Having never taken care of a child before, Song Xia witnessed for the first time just how terrifyingly disruptive a half-grown boy could be.
Shen Chunming started pouting the moment he stepped down from the carriage. As soon as he entered the courtyard, Song Xia saw large tears welling up in his big eyes. The moment he caught sight of his biological older brother walking out of the house, he burst into a loud, wailing cry.
At first, Song Xia hurriedly fetched some small snacks to comfort him, but Shen Chunming wouldn’t even look at the pastries that made Shen Jiang and the others drool. Instead, he simply hugged the steward’s waist and howled at the top of his lungs.
“Steward Wang! I’m not staying here! I want to go home!”
Steward Wang stroked Shen Chunming’s head with grandfatherly affection, but his tone was filled with utter helplessness.
“Young Master, this is your own biological older brother. Coming here was something Eldest Young Master Shen specifically requested. Come on, Young Master, greet your brother.”
“I won’t! I want to go home! The Shen estate is my home! This place isn’t! I don’t want any older brother!” The voice of the pre-adolescent boy was exceptionally sharp, making Song Xia’s ears ring. Song Xia silently shuffled backward two steps. This was a family matter for the Shen clan; as a fake sister-in-law, she certainly couldn’t manage all of this.
“Eldest Young Master, look at this…” The steward looked apologetically at Shen Huaijing.
Shen Huaijing maintained his cold expression, his eyes carrying a hint of icy indifference as he expressionlessly stared at his wailing younger brother.
Steward Wang looked down at the child clinging to him as if crying his heart out, and with a sympathetic tone, advised: “Eldest Young Master, the master and mistress also said—although our households have split, we are still the closest of blood relatives. Young Master doesn’t necessarily have to follow you here. You’ve just gotten married here, and it’s hardly convenient to raise a half-grown child, isn’t that right? The mistress’s intention is for him to continue staying with the other young masters back home, where food and drink are plentiful and you needn’t worry.”
“Steward Wang, I have already settled the matter with my uncle and the others. Now that Ah-Ming has been delivered, I won’t keep you any longer.”
Shen Huaijing flatly rejected Steward Wang’s words.
Seeing Shen Huaijing’s resolute stance and knowing he had delivered the message, Steward Wang pressed no further. After offering a few words of comfort to Shen Chunming, he bowed to Song Xia and Shen Huaijing, left the brought items behind, and departed.
Leaving behind only a little person chasing desperately after the carriage.
Seeing Shen Chunming chasing behind the carriage while Shen Huaijing stood silently watching without a word, Song Xia cursed under her breath for the cruelty of it and hurried after the boy.
Sure enough, how could Shen Chunming’s short arms and legs possibly outrun a four-legged carriage? After running just a short distance, he tripped and fell flat on his face with a loud smack, bursting into tears.
Just as Song Xia ran out the gate, she saw Shen Chunming sprawled on the ground and rushed over to pick him up.
Shen Chunming possessed remarkable strength; he violently shoved Song Xia’s hand away and shouted, “What kind of person are you, daring to touch me!”
Shen Chunming’s fair, plump little face was smeared with alternating streaks of black dirt and white dust, with tears and snot masking his entire visage. His words lacked any sense of imposing presence, instead adding to his thoroughly wretched appearance.
Song Xia didn’t bicker with a child. She wanted to wipe his face, but seeing how filthy it was, she hesitated. After a moment of thought, she simply lifted the hem of Shen Chunming’s own garment and, ignoring his struggles and protests, wiped his face clean with it.
Then, she dragged the screaming, crying child back toward home.
Catching sight of Sister-in-law Xing’er peering out from the neighboring courtyard to see what was happening, Song Xia gave her a quiet wave of acknowledgment.
The moment she dragged Shen Chunming back into the house, Song Xia saw that Shen Huaijing was still maintaining the exact same posture, standing motionless in the courtyard.
Seeing that Shen Chunming was still throwing a life-or-death tantrum, Shen Huaijing finally grew somewhat angry.
“From now on, this place is your home! Nowhere else has anything to do with you! Remember that your name is Shen Chunming!”
Hearing Shen Huaijing’s words, Shen Chunming stopped crying, simply staring at Shen Huaijing with swollen, reddened eyes.
“The child is still young…” Song Xia offered a dry, awkward word of persuasion from the side, feeling as helpless as an outsider who had blundered into a family feud.
Shen Huaijing dropped a cold sentence: “If he refuses to see reason, he doesn’t get to eat!” and turned back into his room alone.
Leaving Song Xia to face the sobbing, plump little boy.
The Shen family’s genetics were decent; both children were exceedingly handsome and refined in appearance, but Shen Chunming had clearly strayed somewhat off course. He looked easily over a circle fatter than other children his age, dressed in excessively opulent attire with dangling jewelry clinking all over his body, looking precisely like a walking jewelry display stand. Worse still, Shen Chunming’s brow and eyes carried an unpleasant aura of overbearing arrogance.
Shen Chunming spat fiercely onto the ground, shouting toward Shen Huaijing’s retreating back, “If I don’t eat, I don’t eat! Let’s see you try to starve Your Young Master to death!”
Hearing these words, Song Xia felt a splitting headache coming on. It looked like there would be no end of trouble to deal with from here on out.
True to expectation, throughout the days following Shen Chunming’s arrival, he invented endless ways to stir up trouble.
After going hungry for a whole night on his first day, Shen Chunming still refused to eat properly. Finally, by the fourth day, having finished the small snacks he brought with him and driven mad by hunger, he sniffled and sidled up to Song Xia during breakfast, hoping to eat with her.
Seeing that Shen Chunming was willing to eat, Song Xia was quite pleased and ladled out a full bowl of porridge for him. To her absolute shock, the moment Shen Chunming glanced at it, he swiped his hand and knocked the bowl flying.
“What is this garbage?! Is this supposed to be food for humans?! I want meat! Meat!” Shen Chunming hollered arrogantly at Song Xia.
Before Song Xia could dodge, watching a bowl of scalding porridge about to spill all over her, Shen Huaijing reacted with lightning speed, pulling Song Xia backward just as the bowl crashed onto the floor.
“This is all the food there is here! Shen Chunming, you’re no grand young master either! If you refuse to eat this food, then don’t ever eat again!” Shen Huaijing’s voice was filled with intense fury. He himself wasn’t particularly picky about food; back at the estate, he was accustomed to eating easily digestible foods like congee every day, so he had adapted wonderfully to the simple, rustic porridge meals Song Xia prepared now.
However, Shen Chunming had been utterly spoiled rotten by the Shen household, accustomed daily to lavish feasts of fish and meat. Upon seeing this humble fare, he smashed the bowl without a second thought.
In truth, Shen Chunming had harbored a lifelong fear of this biological older brother of his. Back at the estate, his older cousins and brothers were always whispering about how stern and unapproachable his eldest brother was. Combined with Shen Huaijing’s harsh reprimands every time he threw a tantrum over the past few days, Shen Chunming became all the more convinced that his own brother detested him.
Thus, hearing Shen Huaijing’s words, Shen Chunming stubbornly put on a show of indifference, turning his head away with a huff.
“Ah-Ming, even though these meals aren’t grand feasts, every single grain of rice was grown through backbreaking labor! You absolutely cannot waste food like this!”
Song Xia’s anger flared as well. This brat had spent the past few days complaining that his bed wasn’t big enough or soft enough, whining that there were no servants to wait on him hand and foot, throwing tantrums from morning till night, and speaking rudely to her at every turn.
Song Xia had let all of that slide, thinking that children raised in wealthy households naturally picked up bad habits.
However, Song Xia detested food waste above all else. Every single grain of food was grown through the sweat and blood of hardworking peasants; she would never tolerate anyone trampling on it like this.
Shen Chunming never expected that the older sister who had smiled warmly at him and refused to lose her temper over these past few days would suddenly address him in such a severe tone.
His brother didn’t like him, and his sister-in-law wasn’t taking his side. Feeling pitiful beyond words, a fresh wave of grievance washed over him.
Back at home, whenever he wanted to eat something, he ate it; whenever he wanted to do something, he did it!
With reddened eyes, Shen Chunming turned and bolted back into his room.
After scolding Shen Chunming, Song Xia turned her angry gaze toward Shen Huaijing.
“Is this how you teach your younger brother? Every day consists of nothing but glaring at him and yelling at him? He’s only nine years old—what does he understand? If you don’t teach him, do you expect him to magically figure it out on his own?”
Song Xia truly could not watch this any longer. Aside from the Shen family’s extreme pampering, the reason Shen Chunming had turned out this way was precisely because his older brother had completely failed to provide any guiding example.
“Teach him? How else is one supposed to teach him? He’s nine years old and can’t even write his own name properly, nor can he distinguish right from wrong!” Shen Huaijing sneered coldly.
“If you have no intention of properly raising and educating Ah-Ming, you might as well have left him in the Shen estate to be an idle, wealthy young lord! Why must you project your bitter grudges onto an innocent child?”
“Because his surname is Shen! He is the child of my parents, my own flesh and blood, my only younger brother! As for the rest—if he refuses to understand who he truly is, then teaching him is a waste of breath.”
“Shen Huaijing, you still remember he’s your own flesh-and-blood brother—your only surviving kin in this world!” Feeling as though reasoning with Shen Huaijing was like talking to a brick wall, Song Xia dropped those words and stormed off.
Leaving Shen Huaijing sitting quietly alone in the courtyard, facing the unfinished meal left behind by the three of them.
Utterly speechless at the pair of brothers, an infuriated Song Xia stomped over to Sister-in-law Xing’er’s house to borrow a small wicker basket and a small chopper, then headed up into the mountains.
Song Xia did not dare venture deep into the mountains alone since she was completely unfamiliar with the terrain, so she confined her search slowly along the outer perimeter.
“What kind of people are these?! Every single one of them is a freak!”
Song Xia vented her frustration by hacking fiercely at the waist-high weeds blocking her path, muttering curses as she walked.
“The older brother is an ice block, and the younger brother is a little demon seed!”
“I must have been out of my mind to cook meals for them! They can all starve for all I care!”
“Can’t do a single thing right, yet they strut around acting high and mighty every single day!”
“Eat meat! I want to eat meat too! I’ve been in this place for over a week and haven’t even caught a whiff of meat!”
The more she complained, the more pitiful she felt her lot in life was. Her soles were aching from walking, so she simply cleared a small patch of open ground and sat down to rest.
Though she had been going out to the fields for daily “rehab” recently, her frail physical vessel remained exceptionally weak, and her household nutrition failed to keep pace. Every day she subsisted solely on watery rice congee, dried wild greens, and salted pickles bought from Sister-in-law Xing’er’s family.
Consequently, to this day, Song Xia remained a skinny, fragile shadow of a person.
It wasn’t as though Song Xia hadn’t considered spending money to buy some food back, but firstly, she currently had no reliable means of earning an income—their household had money flowing outward with zero coming in, plus two extra freeloaders to feed. Secondly, the nearest county town from this little village was nearly forty li away; villagers only made the trip when they had accumulated enough goods to trade for cash, using the proceeds to buy salt and daily household necessities.
It was entirely too inconvenient.
Sitting on the ground, Song Xia profoundly yearned for the days in her past life when food delivery could be summoned straight to her doorstep with a tap on her phone.
Fingering the wild weeds beside her, her basket holding only a sparse handful of common wild greens, she reflected on how genuinely hard life was.
Suddenly, Song Xia halted her fingers and looked up toward a distant tree.
That tree was laden with clusters of small, bright red berries which, amidst the barren mountain forest, looked exceptionally vivid and festive.
Unable to resist, Song Xia walked over to take a closer look. Having been here for so long, she hadn’t tasted a single piece of fresh fruit!
The moment she clearly recognized the fruit, Song Xia exclaimed in pleasant surprise: “Hawthorn!”
Standing beneath the tree and gazing at the sparse hawthorns hanging above, Song Xia couldn’t help swallowing hard.
Just looking at these hawthorns brought the sweet-and-sour taste rushing vividly to her tongue, causing her mouth to flood with saliva.
The hawthorn tree stood roughly three to four meters tall. The lower branches within easy reach had almost entirely been stripped bare by others, leaving only a few inferior-looking fruits behind. However, near the very treetop, numerous large, bright red fruits remained unpicked—presumably because they were out of the children’s reach.
Scanning her surroundings, Song Xia picked up several stones and threw them upward in an attempt to knock some down, but with negligible results, managing to dislodge only a pitiful few.
Finally, foraging around, Song Xia found a long wooden pole, carefully scrambled up into the tree, and thrashed vigorously until she finally knocked down the cluster of hawthorns crowning the top.
Selecting the reddest and largest hawthorn to bite into, her facial expression twisted instantly into an uncontrollable grimace from the sourness.
“Good grief, these are purely wild!” Sour and astringent with a faint hint of sweetness, they tasted completely different from the hawthorns in her memories.
Still, counting them as fresh fruit nonetheless, Song Xia collected half a small basket of hawthorns and headed back down the mountain in high spirits with the basket strapped to her back.
Upon returning home and putting her things away, she noticed that the two brothers were still maintaining their mutual avoidance in opposite corners of the house. Sighing, Song Xia picked out a couple of hawthorns for Shen Chunming—regardless of whether he wanted them or not—and took a generous handful over to Sister-in-law Xing’er’s house to return the borrowed basket.
Seeing Song Xia bring her hawthorns as a return gift, Sister-in-law Xing’er chuckled.
“Xiaxia, you’re actually eating these little red berries?”
“What do you mean?” Song Xia asked, curious about her reaction.
“Oh my, around our village, we have plenty of these wild red berry trees on the mountain! But only those wild rascals of kids in the village love picking and eating them. I can’t stomach them myself—they’re sour enough to make your teeth fall out!” The mere sight of the bright red fruits made Sister-in-law Xing’er’s teeth feel sensitive.
“Hahaha, I tasted one; it really is both sour and astringent.” Seeing Sister-in-law Xing’er’s mock wince of sourness, Song Xia recalled her own facial contortions upon taking that first bite on the mountain and burst out laughing.
“If these berries were just sour, that would be one thing—after all, fruit is a rare treat! But let me tell you something, Xiaxia, once you eat these berries, they make a person ravenously hungry. If you just finished a meal and eat a couple of these, you’ll be starving again in no time. And if you’re ever starving in the mountains and pick these to eat, they actually make you hungrier the more you eat them! That’s why only that bunch of kids loves picking them; sometimes they don’t even eat them, just pick them for fun because they look pretty,” Sister-in-law Xing’er explained with a covered laugh, figuring that since Xiaxia was still young, it was normal for her to enjoy such childish things.
Hearing Sister-in-law Xing’er say this, Song Xia’s immediate, instinctive thought was: Does that mean deep in the mountains, there must be a whole abundance of hawthorns?!