Yu Qinghuan stood in the cold, deserted courtyard, her eyes bright and alert.
She had certainly enjoyed herself while clearing out the house.
But when the Li family woke up tomorrow morning and discovered that their home had been stripped bare, who would be their first suspect?
Without a doubt, it would be her—the “madwoman” who had thrown a spectacular tantrum just the previous night.
In the 1970s, when reputation and clan ties carried enormous weight, being accused of stealing from her husband’s family and reported to the public security bureau would seriously interfere with her plans.
If Yu Qinghuan was going to do something, she would do it cleanly, leaving herself completely uninvolved.
“You want to suspect me? Then let’s see whether you have any evidence.”
Yu Qinghuan let out a cold laugh as her sharp mind began working rapidly.
First, there was the door she had kicked apart.
The door panels had flown outward from inside the woodshed, and the splintered wood fibers all pointed toward the courtyard.
Any experienced police officer would immediately recognize that the damage had been caused by force from inside.
Yu Qinghuan bent down and picked up the broken pieces of wood scattered across the ground.
Then she took a large modern sledgehammer made of high-carbon steel from her dimensional space.
Bang! Bang!
Using the rounded head of the hammer, she struck the remaining doorframe and broken panels several times, hitting them forcefully from the outside inward.
The heavy blows thoroughly destroyed the original fracture patterns.
Now, the damage looked as though several burly men had used a heavy object to smash their way in from outside.
Next, Yu Qinghuan took out a pair of men’s military liberation shoes in size 44.
She had picked them up from a military-supplies store while stockpiling goods.
She put on the oversized shoes and deliberately stomped several chaotic footprints into the muddy ground in front of the woodshed.
She even left impressions of the enormous shoes beside the courtyard wall and near the cellar entrance.
How could an eighteen-year-old girl with a petite frame possibly have feet large enough to wear size 44 shoes?
After finishing the footprints, Yu Qinghuan took off the oversized shoes and returned them to her dimensional space.
She looked around the empty courtyard, feeling that something was still missing.
“Right. I still need physical evidence.”
In this era, rural villagers generally smoked tobacco rolled in discarded newspaper using homegrown tobacco leaves.
Only urban officials or smugglers with spare money could afford packaged cigarettes with filters.
Yu Qinghuan sank her consciousness into her dimensional space.
In the tobacco and alcohol section, she selected a pack of Peony brand cigarettes—a rare luxury in this era that only high-ranking officials in major cities could usually obtain.
She pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a match.
Then she let the thin smoke curl upward as the cigarette burned down to more than half its length.
Afterward, Yu Qinghuan pressed the cigarette butt into the muddy ground to extinguish it and casually tossed it beside the pile of dried grass near the cellar entrance.
She repeated the process, leaving another cigarette butt, this one smoked only three times, in a shadowy corner behind the courtyard gate.
Two discarded luxury cigarettes with filters.
That would certainly give the public security officers plenty to think about.
This had to be the work of a professional burglary gang from the city, one that was organized and had planned the crime in advance!
They had even been brazen enough to smoke at the crime scene!
And their target?
It had undoubtedly been the substantial military allowances sent home by Li Zhengting, the young military officer.
Finally, Yu Qinghuan walked to the gate of the Li family courtyard.
The gate had been secured from the inside with a wooden bolt.
She slipped the crowbar through the gap and pried hard.
Crack!
The wooden bolt snapped in two.
She left the gate slightly ajar, creating the impression that burglars had forced their way inside and then swaggered out without bothering to close it.
Looking at the “perfect crime scene” she had arranged with her own hands, Yu Qinghuan was thoroughly satisfied.
The logic was airtight. There wasn’t a single flaw.
By the time she finished everything, the sky was already beginning to brighten.
The cold morning mist gradually spread through the courtyard, chilling anyone exposed to it to the bone.
Yu Qinghuan rubbed her sore shoulders and slipped directly into her boundless dimensional space.
The woodshed was drafty, and she had no intention of freezing in the bitter winter cold.
Inside the space, the air was warm as spring, and everything was bright and spotless.
Yu Qinghuan walked over to the living quarters.
There stood the latex-and-memory-foam mattress bed she had bought for a fortune in her previous life.
It was covered with a silk bedding set, while a fluffy down comforter carried a faint lavender fragrance.
Yu Qinghuan took off her dusty, tattered cotton-padded jacket and changed into a soft, comfortable cotton pajama set.
She sank into the plush mattress and let out a contented sigh.
“Modern technology really is the best.”
Whatever panic the Li family might experience outside, all Yu Qinghuan wanted now was to enjoy a beautiful, uninterrupted nap.
She had even set an alarm clock inside her dimensional space.
It would ensure she woke up in time to hear the first scream of the morning.
In the darkness, Yu Qinghuan closed her eyes and quickly drifted into a peaceful, sweet sleep.
Meanwhile, inside the main house, the effects of the sleep incense were gradually fading as the morning breeze swept through.
On the earthen kang, Miao Cuihua twitched her fingers.
Her eyelids felt as heavy as lead.
Her mind was a complete muddle, as though she had been horribly hungover, and her temples throbbed with sharp, needle-like pain.
“Mm…”
Miao Cuihua muttered before finally managing to open her eyes with great effort.
It was already broad daylight outside.
Brilliant sunlight streamed through the tattered window paper and shone directly onto her face.
“Oh, goodness! How did I sleep so deeply?”
Rubbing her aching head, Miao Cuihua sat up on the kang.
She had a vague feeling that something earth-shattering had happened the previous night, but her mind was so sluggish that she couldn’t recall it for the moment.
Beside her, Li Chunhua was still snoring like a dead pig, half her face swollen like an oversized steamed bun.
The moment Miao Cuihua saw the injuries on her daughter’s face, her murky eyes contracted sharply.
Her memories came rushing back!
“Last night… that madwoman Yu Qinghuan!”
Miao Cuihua jolted in fright.
She didn’t even bother putting on her shoes. Barefoot, she scrambled off the kang.
Instinctively, she reached for the waistband of her trousers.
Her fingers found the thick stack of one-hundred-yuan wedding money.
Only then did she finally breathe a sigh of relief.
“The money is still here! The money is still here…”
Miao Cuihua patted her chest, still shaken.
As long as the money hadn’t gone missing, that wretched girl could go as crazy as she liked. She would never escape Miao Cuihua’s control.
“Chunhua! Old man! Get up, both of you! The sun’s already shining on your backsides!”
Miao Cuihua kicked Old Man Li awake and shouted at the top of her lungs.
She planned to head to the kitchen and make breakfast first. Once she had eaten her fill, she would deal with that crazy girl in the woodshed.
Shuffling along in her cloth shoes and cursing under her breath, Miao Cuihua pushed open the main house door.
However, the moment she stepped outside and saw the courtyard, she froze completely.
The wedding-gift table, which had been neatly arranged the previous day, was now nothing more than a pile of broken wooden pieces.
The courtyard gate stood slightly ajar, and enormous, unfamiliar footprints covered the ground.
The woodshed door had been smashed to pieces beyond recognition.
An ominous feeling instantly settled over Miao Cuihua.
She rushed toward the kitchen as though possessed, stumbling over her own feet.
The moment she pushed open the kitchen door, the sight before her made her vision go black.
There was no pot.
There were no bowls.
Even the bottles that normally held the soy sauce were gone.
The empty earthen stove had been reduced to a single, pitch-black hole that seemed to lead straight to the center of the earth.
“The big iron pot… My pot! Where’s my pot?!”
Miao Cuihua let out a piercing scream.
Like a madwoman, she turned and raced toward the cellar in the backyard.
When she tore away the dried grass and saw the broken iron padlock and the completely empty pit beneath it—
“Nooooo!”
A shrill, piercing scream erupted from her throat, sounding like an old hen being strangled.
It tore through the morning mist in an instant.
Her heart-wrenching cry shattered the dawn silence of the Hongqi Production Brigade!
“AAAAAH! OH, HEAVENS ABOVE! WE’VE BEEN ROBBED!”