A faint whiff of foot odor reached her nose, mingling with the diesel fumes in the air. The bus jolted beneath her again and again. Shen Xuewei’s brows drew together as she slowly woke.
She blinked once, then again, as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She slapped away the pair of legs in front of her and abruptly sat up.
What… what was going on? How had she gone to sleep at home and woken up on a sleeper bus—the kind she hadn’t ridden in years?
Her father, who had been sleeping soundly, woke when she slapped his legs. He opened his eyes, looking annoyed.
“Xiaowei, didn’t I tell you before we got on to go straight to sleep? You won’t get carsick if you sleep. We haven’t even been on the road for two hours yet. Why are you sitting up?”
Shen Xuewei stared, dazed and shocked, at her father’s face, which looked much younger than she remembered. At last, she understood.
She… seemed to have been reborn, back in the year she was sent to her maternal grandparents’ home.
There had been no car accident, no jump from a building, and no thoughts of ending her life.
The milk tea shop she had taken over had just opened, and in her excitement, she had gone to bed two hours later than usual.
And then, without warning, she had been reborn.
Dazed, she positioned a red plastic bag beneath her chin and lay back down.
Gradually, she curled herself into a ball.
Her father glanced at her. When she didn’t move again, he pulled his thin blanket more tightly around himself and went back to sleep.
When she heard his faint snores, Shen Xuewei slowly opened her eyes. She touched her shrunken body and tried to make sense of everything.
She knew rebirth was all the rage. After all, she’d read enough novels over the years.
But how had it happened to her?
When she was in her twenties, she had indeed imagined being reborn, wondering what she would do if she could go back and start over.
But she was thirty-two now, past the age for indulging in fantasies.
Through her own efforts, she had managed to buy a house and a car.
She wasn’t rich, but she had a stable life, a few close friends, and was about to welcome a cat and a dog.
She was perfectly happy with that life. She had no regrets at all. She had never wanted to be reborn!
If she remembered right, it was February 2000, not long after Chinese New Year.
She remembered the date so clearly because that was the year she was old enough to start school, but didn’t have a household registration.
In the city, the only option for her was a private elementary school.
On top of the steep tuition, they would also have to pay the school a hefty sponsorship fee.
Her parents would never have been willing to spend that much money on her.
So during the Chinese New Year holiday, under the pretext of asking after her maternal grandparents’ health, Mother Chen suggested sending her to school near her maternal grandfather’s home.
The old couple doted on their daughter. As soon as she brought it up, they agreed without the slightest hesitation.
They added that Mother Chen had another little one to look after, which made things difficult, and that schooling in Huacheng was expensive. They suggested sending Shen Xuewei’s older brother, Shen Xuewen, there too, offering to help look after the children.
That way, the two children could go to school together and keep each other company.
Shen Xuewen was the first child of Father Shen and Mother Chen—and a boy, to boot.
How could the couple bear to send him off to suffer in some remote mountain backwater?
They said only that he had already started school, and that changing environments again might make it hard for him to adjust and hurt his grades. So they turned down the offer.
A few days after Chinese New Year, Shen Xuewei followed her father onto a sleeper bus bound for Yizhou City.
Shen Xuewei had suffered from motion sickness since childhood. After she started working, riding in vehicles so often had eased it somewhat.
But now, with the sudden change in her surroundings, the nausea had not let up at all as she lay on the sleeper bus.
She was seven that year, though her birthday hadn’t come yet, so strictly speaking, she was still six.
Children aged seven or under—or under 1.2 meters tall—could ride the sleeper bus without a ticket.
But even though she didn’t need a ticket, the bus wasn’t going to set aside a berth just for her.
Besides, the berths were so narrow that her father took up the entire space on his.
So she had to sleep in the aisle beside him.
Whenever someone came by—say, on the way to the toilet—she had to move out of the way quickly, or she might get stepped on.
The sleeper bus from Huacheng to Yizhou City took nearly twenty hours.
Because she was so carsick, Shen Xuewei couldn’t eat a thing. She didn’t have a single bite the entire way.
By the time they finally reached the Yizhou City bus station, she looked green.
Her father took her to a little eatery outside the station to get something to eat, then brought her back to wait for their next bus.
Her maternal grandparents didn’t live in Yizhou City. It would take at least another six or seven hours to reach their home.
First, they had to take a coach from the bus station to the county seat, then a minibus from there to the town.
From the town, they would need to catch a van to a village connected by road. Then they would have to walk along mountain paths and cross several mountains before reaching her grandparents’ home.
Shen Xuewei no longer remembered how she had felt at that point in her previous life.
But she imagined she must have been confused, uneasy, and afraid.
She had never told her family about those feelings.
And they… had never cared how she felt.
From the time she was little, all Father Shen and Mother Chen had asked of her was to be good and obedient, not to slack off, and to help with the housework.
So even at her young age, she could already wash dishes, mop floors, and do laundry properly.
When outsiders saw her, they praised her parents for teaching her to be so sensible despite her young age.
Her parents would respond with self-effacing words, their faces full of pride.
Until she was twenty-five, she had always been the well-behaved, obedient girl in her relatives’ eyes.
After she turned twenty-five, all kinds of ugly labels—rebellious, selfish, petty, unfilial—were hurled at her by Father Shen and Mother Chen.
But by then, she no longer cared.
Before she was reborn, she and her parents hadn’t seen each other for years.
Now, with time turned back and her father still young before her, Shen Xuewei lowered her eyes and avoided the hand he held out to her.
Her father didn’t seem to mind. He just reminded her, “Then walk on your own. Stay behind me, and don’t wander off.”
Shen Xuewei nodded lightly, putting on an obedient expression.
What a terrible point in time to be reborn!
If she’d been reborn at sixteen, she would have dropped to her knees at once and kowtowed in thanks to Heaven for its great kindness.
Then she would have seized the opportunities of the times, ridden the wave, made a fortune, and become a wealthy woman.
She had read so many rebirth novels. Whenever she saw the heroine humiliate the villains and slap them in the face, her blood would boil, and she’d wish she could jump into the story and get a few hits in herself.
But the reality was, she was only six now.
Even with a thirty-two-year-old soul in a six-year-old body, she couldn’t change her circumstances.
She was small, not very strong, and had no money. Heaven hadn’t given her any cheats, either.
Forget about taking down villains—wherever she went, she’d be the one getting bullied.
Well, her memories of her previous life did count as a cheat, of sorts.
But that little cheat was no use to her now!
If she ran up to someone and told them which year the stock market would experience wild swings and which year housing prices would soar and plummet, her father might send her straight to a mental hospital.
For now, she had no choice but to obediently follow her father to her maternal grandparents’ home in the mountains. There was no other way.
Her relationship with her family had indeed grown quite strained in her previous life, but she had no other option now.
In an era when human traffickers still turned up from time to time and there were no surveillance cameras, if she didn’t stay close to her father, she could easily be abducted and taken who knew where.