After repeating the process several times, Lu Minggui found herself still standing at the door, unable to open it.
She grew anxious. What was going on? Had she guessed wrong?
Could it be that she could only go to that place once?
If that was true, wouldn’t she be a fraud? She had already tricked that young man into taking five meat buns!
After thinking it over, she decided to try another route, racing down the path to another door. This time, she pushed—and it opened immediately. She was back beside the wooden chest.
So she could return home, but the other door to the vegetable market didn’t always open.
Curious, Lu Minggui reached for her wooden hairpin again, testing it several times. She realized one thing: touching the hairpin allowed her to enter the white room.
However, the door leading to the market wasn’t guaranteed to open. The reason remained a mystery.
To avoid confusion between the door home and the door to the market, she tied a piece of hemp rope around the home door as a marker.
As she finished, her eyes caught something yellow on the ground. It was a single daylily, fallen yet still fresh as if just picked.
A thought struck her: if she could enter the white room, and the daylilies could appear there, could she store other things too? Could she even move the wooden chest in? Now seemed the perfect time to test it while the house was empty.
She pushed open the door of the white room, returning to her room. The chest was too heavy to lift, so she held the hairpin in one hand and the chest in the other, silently repeating, “I want to move the chest, I want to move the chest.”
To her surprise, it worked. With a flash of white light, she and the chest appeared in the white room.
“How curious… I can move things in?”
“Then I could store a lot here. This white room really is a treasure!”
Her joy was immense. Yet she realized her house was nearly empty—what could she put in there? She decided to return the chest for now, just in case someone noticed.
Thinking further, she looked at the chest’s copper lock. If items could be placed in the white room, the lock was meaningless. The first son’s family probably imagined she had hidden secret money in it.
She packed the silver coins, sugar, eggs, and meat buns into a blue cloth bag, placing everything inside the white room. The chest was now almost empty, save for two tattered clothes.
Having finished, she heard noise outside. Carefully, she hid the red banknote in her sleeve and opened the door.
She saw Manman pulling out the small stove from yesterday, preparing medicine for her mother.
Manman looked surprised. “Grandma, when did you come back?”
“I’ve been in the house all along. You’re already making medicine?”
“You’re such a good grandma,” Manman said shyly, “I learned by watching you yesterday.”
Lu Minggui smiled. “Smart girl. Your mother?”
“She’s sewing clothes for my little brother.”
Manman hoped for a younger brother so that Jinbao wouldn’t bully her, and she’d have someone to protect her.
Lu Minggui nodded. “Then we won’t disturb her. Let’s make the medicine first.”
Grandmother and granddaughter busily cooked the medicine, and after some time, three bowls of water boiled down to one.
By now it was almost noon. Song Dazhi and his wife hadn’t returned, and the three children of the eldest household were still out playing.
Shen Juye got up. “Mother, what should we make for lunch? I can cook.”
Despite being told to rest, she had become used to helping.
Lu Minggui remembered that even outside of busy farming times, the Song household’s midday meal was slightly better than usual.
They’d have porridge from mixed grains with pickles, black wheat buns, or wild vegetable dumplings. Sometimes her grandsons would ask for eggs, and she’d make vegetable and egg soup or cook some eggs.
Under coaxing from Hu Cuihua and Song Dazhi, she often spent silver coins to buy extra food.
The three children from the eldest household would gather around, praising her: “Grandma is the best!”
In the past, she had enjoyed this flattery, but now she felt uneasy.
She touched Manman’s soft hair and said to Shen Juye, “Don’t worry about lunch. The three of you have something to eat.”
“Rest a bit. Take your prenatal medicine first.”
Shen Juye didn’t understand—what did she mean “have something to eat”?
She had noticed a change in her mother-in-law recently. Once distant, now she treated Manman with the care of a mother.
Even protecting her from Jinbao’s bullying yesterday surprised her.
Shen Juye felt warm inside—despite the hardships, as long as her daughter was safe and cared for, she was willing to do anything.
Seeing the sun still low, Lu Minggui went to the kitchen to cook a pot of brown rice porridge. She brought white sugar from the white room, adding it to the porridge.
Examining the sugar, she noticed its unusual purity. It was bright white and fine-grained, unlike the local sugar which was uneven and yellowish.
She poured the porridge into a wooden bowl, sprinkled in some white sugar. Instantly, the sugar melted like snowflakes in water, transforming the plain porridge into an aromatic, tempting treat.