With the Lin family fallen, Ye Xiaoxiao’s final wish had been fulfilled. Yet she felt lost.
In life, the most frightening thing was living without a goal.
Back when she had been trapped with Tang Daniu—unable to eat her fill, unable to stay warm, and often beaten—she had only held onto one thought: she had to see her children again. She wanted to ask Li Tianyou why he had allowed his parents to sell them.
Now that her children were gone, what difference was there between living and being a walking corpse?
Looking at the dozens of bank cards holding hundreds of billions, she felt it would be wasteful to leave them unused.
Thinking about the ancestral wooden bracelet space filled with items collected from different eras, she realized that her ancestors had been constantly gathering supplies and storing them inside. Only because she had been fortunate enough to activate the space had she survived—and taken her revenge.
Perhaps she could follow the example of her ancestors, filling the space with supplies so that one day, another descendant who found the bracelet in their moment of helplessness could also be saved by it.
Her long experience of hunger made her believe that stockpiling food was the most reliable thing.
So Ye Xiaoxiao disguised herself as a middle-aged man and began purchasing supplies.
Her first stop was the largest wholesale market in South China, where she bought 150,000 jin each of rice and flour.
She purchased 100,000 jin each of mung beans, soybeans, red beans, black rice, red rice, corn, and other coarse grains.
For meat, she bought 100,000 jin each of pork, chicken, duck, goose, several common fish, eggs, and duck eggs.
She also bought 10,000 jin of quail eggs.
Beef, mutton, and donkey meat were purchased in Inner Mongolia—100,000 jin each.
She bought 10,000 jin each of various flavors of beef jerky, pork jerky, and donkey jerky.
She also bought 10,000 sets of cleaned pig, chicken, duck, cow, sheep, and donkey offal.
For milk, she purchased 1,000 boxes of each flavor.
In the United States, she spent 200 million on the most advanced personal protection equipment and tools.
In Guangdong Province, she collected saplings of longan, mango, lychee, green jujube, banana, pineapple, and many other fruit trees—planting 1,000 trees of each inside the space.
At a famous seed wholesale market, she gathered seeds for various grains and vegetables and planted them in the designated farming areas of the space.
She packed 5,000 sets of Cantonese dim sum breakfasts, 20,000 pieces of various breads, 5,000 servings of white-cut chicken, 5,000 roasted ducks, 5,000 roasted geese, 5,000 servings of beef offal, 2,000 roasted pigs, 1,000 servings of countryside tofu, and many other foods—storing them all in the space.
She purchased 100 jin each of various fresh fish, seafood, and aquatic seedlings, releasing them into the vast lakes and seas within the space that covered tens of thousands of acres. Perhaps due to the abundant spiritual energy there, both marine and freshwater creatures could survive inside.
In Guangxi Province, she collected 1,000 saplings each of starfruit, passion fruit, sugarcane, persimmon, and water chestnut, planting them in the space.
She also stocked 5,000 servings each of famous local foods:
Nanning Laoyou noodles, Guilin rice noodles, Liuzhou snail noodles, Wuzhou Bingquan soy milk, Wuzhou herbal jelly, Lipu taro pork, five-color glutinous rice, beer duck, beer fish, and more.
In Hunan Province, she gathered 1,000 saplings each of Golden Autumn pears, Jingzhou bayberries, Anjiang pomelos, Mayang tangerines, Qianyang rock sugar oranges, and Xiang pearl grapes.
She also stocked 5,000 servings each of Changsha stinky tofu, spicy crawfish, Changde sauce duck, chopped chili fish head, and sugar-oil rice cakes.
…
From south to north, she collected supplies all the way.
In the three northeastern provinces, she gathered seeds and seedlings of ginseng, yuan mushrooms, hazel mushrooms, lion’s mane mushrooms, pine mushrooms, wood ear fungus, and blueberries, planting them in the space.
She packed 5,000 servings each of Guo Bao Rou, braised pork strips, Di San Xian, traditional pork-butchering dishes, chicken stewed with mushrooms, iron-pot stewed goose, sauce-braised bones, and red sausages.
…
From north to west, all the way to Xinjiang, she planted 1,000 saplings or seeds each of grapes, fragrant pears, Hami melons, red dates, and pomegranates.
She bought 200,000 jin of Xinjiang cotton, considering it a kind of patriotic support.
She also stocked 5,000 whole roasted lambs.
…
From the west to the southwest, all the way to Yunnan Province, she purchased 100 jin each of fresh mushrooms such as chicken mushrooms, matsutake, ganba mushrooms, bamboo fungus, milk mushrooms, tiger-palm mushrooms, green-cap mushrooms, and cured-meat mushrooms, planting them in the space. She also bought 5,000 jin of dried mushrooms and stored them in the warehouse.
At the same time, she rented a large warehouse in Yunnan and purchased two complete sets of grain-processing machinery, along with 1,000 boxes each of toothbrushes, toothpaste, shampoo, body wash, and sanitary pads.
She also bought 5,000 sets of daily necessities such as bedsheets, quilt covers, pots, bowls, and various household items.
Out of nostalgia for the 1970s, Ye Xiaoxiao bought 500 old-style bicycles, 2 cars, and 2 tractors.
Out of longing for the future, she purchased 100 units each of the latest mobile phones, drones, cars, bicycles, motorcycles, and electric bikes—none of them registered with license plates.
For her children, she prepared 2,000 sets of clothing for every decade from birth to age sixty, covering styles from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
She bought massive quantities of both prescription and over-the-counter medicines, spending about 100 million.
She ordered 5,000 units each of washing machines, sewing machines, televisions, rice cookers, and radios directly from factories—both new and old models, all without brand labels.
The people she owed the most were her children.
If she had been smarter back then and avoided being plotted against, they wouldn’t have suffered such tragic fates.
Finally, in Yunnan and Myanmar, Ye Xiaoxiao bought several jade mountains, collecting all the jade and raw jadeite stones inside and storing them in the space.
She still had plenty of money left.
So she continued purchasing fruit, vegetable, and flower seeds from around the world, planting them in the space.
She also collected thousands of servings of cuisines from all over the world, storing them inside.
In the end, she still had over 20 billion remaining. She donated it all to tens of thousands of orphanages across the country, wishing that every child could grow up healthy and happy.
On the plane returning home from the United States, Ye Xiaoxiao had only one wish:
To return to the place where her children had died and accompany them.
Suddenly, screams erupted inside the aircraft.
Pulled from her thoughts, Ye Xiaoxiao saw flames rushing straight toward her—
Then the plane exploded.
Perhaps this was for the best.
At last, she was free.
With that final thought, Ye Xiaoxiao died.
Li Tianyou’s soul, which had followed her all along, also vanished with her between heaven and earth.
What Ye Xiaoxiao didn’t know was that the plane explosion was not an accident.
It was a conspiracy.
A conspiracy targeting her.