This time, two mu of corn, one mu of wheat, half a mu of sugarcane, and half a mu of cotton were planted in the Dimensional Space, with the rest still planted with vegetables.
From the more than four hundred jin of cotton produced earlier in the space, Li Ruolan took a portion after removing the seeds and drying it, and had it carded into thick cotton quilts at a small workshop.
Four twelve-jin cotton quilts, four eight-jin ones, and four six-jin ones, all cotton batting without sewn covers.
As for the quilt covers, she would wait to buy them after transmigrating. If things here turned out to be different from that time, it would be hard to explain if anyone noticed—everything had to be handled with the utmost care.
After everything in the space was set up, Li Ruolan and Deng Minghao did a thorough check and added quite a few more things.
They added two large six-door wardrobes in the small wooden cabin, along with a desk, drawers, and other furniture, and replaced the beds with two two-meter-wide beds.
Outside the cabin, they even built two stoves that could be used for boiling water and cooking.
After all, once they got to the other side, they would both be sent down to the countryside. With parents as biased as Li Ruolan’s, they certainly wouldn’t give her anything good.
Deng Minghao was treated a bit better than Li Ruolan in his family, but only enough to fill his stomach. After all, the Deng family had no shortage of sons—Deng Minghao had an older brother and a younger brother.
So when the two of them went down to the countryside, their families probably wouldn’t give them anything good. To be able to eat well even in the countryside, they would definitely need a kitchen.
They added all sorts of odds and ends, and another month or so passed.
“Do you think we guessed wrong? If we’re really going to transmigrate, why hasn’t anything happened yet?” Deng Minghao said to Li Ruolan.
Half a year had passed, and Li Ruolan was starting to doubt her original judgment too—had she really been wrong?
“Then let’s wait one more month. If we still haven’t transmigrated after a month, we probably guessed wrong. With the Dimensional Space as a Cheat Tool, maybe we could build a big estate instead.”
After waiting another two days with no sign of transmigration, Deng Minghao got so bored that he took Li Ruolan fishing by the river.
Unfortunately, Deng Minghao’s luck wasn’t good today—he fished for most of the day without catching a single fish.
“How long has it been? If we don’t catch anything soon, let’s go back.” Li Ruolan squatted boredly beside her husband Deng Minghao, watching the float in the water.
Deng Minghao looked utterly justified: “Go back and be bored anyway? We’re bored wherever we are—might as well be bored fishing here.”
That made sense. Lately, Li Ruolan and Deng Minghao had been on edge the whole time, waiting and waiting for a transmigration that never came.
Might as well let Deng Minghao relax a little. Li Ruolan sighed, picked up a small net, and went to play by herself along the riverbank.
“Should we dig a pond in the space? We could raise fish, lobsters, hairy crabs, that kind of thing.”
Deng Minghao said, “If it doesn’t leak, we could dig one. I’ll try when we get back.”
Li Ruolan gave an “mm” and said nothing more. Suddenly, she noticed something glinting in the water. She quickly scooped at it a couple of times with her little net—and scooped up a round bead.
It was a bead made of pebble stone, perfectly round and smooth.
Li Ruolan thought it was quite amusing that a pebble could grow into this shape, so she ran back to Deng Minghao: “Minghao, look—I found a round pebble!”
Just as she ran up to Deng Minghao, Li Ruolan felt her foot slip, and her body immediately toppled uncontrollably toward the water.
Seeing this, Deng Minghao quickly tossed his fishing rod aside and reached out to grab Li Ruolan.
Their hands clasped together, with the round bead right between their palms.
“Splash!”
Li Ruolan and Deng Minghao both fell into the water.
Fortunately, Deng Minghao could swim, and the fishing spot they had chosen wasn’t deep. Holding Li Ruolan, he quickly surfaced.
“Honey, you nearly scared me to death. You can’t be so careless next time,” Deng Minghao said as he set the soaked Li Ruolan down on the ground.
Li Ruolan had swallowed a couple mouthfuls of water and was coughing miserably, but hearing Deng Minghao’s words, she nodded repeatedly—she really hadn’t meant to.
Deng Minghao patted her back to help her feel better.
“I really didn’t mean to, I’ll be careful next time… You! Husband! Why have you gotten younger?”
Li Ruolan was apologizing to Deng Minghao when, mid-sentence, she suddenly noticed that her husband seemed to have grown much younger—he now looked no older than eighteen or nineteen.
Deng Minghao’s eyes were wide open at that moment too, because he had also noticed that Li Ruolan had become younger.
They had been high school classmates and got married after graduating from college, so they were both very familiar with what the other looked like at eighteen or nineteen.
“So, we’ve already transmigrated? We just fell into the water and came out, and now we’ve transmigrated?” After saying this, Li Ruolan looked around at her surroundings.
This place seemed to be a park. They were lying at the edge of a lake in the park, surrounded entirely by lush, verdant trees and a shimmering lake surface.
It was completely different from the place where they had been fishing. It seemed they really had transmigrated.
Just as Li Ruolan finished these thoughts, she suddenly felt a pain in her head. Deng Minghao was no better off than she was—both of them clutched their heads in agony.
Before, they had only dreamed of fragments of the past in their sleep—like scattered pieces, not very coherent.
But now, Li Ruolan and Deng Minghao had received the original owners’ complete memories.
The reason Li Ruolan had appeared here was that she had come to end her life.
As for Deng Minghao, he had happened to see Li Ruolan jump into the lake, so he dove in to save her. In the end, neither of them made it to shore—both died in the lake water, and their bodies were then taken over by the modern-day Li Ruolan and Deng Minghao.
Li Ruolan had already looked down on the family situation of the supporting character Li Ruolan from the dream, but she never expected that reality would be a hundred times uglier than what she had seen.
The supporting character Li Ruolan had just graduated from high school. Her father, Li Hongjun, had never intended to send her to the countryside at all.
Instead, he planned to marry Li Ruolan off to the factory director’s son, in exchange for a job position for his precious son.
The factory director’s son was almost thirty this year. He had already beaten two wives to death and had two sons and a daughter—three little burdens.
Li Hongjun wanted to marry Li Ruolan off to such a beast, completely disregarding whether she lived or died, caring only about the job position and a large bride price.
This was the predicament Li Ruolan now faced. She simply couldn’t bring herself to marry such a man, and in a moment of despair, she had thrown herself into the river.
Deng Minghao’s situation wasn’t much better.
The Deng family didn’t favor sons over daughters, but the Deng family had many sons—three of them, with Deng Minghao being the second.
People used to say: the eldest son is the treasure, the youngest is the old man’s darling, and squeezed in between is the second fool. Deng Minghao was exactly that—a barely noticeable presence in the family, someone who hardly mattered at all.
His eldest brother, Deng Minghai, had once been a soldier. After leaving the army, he transferred to a job at the steel mill, where he became the captain of the security department.
Everything in the household depended on the eldest, Deng Minghai, which made Deng Minghao even more overlooked in the family.
He was the kind of son whose family’s attitude was: as long as he doesn’t die right in front of us, whatever happens to him is fine.
To pay for school, Deng Minghao unloaded cargo for people and glued paper boxes together—doing every dirty, exhausting job he could find. Only by doing all that did he manage to save up enough money to put himself through high school.