“Dr. Lin! Dr. Lin! Please wait for me!”

The old man stopped, and turned with a smile.

Dr. Lin Baoguang recognized the man as the old master of the mill. He must have been very old, but he could still run—run and crawl, to be more precise.

“Take it easy, Wu, I’ll wait for you,” Dr. Lin Baoguang said.

Grandpa Wu stopped, panting. He tried to get a close look at the doctor, but the bright light from the little man blinded him.

“Ah, ah!” Grandpa Wu exclaimed, becoming more anxious. “May I hold your hand?”

Grandpa Wu gripped Dr. Lin’s hand. “This is a real person!” he said to himself. He recalled the scene when Dr. Lin Baoguang had given him the donkey.

The donkey was a small breed which he had never seen. It was not much bigger than a dog but better at work than any donkey in the village. A child told Wu that Dr. Lin had left it in the woods for him. It was then that Wu realized the importance of his mill.

“The mill is still operating, and business is good.”

“Good to know.”

Grandpa Wu went back, satisfied. Dr. Lin Baoguang heard noise from Niulan Mountain. He said to himself, “When a Yun villager lives to an old age, as Wu has done, his every move will be watched by the ancestors.” His eyes cleared, and now he could see far, far away. The light of the rising sun shone on a rock by the side of the road. Dr. Lin sat on the rock and began to imagine how this area would have looked in the times before he was born. He reasoned that there was a connection between his hometown and this place. All his previous fears of losing witnesses now seemed superfluous.

He looked up and saw that the people who had been working in the fields in the morning were all gone. The land was quiet, taking on the appearance of the era when it was only wilderness.

“Grandpa Lin, are you going back?” a little girl’s sweet voice asked.

Dr. Lin Baoguang turned around and saw a beautiful hoopoe on the empty road. So it was the bird talking to him. The bird hopped along without paying any attention to him, and in a few moments it was out of sight. Dr. Lin felt that his body was congealing with the rock, and the clouds were hanging down from the sky. At that moment, he truly saw how the landscape looked before he was born. The bell of Blue Mountain pealed, as it had before. But this time it sounded a little peculiar, a little overpowering to him. Was someone new ringing the bell? Or had the system changed over there on Blue Mountain? Dr. Lin Baoguang found it difficult to move his body. He was both alarmed and delighted. At every tightening of his aged muscles, the hoopoe which was out of sight uttered a mournful cry. “Ah, my home,” he said softly. Ah, his hometown had always been Yun Village. Before his gaze was extinguished, he saw the rosy cloud.