Later on, people from the commune came and busied themselves for a while. People from the county seat also came and busied themselves for a while, before a conclusion was produced: a bomb dropped by Japanese planes in 1942 had detonated after a thirty-year delay. This meant that the Sino-Japanese War in Maqiao lasted right up to the year when it claimed the life of Xiongshi.

Zhihuang and his wife were utterly grief-stricken. Zhihuang took it particularly badly: since previously he'd always thought there'd been something between his wife and Wanyu, and that Xiongshi was most likely illegitimate, he'd never been terribly affectionate toward his son. After Wanyu died, the discovery that Wanyu was hardly a man dispelled this cloud of suspicion, and he turned a far more genial, fatherly face to Xiongshi, picking wild chestnuts and other things for him on his way home from the mountain quarry. Little had he imagined that from that time on, there would no longer be a pair of little hands to receive those chestnuts. Xiongshi wasn't at home, in the fields, by the stream, near the mountains; he was nowhere. His son had become a resounding explosion, before scattering and disappearing into eternal quiet.

Xiongshi's head was both unusually big and unusually round. He grew into quite a sturdy figure, his fluttering eyes as bright and beautiful as his mother Shuishui's. Just one of his sidelong glances dripped with feminine charm, reminding people of how Shuishui had been in her days as an actress. When people saw him, they couldn't help giving his bottom or his cheeks a pinch, vying with each other to squeeze his irresistible charms. He hated this kind of harassment, and unless offered something nice to eat would imperiously reject such advances, giving outsiders a steely once-over. With one roll of the eyes he could gauge whether you really had something to eat in your pocket, whether it was really worth trusting your smiling face, or whether he should act cool and calm for the time being and bide his time. He hated mushy talk from old people more than anything, it drove him mad, to curse then kick then spit-until, pushed to his limit, he would suddenly bite. His lion's jaws bit everything under the sun, starting with his mother's breast. No one who'd sat next to him at primary school, whether male or female, escaped his teeth. In the end, even the teacher's luck ran out.

He refused to produce a self-criticism in front of the headmaster for hacking at the table edge with his knife. "Self-criticize this, self-criticize that! I've had enough of doing things your way!"

As the head teacher dragged him by the ear to the teacher's room, he retaliated by biting the head teacher, then fled far, far away, holding up his pants and swearing his head off.

"I'll get you, you horrible brat!" raged the head teacher.

"You might beat me today, but just wait until you get old and come by my place with a stick, I'll push you into a great big pit!"

He was forecasting a victory many years in the future.

The head teacher followed him off into the distance, brandishing a carrying pole.

He couldn't catch up with him, of course, and soon the ball of flesh that was Xiongshi had rolled up to the house facing the mountains, and stood there, arms akimbo, keeping up the flow of abuse. "Hey, Li Xiaotang, you big old pig, your pubes are showing…"

He was using the headmaster's full name to curse him, although I don't know how he found it out.

Going back to school was, of course, now out of the question. Other people said that Zhihuang had brought up a complete menace through lack of discipline. Him, a student? You'd train a dog before you trained him!

Later, he would often come down to look at the school, viewing from a distance the students reading aloud in unison, doing gymnastics, or playing ball. If his former classmates saw him, he would make as if he was playing horse, "Whoah there, chaaaaaarge," galloping off into the distance, acting as if he were having a grand old time, as if he were taking absolutely no notice of what was going on in the school.

One day, playing in the sands with a few kids, he started to antagonize the others by grabbing hold of a battered overshoe which he was using to shovel sand. A few of them resolved to take revenge by shitting into the village well and framing Xiongshi for the deed. Saying he'd done it, they went with great fanfare to where the adults were working to report him. The adults were all furious at this news and Shuishui wanted to hide her face in shame; turning red, then white in anger, she yelled at Xiongshi: "Can't stand it if you don't get into trouble, can you?"

"I… didn't do it."

"Still talking back! All these people saw you-d'you think they're blind, got beans for eyes?"

"I didn't do it."

"There's no water to drink, so you'd better go fetch some! You fetch water for every single family, go fetch it from the river!"

"I didn't do it!"

"Still won't own up?" Shuishui gave him a resounding blow to the face. Xiongshi swayed back, swayed forward; the impact instantly produced a deep red imprint of her fingers on his face.

Seeing that Shuishui was prepared to go further, a few women standing around stepped forward to calm her down, telling her to let it be, kids don't understand anything, they're always like that, knock them around a bit, okay, but you don't want to beat them too hard… These mediations in fact only enraged Shuishui yet further, acting as a kind of pressure on her: if she didn't become more furious, more ferocious, she would have had no way of differentiating herself from everyone else. It wasn't worth anybody's while to try and calm her down-a bad end was already in sight. Under this kind of pressure, she had no option but to roll up her sleeves and plunge on. Pow, wham, two more slaps exploded; not with the sound made off a human face, more like the cracking of a wooden bucket.

Xiongshi bit his lip hard and stared fixedly at his mother. Tears gleamed unsteadily in his eyes; in the end they didn't fall, but paused then slowly retreated.

He didn't return home that evening, nor the next day, nor the day after that… still no Xiongshi. Zhihuang and Shuishui searched everywhere in the mountains, helped by the villagers. Just as everyone was pretty much despairing, an old herbalist from Zhangjia District found Xiongshi in a burrow in the mountains. Wild in appearance, he was asleep in a nest of thatch grass, and apart from the occasional flash of his eyes, all else was filth and grime, the clothes on his back ripped and torn into strips of tattered cloth. For a whole eleven days, he had survived on wild fruits, leaves, and tree bark; when he was taken back home and Shuishui boiled him two eggs, his face contorted into a terrible grimace after just one bite. He ate no more, and ran outside to sit under a tree, staring blankly at everyone, as he ripped up the grass around him in an automatic reflex and stuffed it into his mouth. The onlookers were all astounded: surely only animals prefer grass to boiled eggs?

Probably because of this history, Shuishui lost her mental grip after Xiongshi was obliterated in the huge explosion, and for some time refused to believe that her son was no more. She would run up to the mountains and shout herself hoarse calling her son's name-she still believed he was hiding in some hole in the mountains. This went on until people had no choice but to show her what they had all along held back: the finger, the half of the little foot and the two bowls containing splinters of bone and flesh. Her eyeballs bulged terrifyingly, then she fell into a dead faint.

When she came to, some of the women said to her, "You have to think of the bigger picture, in a situation like this all you can do is think of the bigger picture. Your Xiongshi left you early, but wasn't it a dear life? No worries about food, or clothes, messing about all day long, then when he'd messed about as much as he could, he left, no illness, no pain, he was lucky. Things could have only got worse for him."