“My head is injured. We can use the fact that Sanyou hurt me to make Eldest Uncle’s family pay a price,” Xu Duoduo said.
“Tomorrow morning, Mother and Big Sister, don’t go make breakfast. If Grandma comes calling, both of you cry as hard as you can and say I’m dying.”
Old Xu had a job as a security guard at the Number One Steel Factory, earning fifteen yuan a month.
Eldest Uncle Xu Dagen and his wife Chen Hehua also worked at the steel factory, making thirty yuan and twenty-two yuan respectively. Xu Dayou had just entered the factory as an apprentice and earned twelve yuan a month.
Xu Ergen worked at the meat processing plant and made twenty-eight yuan monthly. After finishing the housework, Zhou Rong would take the three girls to fold paper boxes, earning another eight yuan a month.
Youngest Aunt Xu Xiaomei worked at the scrap collection station and earned eighteen yuan monthly.
Third Uncle Xu Sangen and his wife Liu Shengnan both worked at the textile factory, each making twenty-five yuan a month.
The entire household consisted of eighteen people. Altogether, the family brought in one hundred and eighty-three yuan every month, not even counting ration coupons.
In the county, this was considered a very wealthy family.
Yet only Xu Ergen, Zhou Rong, and Xu Xiaomei had to hand over their entire salaries.
Xu Dagen and Xu Sangen had never turned in a single cent.
Xu Dagen’s excuse was that when he got married, his wife’s family had not asked for a bride price. They needed to save money to make up for it later so the Xu family could “save face.”
They had been “saving” for so many years that Xu Dayou was already eighteen and working in the factory, while Xu Siyou was already ten — yet somehow they still hadn’t saved enough.
Xu Sangen’s excuse was that his children were young and cried at night, preventing the couple from sleeping well before work. So every evening after dinner, the family of four would wipe their mouths and head straight to his in-laws’ house to sleep, contributing neither money nor labor.
Old Xu and Old Madam Xu were constantly fooled by Xu Dagen and Xu Sangen. Or perhaps they were only pretending not to notice.
In any case, the livelihood of all eighteen family members depended entirely on the fifty-four yuan earned by Xu Ergen’s family and Xu Xiaomei.
Besides using ration coupons, Old Madam Xu would even buy extra grain from the black market every month. Fifty-four yuan was barely enough to feed the entire family in those times.
But the four strapping boys from Eldest Uncle’s family ate enormous amounts, and Eldest Aunt often secretly brought grain back to her own parents’ home.
Naturally, food was never enough.
And so the pitiful, unloved branch of Xu Ergen’s family became the old oxen of the household — the ones who worked the hardest while eating the least.
Two old oxen leading three little oxen.
The four “Yous” from Dagen’s family were each as sturdy as calves. The twin boys from Sangen’s family were also plump and rosy-cheeked.
Only the three girls from Ergen’s family drank watery porridge thin enough to reflect a person’s face, occasionally paired with a coarse black-flour bun. They were so skinny and weak that even a level-two wind could blow them away.
As Old Xu often said:
“These little girls will belong to someone else’s family sooner or later. Why should they eat anything good? As long as they don’t die, that’s enough.”
“Eat quickly before it gets cold,” Xu Ergen said, his eyes reddening as he looked at his starving youngest daughter.
Before, for the sake of filial piety, he could tolerate being hungry and overworked.
But now his second daughter had suffered such injustice, and his own parents were willing to watch her die with their eyes open.
He could not endure it anymore.
The family divided two buns and a bowl of porridge between them before lying down in the darkness to sleep.
Listening to everyone’s even breathing, Xu Duoduo raised her left hand and looked at the scar on her palm. With a single thought, she entered her space.
Back in the apocalypse, Xu Duoduo had never awakened a spatial ability. Instead, while fighting zombies, she had accidentally cut her left palm, leaving behind a winding scar. After it healed, a mysterious dimensional space appeared, hidden inside the scar on her left hand.
Originally, the space contained only a small pond shaped roughly like the scar on her palm and a tiny thatched hut beside it. The hut was only about fifteen square meters. Time inside the space stood still.
But now, after merging with her father Xu Nuo’s space, the small pond had become a winding creek stretching endlessly into the distance.
The thatched hut had transformed into a small loft.
On the first floor, right after entering, was a living room furnished with the large sofa from her old home. On the coffee table sat a huge storage box filled with crystal cores of every color.
Her mother Ling Xiaoxiao had thoughtfully left a sticky note:
Green ones go on the water valve.Yellow ones should be buried in the soil.Red ones go on the power switch…
In short, the crystal cores functioned like batteries.
So the crystal cores collected by the apocalypse base had actually been used as energy sources.
To the left was a storage room roughly the size of her original hut, about fifteen square meters. Shelves were lined with the survival supplies their family of three had painstakingly gathered during the apocalypse. Near the entrance were dishes secretly cooked by the family during their spare time.
To the right was the staircase leading upstairs. Beneath the stairs was a fully equipped kitchen.
Upstairs, her bedroom and large bed had all transferred over as well. The bathroom had become larger and even included an enormous bathtub.
Outside the house stood a shipping container on the left side. Xu Duoduo went in for a look and found all the supplies she had gathered at the very end of the apocalypse piled inside.
To the right of the house were about ten mu of rich black farmland, with farming tools stacked nearby. Tiny green sprouts had just emerged from the soil.
This had to be her father’s farming space.
Standing beside the creek, Xu Duoduo stared at the colorful crystal cores scattered along the riverbed.
Then something suddenly struck her.
The son-preferring Old Xu.The vicious Old Madam Xu.Dagen, Ergen, Sangen.The joke-like names given to the three girls.
Oh my god.
Wasn’t this the very era novel she had been reading moments before dying in the apocalypse — The Fallen Heiress?
In the novel, Xu Dayou entered the steel factory as an apprentice and met the female lead, Lin Weiwei, during his very first month there.
Lin Weiwei was the granddaughter of a major capitalist. She was born to the capitalist son’s mistress and had been raised at her grandmother’s home since childhood. Because she was an illegitimate child, very few people knew she was the granddaughter of a wealthy capitalist.
During the chaotic political climate, Lin Weiwei married into the Xu family shortly after the Cultural Revolution began.
After ten years of turmoil, her biological father finally found her and brought her back to Beijing. There, she met the male lead, and the two eventually lived happily ever after.
The Xu family, after being abandoned by her, received a huge compensation payment from Lin Weiwei’s father. They used it to buy several houses in the provincial capital and thereafter lived leisurely lives collecting rent.
Old Madam Xu and Old Xu both lived past ninety.
The novel briefly mentioned that half a year before Lin Weiwei married into the Xu family, Xu Ergen’s daughter Duoduo had died after remaining unconscious for two days following a head injury.
Zhou Rong blamed herself deeply for Duoduo’s death and gradually lost her sanity, sometimes lucid and sometimes confused. Within two years, she wandered off and never returned.
Xu Ergen became mentally distracted after his second daughter’s death. While working, he lost focus and crushed his own hand in an accident. Forced into early retirement, he gave his factory position to Xu Eryou. After returning home, he sank into depression and died within two years as well.
After Old Madam Xu discovered Lin Weiwei’s true identity as the granddaughter of a capitalist, she married Xu Bu off to the deputy director of the Revolutionary Committee — the only person who knew the secret — in order to preserve the family’s comfortable life.
But the deputy director was no good man. He had beaten his first wife to death.
Xu Bu suffered beatings constantly after marriage and died in 1975.
The youngest sister, Xu Ting, was still very young when her elder sister married off, her second sister died, her mother disappeared, and her father passed away. She worked tirelessly for the Xu family for ten years, only for Old Madam Xu to later marry her to that same brother-in-law, who had by then become director of the Revolutionary Committee.
Xu Ting was beaten to death just one month before that political movement finally ended.
Back when Xu Duoduo had finished reading the novel, she had been so furious at the tragic fate of that family of five that she wanted to strangle Old Madam Xu herself.
Now, leaving the space, Xu Duoduo opened her eyes wide and slowly digested the reality that she had transmigrated into the book.
Listening to the steady breathing around her, she realized that Xu Ergen’s family was no longer fictional characters on paper.
They were living, breathing people who truly cared for her with all their hearts.
She had come into this world carrying the hopes of her parents, who wanted her to live well.
And she would make sure Xu Ergen’s family lived well too.