She had an ancestral space.
If this were the start of a novel, it would be quite the cliché.
Jiang Ting thought as much while taking a deep, satisfying swig of iced cola. She let out a long “ah” of relief and followed it up with a cola-flavored burp.
With a mere flick of her mind, the can of cola—only one sip down—vanished from her hand, leaving behind nothing but a few lingering droplets of condensation on her palm.
Her right fingertips brushed against the dark green lucky bead worn on her left middle finger, which was threaded through a black cord.
The bead felt like jade but wasn’t quite jade. It was smooth and cool to the touch, and while it looked ordinary and inexpensive, it wasn’t made of any material Jiang Ting recognized.
As for how “ancestral” this space was, that was impossible to trace.
Jiang Ting only knew that its previous owner was her grandmother, and before that, her grandmother’s mother. As for who owned it before then, her grandmother never told her—perhaps because there simply wasn’t enough time.
The space was passed to Jiang Ting on her grandmother’s deathbed. At the time, her grandmother didn’t have much time to explain everything clearly, and Jiang Ting wasn’t in any state of mind to listen.
She had been too busy crying.
Jiang Ting’s mother was named Jiang Wan’yi. She had become pregnant by accident during her school years and gave birth to Jiang Ting out of wedlock.
Because she had a daughter, the boyfriend’s family refused to take responsibility. Enraged, Jiang Wan’yi left home and didn’t return for ten years.
The newborn Jiang Ting was left behind. Her mother didn’t want her, and her biological father didn’t want her either. It was her grandmother who raised her.
Her grandmother was an incredibly blunt old woman who hated lying. From the moment Jiang Ting was old enough to understand human speech, her grandmother had plastered her ears with the truth, leaving the poor girl dazed.
Jiang Ting figured that if any other sensitive teenager heard that neither their mother nor father wanted them, they would be devastated.
But she had been hearing it since she was two. At an age when she didn’t even know what “sadness” was, she had already grown used to it. Consequently, she had always accepted the situation quite well.
Pinghu was a small county under the jurisdiction of Yu City, and that was where Jiang Ting grew up with her grandmother.
Her grandmother owned a two-story building facing the street. The first floor was a storefront for rent, and the second floor was where they lived.
Her grandmother said the building had been left by her own grandfather. When Jiang Ting was little, she asked, “Then where is Great-Grandpa?”
Her grandmother, as blunt as ever, replied, “Dead.”
Her grandmother’s bluntness was selective. She neither told Jiang Ting how the grandfather had died, nor where her mother had run off to.
The only thing Jiang Ting knew was who her father was, because his family lived just one street over.
The year her father got married, Jiang Ting accidentally overheard the neighbors gossiping. That was how she found out that the famous, good-for-nothing yellow-haired punk on the next street… was her father!
Jiang Ting had just started elementary school then. She was a very well-behaved student who valued manners and civility. When she heard the news, she felt as if the sky had collapsed.
She went to her grandmother in tears, hoping to hear a denial. She really didn’t want a yellow-haired punk for a father!
But her grandmother simply nodded, looking at her with pitying eyes. “Your father is a piece of trash.”
That sentence was so devastating that Jiang Ting was depressed for a long time. It even killed any lingering fantasies she had about her mother, who apparently had very unique taste in men.
Unexpectedly, when she was ten, Jiang Wan’yi actually returned.
She was a very beautiful woman, dressed fashionably. Perhaps to give herself some confidence, she was draped in jewels; she even wore several jade bracelets on a single arm.
Jiang Ting heard Jiang Wan’yi tell her grandmother that she had been healing her emotional wounds abroad all these years, but now she had fully moved on and found the love of her life.
She was getting married.
Her grandmother asked, “What about your daughter?”
Jiang Wan’yi looked very conflicted. “Mom, he doesn’t know I have a child. A family like theirs… they wouldn’t accept Xiao Ting.”
Jiang Ting had been called “Jiang Ting” since she was a baby; no one had ever called her “Xiao Ting.” Those two syllables made the hair on her arms stand up. It was unbearable. The last shred of fantasy she had for her mother quietly flickered out.
Jiang Wan’yi left quickly. She couldn’t get used to the cramped, dilapidated state of the small building and didn’t even stay a single night.
After she left, her grandmother took out a card and told Jiang Ting, “Your mother gave this to you. It’s a lot of money.”
The ten-year-old Jiang Ting had been pampered by her grandmother. She never lacked for food or clothing; whatever her classmates had, she had too. She had never suffered because she was “parentless.” Thus, she didn’t understand the allure of money and told her grandmother coolly, “We don’t want her stinking money!”
Her grandmother laughed loudly. “If you don’t want it, I do! Raising you is very exhausting.”
A few days later, while Jiang Ting was doing her homework, her grandmother suddenly muttered, “Could a family like that really accept a county-town girl who didn’t even finish high school?”
Jiang Ting didn’t quite understand then, but as she grew up, she realized her grandmother couldn’t let it go. She still cared about Jiang Wan’yi.
Later, when Jiang Ting was in high school, she often felt her grandmother secretly observing her.
She thought: I’m not Jiang Wan’yi. I have no interest in men.
Sure enough, Jiang Ting had no interest in men. she was obsessed with studying every day. Although she eventually hit the ceiling of her own IQ and got into the mediocre Yu University with a mediocre score.
At least it was close to home. A three-hour bus ride on the weekends and she’d be back.
But Jiang Ting still wasn’t satisfied. She convinced her grandmother to move to Yu City with her. “We’ll rent a place. An old neighborhood with lots of seniors. While I’m at school, you can socialize in the complex and make new friends.”
Her grandmother hated socializing and firmly refused.
Her grandmother had given birth to Jiang Wan’yi in her thirties. Now that Jiang Ting was grown, her grandmother was getting old. The shrunken old lady was now shorter than Jiang Ting.
That generation had suffered too much in their youth. They seemed nimble when working, but in reality, their health wasn’t great. Jiang Ting was worried and went home every single weekend without fail.
Despite her vigilance, she still couldn’t prevent the accident.
Her grandmother missed a step while going upstairs, fell from the second floor, and hit the back of her head.
Jiang Ting received a call from a neighbor. Without wasting a second, she took a taxi from Yu City and managed to see her grandmother one last time.
Her grandmother was already drifting in and out of consciousness.
It was only then that Jiang Ting learned from the doctor that her grandmother’s vision had long since failed.
Jiang Ting was stunned. But… but when she was at home, her grandmother moved around normally. She didn’t seem like someone with poor eyesight at all.
Jiang Ting wailed at the bedside.
The neighbor who had brought her grandmother to the hospital had already left, and the helpless doctor had walked out too.
Her grandmother opened her eyes and smiled at her. “Don’t cry, Jiang Ting. Grandma has a treasure to show you.”
Grandma’s “treasure” was a black string she always wore around her neck, with a dark green jade bead the size of a fingernail threaded through the middle.
Jiang Ting remembered a summer when she was five or six. They didn’t have an air conditioner then. Her grandmother would spread a bamboo mat on the balcony, and the two of them would sleep there at night. Her grandmother would hold Jiang Ting, fanning her with a palm-leaf fan.
Little Jiang Ting, curled in her grandmother’s arms, saw the tiny jade bead beneath her grandmother’s thin summer clothes.
She held the bead in her palm. It was cool—cooler than the breeze from the fan.
Jiang Ting asked, “What is this?”
Her grandmother said, “It’s our family’s greatest treasure.”
Jiang Ting didn’t believe her. “I’m the family’s greatest treasure!”
Her grandmother laughed. “Yes, you are the greatest treasure. This is the little treasure.”
Satisfied, Jiang Ting prepared to sleep.
After a while, she heard her grandmother’s voice again, her soft breath tickling the top of her head. She said, “When you grow up and graduate from university, I’ll be old. When that time comes, I’ll give the little treasure to you. The big treasure will wear the little treasure.”
Jiang Ting was almost asleep and murmured groggily, “Grandma is an immortal. Grandma won’t get old.”
On the hospital bed, her grandmother said, “You were always a crybaby when you were little. Much harder to raise than your mother.”
“I had no choice but to perform magic for you. Once you saw me make things appear, you’d stop crying.”
“When you got older, I didn’t dare do it anymore, fearing you’d blab. Who knew that even though you don’t remember, you still feel in your heart that Grandma has magic.”
“It’s not magic. It’s just a mysterious stroke of luck from an unknown source.”
“Your grandfather is dead, your mother is out there and won’t come back, and your father might as well be dead. Now, Grandma is going to die too.”
“Jiang Ting, when Grandma is gone, you have to be okay.”
Jiang Ting was choked with sobs.
Much later, she found Jiang Wan’yi’s number on her grandmother’s old flip phone.
She called it, only to hear Jiang Wan’yi say, “I’m about to give birth. I… I can’t come back for now.”
After twenty years of a carefree life, Jiang Ting felt hatred for the first time that day.
She hated her own helplessness. She hated that Jiang Wan’yi had given birth to four children in ten years and was still having more, yet refused to even see her own mother off!
Jiang Ting took her grandmother’s magic bead and, with the help of the neighbors, finished the funeral.
She returned to school, and the first thing she did was rent a room in the old neighborhood she had scouted out—a home that came too late.
The water droplets from the iced cola fell onto the dark green jade bead, coating it in a watery sheen.
Her grandmother said the bead was ancestral, but it wasn’t passed down through every generation.
It chose its master. It only chose the person it recognized.
When Jiang Wan’yi was young and her father passed away, her grandmother’s heart was like cold ashes. She wanted to pass the bead to Jiang Wan’yi, but the bead refused.
“That was when I knew I could only live and wait. Wait for its next master to appear,” her grandmother had said.
Jiang Ting closed her eyes and focused. In the darkness, the position of the jade bead on her left hand emitted a faint, shimmering light. That light guided her, and she felt her consciousness merge into the bead.
Even with her eyes closed, she could see the scene inside the bead. It was a square space emitting a jade-white luminescence.
Jiang Ting’s consciousness hovered in mid-air, gauging the size of the space.
It had grown again.
Jiang Ting still remembered the day she had put on the jade bead with tear-filled eyes and entered the space for the first time under her grandmother’s guidance.
At that time, the space was only about 20 square meters—the size of a small room.
Her grandmother said that although the space was small, time inside was static. Anything put inside would never change. The items stored there had saved many lives in the past.
When the space was passed to Jiang Ting, it was nearly empty, except for a pile of gold, silver, and jade ornaments in one corner.
Her grandmother told her not to take them out unless it was absolutely necessary. They were all antiques, and with modern technology being so advanced, it would be hard to explain if someone noticed them.
Jiang Ting understood the logic.
What she didn’t understand was why such a perfect natural refrigerator should go to waste on dead objects.
Later, while renting off-campus, she developed the habit of buying large amounts of food at once. She kept a small portion in her real fridge and stored the bulk of it in the space.
From then on, in private, a single thought allowed her to take out any snack or drink she liked at any time. It was incredibly convenient.
But other than that, the space didn’t bring many changes to her life.
She continued her studies and life as planned.
Until one day, she put some leftover takeout into the space and suddenly remembered she had put a lot of leftovers in there but rarely took them out to eat. To prevent the space from becoming a landfill, Jiang Ting entered the space again using the method her grandmother taught her, only to find that the space had actually grown.
!!!
Jiang Ting hadn’t measured it precisely, but the growth was visible to the naked eye. It had at least doubled from the previous 20-square-meter size!
The items she had put inside were fixed in mid-air. They didn’t move, and they didn’t emit any smells; they were completely static.
Jiang Ting was panicked for a while.
But her grandmother was gone, and there was no one to answer her questions.
She didn’t know if the space had always been growing or if these were new changes that only started happening in her hands.
With no one to tell her secret to, her panic eventually gave way to a slow calm.
She simply developed a habit of checking the space with her consciousness every few days.
Then she realized that the space grew a little larger every once in a while, and its growth was entirely irregular.
Jiang Ting speculated: Could this be caused by the food I’m storing in the space?
So, for a while, she went on a frantic hoarding spree. From her favorite takeout to fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, and cold drinks, she stuffed everything into the space.
The space was nearly filled at one point, but it didn’t change because of that. The only thing that changed was Jiang Ting’s bank balance.
With the inheritance her grandmother left and the money on the card Jiang Wan’yi had given her, Jiang Ting was considered a “minor rich lady” among university students.
She had squandered over a hundred thousand of her several hundred thousand yuan in savings.
Jiang Ting comforted herself: It’s fine. The money hasn’t disappeared; it’s just turned into delicious food to accompany me.
Later, the space continued to expand irregularly. Unable to find the cause, Jiang Ting gradually accepted the changes and stopped overthinking it.
After all, the food hoarded in the space was enough to last her a long time. Any further research would cost her more money and effort—it wasn’t worth it!
Later, the tenant of the first-floor storefront moved out. Jiang Ting went back to pack up everything that bore traces of her grandmother’s life and placed them next to the small pile of gold, silver, and jade in the space. Then, she sealed up the small building and never went back.