By this time, the other onlookers among the educated youth had swarmed forward as well, packing the tiny mud-brick room to absolute suffocation.
Hearing Wang Qiuxia’s words, everyone hurriedly swept their gazes across the interior.
Yet in a space no larger than the palm of a hand, where on earth could such a full-grown person possibly hide?
Sheng Xia chimed in right on cue. “What Jiang寒? Sister Qiuxia, what on earth is going on?”
Xu Aiguo spoke up first, preempting the others. “Wang Qiuxia claims that Jiang Han and you were sleeping together in the educated youth dorm, and now she’s brought us here to catch you in the act!”
Wang Qiuxia glared at Xu Aiguo. “Catch you in the act? Nonsense, it’s clearly you who’ve been caught committing hooliganism! Sheng Xia, it’s all my fault. If I’d known Jiang Han would force himself upon you, nothing could have made me leave you all alone in the dorm. Don’t be afraid—as long as you honestly testify that Jiang Han slept with you, we will definitely secure justice for you!”
Sheng Xia wore an expression of utter shock.
She remained dazed for a couple of seconds, as if only just registering what was happening, her face a mask of disbelief.
“What on earth are you people spouting nonsense about! Sister Qiuxia, how can you smear my name like this? When I woke up this morning, my head was splitting with a terrible fever, so I had to ask you to help me request leave from the team leader. I even gave you a yuan, begging you to go to the village medical station to buy me some medicine! In the end, I was on the verge of dying of sickness on the kang, yet I never received your medicine. And now, instead, I get you standing there with a straight face, splashing dirty water all over me?”
Wang Qiuxia was even more bewildered than Sheng Xia. “What splitting headache? What buying medicine?”
Sheng Xia ground her teeth. “When you walked out this morning, you didn’t want to help me buy medicine at all; you even tried to shake me down for extra money. Knowing I couldn’t just have you run errands for nothing, I gave you an extra yuan—never dreaming you’d harbor evil intentions and turn around to hold a grudge against me!”
“No matter how much you hate me, you shouldn’t ruin my reputation like this! You’re a young woman yourself—don’t you know how important a girl’s reputation is? For the sake of a single yuan, you’re trying to drive me to my grave!”
Sheng Xia’s mouth moved as fast as a machine gun, rattling off bullets of words one after another.
“And to think I treated you like a true sister, pouring my heart and soul out to you! I never expected you to be so vicious, plotting to frame me like this! Come on, let’s go settle accounts with the village chief! If we don’t clear this up today, I am not letting you hear the end of it!”
“I didn’t… I wasn’t!” Wang Qiuxia was completely stunned.
She simply couldn’t comprehend how a perfectly sound plan had suddenly derailed like this.
Based on her understanding of Sheng Xia—that brainless, soft-tempered pushover—as soon as everyone found out she and Jiang Han had slept together, Jiang Han, desperate to prove his innocence, would inevitably start pointing fingers and tangling with Sheng Xia.
At that point, everyone would see that Sheng Xia was the one who had slipped Jiang Han an aphrodisiac, leaving Jiang Han the innocent party.
That way, Sheng Xia’s crime of illicit relations would be set in stone.
A struggle rally would be inevitable.
And preferably, she’d be sent down to the labor farm for re-education.
Didn’t Song Zhiqiux say so? Conditions on the farm were harsh; no matter how brilliant and beautiful a flower was, once it reached the farm, the brutal beatings of reality would grind it straight into the mud.
At the mere thought of Sheng Xia’s delicate, flower-like face turning into that of an ugly hag, Wang Qiuxia had been beyond thrilled.
She had deliberately rounded up a large crowd just to watch the show.
Never in her wildest dreams had she expected Sheng Xia to refuse to play by the rules.
Not only did she fail to follow the script, but she stubbornly refused to admit fault and launched a vicious counterattack instead, dragging her down into the water with her.
“Sheng Xia, what kind of nonsense are you babbling! You’re lying!”
Wang Qiuxia’s face twisted with rage as she shrieked.
What a headache? What gives her money to buy medicine? None of that ever happened!
“Sheng Xia, what on earth is your game, smearing me like this?”
Sheng Xia chimed in with a languid tone. “Indeed… I’d also like to know what possible benefit you could get from smearing me and Jiang Han? Besides, the room is only this big—whether anything actually happened or not, aren’t you people well aware?”
The faces of the onlookers, implicitly referenced by her words, turned awkward.
Long before the two women locked lips and tongues in a war of words, someone had already seized the opportunity to turn the room upside down.
Indeed, they hadn’t found Jiang Han anywhere.
Furthermore, the bedding on Sheng Xia’s kang was damp—clearly sweat produced from a high fever.
The crucial point was that the bedsheet was sparkling clean; not even a trace of a maiden’s blood was to be seen.
There was simply none of the evidence Wang Qiuxia had claimed about her sleeping with Jiang Han.
In an instant, everyone understood the score.
Most likely, everything Sheng Xia said was the truth.
Wang Qiuxia, greedy and insatiable, had deliberately blackened Sheng Xia’s name, maliciously spreading rumors that Sheng Xia had slept with Jiang Han.
Immediately, someone spoke up: “Wang Qiuxia, this is where you’re in the wrong. You and Sheng Xia have no grievances between you; how could you go around spreading this kind of filth?”
“That’s right! If you hadn’t sworn up and down that Comrade Sheng and Jiang Han… and spoken with such absolute certainty, how could we possibly have tagged along to make fools of ourselves?”
“Exactly! To think you’re a female comrade yourself! I never imagined your heart could be so pitch black.”
Unable to defend herself against all sides, Wang Qiuxia turned deathly pale. “It wasn’t me! I didn’t! It was clearly Sheng Xia who—”
In her panic, Wang Qiuxia’s gaze locked from afar with Song Zhiqiux, who was standing quietly within the crowd.
She saw Song Zhiqiux give her a slight, subtle shake of the head.
A silent signal telling her to say no more.
Things had reached this point; further talk was useless.
Not only would it fail to bring Sheng Xia down, but it would completely drag Wang Qiuxia into the abyss.
Better to cut her losses now.
Seeing this, Wang Qiuxia felt as though she had suddenly found her backbone, and could only resign herself to fate, snapping her mouth shut.
“Comrade Sheng.”
Song Zhiqiux, who had remained silent all this time, finally spoke up.
“This whole matter was just a misunderstanding on Comrade Wang’s part. It is only right that you demand justice from her; even if you took this all the way to the village chief, you’d be entirely in the right.”
The crowd nodded in agreement.
Sheng Xia remained silent.
Sure enough, she heard Song Zhiqiux continue: “However, if this matter gets blown out of proportion, I’m afraid the fallout for the educated youth dorm won’t be good. The local villagers already hold some prejudice against us educated youths. They feel there are too many of us, that we’re useless at farm work, and that during these disaster years, they still have to carve out grain shares for us—they’ve been full of complaints lately. If they find out that this kind of scandal happened right here in the dorm, they’ll look at us with even worse hostility. When that happens, will anyone still be able to secure their grain allocation?”
As soon as these words dropped, the expressions of those who had just been backing Sheng Xia’s crusade shifted immediately.
That was true!
Who didn’t know how hard these past two years had been?
There was already hardly any oil or fat to spare, and they were struggling through the lean spring months on empty stomachs.
If their grain rations were cut on top of that, wouldn’t they practically starve to death?
Seeing the crowd come around to her point of view, the corners of Song Zhiqiux’s lips curled up into a smile, her tone turning falsely intimate.
“Xiao Xia, I know you’ve suffered a grievance and your heart is heavy. But even a rotten melon still has its skin; for the sake of everyone here, just bear with it this once. As long as this matter doesn’t leak out, you can make Wang Qiuxia compensate you however you see fit. How does that sound?”
“That’s right, Sheng Xia! What Zhiqiux says is right!”
“Just think of the rest of us for a change.”
“Everyone will definitely remember your kindness.”
Even though they hadn’t been the ones to pull this stunt, who could forget that they were educated youths too?
The mere thought of the local peasants pointing fingers and gossiping behind their backs made everyone’s skin crawl with embarrassment.
Nobody liked being the subject of scurrilous gossip and malicious misunderstandings.
“Besides, aren’t you completely fine? Why make a mountain out of a molehill?”
Someone chimed in with those exact words.
Hearing this, Song Zhiqiux nodded. “Indeed, Xiao Xia, fortunately, it’s just a misunderstanding. Why not have Wang Qiuxia apologize to you and return those two yuan, and let bygones be bygones? We all live under the same roof, and we’re bound to bump into each other day after day. Making a huge scene doesn’t look good for anyone. There’s still a long road ahead of us—are you really going to burn bridges and completely tear your face off?”
With a solemn, earnestly advice-giving tone, she added: “Besides, there is a blessing in being shortchanged—your real blessings are still yet to come!”