Sister Liang told us that the conditions in her family have not been very good, and my father has nothing but such a house in the old city. So when I was a child, I often envied other children for having something, and although those things were close at hand, it would always be very difficult for me to get them. But I'm quite sensible and knows the situation at home, so I don't mention it. However, since the death of his mother, his father has been more and more concerned about him, and his relationship with his father is actually not bad, and there has always been a faint family affection between father and daughter. My father is a person who is not good at expressing himself, but Sister Liang said that she actually understands that everything her father does is to make her life better. When I was 9 years old, piggy banks became popular, and the way many children compared themselves began to change to how many coins I had saved. Originally, this thing was not expensive, so my father bought one for himself at that time.

Sister Liang said that it was her first piggy bank, which was the appearance of a little pig, and she stuffed coins into the pig's back, but if she wanted to take out the money inside, she could only break the little pig. She said that she had always cherished it, but one day she accidentally knocked over the little pig and fell to the ground, when she was very sad, looking at the scattered coins on the ground, but she didn't dare to ask her father for another one, so she wrapped the broken little pig with a handkerchief and secretly hid it under her father's bed.

Sister Liang told us that at that time, she was young, and the house could not get bigger, so there was only one room, so my father used the small square stools in the kitchen to make his feet, and then went to buy a cool board as a bed, and spread a mattress cushion on it, which became a very simple bed. Sister Liang said that under the closed window in my father's room, it used to be where I slept.

But he hid the broken piggy bank under the bed, and it didn't take long for his father to find it. Of course, the father did not blame himself, but pretended not to see it, knowing that his daughter was reluctant to throw it away, and he really liked this thing, so on her birthday that year, the father bought himself a small birthday cake for the first time, and a brand new piggy bank as a gift. Sister Liang said that it was actually not expensive, but my father knew that I liked it, so he gave it to me as a gift. When Sister Liang said this, her face showed that feeling of remembrance and warmth. She went on to say that this new piggy bank is a little different from the one that was broken before, because if you want to take out the money, you don't have to break the whole thing, but there is a plastic plug under the base, and you can remove the money from it by pulling out the plug. So just like that, the steel hammers left over from school every day were put into the piggy bank.

Listening to Sister Liang say this, in fact, it can be regarded as evoking some of my childhood memories. Although Sister Liang is a few years older than me and Hu Zongren, she is still the same age after all. I remember when I was very young, the factory still used food stamps for food, and I still don't know how the food stamps came from. In short, in those days, many things could be exchanged for tickets, although there were still banknotes in circulation in the market, but most of the children like us grew up in factories, and the time to run to the street was actually very small, so naturally they lost the opportunity to squander money. When I started preschool, my pocket money was two cents a day. Because it is a children's school in the factory, it is relatively close, and it can be reached in ten or twenty minutes by walking, so the unique geographical advantage saves me a lot of money for taking the bus. At that time, every morning when I went to school, I squatted on the dumpling stall at the gate of the factory and ate two big sandwich dumplings, each of which was only five cents. Even if I want to change the taste once in a while, I can buy a meatloaf at the pancake stand in front of the school for only five cents. On the way home from school, if I am hungry, I can still eat a spicy skewer, which is still five cents, so that if I am not the kind of child who eats a lot or is very greedy, I can save a dime a day. I also have a piggy bank, which looks like a big rooster, and I think my parents bought this for me probably because I belong to the chicken. So I often exchange the dime I save every day for some coins, and then stuff it into the crack on the chicken's head that looks like a craniotomy, and listen to the sound of the steel hammer in the narrow passage between the neck and the belly, which is the happiest thing I do every day. However, although my family is not wealthy, and my parents are workers, I think it is still a lot more prosperous than Uncle Liang's family in front of me. At least I have my own room and a real bed, and if I don't have a cake on my birthday, I'll be a dead chicken and collapse in front of my parents to show how pitiful I am.

So when Sister Liang talks about this, in fact, there is resonance in my heart. I don't know if it's nickel or tin, 1 cent, 2 cents, 5 cents is the largest, these have long been gone, and the fun of children gathering in the yard to compare with each other whose coins are the earliest years has also disappeared with time.

Sister Liang went on to say that she had been saving money like this for about a year, and she was already 10 years old at that time, and she was already a little girl. Girls mature a little earlier than boys, so when they need more and more money, and their father can't satisfy him every time, there will be occasional quarrels between himself and his father because of such things. Sister Liang told us that later, when she needed to buy something, she gradually stopped asking her father for the money, and secretly took some out of her piggy bank. But after all, he was still a child, and he didn't have the ability to make money, so the money in the jar became less and less, until it became empty. It wasn't until one day when my father was cleaning up that he wanted to pick up Sister Liang's piggy bank and clean up the dust underneath, that he realized that the piggy bank was empty.

Sister Liang said that this was not a big deal, after all, the jar was full of her own money. But I didn't expect my father to criticize herself because of this incident, and taught her that she should learn to be diligent and thrifty since she was a child, and she can't spend a little, don't look at our family so poor, but Dad still saves money, just to be able to raise you as an adult. Sister Liang said that she was young at the time, and she didn't listen to her father's painstaking education, but she just felt that I spent my own money and you still had to criticize me, so she was very unconvinced, and she quarreled with her father that day, and ran out of the door to stay at the same school until late before coming back, and when she came back, her father had slept, and she had never seen her piggy bank since that day.

Sister Liang looked at the piggy bank in front of her childhood, stretched out her hand and stroked it, looking emotional. I took the jar from her hand, and weighed it again, and if I calculated it according to the volume of the thing itself, and then its own weight, and the length of the sound it made when it shook, I could easily tell that the coins in this jar were actually almost stuffed, and that it would be filled with only a few dozen or hundred. It stands to reason that after 20 years, no matter how much you save, you will never be satisfied with even a piggy bank, and later the coins have become 5 cents and 1 yuan, and you can bring back ten or eight of them when you go to the supermarket, how can there be a spare place now?

I told Hu Zongren and Sister Liang my idea, and after obtaining Sister Liang's consent, we decided to open the piggy bank to see if there was anything else in it besides coins.

I didn't dare to go back to the house, so Sister Liang went to the neighbor's house to borrow a folding table, and after opening it, the three of us gathered around the table, Hu Zongren carefully picked off the stopper on the base, and then blocked the coins with one hand to prevent the coins from running around, while slowly pouring out the coins inside, covering most of the table. I took a closer look, and I couldn't find the old coins before, all of them were exchanged for 1 yuan by Uncle Liang, not even 5 cents. Roughly calculated, this table of coins can be almost 1,000 yuan, who made that piggy bank quite big. In terms of appearance, they are all the same, or it is so dense that it is really difficult for me to find any differences. So I told everyone not to touch the coins, and I first spread them out without overlapping, and then I began to use the compass to draw clockwise circles and began to look for them on the full table.

The coin is metal, although it is not magnetic, but the compass needle is very sensitive, and there are many coins, so when I was looking for it, I was actually more or less disturbed. However, this distraction was completely defeated by my experience, and after a few minutes, I quickly found a slightly stronger agile response on the compass that had changed very slightly, so I began to narrow it down, looking for it one by one in a slower motion, and soon I was able to lock on one of the coins in the pile. And that one is not a 1 yuan coin at all. The color is exactly the same as the 1 yuan coin, mixed in it, unless you are a master of everyone to find fault, or you have dropped cherished Ming eye drops, you will never be able to notice.

I first tentatively touched the coin with my hand, and found that the compass did not respond, so I boldly picked up the coin and put it in the palm of my hand to examine it. The two sides of this coin, one of which has a crossed pattern, is very similar to the way the sickle and hammer crossed on the Soviet flag seen in the movie before, except that the sickle hammer has been replaced by a rod but a small circle at one end, and the other has become a pen, just like the two things that Lei Zhenzi held in the portrait I saw with Hu Zongren behind the door earlier.

I flipped the coin upside down, and the reverse of it showed a lotus flower in full bloom, just like the lotus flower in the ghost's hand.