Su Tang looked over and immediately pointed to the location that the orange cat had pointed out and shouted, “Fuhua, check there!”
The water of the river was very cold and Su Fuhua had already dived in several times to search, so he was freezing and nearly to the point where he couldn’t hold on anymore. So when he suddenly heard Su Tang’s shout, his mind was too muddled to process what was going on properly or question why Su Tang would say that, and he just directly jumped to the place where she indicated.
However, the other people on the bank all sent accusing glares at Su Tang. It was already such a tense situation so why was this little girl adding to the confusion?
But it wasn’t long before Su Fuhua remerged, this time carrying a person! It was the girl from the Zhou family who had fallen in!
Zhou Xiaocao was actually very lucky that when she fell through the ice there were other people nearby and it wasn’t long before someone went down to fish her up. And, because of that luck, when she was pulled back to the shore she was trembling and a bit blue but still very much alive.
Su Fuhua gently laid Zhou Xiaocao flat on the ground, and as soon as her mother Madam Yang saw her daughter like this, she leaped over and cried, “Xiaocao, my Xiaocao!”
Su Tang felt that her reaction was a bit exaggerated. This Xiaocao had fallen into the water, true, but it hadn’t been very long before she was fished up. At most she had choked down a few mouthfuls of water, it wasn’t enough to cry over.
When she saw there was nothing seriously wrong with the girl, Su Tang didn’t care about the situation anymore and took her basket to go find a spot to ‘fish’.
Madam Yang held Zhou Xiaocao in her arms and cried, until suddenly she coughed and spit out water. Seeing that, everyone breathed a sigh of relief. “Hm, it’s good that you fished her up so quickly. Otherwise, it’s really hard to say what might have happened.”
“Yeah, it’s all thanks to Su Fuhua!” Everyone looked over at Su Fuhua with warm eyes.
But, as a result, they all saw Su Fuhua still had his eyes locked on the small form of Su Tang, who was busy fishing, and when they saw that they all seemed to remember something. Just now, hadn’t Su Fuhua had dived down to search several times but never found anything, but then Su Tang pointed to a place and he was immediately able to fish the person up?
With that thought in mind, they all looked over curiously at Su Tang. They saw her stand on the bank and throw the basket down into a spot where the water wasn’t frozen, then she just quietly waited for a while. Before long, she pulled the bamboo basket up, and there was a grass carp, a herring, and two crucian carps inside.
Then, after she put all the fish into the wooden bucket next to her, Su Tang went down to toss the bamboo basket into the river again. Having done that, she happened to look up she see the whole group of people all staring at her, she frowned and asked: “What is it?”
Su Fu’an and Su Fuhua were a bit stunned. It seemed that the girl in front of them had finally been eating enough these days, because her originally thin and yellow face had fleshed out a bit, and seemed more pale and delicate. On top of that, she was dressed in plain white which somehow seemed to make her stand out against the darkness of the night all the more, like some sort of fairy.
The two brothers on the bank, Su Fu’an and Su Fuhua, who had relatively more communication with Su Tang and her brother than the other villagers, couldn’t help but have some strange thoughts seeing this scene. As if, perhaps, this girl really had met the River God back then and now she was different because of it.
However, Su Tang didn’t care about what anyone else thought. She had known since the time since she and her brother had been sacrificed to the River God that other people would always look at them strangely. The only reason she intervened this time was that she knew that if she didn’t point out where Xiaocao had fallen there was no way the people searching would have found the girl in time to save her on their own.
Although she wasn’t some sort of saintly second coming of the Virgin Mary, she wouldn’t go so far as to just watch coldly from the side as someone died, which was why she had just casually lent a small hand.
“It’s nothing. I just wanted to thank you, Aunt Tang, for pointing out the place for us.” Su Fu’an eventually just gave Su Tang his thanks.
“En, it wasn’t much.” Su Tang replied casually before turning back to pull up the bamboo basket she had just dropped in the river.
And, sure enough, there were two more herring and a grass carp inside the bamboo basket. At the point Su Tang felt she had ‘fished’ enough for one day, so she didn’t move to put the basket back into the water, instead, she began to pack up and get ready to leave with her basket and bucket of fish.
As she passed by the group of people who were still standing on the river bank dazedly, Su Tang wondered aloud, “Aren’t you all going to head back? Don’t you feel cold?”
Although most of this group were big strong men, they were mostly drenched with water from the freezing river but, despite that, they were all just standing around foolishly. Didn’t they feel cold?
No.
They feel numb😋