At 9 a.m. on May 3, 2018, the weather was clear and cloudless.

Outside the Nuwa Temple, located in Pingli, a small county town in southern Shaanxi, a grand festival is being held at this time. Gongs and drums are noisy, firecrackers are ringing in unison, and the audience is like a cloud.

This day is the eighteenth day of the third month of the lunar calendar, which is the birthday of the legendary Nuwa Niangniang. In previous years, there would be a festival here, but it wouldn't be as lively.

March 18 of this year coincided with the May Day Golden Week, and the county has been vigorously developing the tourism industry in recent years, so it took this opportunity to spend a lot of money to hold this Nuwa festival to promote traditional culture and earn some hot money during the Golden Week.

Suddenly, as soon as the gongs and drums stopped, two people walked out of the side of the square outside the temple. The first was a man, wearing a mask of a ghost, dressed in a wedding dress, and holding a red belt in his hand. On the other side of the red belt is a woman wearing a red wedding dress and a red hijab.

The man plays the ancient god Fuxi, and the woman plays the role of today's protagonist Nuwa. What the two are performing at this time is the part of the marriage of the legendary Fuxi Nuwa brother and sister.

The two slowly walked around the field, then walked to the middle of the field, shook each other, and then the man lifted the woman's hijab. The audience looked at the woman's face, only to see that her face was delicate, although it was not amazing, but it also had a charm, at this moment against the background of the red wedding dress, it was still a little charming, and suddenly burst into a burst of thunderous applause.

The man's name was Huang Dong, and the woman was his sister Huang Xue, who was originally a villager at the foot of Nuwa Mountain. The Nuwa festival has always been held in the village at the foot of the mountain, and the actors who play Fuxi and Nuwa are also brothers and sisters in the village, a tradition that has been followed for hundreds of years.

This year, the county held a big Nuwa festival, and according to the opinion of the Tourism Bureau, the actors were originally to be produced by the county. This is not unreasonable, these years the young and middle-aged people in the village have gone to the city to work, it is not easy to go back and forth, during the festival can rarely return to the village, and it is even more difficult to pick out a pair of young brothers and sisters.

Therefore, in previous festivals, it was common for village women in their forties to play Nuwa and village husbands in their fifties to play Fuxi. However, this year, the county attaches great importance to it, and there are many tourists, so it is naturally impossible to let this kind of thing happen again. Fu Xi wears a mask, but it doesn't matter, but Nuwa must be a young woman, even if her appearance is not outstanding, she can't be sorry that the audience is not.

The village is naturally reluctant to give up the opportunity to play Nuwa on such a big occasion, and if it agrees to the request of the tourism bureau this year, the village will naturally not have another chance to hold a ceremony in the future. Helplessly, the village director made a round of phone calls from door to door, and it was true that no young people were willing to come back, and when they were considering whether to give up, joy suddenly fell from the sky, and Huang Xue, a famous college student in the village, came back. Catching up with her brother Huang Dong, who is teaching in the county middle school, she just happened to get together the actors of Fuxi Nuwa.

Speaking of which, Huang Xue's sudden return is not accidental, but there are some reasons.

Huang Xue is twenty-eight years old, not the cardamom years of ancient times, but a twenty-eight-year-old young woman. Since childhood, her grades have been good, and she was successfully admitted to the university in 2008, although it is not a famous school, but she is also the first female college student in the village, and the Huang family has been proud of it for a long time.

But after graduating in 2012, Huang Xue discovered that today's college students are no longer golden phoenixes, and wanting to find a stable job in the city is far from what she can achieve with a mediocre appearance from a small mountain village. It took her almost half a year to start a clerical job in a small private company with less than 20 employees.

Although the salary of the small company is not high, Huang Xue is diligent and thrifty by nature, but she has also saved some savings, and she also met a boyfriend who works in an insurance company.

After getting acquainted for more than a year, the two took out all their savings and took out a loan to buy a small house of less than 40 square meters in the city, which can be regarded as a settled relationship between the two.

Who would have thought, there are unforeseen circumstances, Huang Xue's company is developing well, it was acquired by a large company at a high price, Huang Xue held the power of personnel before, but there was no place in the new company, and he was compensated by the company for three months' salary and swept away.

After three months of unemployment, her boyfriend has had a lot of grievances about repaying the mortgage and living expenses alone, and as soon as he gritted his teeth, he sold the house that had not yet been delivered behind her back. Although the house price has risen a lot in the past two years, it only paid her back the 30,000 yuan she paid when she made the down payment, and then disappeared from her life.

Years of struggle have come to pass, Huang Xue was disheartened and returned to her hometown alone, hoping to be cared for by her family. It just so happened that the village was looking for a role for Nuwa at this time, and her parents thought that wearing a wedding dress to play Nuwa was also a good omen, so they made the decision to let her and Huang Dong join the festival.

Outside the Nuwa Temple, the sound of gongs and drums sounded again. Huang Xue and Huang Dong sang some local sacrificial songs to the sound of gongs and drums. They have heard these songs many times since they were children, and they have already learned them, but they are not afraid of making mistakes. After singing, the two took up some tributes, led some tourists into the Nuwa Temple, knelt in front of the Nuwa statue, bowed and bowed, and it was the end of today's performance.

Huang Xue knelt on the futon, all kinds of thoughts suddenly came to her heart, remembering the blow in her life this year, while kneeling down, tears had welled up in her eyes. Thinking in my heart: "Nuwa Niangniang, if you have a spirit, come and teach me, what should I do in the future, where is my true love?" Thinking about it, it was already difficult to help herself, and she kowtowed twice in a row.

Just as she was about to stand up, a low female voice suddenly sounded in her heart: "Since you worship me and serve my people, you should relieve my sorrows." Now there is a calamity, you need to go through the experience, after the tribulation, you will be as you wish. Although the voice was low, it was like a flood of bells, and the echo kept ringing in her heart. Then, she felt that it was dark in front of her, and she fainted. Seeing this, Huang Dong on the side hurriedly supported her, and the surrounding audience was also in an uproar.