In the quiet hospital dormitory, a sudden loud “bang” rang out. Several young nurses who were sleeping were instantly startled awake. Panicked, they all looked up toward the source of the noise to see what had happened.
They saw Bai Lu sprawled on the open floor in the middle of the room; she had clearly fallen from the upper bunk.
Wen Nuan, a young nurse sleeping in the lower bunk, hurriedly got out of bed and helped Bai Lu onto her own mattress. “Bai Lu, are you okay?”
Bai Lu opened her eyes in a daze, only to find herself in a crude earthen building. Under the dim light, there were several rusted bunk beds, and gray-white curtains fluttered slightly in the breeze by the dilapidated, old windows.
Wasn’t this the collective dormitory where she had lived for a while before getting married in her youth? Wasn’t she kicked out by her grandson and his wife, forced to huddle in bridge openings with old vagrants and scavenge for a living? How could she have returned to the eve of her marriage at twenty-two the moment she opened her eyes?
Heavens, she never expected that the “rebirth” her grandson’s wife often talked about would actually happen to her. It must be that her sincere prayers were heard by the heavens, and God, in His great mercy, had sent her back to the past.
Realizing she had been reborn, Bai Lu was overcome with excitement. She wanted to laugh at the sky and kneel to thank the heavens, but she didn’t dare do so for fear that the other nurses in the dormitory would think she was a lunatic.
“Bai Lu…” Wen Nuan called out worriedly.
“I’m fine. Everyone, turn off the lights and go to sleep!” Bai Lu waved her hand, then returned to her upper bunk. After lying down, she couldn’t help but pinch her leg. The sharp pain that followed made her even more certain that she had truly been reborn—reborn to a time before any of the tragedies had begun.
Originally, her name wasn’t Bai Lu; it was Bai Zhenzhu. Because her family had encountered trouble and incurred massive debts, her parents had fled with her older sister, her younger brother, and the family’s remaining wealth. They left her behind to bear the brunt of everything. The creditors came to her door, pressuring her and wanting to use her to settle the debt.
At that time, two male classmates from her middle school happened to return from the army: Jin Jialiang, who was being discharged, and Jin Qiu, who was on home leave. Seeing her family in such a state, they rescued her from the fire and took her away from her hometown. To prevent the creditors from finding her, Jin Qiu registered her under the name of a long-deceased relative and changed her name to Bai Lu.
Meanwhile, Jin Jialiang proposed to marry her to give her a legitimate identity.
Bai Lu had only been classmates with Jin Jialiang and Jin Qiu for three years during middle school and hadn’t spoken to them much. Having not seen them for years after graduation, she didn’t know Jin Jialiang’s character. It wasn’t until after she married him that she realized he was not a good husband.
When he came home from work, he would just lie on the heated brick bed and do nothing; he wouldn’t even pick up a fallen broom. He demanded she hand over her salary to his mother for safekeeping. If she didn’t, he would use his “life-saving grace” to pressure her. Meanwhile, he used his own salary to maintain appearances, helping this person and that, never bringing a single penny home. Bai Lu never spent a cent of his money.
If Bai Lu used her own salary to reward herself with a new piece of clothing, he would scold her mercilessly in front of outsiders, making everyone believe she was a spendthrift and a failure, leading people to point fingers at her.
Coming from a well-off family, Bai Lu had been pampered since childhood and had never lifted a finger to cook. Jin Jialiang used her inability to cook to humiliate her every single day. Eventually, when his parents visited and demanded she give up her nursing job to his illiterate sister, he actually agreed. When his parents said they would take her back to their hometown to “train” her into a sensible and considerate daughter-in-law, he agreed to that as well.
However, Bai Lu only pretended to comply. When they bought the train tickets and decided to head back, she went straight to the hospital to request a few days off and hid in the mountains alone. Only after they left did she come down. She didn’t give up her job, nor did she go back to the hometown with Jin Jialiang’s parents.
Knowing Jin Jialiang’s true nature, she stopped enduring him. She became a “moonlight” spender just like him, refused to learn how to cook, and simply brought food home from the hospital cafeteria. Whether Jin Jialiang ate or not was up to him; he could starve for all she cared.
The two lived together without affection for three years until Jin Jialiang died in a workplace accident. His parents rushed over immediately to seize the compensation money from the forest farm and cursed her for being a “jinx” who caused her husband’s death.
After Bai Lu became a widow, Jin Qiu came to her and said he wanted to take her away. Feeling inferior, she felt she wasn’t good enough for him and refused. Later, divorced men, widowers, old men, and even married men all crowded around her. Of course, they didn’t love her; they just saw that she was beautiful and had a good job, and they all wanted to take advantage of her!
After being harassed for five long years, Bai Lu didn’t want to endure it anymore, so she contacted Jin Qiu. Later, she married him.
Jin Qiu was the complete opposite of Jin Jialiang. He wasn’t a chauvinist. Since she couldn’t cook, he took over the cooking and all the housework. As soon as he received his salary, he handed it over to her so she could buy things she liked. During his time off, he would take her hiking, walking, and on dates. Within his means, he worked hard to give her and their child the best of everything.
But fate did not favor such a good man. They were only married for fifteen years before he died in an accident. While he was renovating a relocation house for someone, he fell from a height and died instantly. That family had no money and couldn’t afford the compensation, so they could only pay in small increments. Eventually, seeing that Bai Lu was just a woman with a child who couldn’t cause much trouble, they simply stopped paying altogether.
With nowhere to seek justice, Bai Lu had to work desperately to raise her son. She finally waited until her son got married and had children, thinking she could help look after her grandson and enjoy her later years. However, her son also died young. Her daughter-in-law ran away, leaving Bai Lu and a tiny grandson to depend on each other.
Bai Lu worked hard to raise her grandson, helped him find a wife, transferred the house to his name, and handed over her assets to him. She originally thought her grandson and his wife would treat her well, but she never expected they would change the door locks, throw her old belongings outside, and refuse to let her in.
The community, the Women’s Federation… various organizations tried to help her, but her grandson and his wife simply refused to let her through the door. Later, they quietly sold the house at a discount and ran away with the money.
At the age of seventy or eighty, Bai Lu no longer had the energy to deal with such things. She had no choice but to join the ranks of those collecting bottles, earning a bit of change to feed herself. She never expected that while collecting bottles for the last time, she would look up and see a piercing, blinding light…
Bai Lu felt that her rebirth must be linked to that blinding light. She wondered if her “good” grandson and granddaughter-in-law, upon hearing what happened to her, would crawl back like leeches to drain the last bit of value from her body.