The night sky, like a piece of faded coarse cloth, gently draped over the Yuan family’s earthen adobe house. Inside the west wing, the two spaces separated by an earthen wall were dead silent. The inner room belonged to the three sisters, while the outer room belonged to the two brothers. Only the occasional chirping of insects outside the window accompanied the even breathing of her older sisters.
Three-year-old Lixia curled up on the innermost side of the bed, a bedsheet draped over her belly. There wasn’t a shred of sleepiness in her eyes, however, as she stared straight ahead at the shimmering lottery system screen that only she could see. The food items scrolling across the bottom of the screen were like tantalizing little hooks—the savory broth of the meat buns soaked through their doughy skins, making her throat bob up and down continuously as her traitorous little stomach let out a rumbling “growl.”
She turned her head to look at her eldest sister, who was fast asleep beside her. Having spent the entire day together with her older brothers and sister, she hadn’t found a single moment of free time to secretly open the system. Over the past few years, she had drawn quite a number of items off and on: ten bolts of fabric, ranging from plain, fine cotton to lake-colored silk with hidden patterns; fifty baskets of large apples; fifty boxes of soap; and five hundred meat buns, of which she had only managed to sneakily eat over twenty to this day. There were also one hundred catties of pork that she could only look at but couldn’t eat, and one thousand catties of rice, from which Lixia would occasionally steal a few handfuls to throw into the family rice vat, stirring it a few times so no one could tell the difference.
Yet, there were times when the system was unreliable, yielding useless trinkets: a bottle of contraceptive pills; one hundred sets of bottled and jarred skincare products—which she had secretly slathered on once, leaving her hands feeling incredibly smooth; as well as one thousand delicate roses, and fifty cases of liquor.
Of course, there were also moments when her luck skyrocketed, such as when she drew a Resurrection Pill. She treasured it like a rare, priceless gem—the dark red pill was enveloped in a layer of warm light. According to the system’s description, it could save a person’s life as long as they had a single breath left. She had slowly moved its image to the very first slot, effectively giving it a “VIP seat,” out of fear that it would be hard to find in a moment of need.
“Just one last look.” Lixia stared at the meat buns on the screen, swallowing hard. Her fingertips tapped the virtual screen, and unable to resist any longer, she finally retrieved a biscuit and stuffed it into her mouth, hiding her head beneath the bedsheet to eat in secret. Tomorrow she had to find an opportunity—like when they went to the back slope to gather firewood—to secretly take out a bun to eat, otherwise her heart would always feel empty. But every time she ate in secret, she felt a tightening in her chest—especially when she pictured her family drinking thin rice soup. Guilt would crawl over her heart like tiny insects, leaving her with no choice but to console herself over and over: “If I fill myself up by eating in secret, I can eat less of the family’s grain, and then Mom, Dad, and my older brothers and sister can have an extra bite.”
She had no idea that her behavior of eating less each time was witnessed by Mother Yuan. Every time Mother Yuan held the porridge bowl and saw the pitifully small amount in her youngest daughter’s bowl—and how Lixia would sometimes even pour her own porridge into the bowls of her eldest brother and eldest sister—her heart would ache as if pricked by needles. Among the five children, Lixia was the most well-behaved and the most beautiful, her large eyes always shining with cleverness. Mother Yuan inherently favored her a bit more. Especially when Lixia “foraged” eggs and insisted on stuffing them into her hands for her to eat, Mother Yuan’s heart would feel as sweet as if it were coated in honey, and she would constantly remark to the neighbors, “Our Lixia is the most well-behaved and filial.”
Lixia: Those weren’t foraged, I got them from the lottery.
Each time she could only bring back one or two eggs once in a while, and she even had to spin a lie about discovering them in a haystack, terrified that Mother Yuan would be reluctant to eat them herself and turn around to take them to the street to barter for needles and thread.
As she lost herself in thought, Lixia’s small head nudged against the pillow. With the scent of old cotton batting lingering around the tip of her nose, she gradually drifted into a deep sleep. In her dream, she finally dared to take out all the rice and pork from the system to feed her family.