“The actors are in position!”
At the confirmation, the crew handling the wire began pulling. Shen Yuan was afraid of heights, and with the camera already aimed at him, he could only force down the panic rising in his chest.
An actor’s professional training allowed him to deliver his lines smoothly even with his mind completely blank.
He had to get this take right, no matter what!
If they had to do it again, he was afraid he would be scared to death, his heart stopping from sheer terror.
“Demon Lord! On this day next year, it will be the anniversary of your death!”
Shen Yuan’s ethereal robe fluttered in the air as he thrust out a long sword with one hand. As he recited his lines, he thought he heard something strange. By the time he realized what was happening, he had already lost control and begun plummeting downward.
The instant he realized he was falling, Shen Yuan thought, Please, don’t let me die. He still hadn’t celebrated the tenth birthdays of his younger siblings at the orphanage.
……
Wu Kingdom, Shuiwan Town, Dashu Village.
In a yellow-mud-thatched hut at the foot of the mountain, three children who looked like little beggars huddled together. One of them was holding a tiny baby wrapped in torn cloth.
The children clung tightly to one another like kittens without a mother cat in winter. The dirt on their faces could not conceal their worry and fear as they timidly stared at the frail young man lying on a battered door panel.
The room was utterly lifeless.
A boy with a head of tousled hair trembled as he held a finger beneath the nose of the young man lying there. Then he pressed his little face against the boy’s chest. After staring blankly in helpless confusion, his mouth crumpled and he began to cry in panic. “Waaaah… Big Brother isn’t breathing…”
At his words, another child’s eyes widened, all color draining from his lips. He hurriedly shook the young man and begged, “Big Brother! Big Brother, don’t die! Don’t die, okay, Big Brother!”
The child holding the baby hugged his little sister even tighter and sobbed quietly, “Big Brother, waaaah…”
All three children began to cry. Stirred by their sobs, the baby in the swaddling clothes opened her mouth wide, worked herself up for a moment, and began crying too. “Waaaah, waaaah!”
The three children and one baby cried themselves into a complete mess, overwhelmed with grief. An air of despair hung over the room.
Shen Yuan felt surrounded by darkness. He could see and hear nothing, and his whole body seemed to be floating.
Unable to tell which way was which, he could only drift in place.
Suddenly, he heard a loud cry. The sound rose from low to high, then fell from high to low, with the faint sound of other, softer cries mixed in.
Those cries gave him direction. Shen Yuan moved toward them, and gradually, a faint light appeared before his eyes.
Overjoyed, Shen Yuan pushed himself toward the light with all his strength.
A fierce white light suddenly flashed, and Shen Yuan squeezed his eyes shut.
When he opened them again, he saw three skinny, filthy children holding a baby and crying around him. They were sobbing as if their hearts had been torn apart. On their faces, which had not been washed in ages, the tears had carved clear white trails through the accumulated grime.
Shen Yuan lifted his eyelids halfway and weakly surveyed his surroundings. Seeing the unfamiliar children, the completely bare hut with its holes in the roof and wind blowing in from every side, and remembering the transmigration and reincarnation stories he often saw in web novels, he immediately understood what had happened.
He wailed inwardly: What the hell kind of place has Heaven sent me to?
This looked like the worst possible start. He almost felt like crying too.
The children were immersed in the grief and despair of losing their big brother, crying uncontrollably. Their tears blurred their vision, and Shen Yuan was so exhausted that he could barely open his eyes halfway. None of them noticed that he had woken up.
If they kept crying, these kitten-like children were liable to pass out.
Shen Yuan raised a hand and patted the back of the little one’s hand nearest to him. The weather was still cold, and the scraps of cloth on the child could not even cover his forearms. His arms were thin and black, like dry kindling.
“Don’t… cry.”
As soon as he finished speaking, Shen Yuan fainted again.
The little one’s crying stopped abruptly. He lowered his head and stared at the large hand covering the back of his own.
In surprise, he wiped the tears from his face with the back of his hand, instantly turning his thin little face into that of a tear-streaked kitten.
Once he realized what had happened, he repeated the process from before with his heart in his throat. First he reached out to check for breathing, then he pressed his little face to the man’s chest and listened quietly.
After a while, he excitedly blew a snot bubble. “Third Brother, Fourth Brother, Big Brother’s alive!”
The little kitten called Third Brother stared with wide eyes, his eyelashes wet. Craning his neck and rising onto his toes to look at the person lying on the door panel, he asked cautiously, “Second Brother, Big Brother isn’t dead anymore?”
Fourth Brother held the baby in his arms, tears still streaming from his reddened eyes. He continued sobbing to the baby, who was still bawling, “Big Brother, waaaah…”
“Big Brother’s alive! He isn’t dead! That’s wonderful!” The boy with the bird’s-nest hair wanted to spin around on the spot, but when he saw that there was nothing in the house, he remembered that Big Brother had barely eaten for three days before dying and would surely be hungry when he woke up. He said to his two younger brothers, “Third Brother, Fourth Brother, stay home and take good care of Big Brother and Fifth Sister. I’m going to borrow some grain from the village.”
After saying that, the boy with the bird’s-nest hair stood up, only to feel dizzy for a moment.
Forcing himself to ignore the discomfort, he left the thatched hut without looking back. The two younger brothers left behind stared at each other while holding their still-wailing sister, their eyes full of worry.
Would anyone in the village really lend them grain?
After Shen Yuan fainted, many scenes from his memories appeared in his mind.
Judging from those fragments, the dynasty he had transmigrated into was not recorded in history at all. If he had to find a similar period in history, it most resembled the Warring States era.
The various states were constantly at war with one another, and there was plenty of internal strife within each country as well.
The country he was in was called the Wu Kingdom. Five years earlier, it had still been at war with several neighboring states. Before the external threat had been quelled, internal rebellion had broken out.
The previous emperor had suddenly died of a severe illness. Since he had never named a crown prince, a bloody struggle for the throne began.
In the end, every member of the imperial family who was eligible to inherit the throne died. Finally, a prince who had been lost among the common people was found. Before the Wu Kingdom descended into complete chaos, it took only three days from his ennoblement to his ascension.
Fortunately, the new emperor was a ruthless man who always kept his word. He quickly established his authority and brought some stability to the turbulent Wu Kingdom.
Otherwise, Shen Yuan could hardly imagine how anyone could survive here.
During the earlier wars, all the able-bodied men in the village had been taken to fight. Not one of them had ever sent back word.
Only the elderly, women, and children remained in the village.
Later, taxes and grain were collected to support the soldiers. There was nothing left to eat in the village, and it was not just the village. Even the towns and counties had no food.
With internal and external troubles besetting the Wu Kingdom, taxes and grain were collected everywhere to feed the army. The able-bodied men were taken away, leaving only the elderly, women, and children to work the fields.
Yet people were not allowed enough food to fill their stomachs. Without enough to eat, they had no strength to work. As time passed, no one planted the crops, resulting in a prolonged food shortage that had eventually reached the point where people exchanged children to eat.
In such an environment, the original owner’s family, which had once numbered more than ten people, had been torn apart, some dying and others scattering.
The Shen elders had three sons and one daughter.
Of the three sons, only the eldest had married. The second son, daughter, and youngest son were all unmarried.
Later, the eldest son, who was the original owner’s father, and the second son were conscripted into the army. In those chaotic times, Grandma Shen went alone into the deep mountains to save the family one more mouthful of food and never came back.
The original owner’s mother was pregnant with another child. Unable to bear the hunger, she stuffed dirt into her mouth. Seeing this, Old Master Shen risked his life to catch fish in the river. After nearly dying of exhaustion, he finally caught one, only to be seized by guards belonging to the river’s owner.
The old man was too tired and hungry, and his health had already been poor. After the guards struck him twice, he could not hold on and died.
At the moment of his death, he was still clutching the hard-won fish tightly in his arms.
In the end, he never managed to bring it home and had paid for it with his life.
After Old Master Shen died, all that remained of the Shen Family were the original owner’s pregnant mother, Third Aunt Shen, and Youngest Uncle Shen.
The family was already starving when someone happened to propose marriage to Third Aunt Shen. She asked for some money and grain, and even kept the wedding attire the other party provided for the family. She followed the wedding procession wearing her own tattered clothes.
With the money Third Aunt Shen had earned by selling herself, the family managed to endure for a while longer.
Later, the original owner’s mother went into labor. After giving birth, she suffered massive bleeding and died as well.
Youngest Uncle Shen looked at the five children, gritted his teeth, stuck a blade of grass into his hair, and took his sister-in-law’s corpse to town, where he knelt.
He sold himself, buried his sister-in-law, and left the remaining money, the children’s last chance of survival, to the five children.
The original owner became the eldest person in the family and shouldered the responsibility of head of household. To care for his younger siblings, he lived frugally and did every filthy, exhausting job there was.
But in this world, labor was worth the least. No matter how much work he did, he could not earn any money.
The baby had no breast milk and could only be raised on rice gruel. For the first two months, it was white rice gruel. After that, she could only have millet gruel. Grain**｜expensive, and no matter how frugally they lived, the family soon ran out of money, and the grain jar was empty as well.
Today, the original owner died from overwork and prolonged starvation.
No one knew whether he had starved to death or worked himself to death.
Shen Yuan, who had come from a later era, borrowed the corpse to return his soul and came back to life.
The four children he saw when he opened his eyes were all the original owner’s full younger siblings.
Shen Dong, Shen Xi, Shen Nan, and Shen Bei.
According to his memories, the original owner had the same name as Shen Yuan.
The original owner’s name had been given to him by an itinerant Daoist priest. The priest had said he was destined for great wealth and honor, with an immortal connection and miraculous encounters awaiting him. The entire Shen Family had been delighted to hear this and even stuffed a piece of flatbread into the Daoist’s hands.
However, no one in the village believed it. They all said the Daoist had conned the Shen Family by telling them what they wanted to hear.
But who did not like hearing flattering words? Life had still been fairly manageable at the time, and there had been no war. Being cheated out of a piece of flatbread was no big deal.
From the memories, Shen Yuan could easily tell that ordinary people here were, for the most part, illiterate.
Official schools were places only the children of noble families could enter. If commoners wanted to learn to read, they either had to encounter a kind wandering scholar willing to teach them, inherit a family education, or take part in the selection of minor officials, in which case the government would provide basic training and they might learn a few characters.
In a village full of boys called Er Dan and Da Niu, and girls called Hua Ya, names like East, West, South, and North sounded particularly pleasant and distinctive.
After accepting the original owner’s short sixteen years of memories, Shen Yuan felt as if he had been unconscious for a long time. In reality, he had only been unconscious for half an hour.
Opening his eyes, Shen Yuan struggled to sit up.
Shen Xi and Shen Nan, who had been watching over him nearby, immediately crowded around him and looked up at him anxiously.
Shen Xi tugged on Shen Yuan’s ragged hemp-cloth sleeve with his little hand. His voice still carried the remnants of his earlier sobs. “Big Brother, does anything hurt? Third Brother can rub it for you.”
Shen Nan held the baby Shen Bei in his arms. His face was almost pressed against little Shen Bei’s, and he nodded timidly, softly agreeing, “Big Brother, Third Brother is right.”
Meanwhile, Shen Bei stared at Shen Yuan while sucking on her fingers.
Looking at the three children before him.
Shen Yuan let out a quiet sigh.
Even the original owner had only been a sixteen-year-old boy. Shen Dong was nine, Shen Xi was seven, Shen Nan was six, and Shen Bei was only six months old, not even a year old.
If Shen Yuan had not borrowed the original owner’s body and come back to life, a household with no adults, only three children under ten and a baby in swaddling clothes, could never have survived in this country, which had just undergone a change of regime and had enjoyed only five years of peace with the neighboring states.
Shen Yuan looked around at the dilapidated thatched hut. In this turbulent dynasty, could he really survive in this world?
As a soul from another world, Shen Yuan could not help feeling some fear after learning about this place.
No one knew when war might come again.
But when Shen Yuan lowered his head and saw the three children gazing up at him with round, bright eyes like black grapes, he inevitably thought of the younger siblings at the orphanage and of his own life there.
Shen Yuan had known since childhood that he was an unwanted blade of grass.
But what was wrong with being a blade of grass?
Grass had tenacious vitality. It could survive even under the harshest conditions.
Shen Yuan wanted to live.
Now that he had been given a new life, so what if he had started with the worst possible situation?
No matter what kind of world this was, he would find a way to take root and survive.
He would not only take root here and live well himself, but also protect the younger siblings the original owner had left behind.
Since he was using someone else’s body and identity, taking care of the original owner’s younger siblings was the least he could do.
Once he had finished absorbing the memories and resolved to work hard to survive, Shen Yuan’s panic over transmigrating to another world eased.
His mind was much clearer, and the tension in his spirit had eased. At last, he felt a searing pain in his stomach.
He was hungry.
He was really, really hungry.
He could think about everything else later. Right now, the most urgent thing was to eat something and save his life.
He had better not starve to death again.
Author’s Note:
Let me explain this in advance:
Ancient times were different from the modern era. Ancient economies were primarily agricultural, relying entirely on human labor. “The more people, the more land you can farm.” Having more children was one way to increase labor and wealth.
On top of that, the mortality rate for children among ordinary people in ancient times was extremely high. They had no way of knowing whether a child would survive to adulthood, so having more children to ensure that the family had enough labor was the only path ordinary people of that time could take. (This is based on Baidu and other sources. I won’t go into the other reasons. If you’re interested, feel free to look them up.)
Therefore, you cannot view ancient times through the modern perspective of, “If you’re poor, why do you keep having children?”
Readers who cannot accept this may stop reading at this chapter and not continue on. Although this will not be a major focus later, the protagonist really does have four younger siblings [facepalm, laughing and crying]