Cold.
A cold that pierced to the bone marrow.
It was as if her entire body had been submerged in a frozen river for three days and three nights, a desperate chill seeping even into the cracks of her bones.
The moment Shen Taotao’s consciousness returned, the last thought circling in her mind was tinged with the numbness of a corporate drone working overtime—the blueprints weren’t finished yet.
Immediately after, a familiar, convulsive pang of pain shot through her stomach.
She was starving, a fiery ache.
She thought indignantly, Did I forget to order takeout again? Now I’m really going to become a hungry ghost.
Under this pincer attack from the twin hells of hunger and cold, she snapped her eyes open.
There was no blinding white light from a computer screen, nor a desk piled high with blueprints.
What met her eyes was a gloomy, gray sky that looked as if it could collapse at any moment.
Goose-feather snowflakes, whipped about by the shrieking north wind, pelted down on her like countless small knives.
Shen Taotao shuddered and became completely lucid.
She was curled up somewhere, but it wasn’t the warm sofa of her rented apartment, much less the swivel chair in her office.
Beneath her was a hard, uneven wooden plank that made her bones ache.
The wooden plank… was also shaking.
Creak, creak. The sound was dry and desperate, like the groan of a dying patient.
A prison cart.
The two words, carrying a musty odor mixed with rust and bitter cold, slammed violently into Shen Taotao’s mind.
She was completely stunned.
She was a law-abiding corporate drone from the twenty-first century. The most she ever did was complain that she couldn’t stand another day of this damn job. How did she end up in a prison cart?
She subconsciously tried to move, but her limbs were as stiff as rusted parts. The slightest motion brought a bone-chilling cold and an indescribable soreness.
Her gaze swept with difficulty across her surroundings.
As far as she could see, there were others crammed into the narrow prison cart just like her.
Several people were huddled together in a small group, clinging to each other, using their bodies to arduously fight against the bitter cold and the jolting of the cart.
Closest to her was a middle-aged woman wearing a thin cotton-padded jacket so filthy its original color was indiscernible. Her hair was disheveled, her face ashen, and her lips were blue and chapped with bloody cracks from the cold.
Yet her eyes were fixed on Shen Taotao, her murky pupils filled with worry.
“Tao… Taotao?” The woman’s voice was hoarse, like a broken bellows, and heavy with the sound of weeping. “Are you freezing? Just bear with it a little longer, just a little longer, okay?”
Just as the woman spoke with a trembling voice, Shen Taotao felt a boom in her head!
Countless memory fragments that didn’t belong to her, accompanied by a sharp, stabbing pain, rushed in like a tsunami!
The Ministry of Public Works… her honest and simple father… framed for embezzling river course project funds… their home ransacked… exiled to Ningguta… a thousand leagues of ice, ten thousand leagues of snow… a place of certain death…
“Ugh…” Shen Taotao let out a low groan of pain, instinctively pressing her hands to her splitting temples.
“Taotao!” Another man, positioned closer to the wind, immediately turned his head in alarm. He seemed to have been sturdily built, but now he was gaunt and emaciated, his face unshaven and similarly etched with frostbite and exhaustion.
He tried to straighten his back, using his broad shoulders to block as much of the frigid wind as possible as it poured madly through the gaps in the prison cart. “Hang in there, don’t be afraid. Big Brother will block the wind for you!”
This simple sentence seemed to carry a scorching heat that instantly seared Shen Taotao awake.
She snapped her head up, her gaze sweeping like a searchlight across these strange faces, which, though etched with despair, were still conveying concern for her.
They matched the faces in the original owner’s memory one by one!
This was her family: her father, Shen Houpu; her mother, He Shi; her eldest brother, Shen Dashan; her second brother, Shen Xiaochuan; and her second sister-in-law.
They were all here, on this hellish road of exile, in this prison cart bound for a place of death.
The cold reality hit her face more fiercely than the wind and snow outside the cart.
She, Shen Taotao, a modern-day civil engineering workaholic who had competed to death in architecture school, had died from overwork while pulling an all-nighter to revise blueprints.
And she had transmigrated!
She had become the daughter of a disgraced official with the same name, starting the game with her entire family exiled to Ningguta!
This was a goddamn double kill!
“Tao…” Seeing her dazed expression, He Shi, beside her, grew even more anxious. Her trembling hand reached deep into her own robes, fumbling for a long while before pulling out a small, hard object of a suspicious color, its original ingredients unrecognizable.
She carefully broke off the only remaining half… a tiny piece not much bigger than a fingernail.
The throats of Shen Xiaochuan and her second sister-in-law bobbed unconsciously, but their eyes held no greed, only worry.
With an almost sacrificial reverence, He Shi forced that tiny morsel into the crack between Shen Taotao’s cold, chapped lips.
“Taotao, quick, hold it in your mouth… quick… It’s Mother’s fault, Mother is useless… This is all the bran cake that’s left…” He Shi’s voice was broken. Tears welled in her eyes, only to be quickly frozen into ice crystals by the cold wind. “It’ll help for a little while… Don’t fall asleep, okay? Say something to Mother, don’t sleep…”
An indescribable, coarse texture, a mixture of old, rotten grain and sand, spread through Shen Taotao’s mouth.
It felt like a razor blade scraping down her throat, making her chest ache as she choked.
The hunger in her stomach, provoked by this minuscule stimulus, began to roar even more crazily.
But this… was the last of their food.
Shen Taotao’s heart sank. She turned her head to look at the other corner of the prison cart, at the gaunt, aged man curled up there.
That was her father in this new life, Shen Houpu.
He was wrapped in tattered rags that could hardly be called a cotton coat, his head buried in his knees, his shoulders shaking with suppressed sobs.
He didn’t dare to look up at anyone, especially not at the daughter he had implicated. The thick, suffocating aura of deathly stillness around him seemed to freeze even the howling wind and snow for a moment.
“Father…” Shen Taotao called out subconsciously, her voice hoarse with the daze of her recent transmigration.
Shen Houpu trembled violently and buried his head even lower, like an old beast curled up, waiting for death.
His reaction was like an iron hammer, smashing down on Shen Taotao’s frozen heart.
Looking at this father, who was about to cry himself into a stupor from silent self-blame! Looking at this mother, who saved the last bit of life-saving food for her!
And looking at her eldest brother, who, despite being on the verge of collapsing from the cold, was stubbornly blocking the wind like a mountain!
And her second brother and sister-in-law, huddled beside her, doing their best to share the burden of the cold, their eyes full of worry!
They were all in hell, barely able to fend for themselves, yet they were instinctively protecting her, the youngest “little sister”!
A tremendous force, a mixture of anger, grievance, unwillingness, and a powerful will to survive, suddenly exploded from the depths of Shen Taotao’s being!
It was like setting off a long-dormant volcano!
No!
Absolutely not!
This hell for hungry ghosts wasn’t going to take her again! Nor her family!
Shen Taotao abruptly opened her mouth, trying to suck in a breath of icy air to suppress the exploding flame in her chest. Instead, she choked on a large mouthful of frigid wind laced with ice shards. The cold snow particles shot into her windpipe, causing her to cough her lungs out, her face instantly smeared with tears and snot.
“Taotao!” “Little Sister!” Several hands reached out in panic at the same time, wanting to pat her back.
Shen Taotao waved their hands away, coughing so hard she bent over, her forehead pressing hard against the cold bars of the prison cart.
The rough wooden splinters pricked her skin. The cold sensation and pain, however, cleared her mind in an instant, as if the clouds had parted to reveal the sun!
Ningguta—wasn’t that her hometown where she grew up in the modern era!
But by the time she was born, Ningguta was already the “Great Northern Granary”—so abundant that you could knock out a roe deer with a stick, scoop up fish with a ladle, and wild pheasants would fly right into your cooking pot.
It was a vast land with rich resources. Even if it was a godforsaken place right now… she could, she definitely could, make golden waves of wheat roll like the sea here.
At this thought, the look in Shen Taotao’s eyes changed abruptly.
She raised her head. Her face was still smeared with ice shards and tears, but her lips pulled back into an almost ferocious arc. Her jaw was clenched tight, but her eyes were astonishingly bright.
She refused to believe that she, a civil engineering maniac who had conquered mountains of blueprints, couldn’t handle one Ningguta.
She, Shen Taotao, swore that she would personally carve out a warm kang bed and get her whole family a hot meal.
“Father, Mother, Big Brother, Second Brother, Sister-in-law…” Shen Taotao’s voice was extremely hoarse, like sandpaper scraping across a tabletop, yet it carried a stubborn force that wouldn’t turn back even if it meant crashing through a wall. “Everyone, get closer. Our good days are about to begin!”