The peace of the full belly and the promise of spring lasted exactly seventeen days.
The first sign was the sky. In the late afternoon, it turned a sickly, bruised yellow-green. The wind, which had been a gentle companion, died to an ominous stillness. The air grew thick and heavy, pressing down on the ranch. The chickens grew silent and huddled in their coop. The cattle stopped grazing and stood together, facing the same direction, their instincts humming with a primal warning.
Zhao He emerged from the shed where he'd been mending tack, his head tilted back, nostrils flaring as if tasting the air. "Hail," he said, the word a flat stone dropped into the quiet. "Big. Soon."
Panic, cold and immediate, shot through Lin Yan. Their wealth was no longer buried silver or promises. It was alive, vulnerable, and exposed. The lush pasture, the new grass on the expanded slope, the garden where the first precious shoots of their own millet and beans were peeking through—all of it was a target.
"The cattle!" Lin Dahu cried, already moving toward the pasture. "Get them to the shelter!"
But the main cattle shelter, while sturdy, was only built for three or four animals comfortably. With Founder, Maple, Breeze, and Ember, it was full. The new five-mu expansion had only a basic windbreak, not a roof.
"Founder, Maple, Breeze—into the main shelter!" Lin Yan shouted, snapping into action. "Tie! Zhu! Get them moving! Ember stays with Mother and Xiao in the lee of the house, under the big eaves! Zhao He, help me with the tarps!"
The family exploded into motion. Lin Tie and Lin Zhu, using their voices and prods, drove the three older cattle toward the shelter. Founder, sensing the panic in the air, resisted for a moment, his head lowered, before Lin Tie's unwavering pressure guided him in. Maple and Breeze followed, their eyes wide.
Lin Yan and Zhao He scrambled to the hay shed. They grabbed the large, stiff tarpaulin they'd used on the alpine drive. The first fat, cold drops of rain began to fall, hitting the ground with audible plops. In the distance, a low growl of thunder rolled across the hills.
They sprinted to the new pasture expansion. The young grass, their hope for next year's hay, was a waving sea of green. It would be shredded. But the immediate concern was the few young fruit trees Lin Zhu had transplanted and the stacked lumber for future fences. They threw the tarp over the woodpile, weighing it down with stones.
"The chickens!" Wang Shi yelled from the hut doorway, where she was shepherding a wide-eyed Ember into the protected space. The improved hens were still outside, pecking nervously.
Lin Xiao darted out, shooing the frantic birds toward their coop. He got most of them in just as the sky cracked open.
It wasn't rain. It was a bombardment.
Ice stones, the size of quail eggs and some as large as a man's thumb, screamed from the sky. They hit the ground with terrifying force, ricocheting, shattering. The sound was a deafening, continuous roar—a million glass marbles exploding on stone and wood and earth.
Inside the main hut, pressed against the wall with Ember's warm, trembling bulk beside them, the family listened in horror. The CRACK-THUD of hail on their thatched roof was terrifying. Would it hold? A new sound joined the cacophony—the sharp, sickening ping of ice striking the metal cooking pot left outside.
The storm raged for ten minutes. An eternity. Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped. The hail ceased. The rain gentled to a downpour. The silence, broken only by the drumming of rain and the occasional distant thunder, was profound.
They emerged into a world transformed.
The ground was a white, churning slurry of ice and mud. Leaves were stripped from every bush and tree. Their precious kitchen garden was a massacre of broken stems and pounded earth. The new pasture was not shredded; it was pulverized, the tender grass beaten into the mud. The older pasture was bruised and battered, but the mature grass had held, though littered with a carpet of green fragments.
Lin Yan's heart sank like a stone. But the worst was yet to come.
A frantic clucking came from the chicken coop. Lin Yan waded through the slush and ice. Inside, it was a scene of minor chaos but not disaster. The roof, thanks to Lin Zhu's excellent thatching, had held. A few birds were visibly shaken, one had a bloody comb where a hailstone must have found the entrance, but all were alive.
Then a low, pained bellow echoed from the cattle shelter.
They ran. Inside the dim shelter, the smell of warm hide and fear was sharp. Founder, Maple, and Breeze were huddled. Lin Tie was kneeling beside Breeze. The gentle heifer was lying down, her breathing rapid and shallow. A massive, angry welt was rising on her left flank, already turning purple. A direct hit from a large hailstone. Worse, her left eye was half-closed, swollen and weeping.
Lin Yan's husbandry knowledge raced. Bruising, possible internal trauma, eye injury. Not immediately life-threatening, but a severe setback. A pregnant or milk-producing animal would have been devastated. Breeze was neither, but her pain was a knife in their collective side.
Zhao He examined the roof of the shelter. A single hailstone had punched a clean hole through a thinner spot in the old timber. The culprit.
The assessment of the damage was a silent, grim procession. The garden: total loss. The new pasture expansion: set back by months. Breeze: injured, requiring careful nursing. Several roof tiles on the hut were cracked. The triumph of the paid tax, the joy of Ember's pregnancy, felt like a cruel joke from a fickle heaven.
As they stood in the ruin of their hopes, Old Chen arrived. He picked his way delicately through the ice, his expression one of somber, performative concern. His own fields, lower and more sheltered, had suffered, but less.
"A terrible blow," he intoned, shaking his head. "Heaven's will is inscrutable. Just when a man thinks he has found his footing…" He let the sentence hang, his eyes taking in the battered garden, the muddy pasture, the injured heifer. "A season's work, gone in a moment. And with winter coming… the burden of feed…" He didn't need to finish. The threat of a hungry winter, of having to sell animals to buy grain, was implicit.
Lin Yan felt a hot surge of anger, but he forced it down. Despair was a luxury they couldn't afford. This was a test, not an ending. He looked at his family's stunned, devastated faces, then at Zhao He's grimly set jaw, and finally at Old Chen's carefully veiled satisfaction.
"Heaven's will may be inscrutable, Uncle Chen," Lin Yan said, his voice surprisingly steady. "But a man's will need not be. The garden can be replanted with late-season greens. The pasture will recover; the roots are strong. The injured will heal." He turned his back on Chen, addressing his family. "We have hay in the shed. We have sound animals. We have each other. We clear the ice. We tend the wounds. We rebuild."
His words were a lifeline. Lin Dahu straightened his shoulders. Lin Tie gave a firm nod. Wang Shi wiped her eyes and moved toward the hut to prepare poultices for Breeze.
Old Chen, dismissed, simply nodded. "Such fortitude is admirable. I pray it is enough." He walked away, leaving them in their battered, ice-strewn kingdom.
The work began. They cleared the worst of the hail sludge from the garden, salvaging what little they could. Lin Yan and Zhao He carefully examined Breeze, cleaning her eye with a saline solution of boiled water and salt, applying a cold compress of snow to the great bruise on her flank. Lin Zhu and Lin Tie patched the hole in the shelter roof.
That night, in the hut smelling of damp earth and medicinal herbs, the mood was grim but not broken. The system screen in Lin Yan's mind, which had been silent during the storm, now glowed with a new, urgent message.
[Crisis Event: Major Hailstorm.]
[Damage Assessment: Vegetable Garden – Destroyed. New Pasture – Severely Damaged. Livestock – 1 Injured (Moderate). Infrastructure – Minor Damage.]
[Immediate Threat: Winter Feed Security Reduced. Income Stream (Garden Produce) Eliminated.]
[Recommended Actions: 1) Implement Emergency Feed Supplementation Plan. 2) Explore Alternative Immediate Income Source. 3) Reinforce Infrastructure Against Future Events.]
[Crisis Mission Generated: 'Weather the Storm.' Restore ranch operations to pre-storm capacity within 60 days.]
[Reward: 200 Points. 'Weather-Resistant Crop Varieties' Knowledge.]
A mission. A path forward. The points were a currency of hope. The knowledge was a shield for the future.
"We have the hay contract with Huang," Lin Zhu said, thinking aloud. "That's steady. The eggs continue. We lost the garden vegetables we'd eat and sell, but it's not our main income."
"Breeze's injury means she won't be bred this season," Lin Yan added. "A setback, but not a disaster. Our core—Founder, Ember's pregnancy, the hay grass—is intact."
"The new pasture…" Lin Dahu began.
"Will recover," Lin Yan insisted. "We'll help it. We'll use some of our saved copper to buy a load of manure from the county stables, work it into the mud. It will come back stronger."
It was a defiant plan in the face of ruin. As they talked, strategizing their recovery, the shock wore off, replaced by a gritty determination. The hailstorm had broken their crops, but not their will. It had exposed their vulnerability, but also their resilience.
Lin Yan looked out the door at the clearing sky, where a few brave stars were reappearing. The storm had passed. The cleanup would be long and hard. But they were still here. The ranch was wounded, but its heart—the family, the herd, the stubborn will to grow—still beat strong. The breaking storm had tested their foundations. And they had held.