Abs…
Rock-hard eight-pack abs…
Wow! And they were still twitching faintly.
Shen Jiaqi hissed and gasped, wanting to touch, loving to touch, unable to stop at all.
Before she had touched enough, a dull pain shot through her backside, someone had thrown her hard onto the ground.
It was just one touch, it wouldn’t cost him a piece of flesh… hiss, that hurt!
Shen Jiaqi was soaked through. She opened her eyes weakly.
A tough, handsome man, nearly one meter nine tall, with a lean waist and long legs, glared at her with a red face and stiffly backed off to one side.
“My poor ill-fated daughter! So the man is gone, he’s gone, why couldn’t you see past it and go jump in the river…”
“Even if you never marry your whole life, as long as your dad and mom have a bite to eat, we won’t let you go hungry…”
“If you were gone, your mother wouldn’t go on living either…”
Shen Jiaqi looked at this middle-aged woman wailing to the heavens, her head buzzing.
The man was gone?
Jumped in the river?
Wait…
Hadn’t her ship sunk?
She couldn’t swim, she had choked down a few mouthfuls of water and lost consciousness. How could she be here…
She raised her eyes and looked around: blue sky, white clouds, green trees casting shade. The people around her were all very plain, dressed in retro work clothes from the seventies and eighties.
Memories that did not belong to her forced their way into her mind…
She had transmigrated into a book!
Into a period novel with warped values, into the body of a female cannon fodder with the same name.
The original owner, the female cannon fodder, had set her sights on the book’s male lead, the sent-down educated youth Jiang Shiyan.
She had clung to him shamelessly, emptied out the family’s savings to throw money at the pretty boy, and in the end lost both the man and the money.
The book’s lucky-koi [1]lucky-koi (jin li, 錦鯉) Metaphor, someone believed to carry innate good fortune, like a lucky ornamental koi jQuery('#footnote_plugin_tooltip_2993136_1_1').tooltip({ tip: '#footnote_plugin_tooltip_text_2993136_1_1', tipClass: 'footnote_tooltip', effect: 'fade', predelay: 0, fadeInSpeed: 200, delay: 400, fadeOutSpeed: 200, position: 'top center', relative: true, offset: [-7, 0], }); female lead, Ye Zhaozhao, was a reborn girl. Before her rebirth she had married a poor, rough man from the village.
She looked down on that rough man and mocked him coldly every day. Three days into the marriage the rough man left home and never came back. Ye Zhaozhao kept an empty room alone, lived a lonely, bitter life, and in the end died miserably.
After her rebirth, to change her fate, Ye Zhaozhao strung the rough man along on one side, making him deliver grain to her family.
On the other side she secretly hooked up with the very promising Jiang Shiyan, and coaxed him into breaking off the engagement with the original owner.
The original owner couldn’t see past it, and so… she jumped in the river!
Shen Jiaqi remembered that in the book, after she jumped in the river it was Jiang Shiyan who pulled her out. From then on she latched onto Jiang Shiyan and refused to break off the engagement no matter what, and later she was schemed against by the female lead, and her family was ruined and its people died.
Thinking of Ye Zhaozhao’s sinister viciousness, Shen Jiaqi shuddered. No, she had to change this miserable cannon-fodder fate.
Her mind made up, without even having seen him clearly, she lifted her head and said to that burly man, “Jiang Shiyan, you saved me, so we’re square now… I won’t cling to you anymore!”
The moment she said it, the place fell dead silent. Everyone froze where they stood.
The burly man especially, his eyes went perfectly round as he stared at her in disbelief.
A long moment passed…
“Heavens above, my perfectly fine daughter, how did she turn stupid? She can’t even tell people apart…”
Told him wrong?
He wasn’t Jiang Shiyan?
Only then did Shen Jiaqi look him over from head to toe. He really didn’t look much like him!
The Jiang Shiyan of the original book had clean, handsome features and fair skin, and wore a snow-white shirt all day long. One look and you knew he was an intellectual, completely unlike the mud-legged men of the countryside, and he had captured the original owner’s heart in an instant.
The lean, muscular man in front of her wore a faded set of work clothes, his beard stubbly, his skin a healthy wheat color. One look and you knew he was in his vigorous prime.
Those rock-hard eight-pack abs, that firm waist, really something!
He really wasn’t much like the soft-skinned Jiang Shiyan of the book, but he suited her taste better…
If he wasn’t the male lead, then who was he?
Shen Jiaqi blinked at him like a starving wolf, staring until the roots of his ears went red and even his breathing turned hot. “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m Lu Zheng.”
Lu Zheng…
What a familiar name…
Wasn’t this… that poor, shabby rough man Ye Zhaozhao had married before?
How could it be him…
Something was off. Why wasn’t it following the original text?
Was it because her transmigration into the book had thrown this world out of order?
Before she had time to think it over, the middle-aged woman on the ground, her mother Qiao Huilan, was hauling and dragging at her, insisting on taking her to the hospital to have her head looked at.
Shen Jiaqi was speechless and struggled to refuse. “Mom, there’s nothing wrong with my head… I was just dazed a moment ago and mistook him for someone else.”
“Really nothing wrong?” Qiao Huilan felt at her here and there in concern, her heart breaking.
“Really nothing. It’s just… my foot hurts, I can’t put any strength into it.”
She frowned, touched her red, swollen ankle, and looked coyly at the rough man beside her. “Comrade Lu Zheng, could you do a good deed all the way and carry me home on your back?”
The skin of Lu Zheng’s lower belly went suddenly scalding. The picture of the woman taking the chance to cop a feel just now was still vivid in his mind.
He swallowed audibly and refused with a cold face. “Men and women shouldn’t touch.”
“Touch or not, you’ve already held me. What, are you afraid I’ll cling to you?”
“Comrade Shen, please have some self-respect. I’m engaged…” Lu Zheng didn’t want to get tangled up with her any further, the moment he finished he turned and ran.
Watching his back as he fled in a panic, Shen Jiaqi sighed quietly to herself. Poor rough-man brother, any moment now you’ll have no more use value, and the female lead will break off the engagement.
A rough man this handsome and this upright, with a sense of boundaries too, and Ye Zhaozhao actually looked down on him, she really was blind!
If he were her husband, wouldn’t she cling to him every day and touch every muscle on his body to her heart’s content!
“Qiqi, what are you spacing out for? The ground is cold, get up now, Mom will help you home…”
Holding her mother’s hand, she got to her feet with effort and limped back to that home with four bare walls.
A few crude thatched huts, a low fence wall.
In her twenty-five years of life, Shen Jiaqi had never seen a yard this run-down.
Shabby it was, but it was swept very clean, and she even had her own room, so it counted as not bad.
Thinking of how the original owner had secretly given the family’s grain and the grain coupons, cloth coupons and oil coupons all to Jiang Shiyan, leaving the whole household to go hungry and cold, and how in the end the male and female leads joined hands to frame them, turning them into vermin of the commune, driven off to the cowshed for reform, some ending up dead and some mad, the more she thought about it the worse she felt, and a wave of bitterness rose in her heart.
The two Shen elders had five children in all. The first four were all sons, Shen Jiaqi came late in their lives as a daughter, and they guarded her the way they guarded their own eyes.
Her several brothers doted on her too, brainless, out-and-out doting.
And yet the original owner was love-brained, and at one glance had picked Jiang Shiyan, who couldn’t carry a load on his shoulder or lift a thing with his hands.
Never mind making her brothers hand over work points, she also carried the house empty like a rat to throw at him.
Not only that, the original owner had taken the money meant to save her eldest sister-in-law’s child, causing her little nephew’s fever to burn him into an idiot, which made the eldest sister-in-law so angry she threatened to kill herself.
The second sister-in-law had her rations docked by her, and malnutrition caused a miscarriage, in her anger she divorced the second brother.
The third brother had already arranged a match with the girl he loved and the betrothal gifts were about to be delivered, when the original owner stole the bride-price money and gave it to Jiang Shiyan, ruining the marriage.
The fourth brother had been a fine candidate recommended for a worker-peasant-soldier university, but because he stood up for her and struck Jiang Shiyan, he was disciplined and lost the chance.
Thinking of these rotten deeds made Shen Jiaqi’s head ache.
What kind of brain-dead author writes a brain-dead cannon-fodder character like this?
Isn’t a cannon fodder’s life a life too?
It’s fine! No panic!
Since she was here now, there was still time for all of it…
Shen Jiaqi accepted it all quickly enough. She had just pulled her emotions together and was about to step through the door when a wok spatula came flying up in front of her, nearly smashing her toes.
“Shen Jiaqi, such a big river, how did it not drown you!”
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