[Brain storage area, the author is keeping it safe for you~!]
Ye Qisheng was awakened by a terrifying crack of thunder.
Waking up grumpy with a splitting headache, she sat up abruptly and complained impatiently, “Aunt Fang! What are you doing? Why didn’t you close the window!”
After venting, she suddenly opened her eyes and was instantly dumbfounded.
Where was her personal butler, Aunt Fang?
She wasn’t even in her magnificent, palace-style bedroom!
Inside the dilapidated and cramped mud-and-straw hut, a dense circle of emaciated men, women, and children surrounded her, staring at her with unified gazes.
These people were uniformly dressed in coarse cloth garments, their hair tied up in buns, wearing narrow-sleeved long tunics. The faint light from the oil lamp beside the bed blurred their faces. Coupled with the flickering lightning and roaring thunder outside, a creepy and terrifying feeling arose spontaneously, as if she were surrounded by a horde of ghosts.
Just a second before Ye Qisheng screamed her lungs out, an old voice timely steadied her heart.
“Miss, you’re awake.”
The speaker was a white-haired, kindly-looking old man. Ye Qisheng finally felt a trace of human vitality. Patting her chest to calm her wildly beating heart, she asked warily, “Who are you? …Why am I here?”
She had clearly been throwing money around on the world’s most luxurious yacht; how did she end up here?
The old man didn’t speak. A thick-eyebrowed, burly man standing behind him answered her, “This is Liuye Village. Doctor Xu saw you lying unconscious by the roadside and brought you back.”
Liuye Village?
Unconscious?
Having just woken up from endless darkness, Ye Qisheng’s head was still a bit groggy. It wasn’t until a throbbing pain came from the back of her head that she slowly recalled bits and pieces of what happened.
That’s right.
She remembered playing a high-stakes game of Showhand on the casino cruise ship. Because her luck was absurdly good, she won two hundred million dollars in one breath.
Those sore losers, wealthy merchants and tycoons, were unwilling to accept defeat. Taking advantage of her stepping out onto the balcony to answer a call, they gagged her from behind, tied her up securely, and threw her into the sea.
Although she knew how to swim, she was bound so tightly by thumb-thick ropes that she couldn’t move. She quickly choked on the seawater and fainted, and when she woke up again, she was met with this current scene.
Ye Qisheng was utterly perplexed; no matter how hard she thought about it, she couldn’t figure out how she had ended up here.
In the 22nd century, her motherland had long progressed from a feudal society into a civilized and developed modern society. After years of targeted poverty alleviation, it was incredibly rare to see such mud-walled, thatched-roof huts.
Furthermore, she was far out in the Atlantic Ocean when she was thrown into the sea. Even if the ocean currents twisted and turned a thousand times, she couldn’t possibly float back to some remote, impoverished backwater of her home country!
Ye Qisheng was so frustrated she wanted to go crazy. Accidentally touching the thick gauze taped to her left cheek, she immediately paled in fright and shrieked, “My face… What’s wrong with my face!?”
She hurriedly looked around, wanting to find a mirror to check, but the house was completely bare. Aside from the wooden bed beneath her, there wasn’t even an extra chair, let alone a mirror.
The old man who had spoken earlier opened his mouth again to comfort her, “A few pustules grew on your face. In this wilderness, there are many bees, ants, and poisonous insects; they might have bitten you while you were unconscious. However, it’s nothing serious. I’ve already applied medicine to it, and it will heal in due time.”
Ye Qisheng nervously covered her left cheek. “Really? It won’t leave a scar, right?”
Doctor Xu shook his head. “Rest assured, as long as you apply the medicine on time and watch your diet, I guarantee your face will be as good as new.”
Getting a definite answer that she wouldn’t be disfigured, Ye Qisheng breathed a sigh of relief and calmed down slightly.
Being murdered and thrown into the sea was unlucky enough. If her most precious face was also ruined, she might as well have just died and fed the fishes!
Just as she was secretly rejoicing, the thick-eyebrowed, burly man suddenly spoke up, his voice as cold as ice. “Where are you from? Looking at your attire, you shouldn’t be from around here, right?”
Ye Qisheng blanked for a moment, subconsciously looking down at herself.
Right now, she was wearing a blue-and-white porcelain-colored long dress with a high slit. It was a limited-edition new arrival from brand G, with only three pieces available globally. She had generously snatched one up the moment it was released.
It was undeniably beautiful, but the style was far too fashionable and modern, contrasting sharply with the aesthetic of everyone else present.
New to this place, Ye Qisheng still hadn’t figured out the current situation, so she could only bite the bullet and lie, “I am from Jing City, and it’s my first time visiting your esteemed land.”
“Jing City? Where is that?” The burly man’s thick eyebrows knitted tightly. His falcon-like gaze stared at her unblinkingly, as if trying to bore a hole right through her.
Bearing this mountain-like pressure, Ye Qisheng considered for a moment and carefully spun her lie. “It’s a coastal city very far from here. A plague broke out over there, so I fled with my family. Unexpectedly, we got separated along the way. I searched alone for several days and was truly at the end of my rope. Later, I fainted from hunger…”
After hearing Ye Qisheng’s words, the villagers began discussing all at once. Some sympathized with her, while others expressed disbelief; they were saying all sorts of things.
Ye Qisheng looked at these people anxiously, her heart doing somersaults. She had never been so nervous in her entire life.
When she heard the words “refugees” and “war,” she was instantly dumbfounded!
No way, right? Could it be?
Did she really catch the time-traveling transmigration wave?
Otherwise, Hua Xia was currently enjoying an era of complete peace. Where would refugees and wars come from?
The most crucial point was, how else could she explain the fact that she didn’t die after being thrown into the sea?
She had now fully remembered everything. When those black-hearted, sore-loser bastards made their move, the cruise ship had already sailed to waters very far from the port.
At that time, the moon was dark, the wind was high, and the deep sea was vast. Under such circumstances, even if someone noticed and immediately jumped down to rescue her, the success rate of a salvage operation was practically zero.
Not to mention that she was gagged and tied up back then. Let alone struggling, she couldn’t even cry out for help. She could only gradually lose consciousness in despair.
After hearing Ye Qisheng’s words, the thick-eyebrowed, burly man and Doctor Xu were also placed in a difficult position. The two discussed for a while before the burly man clapped his hands, signaling for everyone to quiet down. “Doctor Xu has to go on house calls tomorrow morning, so it’s inconvenient to disturb him here for too long. Whoever has a spare room in their house, temporarily take this girl in for the night. We can discuss other matters later.”
The crowd looked at each other; no one made a sound.
It wasn’t that there was nowhere to sleep. With a pillow and a mattress, where couldn’t they set up a floor bed?
The main issue was that no one wanted an extra mouth to feed in their house.
There had been continuous floods over the past two years. The low-lying farmlands were completely wiped out, and many dry-land crops couldn’t be planted. To make a living, aside from rushing to plant rice, the villagers had to open up the flooded mountain pits and enclose them to raise fish.
Right now, the harvest season hadn’t arrived yet. Every household was so poor that they had to tighten their belts to get by. They could barely afford to feed their own children, so who would have surplus grain to share with a stranger?
Seeing the crowd’s reaction, Ye Qisheng felt her heart plunge into icy water, completely chilled to the core.
Before transmigrating, she was the illegitimate daughter of the Ye family, the number one wealthy family in the capital. Her biological father’s wealth rivaled that of a nation, and her mother was the most favored “second wife” among her father’s harem of lovers, second only to the noble and prominent legal first wife.
Although her father had never mistreated her materially, due to her unpresentable identity as an illegitimate child, she had seen plenty of the fickleness of human nature since childhood.
She understood that these people had no obligation to help her.
But having just arrived in this new world, unfamiliar with the people and the place, and with her face disfigured, she desperately needed assistance.
Seeing that no one spoke up for a long time, she looked pleadingly at Doctor Xu in front of the bed, hoping he would follow through with his good deed and take her in temporarily.
Doctor Xu understood her gaze and shook his head. “I only have this one room, and you’re a young lady. It would be highly inconvenient and inappropriate for you to stay here.”
Ye Qisheng also knew she couldn’t force others to do what was difficult for them, so she could only silently withdraw her gaze.
Everyone pushed the responsibility onto each other, and no one was willing to take on this troublesome burden. In the end, it was the thick-eyebrowed, burly man who made the decision. “Since no one has a spare room, she will temporarily stay at my house first. Everyone shouldn’t have any objections to this, right?”
As soon as these words were spoken, the others breathed a sigh of relief and voiced their agreement one after another.
Doctor Xu possessed superb medical skills and was a highly respected doctor in this area. He often treated the villagers without charging consultation fees. Since he was the one who brought this girl back, it wasn’t good for them to just stand by and watch. Now that someone had voluntarily offered to shoulder the responsibility, they were naturally happy to see it happen.
Seeing that the matter was about to be settled just like this, a girl in green clothes with her hair tied in double buns standing in the crowd grew anxious. She pushed through the people, stepped forward, and grabbed the burly man’s arm, protesting in dissatisfaction, “Brother! Our family is so poor we can barely put food on the table! You’re still taking in an outsider; aren’t you afraid of getting scolded by Mother later?!”
[Fictional era, not actual history; please do not project this onto any real dynasty! This is an illogical, non-strong-female-lead novel. The female protagonist is just a brainless, scheming-free, useless rich second-generation heir who loves to do whatever she wants. Her only expertise is the universal human skill of shopping.]