Her head was spinning, as if someone were stirring a stick inside her brain; it was both dizzying and painful.
“I’m tired. You walk the rest of the way yourself. It’s just a bit further ahead. You’ll see a tree after about half an hour, and the ginseng is right under it.”
“Did you hear me?! We’ll wait for you here, you go dig it up yourself!”
Vague voices drifted into Ming Fei’s ears. Then, her body was pushed, and she stumbled, only saved from falling by someone grabbing her arm.
“Tsk, why are you helping her? We’re letting her have the ginseng we found for the sake of her dad. Let her find it herself.” A boy wearing an army-green padded cotton jacket folded his arms and glared impatiently at his younger brother. “Don’t you want to save your dad? Go dig up that ginseng, and your dad will be saved.”
Finally, Ming Fei could hear clearly. She looked up and saw two similar-looking boys watching her. The older one clearly had malice in his eyes.
Her head was still foggy, and her body felt weak from the inside out, telling her that this body was sick. She didn’t have time to wonder where the original owner had gone; she only knew that these two were definitely up to no good by making her dig for some ginseng. The older boy’s malice was far too obvious.
“I know where the spot is now. Let’s go back first and bring the adults to dig it up together.”
She wasn’t about to leave on her own right now. If she really went looking for that likely non-existent ginseng, these two probably wouldn’t wait for her. They would just leave, abandoning a sick little girl in the middle of the desolate mountains.
Jin Dan hadn’t expected Ming Fei to want to go back, and he was having none of it.
“Don’t tell me you don’t actually want to save your dad?”
“I do, but I don’t know how to dig, and I don’t have enough strength. Let’s bring the adults,” Ming Fei said with an innocent face, putting on a frightened expression while secretly staying on high alert. “Mom said children shouldn’t go up the mountain because there are wolves and bears. So, let’s go back first.”
As she spoke, Ming Fei kept her eyes fixed on the older one.
Seeing that he couldn’t trick Ming Fei, Jin Dan grew disappointed. His eyes shifted as a new idea formed. He shoved Ming Fei—who was barely half his height—with one hand and grabbed his younger brother, Yin Dan, with the other. Without looking back, he turned and bolted.
“Hahaha, dream on! You stay here in the mountains by yourself and wait to be eaten by wolves!”
Ming Fei caught herself against a nearby tree just in time to avoid falling. Her palms burned from the scrape, but she had no time to worry about that. She immediately started chasing after the two boys.
She was completely unfamiliar with this place. She had to follow them down the mountain; the wilderness was far too dangerous for her current self.
“Brother, wait for me!”
“Brother, what if something happens to her if we leave her in the mountains?” Yin Dan looked back.
“What could happen? It’s her own fault for being so easy to trick—she actually believed there was ginseng on this mountain. If there was something that good, would I not dig it up myself and bring her instead? Hurry up, or I’ll hit you!”
Yin Dan shrank his neck and quickly kept pace with Jin Dan.
Seeing his brother follow, Jin Dan was satisfied and continued his lecture. “That dead girl needs to be taught a lesson. Last time I ate a handful of her peanuts, she actually went and told Second Uncle. Mom said Second Uncle isn’t going to make it. He has no sons, so when the time comes, we’ll take over the house and the two of us can live in a big house!”
“Mm-hmm. When we get back, should we tell Second Aunt about Feifei going up the mountain?” Thinking of the little cousin left on the mountain, Yin Dan was still a bit worried.
“Tell her what? You want to get scolded? If you want to say something, go ahead, but don’t involve me. Either way, I’m not admitting I took that dead girl up the mountain.”
The voices of the two drifted further away until everything went silent. Even though Ming Fei tried her hardest to follow them down, she was too small and this body was still sick. Before long, she was forced to stop, gasping for breath.
Up on the mountain, the wind howled, and the branches swayed incessantly with the gusts. Finally, one branch seemingly couldn’t take it anymore and fell from the tree, hitting Ming Fei right on the head.
Ming Fei, dressed in an old padded jacket, was struck by the branch, but it felt as if she had been hit by a cannonball. Her head throbbed with a splitting pain as a flood of memories that didn’t belong to her surged into her mind. They crashed through her consciousness like a revolving lantern, making it impossible to tell who she was for a moment. She didn’t know how much time had passed—it could have been seconds or minutes—but Ming Fei finally understood her current situation.
It seemed she had transmigrated into a book, becoming the little girl who shared her name.
Back before the world had drastically changed, Ming Fei’s roommate had read a novel. Because the supporting female character who served as the Duizhaozu (foil) had the same name as her, the roommate had specifically shared it with her. However, Ming Fei hadn’t been very interested and didn’t know much about it.
If she had known she would one day transmigrate into the book as that namesake girl, she would have memorized the book no matter what.
Now, she only knew that the female lead was Ming Fang, the cousin of this body. She knew nothing of the rest of the plot; she only knew what had happened to the original owner based on her memories.
Her temples throbbed painfully. Only then did Ming Fei remember that this body hadn’t recovered from a cold yet and was still running a fever. This was why her limbs had felt weak since the beginning.
Recalling the memories she had just received, Ming Fei couldn’t help but curse the two brothers, Jin Dan and Yin Dan, to high heaven in her mind. However, the most important thing right now wasn’t cursing people, but getting down the mountain as quickly as possible.
She was worried that if she was too late, it would be all over—because the original owner’s parents were going to die, and it was going to happen today.
Winter was considered the quietest time of the year. Therefore, every winter during the agricultural slack season, the nearby production brigade would organize people to go to the river to dredge the channels in preparation for the next year’s rice planting. The original owner’s father, Ming Erde, had slipped while working as a river laborer. The back of his head had hit a rock, and he was now lying at home, at death’s door.
Everyone was saying that Ming Erde wasn’t going to make it. At her young age, the original owner only knew that the house was filled with gloom and her father might die. So, when Jin Dan lied to her, saying he had found ginseng on the mountain in the spring and that ginseng could save lives, she followed him up without much hesitation.
In the mind of a six-year-old child, as long as she found the ginseng, she could save her father. She never considered that there never was any ginseng—it was just a prank Jin Dan used to trick her.
But in Ming Fei’s eyes, this wasn’t some child’s prank at all. It was murder!
Just as she had thought earlier, the two brothers had indeed abandoned the original owner.
In the middle of winter, tricking a six-year-old girl into the desolate mountains and abandoning her, then not breathing a word about it after going back down—could that be a simple prank? Especially when the little girl was still sick!
This was clearly murder!
The older one was twelve and the younger ten; both were half-grown kids. How could they not know the dangers of the mountains?
Even more fatally, the original owner knew nothing about the mountains. The children around here often ran up the mountain, so they were very familiar with the lower areas. The original owner was an exception; she had been sickly since childhood and almost never followed the other children up. If it weren’t for her worry over Ming Erde, she could never have been tricked into coming up.
The original owner had followed Jin Dan and Yin Dan up the mountain. Halfway there, Jin Dan said he was tired and coaxed the original owner into looking for it herself. Although she was afraid, for Ming Erde’s sake, the original owner went anyway. How could she have guessed those two conscienceless brothers would head straight down the mountain as soon as she left?
In the end, she found nothing and got lost. By the time she finally managed to limp back, she found that her two cousins who had promised to wait for her were long gone. Only then did she frantically try to get down.
And when she finally reached the bottom, what faced her were her deceased parents and a household in chaos.
It turned out that while she was on the mountain, her mother, Xu Cuihua, couldn’t wait any longer for her to return and went out to look for her. When she couldn’t find her, someone told her they thought they saw the Jin Dan brothers taking the original owner away. Xu Cuihua hurriedly went to Ming Dade’s house to ask, but the brothers refused to admit they had taken the six-year-old girl up the mountain and abandoned her.
During the ensuing dispute, something happened, and Xu Cuihua collapsed with her head covered in blood. Ming Erde, who had been unconscious, finally woke up only to hear that his daughter had been taken by his nephews and was missing, and that his wife had died after hitting a wall while looking for the child. Facing his defensive mother and sister-in-law, he was literally fumed to death.
Ming Fei patted her still-dizzy head, climbed up, identified the direction, and continued walking.
There were small paths up the mountain, but Jin Dan might have been worried she would find the way, so he had deliberately led her toward a place where no one ever went. There were no paths down to be found nearby. Ming Fei was now tired and hungry. She used a stick to push aside the weeds and walked in the direction the two brutish brothers had disappeared.
Gasping for air and taking heavy steps, she didn’t know how long she had walked or where she had gone. She could only use the sun to judge the direction to avoid going off course, but she still couldn’t find the small paths created by the villagers.
Suddenly, Ming Fei’s steps halted. Everything seemed to hit the pause button. Then, she scrambled up a nearby tree. Less than two minutes after she climbed up, there was indeed movement below.
It was a wolf!
An injured mother wolf with cubs was stumbling this way, and behind her followed a huffing wild boar.
Wolf packs hunt wild boars, but an adult wild boar requires a whole pack to take down. This mother wolf with cubs clearly wasn’t enough; who knew how she had provoked that wild boar.
Trying her best to hide her body behind the mulberry tree, Ming Fei’s heart was in her throat, terrified of attracting attention below. This mulberry tree wasn’t very tall or sturdy; a wild boar’s strength could easily knock it over. And if it fell…
Fortunately, the protagonists of the chase occurring below didn’t pay any attention to her, the “two-legged beast.” They scurried past the tree and disappeared into the withered bushes.
Her racing heart slowly settled down. On this freezing day, Ming Fei felt her back was soaked with sweat.
There was no mention of this in the original owner’s memories; she had never encountered a fighting wild boar and mother wolf. So just where had she ended up?
She didn’t dare get down from the tree recklessly. Clutching the trunk, she waited a while longer. Suddenly, she heard a distant howl of pain from the wolf and the angry roar of the wild boar. Then, everything went quiet again.
After another few minutes, Ming Fei couldn’t wait any longer. She quickly slid down the tree and ran in the opposite direction of the boar and wolf. There was a battle going on over there; such a big commotion would surely wake other animals, and the smell of blood would attract other carnivores. She couldn’t stay nearby.
After walking for another half hour, Ming Fei felt it should be around late afternoon. Her heart grew more anxious, and her exhausted steps became erratic. Her foot tripped on something, and she pitched forward onto the ground. At the same time, she heard a faint whimper.
Ignoring the dry leaves on her head, Ming Fei turned her head and saw a curled-up little wolf cub.
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New story pre-order, this is the mirror image of this story:
《Dad is Nüzun, Mom is Nanzun [90s]》
Cen Lan’s system ran away, but before it left, it found her a peaceful little world with abundant resources for her retirement.
As a result, as soon as Cen Lan opened her eyes, she was faced with a weak mother, a delicate father, three thatched huts, and an old yellow dog that wobbled with every step.
There was also an uncle trying to foist a son onto her father and make her parents help raise the child.
A maternal uncle who owed money and tried to make her mother pay the debt, bringing the creditors to the door.
Ten-year-old primary school student Cen Lan looked back at her panicked mother and weeping father, went into the kitchen, grabbed a kitchen knife, and slammed it onto the table.
“From now on, I’m the head of this house. You don’t have any objections, do you?”