfall, to say the least.
The flip side was that while his true self was fully immersed in contemplation, the avatar in the Small Universe would periodically enter a vacant, hollow state — as if it had lost its soul. The old woman stumbled upon this more than once and began to worry that Yang Kai had some kind of affliction. Here was a perfectly healthy young man who seemed to drift into bouts of dementia — she couldn't help but cluck her tongue and sigh.
As the days passed, Yu Lu's belly grew larger and larger. The old woman grew increasingly anxious and went to visit her almost every day. Yang Kai, for his part, went out to the small river beyond the settlement each morning to catch fish, which the old woman would turn into fish soup to bring over for nourishment.