Hearing the old lady’s scolding, Liu Duchuan silently helped Jingao wrap the wound on his leg with a strip of ragged cloth. Then, she wiped away her tears, stood up, and carried half a basin of bloody water outside to empty it.
“Duchuan, I’m sorry. Just endure it a little longer. Once my leg heals, I will take you and Jinjin away from this family, and we’ll live on our own elsewhere,” Jingao comforted Liu Duchuan in a low voice.
Liu Duchuan paused, looked back at him, smiled with tears in her eyes, and gave a soft “mm.”
She had long been hoping that Jingao would take their family of three and leave. If she continued to live in this house, she worried that Jinjin would be secretly sold off by the old lady and the others; she frequently saw the old lady and Xu whispering to each other behind her back, which filled her heart with dread.
Moreover, Jinjin falling severely ill this time, suddenly running a high fever and then collapsing, was also extremely suspicious.
Jinjin blinked her big eyes, looking at her mother’s back and then at her father. How could this injury become so severe? She hurriedly called out to Liuliu in her mind.
“Liuliu, will my dad’s leg get better?”
[Originally, it wouldn’t have. He would have had to undergo amputation, and your dad would have lived his life as a one-legged disabled man, passing away before you were even married.]
[But now that you have come, and you have me, we can find the herbs to change all of this!] Liuliu reminded Jinjin.
Jinjin was startled. So her past-life self had lived such a miserable existence, and her dad had even ended up disabled?
She definitely had to find the *Di-ding cao* to cure her dad’s leg.
…
An incense stick of time earlier, in the courtyard.
After Jingao and Duchuan walked out of earshot, Xu anxiously hurried over to the old lady.
“Mother, the family only has that little bit of silver left, and we have to buy rice by the day after tomorrow at the latest, or we’ll all go hungry! We absolutely cannot let the second branch take it out to see a doctor and buy medicine!”
Wang nodded, her eyes dark and gloomy as she watched the backs of Jingao and Liu Duchuan. “Don’t worry. Look at his leg; it’s already lame, and the injury is so severe that I’m sure it can’t be cured. I’m certainly not going to throw money into a bottomless pit in vain!”
Nearby, the grandfather and the eldest brother, Jinshi, exchanged glances, then silently returned to their respective rooms to rest without expressing any opinion, which was taken as tacit approval of the old lady’s decision.
Xu proudly slanted her eyes to glare at the young couple who had just entered the door, leaned closer to the old lady, and whispered:
“Mother, what should we do? This time the little thing didn’t die again. We’ve already given her that poison twice, so why can’t we ever finish her off? Could there be something going on? Now that the second brother is crippled too, their family will just drag us down. What are we going to do with our Haohao in the future? Are we expected to support them in their old age too?”
The old lady’s face instantly darkened, and she let out a cold, low curse, “That big cheapskate born of that cheap bone was hard to kill, and now she gave birth to a younger one who still won’t die. Why is her fate so tough?”
“Exactly! The older one won’t die, and the younger one won’t die either—bad luck. Anyway, he’s still all right right now. Why doesn’t Mother just divide the family and kick them out!” Xu whispered, offering the old lady an idea.
“Then let’s split the family, kick their bunch out, and let them fend for themselves. We’ve already done everything we could by raising them for so many years!” The old lady said with a vicious look in her eyes, gritting her teeth.
In the past, when Jingao was young, driving him out would have ruined her reputation. But now that a wife had been married in for him, people wouldn’t say anything if they were split off. Even if their family died out there, it would no longer have anything to do with them.
Xu hurriedly nodded and said it was good, a smile of a successful scheme gleaming in her eyes.
At lunchtime, the whole family gathered around the low table under the big tree in the courtyard, sitting on straw mats to eat.
The eldest family’s son, Haohao, was nine years old this year. He looked blockheaded and thick-witted, with a roll of fat around his chubby belly and a neck so short it looked like a watermelon was resting on a pile of grease.
Yet the grandfather and grandmother always praised their grandson for being blessed, saying he looked like a Maitreya Buddha and possessed an air of prosperity.
After glancing at Haohao once, Jinjin didn’t want to look a second time. She just kept her head down, locking eyes with the yellow rice grains in her bowl.
She had never eaten rice like this before; it was both dry and hard.
The vegetables were the same—stir-fried until they were bitter and pitch-black, lacking any fragrance, and she had no idea what kind of vegetables they were.
Jinjin missed the foods from the modern world that she used to turn her nose up at, especially the baby meals her mom used to make for her. The rice was soft and sticky, and Mom would roll the rice into little rice balls, pairing them with green vegetables and nutritious soup. The dishes were stir-fried to aromatic perfection, delicious, nutritious, and healthy.
She didn’t really want to eat it, but she didn’t dare say anything because this meal had been cooked by the mother of this world.
Furthermore, she noticed that everyone’s bowl contained this kind of yellow rice. With six adults and two children eating, there were only two plates of black-looking vegetables on the table—one large and one small—alongside another bowl holding three boiled eggs.
Seeing that everyone in the family seemed to be eating with great relish, Jinjin didn’t dare make a single sound of doubt.
At this moment, Haohao was sitting right between the grandfather and grandmother, eating big mouthfuls while the old couple kept picking food and putting it in his bowl.
Meanwhile, Jingao’s family of three sat quietly on the opposite side, picking at the food in the small plate in front of them.
Liu Duchuan had specifically boiled three eggs while cooking. Since Jinjin had just recovered from her illness, she wanted her own Jinjin to have one, while two were prepared for Haohao.
Understanding his wife’s intention, Jingao put down his chopsticks and directly picked up one egg to start peeling its shell. Seeing this, Xu and Jinshi quickly each grabbed an egg as well to peel for Haohao.
When Haohao saw his parents get two eggs, he pointed at the egg in Jingao’s hand and whined coquettishly to the old lady, “Grandma, that egg is mine too!”
The old lady raised her head to look at Jingao and said in a deep voice, “Give that egg to Haohao too!”
Jingao frowned. “Jinjin has just gotten better and also needs to nourish her body. Haohao already has two.”
With a sharp *clack*, the old lady slammed down her chopsticks, glared angrily at Jingao, and snapped:
“You’re an elder; are you really going to fight a child over an egg? Haohao is a boy in our family after all, and he’s the one who will carry on the family line for the Old Jin family. Jinjin is just a money-losing girl—no matter how well she eats, what’s the use? In the future, she’ll just belong to someone else’s family anyway.”
Jingao frowned and was just about to speak when Liu Duchuan quietly tugged at his clothes and whispered, “Husband, forget it. Our Jinjin doesn’t want it!”
With a dark face, Jingao placed the half-peeled egg back into the bowl and lowered his head to eat his meal.
Liu Duchuan silently picked out a few vegetables for Jinjin and whispered, “Eat up. The vegetables are good too—eat your fill!”
Jinjin sensibly nodded, murmured an “okay,” and buried her head in her food.
In her mind, she complained to Liuliu, “Liuliu, the food in this world is so hard to eat!”
[Host, do you think it might just be because your mom is a bad cook?] Liuliu bantered.
“No way, my mom already cooked it as deliciously as she could.”
Jinjin fiercely defended her past-life mother. She felt that Mother was already working very hard, and she couldn’t complain about her cooking being bad.
Seeing Jingao drop the egg back, the old lady clenched her teeth and set down her chopsticks.
“Second brother, now that Jinjin is better and your leg can walk, your father and I have discussed it—let’s go ahead and divide the family!”
“Your father and I are getting older, and in the future we won’t be able to do heavy work or earn money. We’ll live with your eldest brother’s family.”
“The house in the family is meant for Haohao to marry a wife in the future, so we won’t divide it and give it to you. All the farmland will go to your eldest brother’s family as well, since they are supporting us in our old age, and it will be passed down to Haohao in the future. You know how to hunt and can support a family; presumably your wife wouldn’t care for the things around the house anyway, so we won’t give you anything else.”
“As for the things inside your room, you can take whatever you want. Aside from that, there’s nothing else for you.”
Finished speaking, the old lady stared intently at Jingao, waiting for his reply.
Jingao froze in astonishment. They wanted to split the family?