Chen Jue closed his eyes, not wanting to dwell on the things that weighed on his mind. Instead, he continued reporting the good news: “This person has gone to perform corvée labor, and I don’t know when he’ll return. That’s not important. What I want to tell you today is something… major. I’ve given you a descendant—I gave birth myself. If the two of you knew, you’d probably be happy, right?”
Chen Jue spoke hesitantly, as even he had taken three days to accept this child.
Thinking this, Chen Jue continued explaining: “I know you both think I’ve gone mad. Someone like me… has an extremely low fertility rate, so I wanted to see for myself. If it can be documented, I want to explore another way for life to come into being. If it succeeds, perhaps our hospital’s 520 Extrauterine Embryo Research Project could take another direction. Don’t you think so, Dean Chen?”
Dean Chen, far away in another time and space, naturally offered no response. Chen Jue waited for a while, but no sound came. He closed his eyes, his face etched with a grief no one could see.
Yet this sorrow vanished in an instant. Moments later, he returned to his usual expressionless self.
Chen Jue continued speaking to the medicine shelf and the empty air: “Mom, Dad, the reason I’m telling you all this is that I’m still alive, living in another world. Don’t worry about me. Take good care of yourselves.”
After finishing, Chen Jue looked down at his belly.
Perhaps the heavens, acknowledging the many lives he had saved, had given him another chance to live.
As for the child in his belly, he would treat it as repaying a debt.
Chen Jue patted his belly gently. It began rumbling again—the sun had just risen above the treetops. Judging by the angle, it was only around 7 a.m., and he was already hungry. Carrying a child required a lot of energy. For now, he wouldn’t think about anything else; he just needed to fill his stomach.
Chen Jue prepared to find something to eat, but standing at the kitchen door, he didn’t know where to start. It wasn’t that the kitchen was empty—it had everything it needed: a large stove connected to a smaller one, pots, bowls, and utensils. Without modern cabinets, everything was out in the open, yet Chen Jue felt utterly lost.
In his past thirty years, he had only known how to eat. In the kitchen, he could only operate a coffee machine. Aside from the occasional meal prepared by Director Zhou, he had hardly used any kitchen tools.
Chen Jue stood there for a moment before finally going to gather firewood. He took stock of the supplies, though it hardly required a detailed check—everything was plain to see.
The grain was stored in three vats as thick as water buckets, but the contents were nearly depleted. The coarse corn kernels were only reachable by bending over, the small sorghum grains formed just a thin layer at the bottom, and the grayish wheat flour was down to its last half-gourdful.
No wonder the original owner was malnourished and hypoglycemic—there simply wasn’t much food stored in the house.
This Huo Lin was a hunter with little farmland. Moreover, during this lean season, even other villagers had little to eat, so it was unlikely they would sell any surplus grain to him. The medicinal herbs he gathered couldn’t be sold, leaving him unable to exchange them for food.
In the end, Chen Jue used a gourd dipper to rinse half a dipper of coarse corn grits to make porridge—a dish Director Zhou had once made for him.
In later times, it was said that eating coarse grains was good for you.
Chen Jue looked at the coarse grains and considered the season, roughly deducing that he was likely in central or northern China—not far from Beijing.
Beijing…
Stop, don’t think about it. Even if Beijing was nearby, Director Zhou and Dean Chen wouldn’t be there.
Suppressing the ache in his heart, Chen Jue crouched by the stove and struggled to light the fire with a fire starter.
The fire starters used by the ancients weren’t matches. Chen Jue blew on it for a while before finally getting it lit. The farmhouse’s stove was decades old, pitch black, and without looking in a mirror, Chen Jue knew he was covered in soot.
But he didn’t care. Although doctors often had a touch of mysophobia, when a person was hungry, such external concerns no longer mattered.
After finally lighting the fire, Chen Jue worried it might go out, so he added more firewood. Before long, he smelled something burning.
There was no aroma of cooked food—just the smell of scorching. In a flurry, Chen Jue lifted the heavy wooden lid, and the burnt smell grew stronger.
He couldn’t even scrape it with a wooden spatula. It wasn’t crispy rice crust—it was a burnt mess stuck to the bottom of the pot.
Chen Jue sighed, holding a spoon.
He had originally intended to cook a bowl of corn grits porridge, but for some reason, it had all turned into dry rice, with the bottom completely burnt.
If the bottom was inedible, he’d eat the top layer. He couldn’t waste food.
A little burnt smell wasn’t so bad—wasn’t it a bit like the aroma of coffee? Or the caramelized top of a crème brûlée?
He imagined the taste of the porridge and forced himself to swallow it.
But the food he swallowed didn’t even make it to his digestive tract before he threw it all back up.
“Ugh—”
Chen Jue barely managed to place the bowl on the low windowsill before stumbling to the corner, leaning against the wall as he retched.
He wasn’t picky, but the child in his belly was exceptionally so. It refused to accept the half-cooked, half-raw meal.
It was food he had worked hard to prepare, but unpalatable was unpalatable. Even the child in his belly clearly rejected it.
Fortunately, the chicken wasn’t picky. The rooster that had been steadfastly perched on the tree saw Chen Jue vomiting and swooped down from the branch, using Chen Jue’s back as a cushion as it landed, leaving behind a feather as a landing fee.
Chen Jue was too busy retching, tears and snot streaming down his face, to pay it any mind.
By the time Chen Jue plucked the feather from his head, the rooster had already devoured the untouched corn grits porridge and soared back up to the tree branch.
Chen Jue trembled as he pointed a finger at it, too exhausted to even scold it.
Sooner or later, he’d kill that chicken.