“Eat slowly. Don’t get oil on your clothes or the bedding. Sit a little farther out.”
Su Yuanyuan moved the children’s lunchbox toward the middle of the table.
The two children ate quietly, obediently nodding before taking turns sharing the meat and vegetables in the boxed meal.
Looking at the two children, Su Yuanyuan felt genuinely relieved.
Taking two children on a long trip alone was actually quite exhausting, but Lu Mingzhu and Lu Siyuan were both very well-behaved and could be considered unusually easy to take care of. They were practically angels sent from heaven.
The train arrived at the next station.
It was a station in the city center, and a large number of people boarded.
People living in the city had somewhat better living conditions, so there were far more passengers buying sleeper tickets than there had been at Bajiao County.
Quite a few passengers headed toward the sleeper carriages. Su Yuanyuan waved at the two children, signaling for them to sit on her berth.
Young children didn’t need to buy tickets, but seats on the train had to be paid for. Children could ride without a ticket, but they were considered free standing passengers. If someone with a ticket needed the seat, they still had to give it up.
Su Yuanyuan was already full and waited for the children to finish eating.
Just as the train was about to depart, a family of three hurried aboard. After wiping the sweat from their faces, they carried their child and sat down in the aisle of the sleeper carriage.
The last batch of passengers boarded, and the train began moving forward.
Su Yuanyuan glanced toward the aisle and noticed that the couple was covered in sweat. She raised an eyebrow.
It was already late autumn. Although it wasn’t particularly cold yet, surely it wasn’t hot enough for them to be sweating this much?
There were quite a few people on the train, so Lu Siyuan and Lu Mingzhu ate even more slowly.
Noticing something strange about the siblings, Su Yuanyuan teased them with a smile.
“Oh my, are you two feeling shy because there are so many people?”
Lu Siyuan smiled bashfully, revealing a row of pearly white teeth. Lu Mingzhu also smiled shyly.
“It’s okay. There are only two bites left. Finish them quickly, and then Mommy will take you to wash your hands and faces.”
Su Yuanyuan wiped the children’s greasy mouths with a handkerchief.
Well, calling it a handkerchief was being generous. It was really just a piece of worn-out cloth.
The two children nodded and continued eating slowly, though they were even more restrained now.
As Su Yuanyuan spoke with the two little ones, she noticed someone watching them from nearby.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the couple sitting in the aisle kept looking over this way.
Su Yuanyuan initially thought they were attracted by the smell of the braised pork. But after observing them for a while, she realized they were looking at the children beside her.
Although Lu Mingzhu and Lu Siyuan were very thin, they had inherited excellent features from both her and Lu Zheng’an.
In the original novel, Lu Zheng’an was described as handsome and dignified, a striking young man known throughout the surrounding villages. His face was exceptionally good-looking.
Even though the children were somewhat thin, they were still very adorable, especially their bright, sparkling eyes.
It wasn’t just Su Yuanyuan boasting like an old woman praising her own wares. The two little ones were genuinely so well-behaved that even she would probably take a few extra glances if she saw them on the road.
Train windows in the 1980s could still be opened. Even with the windows open for ventilation, the smell of braised pork was simply too enticing.
Passengers passing by would glance over a few times, but most merely looked hungrily before moving on.
When children smelled the aroma of meat, their attention was naturally drawn over. Seeing Lu Mingzhu and Lu Siyuan eating so happily, some children began squirming in their parents’ arms, demanding that they wanted some too.
“Mommy, what are they eating? It smells so good.”
Children were naturally curious about all kinds of food, and during this era, daily necessities and food were still relatively scarce. A greasy, fragrant meal of braised pork and rice was especially tempting.
“There’s nothing special. Didn’t you say you were sleepy just now? Go to sleep. We’ll be at Grandma’s house in two hours.”
The child’s mother coaxed the child in her arms while glancing toward Su Yuanyuan.
“Mommy’s lying. That’s meat, isn’t it? Is it a boxed meal sold on the train? I want some too. Mommy, can you buy me some?”
The child’s appetite had been awakened. He licked his fingers and stared fixedly at the boxed meal in Lu Siyuan and Lu Mingzhu’s hands. There was no way he was going to sleep now.
The woman looked exhausted as she held her child, trying to coax him to sleep.
“Didn’t you just eat meat yesterday? Let’s not eat any today, okay? Just wait a little longer. When we get to Grandma’s house, there’ll be steamed buns.”
Something had happened to her husband, so the woman had no choice but to take her child back to her parents’ home for the time being.
After everything that had happened recently, the woman was already utterly exhausted, but she still patiently coaxed the child in her arms.
Food was sold on long-distance trains, but boxed meals containing meat weren’t cheap.
And judging by the meat those two children were eating, it was glistening with oil and clearly good-quality meat. One box must have cost quite a bit.
But the child had clearly been spoiled and refused to listen. No matter what his mother said, he insisted on eating braised pork.
Su Yuanyuan felt somewhat embarrassed hearing the commotion.
The smell of the braised pork really was too strong. Although eating on the train was allowed, it was starting to affect the other passengers.
And since the child was craving it so badly, Su Yuanyuan was about to ask whether her own two children were full. If they were, she could give the other child a piece of meat to try.
Before she could say anything, a scream rang through the entire carriage.
“I don’t want to sleep! I don’t want to sleep! I don’t want steamed buns! I want meat! Buy me meat! If Mommy won’t buy me meat, then Mommy is a bad mommy!”
The child grabbed his mother’s hair and pulled at her clothes as he screamed and cried.
His fingernails couldn’t be trimmed particularly short, and after only a few scratches, several red marks appeared on the woman’s neck.
Su Yuanyuan’s expression immediately turned cold.
She completely lost any goodwill toward the child, and the thought of giving him a piece of meat disappeared as well.
Not every child in the world was cute.
A child who screamed, hit, and berated their own mother was simply a spoiled little tyrant.
Su Yuanyuan didn’t look at the mother and child again.
Someone capable of raising such a badly behaved child was, nine times out of ten, problematic themselves.
She continued watching her own two little ones instead, paying attention to the passengers coming and going.
The child continued crying and making a scene in the carriage.
The woman struggled to hold him, preventing him from kicking people walking past. Looking embarrassed, she coaxed him and told him to stop making trouble, promising that she would buy him something once the dining car came by.
Even after she promised, the child refused to stop. He seemed to become even more worked up, kicking his legs and screaming and crying nonstop.
Su Yuanyuan didn’t want to harbor too much hostility toward a child, so she turned her head away.
Then her gaze suddenly froze.
The crying child next to her was making such a huge racket that quite a few passengers had turned to look. Several children who had been sleeping in their parents’ arms had even been awakened by the noise.
Yet the child in the arms of the couple sitting in the aisle showed absolutely no sign of waking up.
The child looked to be only about two years old and lay quietly in the woman’s arms, breathing very lightly, completely unaffected by the surrounding screams and commotion.
Every child had different sleeping habits. Some were light sleepers, while others slept deeply.
But in such a noisy environment, a child showing absolutely no reaction at all indicated one thing:
Something was wrong.
Su Yuanyuan silently withdrew her gaze and pulled Lu Siyuan and Lu Mingzhu closer, making sure they stayed pressed tightly against her.
She hadn’t expected that on her very first train ride after transmigrating into a novel, she would encounter the classic plotline that the female lead in an era novel was practically destined to encounter:
Child trafficking.
So the human traffickers had been watching her two children earlier not because they were adorable, but because they were sizing up potential targets?
Su Yuanyuan was speechless.
How could even a cannon-fodder supporting female character like her run into this kind of plot?
Wasn’t this supposed to be something that only happened to the female lead in an era novel?