[A/N: Thank you for giving the story a chance! This subgenre is a bit niche, but I made it a point that it would still be readable even if it’s your first story in this subgenre.
This story setting is inspired by China’s Cultural Revolution through the Reform Era. That said, the world itself is fictional, and I even changed the names of the places. While I did base some events on real life events and have researched them, please don’t take the story as historical fact.
The reason I chose this setting was that it was a fun subgenre that showed the contrast between the time of scarcity (cultural revolution era) to the period of fast-rising prosperity (reform era), which happened in a span of a few years. It’s home to various wealth-building tropes that I, as a poor person, love to read about.
It’s also a time period that is ’old’ enough that the FL’s future knowledge would give her significant advantage (which is the charm of the ’transmigrated to ancient times’ subgenre) while being recent enough that modern technology can logically appear en masse, possibly in advance due to FL.
I will avoid political themes for this story. The FL will operate in her own side of the world.
Again, thank you for opening the first Chapter and I hope enjoy the story~]
...
___
Smack!
Slam!
Bam!
Su Qinghua gasped as she felt sharp pain all over her body. It started with a slap on the face. The force was not weak, and her body fell smack on the concrete floor.
When she gathered her wits, another force landed on her stomach, causing her to gag and cough.
"USELESS! Impertinent bastard! What did I raise you all these years for?" Despite the ringing in her ears, she could hear the roar of a man. "How dare you embarrass me like this?!"
Bam!
Another kick, this time, it was on her leg.
Su Qinghua struggled to open her eyes and looked up, seeing the livid face of her stepfather.
What was he doing here?
Hasn’t this guy been murdered in prison?
Did she die, only to encounter this bastard again?
Next to him was a beautiful woman, looking down on her with cold eyes. She gave the man a look and said with a reprimanding tone of voice. "Don’t hit her face anymore."
The man heard her and indeed no longer hit her face, but he was pretty wanton in hitting everything else. "I fed you, who is not related to me, for more than fifteen years."
Slap!
"And you can’t even do such a simple thing?"
Smack!
"Do you think you’re a princess, or something?!"
Before she could respond, she felt sharp pain in her head. "Get back to your room; don’t even think about getting out until it’s time for your wedding."
Her stepfather dragged her across the concrete floor by the hair, throwing her back to her room, locking it from the outside.
The sound of the door slamming, followed by the locking mechanism, echoed in the small room.
Su Qinghua wasn’t able to absorb anything, and her vision blackened right after that.
Unknowingly, as she laid there, her body started to slowly repair the damage on her body, only to be interrupted a couple of hours later.
...
Su Qinghua was woken up not by the dull pain all over her body, nor was she woken up by rolling pain in her stomach caused by hunger. Rather, she was woken up by the sharp pain caused by someone repeatedly pinching a portion of her skin and maliciously twisting it.
"Su Qinghua!! Wake up!"
What is going on with all this abuse?
Su Qinghua groaned as she lay down on the hard floor. She vaguely remembered seeing her dead stepfather and cold-blooded biological mother before she lost consciousness.
However, it was not them this time. She lifted her eyes and met the familiar, hostile stare of a malicious stepsister, Wang Xiuying. Like the other two, they looked much younger than her most recent memories of them.
What was this about, then? Was this the legendary replay of life before death?
And all the way back to her youth, when she had been a willing doormat?
How inconvenient. She really didn’t want to relive this embarrassing time.
Everyone had once been young, and everyone had humiliating memories they never wanted to recall, and when they did, it caused shivers to run down their spine. This period of time was just that for Su Qinghua.
Her eyes sharpened as she tried to recover a bit of her wits, though sadly her ears rang with the other woman’s thin, annoying voice, so she couldn’t concentrate.
"How long are you going to sleep? Where’s my dinner!?" the other girl asked with an annoyed tone. She didn’t yell, but her tone seemed to be passively venomous whenever she was talking with Qinghua.
Before Xiuying could extend her sharp, manicured claws again, a dirty rag flew right at her face.
Smack!
"AHH!"
"So noisy."
"YOU!!!"
Wang Xiuying held her face in shock, coughed, and then gagged in disgust when she saw how grey and dusty it was.
More than that, what shocked her more was the fact that Su Qinghua retaliated.
For some reason, she instinctively felt fear and trepidation.
Looking at her stepsister’s pale face, Su Qinghua felt like smiling despite the pain. Dreaming of herself at this time period wasn’t so bad, after all; it allowed her to take revenge early on, even if it was just her imagination.
Her eyebrows furrowed, wondering if this was a dream, but the sharp pain all over her body was too intense to dismiss it as such.
While Wang Xiuying was in a daze, she looked around. She looked at the familiar closet-sized room and whitewashed walls. She knew that it was the bedroom from her youth.
If this were real, then she seemed to have gone back to her youth, all the way back to 1975 when she had just turned 16. This was an era characterized by chaos, losses, and scarcity. This would then be followed by an economic boom that would shock anyone, even abroad.
Seeing Su Qinghua’s pained and dazed state, Wang Xiuying snapped out of her own shock and immediately reached out to grab Su Qinghua’s hair to teach her a lesson.
Wang Xiuying had always held her conduct to a certain standard. She followed the example of her stepmother, who also had a selfish heart, but generally avoided acting like a shrew, even in anger.
At this moment, however, seeing Su Qinghua’s familiar-yet-unfamiliar eyes that had changed from the previous dullness to the current vibrancy, she immediately had a feeling that she had to pull her back.
She forgot all that time she spent being self-conscious, instinctively not wanting to let Su Qinghua go.
"Did you finally go insane?!" Wang Xiuying gasped in shock, grabbing a tuff of Su Qinghua’s long hair. She raised her other hand to scratch the other girl’s face, almost in a hurried and desperate manner.
Su Qinghua instinctively ducked her head just in time before those sharp nails ended on her face.
A thought repeated in Su Qinghua’s head: She had gone back to the past, and you can make different choices this time.
Another thing she was reminded of was that Wang Xiuying was really there—and she, Su Qinghua, could very much cause the other real pain!
This thought seemed to have injected renewed power inside Qinghua’s body, and she shot up. She gasped when she felt the ache in her body, but it wasn’t anything that could debilitate her anymore.
Rather, the familiar-unfamiliar strength flowed into her body, letting her temporarily overcome the original pain in her body.
She used her whole body weight (which frankly wasn’t much) and rammed into Wang Xiuying’s body, causing the other woman to fall backwards.
Su Qinghua’s room was very small, practically just the size of someone’s cabinet. This was why when she rammed into her enemy, Wang Xiuying’s waist hit the sharper edge of the bed.
"OUCHHH!!!" she screamed like a hen being slaughtered, in stark contrast with the controlled, soft, and innocent image she usually showed.
Su Qinghua’s lips twitched in amusement. Dream or not, this was satisfying.
She should do a bit more.