Knock! Knock! Knock! Brain deposit counter—
Quickly, hand over your brains! May all the sisters coming to read this get super rich. Love you all!
……
“She’s been hauled up! She’s been hauled up! Su family’s pampered little girl, she’s still breathing!”
The bone-chilling river water filled her mouth and nose, and the suffocating pain wrapped around Su Nianqiu like a tight net. She thrashed violently, coughing sharply as her lungs burned with fire.
The chaotic human voices, the fishy stench of mud, and the sharp, malicious gossip of a woman flooded into her mind all at once.
“What a sin! Young as she is, instead of walking the straight path, she has to go messing around with cheap scandals. Now she’s got the nerve to jump in the river?”
“Who’s saying otherwise! The other day I even saw that good-for-nothing Zhao family scoundrel bragging at the village entrance, saying Su Nianqiu’s waist is soft and slender…”
“Bah! Shameless! Her old man is even the production brigade leader. Now the whole Red Flag Brigade’s face has been dragged through the mud by her!”
Su Nianqiu’s head was splitting with pain.
Wasn’t she just back at her haute couture design studio, pulling an all-nighter drafting sketches for a hundred-million-yuan order? Why on earth did she open her eyes to find herself lying in the mud, with people pointing right at her nose and cursing her as a “promiscuous woman”?
Countless unfamiliar fragments of memory surged like a tidal wave, forcibly jamming themselves into her brain.
The year is 1976, Red Flag Brigade. She is Su Nianqiu, the only daughter of Brigade Leader Su Jianguo. Because of her striking looks, she was known as the brigade’s “resident belle.” But a while back, while out picking mushrooms in the mountains, she ran into a man whose whole body was burning hot and whose gaze could devour a person…
A wild, blurring night.
The original owner had been scared out of her wits. She hadn’t even dared to look closely at the token the man left behind—a dragon-patterned jade pendant—and had instead sneaked back home, burying the secret deep down.
As a result, a little over a month later, her monthly period failed to arrive, and she kept suffering from bouts of retching.
This coincidence was spotted by Zhao Dazhang, the village’s biggest gossip and good-for-nothing, who had long lusted after the original owner’s beauty. Harboring bitter resentment after his advances were rejected, he immediately embellished the story and spread rumors all over the village that Su Nianqiu’s conduct was loose and that she had been fooling around with some wild man!
Rumors and gossip are more piercing than knives.
As a maiden from a respectable family, how could the original owner withstand such finger-pointing? Amid the spittle and scorn of the entire village, consumed by shame and fury, she threw herself straight into the icy river at the village entrance.
And then came her—Su Nianqiu, the top-tier 21st-century designer who had transmigrated.
What the hell… I actually transmigrated into a book! Su Nianqiu cursed inwardly.
This starting scenario was pure hell mode! Transmigrating into an unwed, pregnant “fallen woman” of the 1970s? How on earth was she supposed to play this hand!
“Make way! Everyone make way! Old Man Chen is here!”
The crowd stirred as a thin, wiry old man carrying a medicine box, his goatee practically twitching with importance, was escorted through the throng by several villagers.
“Doctor Chen, hurry and take a look, is this girl going to make it?” an aunt asked anxiously.
The traditional Chinese medicine practitioner known as Old Man Chen wasted no time. He squatted down and pressed his withered fingers directly onto Su Nianqiu’s wrist.
Just as Su Nianqiu tried to pull her hand back, a sudden wave of churning nausea heaved in her stomach, and that familiar sickening feeling rose up again.
“Blech—”
Turning her head to the side, right in front of all the villagers old and young, she spat a mouthful of sour water right onto the muddy ground.
At that instant, the entire riverbank fell dead silent.
Every single gaze turned meaningful, sweeping back and forth between Su Nianqiu’s pale yet stunningly gorgeous face and her flat lower belly.
Those eyes were nakedly full of disdain and schadenfreude, eager to watch a good show.
“This… could it be…”
“Eight out of ten times, yes! Look at the way she’s throwing up, it’s identical to when my old lady was pregnant with our second!”
Doctor Chen’s brows locked tight. His three fingers carefully rolled and pressed along Su Nianqiu’s radial pulse. The expression on his face shifted from solemn to shock, finally settling into a strange trace of complexity.
“How is it, Doctor Chen? Is she alright?” asked an aunt who had a relatively good relationship with the Su family, her voice filled with anxiety.
Doctor Chen withdrew his hand, stroked his goatee, and looked at Su Nianqiu with a complicated gaze. After a long pause, he spat out just one sentence:
“She… is physically fine. It’s just this pulse… rolling like pearls in a dish, slippery, smooth, and rapid. It’s… it’s a slippery pulse!”
A slippery pulse!
Those two words hit like a thunderbolt, exploding deafeningly across the quiet riverbank!
In the countryside, who didn’t know what a slippery pulse meant?
It meant there was cargo in the belly! A bun in the oven!
Those rumors Zhao Dazhang had spread turned out, motherfucker, to be true!
“Oh, sweet heavens! She really is pregnant!”
“Shameless vixen! Let’s see how she talks her way out of this now!”
“Su Jianguo’s face as a brigade leader has finally been stripped off by his own daughter and thrown on the ground to be trampled!”
The village gossips acted like they had been injected with chicken blood, spittle flying as they hurled insults. Every single word grew more venomous than the last, as if they wanted to tear Su Nianqiu apart alive.
Just then, two furious figures squeezed in from outside the crowd like madmen.
“Who the hell is talking nonsense?! Get the hell out of my way!”
A ringing, fiery voice rang out. Following close behind was a middle-aged woman dressed in coarse cloth with her back held ramrod straight. In her hand, she was gripping a gleaming, polished nanmu shoulder pole!
Right behind her was a middle-aged man with a pale, ashen face and a sturdy build—none other than Brigade Leader Su Jianguo.
“Qiuer! My Qiuer!”
The moment the woman caught sight of Su Nianqiu lying on the ground, soaked to the bone and pale as a sheet, her tears burst forth instantly. She lunged forward, pulling her daughter tightly into her arms as her voice shook. “My precious flesh and blood, are you trying to take your mother’s life?!”
This was the original owner’s birth mother, Li Xiulan. A woman notorious in the village for her fiery temper and fierce protectiveness over her children.
Held tightly in her arms, breathing in the faint scent of laundry soap and warmth coming off her, Su Nianqiu felt the panic and chill of her transmigrated soul miraculously soothe away.
This was… what a mother felt like?
In her past life, she had been an orphan and had never experienced it.
“Old Su! What are you standing there frozen for?! Which thousand-forced-curses bastard drove my daughter to jump in the river?!” Li Xiulan demanded, holding her daughter as she whipped her head around to roar at Su Jianguo.
Su Jianguo’s gaze swept across the crowd like a blade, causing everyone who caught his eye to instinctively shrink their necks.
“Doctor Chen,” Su Jianguo said in a hoarse voice, suppressing a monstrous fury, “what you just said about the slippery pulse… is it true?”
Doctor Chen felt his scalp tingle under that stare, but he still hardened his heart and nodded. “There’s no mistake. Absolute truth.”
“Boom—”
Su Jianguo and Li Xiulan felt as though they had been struck by lightning.
The crowd erupted once again.
“Did you hear that! Even the doctor said so! Let’s see how the Su family tries to deny it this time!”
“Aiyo, whose seed is actually inside Su Nianqiu’s belly anyway? It couldn’t really be Zhao Dazhang’s, could it?”
Within the crowd, that skinhead wearing bell-bottoms, the good-for-nothing Zhao Dazhang, puffed out his chest triumphantly and wore a lewd grin. “Hehe, hard to say…”
Before he could finish his sentence, a dark shadow accompanied by the sound of whistling wind came smashing straight down toward his head!
It was Li Xiulan!
She had raised the shoulder pole!