I bowed three times and knocked nine times in the ancestral hall of the Liu family, killed pigs and sheep, prayed with incense, and then changed my surname to Liu, called Liu Wenshan, and lived with that young woman, Liu Ruxiang.

The day after I came to Liu's house, Liu Ruxiang set rules for me.

"Don't call me by name, don't call me 'Hey', you have to call me master."

"From today on, I will sleep in the West Head House, and you will sleep in the East Head House, if you dare to cross the border, see how I clean you up."

"In the future, you will have to do all the housework, laundry, sweeping, mopping, etc."

I nodded in agreement.

Liu Ruxiang crossed her waist and straightened her full chest, the corners of her mouth rose slightly, saying that she wanted to reward me and asked me what I wanted.

"Help me get my grandma back."

Liu Ruxiang's willow eyebrows frowned: "I can't do it at the moment, change it." ”

I said that I wanted to go to school, and then I went to junior high school, and she said that this is simple, and everything in the family will be taken care of.

"Since you can't think of it, then I'll give you a creation. As I said before, you were born with double flowers, and you will definitely die on your eighteenth birthday. Therefore, from today onwards, you must study the Dharma of the Zhuang Family Master with me, copy the books and sing books every day, and accumulate 7,749 merits before the age of 18, and use this as the foundation to live as a teacher. ”

However, due to the risks before the age of 18, Liu Ruxiang said that now he must first "plant a life tree and recognize my uncle" to ward off the disaster.

Early the next morning, she dug a small soil pit the size of a basin in front of her house, and got back from the wild a small peach sapling with green leaves, which was my lifesake tree.

I sat next to me on the bench and watched, pinching the corners of my clothes, my eyes a little restrained.

She wore a bright red apron tied around her willow waist, and dragged the meat, brown sugar, and rice wine bought by the neighborhood to the market, plus a bowl of rice and two eggs, and placed them neatly on the edge of the pit.

Then he called out to a strange man, saying that to carry out this ritual, it was necessary for a man with both parents to cultivate soil and plant trees.

"Little bastard, come over and kneel on the side, as soon as I chant the mantra later, you will recite in your heart to ask the tree fairy to bless you, do you remember clearly?"

"Got it." I nodded, walked over to the edge of the pit and knelt.

When everything was ready, Liu Ruxiang cleared her throat and began to chant a mantra loudly: "Yumen Chen's Chen Wenshan's two lives are in conflict, and disasters are lingering, or they are frightened and scabies, or they are welcomed by pomp, or their parents are punished by each other. or the sun and the moon are uncertain, relying on divine power, taking off for a while, and changing the ...... after death"

After chanting the same mantra three times, she stopped, picked up the small sapling next to her, put it into the pit to straighten it, sprinkled a handful of loess, and then called the man with both parents to cultivate the soil.

The small shovel picked up the loess and covered it on the roots of the peach sapling, until it was filled in and patted again, and then it was considered to be planted.

Before it was over, Liu Ruxiang picked up a few grains of white rice and threw them under the sapling, and hung a red cloth strip on a small branch, and the whole ceremony was over.

She picked up the pork belly, eggs, sugar, wine, rice, and other things on the ground. I went to the kitchen and fried the sugar, cut the meat into pieces, added two spoonfuls of salt and stewed it, boiled the eggs and threw them into the pot, beckoning me to go out and recognize my uncle.

Liu's entire village is very large, and the dense number of small bungalows is not in sight.

She took me to the gravel road at the entrance of the village, took out scissors and cut off a strand of my hair, tied it with a red rope and tied it to the treetops above my head, and pulled me to stand in the distance and watch. The first person who said that he would pass by the red rope would be my destined uncle.

After a while, a middle-aged man rode a bicycle and drove slowly past the treetops.

"Hey, don't go!" Liu Ruxiang rushed up and shouted.

The man braked on the ground, stopped and asked, "Xiaoxiang, what's the matter with you?" ”

"I took this little bastard to recognize my uncle, and I happened to recognize you."

Liu Ruxiang pointed to the hair tied with a red rope on the top of her head, pulled me over, and pointed to the man riding a bicycle in front of him: "In the future, I will call him uncle, his house is not far in front of our house, a high red tile house." You have to go to filial piety during the New Year's holidays, don't be rusty, you know? ”

I nodded confusedly, "Got it." ”

My uncle rubbed my head and smiled: "Hey, good guy, I picked up a nephew when I went out this time, no." ”

After the meat was stewed at noon, Liu Ruxiang asked me to take half of it and give it to my uncle, and then kowtow, I ran over and got two pieces of candy.

When she got home, Liu Ruxiang had already brought the dishes to the table, she just picked up the chopsticks, and explained to me while eating, why did she recognize her uncle.

"The number of lives between the nephew and the uncle is related to each other. So there is a saying that the first month of the year shaved his head and killed his uncle. Because hair is also a kind of human flesh and blood, shaving your head in numerology is equivalent to injury, and shaving your head in the first month will reduce your luck even more, so it affects your uncle. ”

"Moreover, knowing one more uncle in the Liu family can be regarded as one more elder to support you."

I looked at the food on the table absentmindedly, secretly glanced at Liu Ruxiang, quickly sandwiched two pieces of fatty meat, and buried my head in eating with a bowl.

"Smack-" Something knocked on the door of the head.

Oops!

"Why are you hitting me?"

I looked up, Liu Ruxiang stared at me with a pair of beautiful eyes, and said coquettishly: "Little bastard, have you never eaten in your life?" Listen to me first. ”

I put down the bowl and stared at the braised pork with my eyes fixed.

"Did your mother give birth before you were born?"

As I recalled, something suddenly came to mind.

It was when I was very young, and my father was still farming at home.

Every Qingming day, he would take me to the grave, usually to buy five bundles of yellow table paper and an apple. After the straw paper was burned in front of the graves of my mother and ancestors, my father would squat by the pond in front of his house with the apple in his hand. He said, "Son, go and be reincarnated, go find a good family and give birth, and so on."

After that, he throws the apple in his hand into the dark pool.

At first, I wondered why my father threw away the fragrant and sweet red apples and gave them to me. Then I saw the apple slowly sink into the water and disappear completely.

On the way home, my father told me that my mother had been pregnant with a boy before, and she also had a difficult birth.

He said Baoda, and then my brother died, and according to the rules, he couldn't be buried in the grave, so he put it in a sandbag and sank it in the pond.

And when it was my turn, my father was not at home, and my mother chose to keep me young on her own initiative, and I was successfully born.

Later, in the Mid-Autumn Festival, I poured the apples I bought from the market into a basin and washed them, and watched these apples float on the surface of the water, floating no matter how I pressed them, and I suddenly sat on the ground and became cold.

When the cook heard me tell the story of my brother, her expression couldn't help but become gloomy.

"If nothing else, your sin-making body is due to your brother, and his life is fused with yours!"