The Eleven Hours

Watching the blood-sucking leeches crawl toward his shoes, Li Huowang lifted his foot and crushed one flat. Then, with an uncharacteristic look of pity, he gazed at Yang Xiaohai standing before him.

“Do these things get on your legs often?”

“Well, when you’re working a paddy field, you get water, you get cow rot, it’s unavoidable. As long as they’re not water snakes, it’s fine. Leeches sucking human blood isn’t a big deal—people have hands, they can pull them off.”

“But when they get on a cow, that’s trouble. A cow doesn’t have hands, can’t take them off, has to just let them suck. That’s why they call it cow rot.”

Li Huowang looked at Yang Xiaohai’s young face. If the boy were in the modern era, he’d probably be in sixth grade, around eleven or twelve. But here, he was already working like an adult.

After a moment’s thought, Li Huowang patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t plow the fields anymore. At your age, you should be learning to read in a private school, not working the land. Let the tenant farmers handle this.”

Once Li Huowang spoke, Niuxin Village soon gained a new teacher.

Although the village was remote, as long as the silver was sufficient, it was easy to find a tutor who had failed the county-level imperial exam.

This wasn’t just for Yang Xiaohai. Li Sui also attended the private school, following Li Huowang’s instructions to only listen and never speak, quietly absorbing the teacher’s lessons.

Besides them, anyone who was free would crouch by the windows, eavesdropping and peeking, as if every little bit they heard was profit.

Even Lü Zhuangyuan came, carrying his grandson who was not yet a year old, saying he wanted to soak up the scholarly aura so the boy might one day become a zhuangyuan himself.

Seeing this, Li Huowang simply opened the door. From now on, anyone in the village who wanted to listen could come into the schoolhouse. Consider it a Niuxin Village perk.

Watching everyone in the schoolhouse focus intently on the lesson, a faint smile crept across Li Huowang’s face. Even the gloom that had been weighing on him lifted a little.

“What are you smiling at?” Bai Lingmiao, standing beside him, asked in surprise.

“Look how good this is. No matter how many hardships we went through on the road, life is getting better. Isn’t this all they wanted?”

Bai Lingmiao reached out and interlocked her fingers with his fleshless hand, leaning her body slightly toward him.

“Yeah. Life will keep getting better. So, no matter what happens in the future, don’t ever try to die. Whatever comes, there’ll always be a way through it.”

Inside, the teacher was instructing his students on something else. “This ‘Confucius says’ nonsense is useless to you lot. I don’t expect you to pass the county exam. I’ll only teach you what’s practical: recognizing characters, and counting with calculation rods!”

“Learn these, and you’ll have a solid skill. You won’t go hungry anywhere! Today, we start with counting rods!” The teacher raised a tube of bamboo sticks high.

“There are eleven shichen in a day!” He picked out eleven sticks from the tube and laid them on the ground.

“For example, a peddler comes to your village to sell goods. He spends five shichen on the road.” The teacher took five sticks away from the eleven. “How many shichen does he have left for selling and sleeping?”

“Huh?” Li Huowang’s expression turned sour.

Sensing the change, Bai Lingmiao asked with confusion, “What’s wrong? Isn’t this teacher good enough?”

“Twenty-four hours in a day. Two hours make one shichen. That means a day should have twelve shichen. I don’t know where this eleven-shichen business came from.”

“This guy can’t even get basic time right. No wonder he failed the exam. Let’s find an excuse to dismiss him before he misleads everyone.”

Hearing this string of words, a flicker of doubt crossed Bai Lingmiao’s pink-tinged eyes. “Li Huowang, what are you talking about? A day is eleven shichen. Where did you get the idea that it’s twelve?”

“What?!” Li Huowang’s mind felt as if it had been struck by something, ringing with a dull buzz.

First, he stared in shock at Bai Lingmiao. After confirming her certainty, he charged straight into the schoolhouse and confronted the teacher. “Is a day really only eleven shichen?”

“Nonsense. If it’s not eleven, how many do you think it is? Do you have some brilliant insight?” The teacher was clearly displeased with this man wrapped in white bandages who had suddenly barged in and interrupted his lesson.

Face pale with shock, Li Huowang turned to look at the pairs of eyes behind him and asked them all, “A day is only eleven shichen?!”

Yang Xiaohai looked thoroughly confused by Li Huowang’s agitation. “Yeah, Brother Li. Isn’t a day always eleven shichen? What’s so strange about that?”

“Only eleven shichen? That means a day here is only twenty-two hours? Where did the missing two hours go?”

In that instant, the world around Li Huowang felt unreal.

Frowning slightly, Bai Lingmiao walked into the schoolhouse, took his hand, and pulled him outside. “What’s gotten into you? A day being eleven shichen is perfectly normal, isn’t it?”

“No. Something’s still wrong.” Calming himself, Li Huowang decided to search for the answer on his own. “Miao-miao, does the village have any timekeeping devices? Bring them all out. I need to use them.”

“Timekeeping device? Will a water clock do? That’s all the Bai family has.”

“Yes!”

Soon, three large, connected wooden buckets arranged from high to low were placed before Li Huowang. The top bucket was filled with water, which dripped through a thin tube one drop at a time into the second bucket.

Each drop fell roughly every second. Li Huowang even doubted the tool, so he also silently counted in his own head.

Yet no matter what he did, the final answer he got was that a day was indeed eleven shichen.

Even allowing for some measurement error, there was no way it could be off by a full two hours.

After staying up all night, Li Huowang finally accepted this reality: in this world, a day really was only twenty-two hours.

Rubbing his tired, stinging eyes with the back of his hand, he muttered to himself, “So that’s it… So the reason I kept oversleeping was because this day was missing two hours?”

Ever since leaving Qingfeng Temple, he had either slept through his alarms or felt like he never got enough rest. Now it seemed the problem was time itself.

Bai Lingmiao, standing behind him, watched with deep worry in her eyes. “Li Huowang, are you going crazy again?”

Li Huowang accepted this twenty-two-hour day far more quickly than he had expected. If even this world was insane, then it made perfect sense that its time was abnormal too.

He stood up and gave Bai Lingmiao a gentle hug. “By the way, back at Qingfeng Temple, was a day also eleven shichen?”

“Of course.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Does something like that need to be said? How was I supposed to know you didn’t even know that?”

As the two spoke, Zhuge Yuan, standing in the distance, listened as the faceless Zuowandao said with a gloating expression, “See? You saw that, didn’t you? This is what a bewildered Heart-Element looks like! Enlightening, isn’t it?”