A bone-chilling hunger cut through her inside out, scraping against her internal organs like a dull, rusty blade.
Ye Yu was literally woken up by starvation.
Her stomach was completely empty, yet it felt as though a fire were burning inside, twisting her gut with violent, rhythmic spasms.
She forced her heavy eyelids open. Overhead was the mud-plastered ceiling of an adobe cottage, its hairline cracks letting in slivers of pale, miserable daylight. The worn wooden door stood ajar, and a biting spring draft seeped through the gap, drenching her like ice water. The faded, thin cotton jacket she wore did nothing to block the piercing chill.
There was no swirling yellow dust choking the sky, no crumbling skyscraper ruins, and none of the omnipresent reek of blood and rust from the apocalypse.
Before Ye Yu could fully process her thoughts, a flood of massive, unfamiliar memories—heavy with despair and a deep sense of grievance—slammed into her mind.
This was the 1970s, in Ye Village, Hongqi Commune, Qinghe County, Huaijiang Province.
The original owner of this body was also named Ye Yu. Her parents had died in an accident when she was young, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents. But once the elders passed away one after another, her uncle’s family descended like wolves sniffing out blood, slowly chipping away at everything she owned.
Trampled into the dirt again and again, the original Ye Yu’s mental thread finally snapped. She gave up on herself entirely, spending her days loafing around with the local hooligans. By the age of twenty, the nickname “Ye the Deadbeat” had spread across neighboring villages, and her reputation was utterly ruined.
In the end, with her food supplies exhausted and trapped in cold and hunger, she quietly fainted on her own heated brick bed—the kang—and breathed her last.
When those eyes opened again, the soul residing inside belonged to a survivor who had fought through ten years of blood and corpses in the end times.
Ye Yu raised her hand slightly.
It was a completely foreign hand—thin-framed, with frostbitten, cracked fingertips, lacking both the thick calluses formed from years of gripping an alloy longsword and the crisscrossing scars of old battles.
Subconsciously, she pressed her hand against her chest. Flat. She felt only the hard, unyielding line of ribs. She slid her hand down across a flat, tight stomach, and then further down…
She froze. Her fingers went rigid mid-motion, and her breath hitched for a split second.
Sitting on the brick kang, Ye Yu looked down at her new body, her mind going blank for a moment.
In her ten years surviving the apocalypse, she had witnessed countless ridiculous ways to die, but she had never imagined that one day she would come back to “life” like this—trapped in the shell of a man.
She cleared her throat. The sound that emerged was low, raspy, and coarse, a stark contrast to the clear, crisp female voice of her past life. It felt profoundly alien—so strange that her skin crawled.
“…Fine.”
The single word slipped out of her mouth, its timbre so unfamiliar it sounded as if someone else had spoken.
She went silent for two seconds, taking a deep breath to forcefully suppress the absurdity of the situation. In the wasteland, a person’s gender didn’t even make the top three list of fatal concerns. Survival always came first.
Supporting herself with her aching arms, she swung her legs off the kang. The second her feet touched the ground, her center of gravity shifted, making her stumble forward. She instinctively grabbed the edge of the brick bed to steady herself.
She tried taking a step. Her movement was awkward, like a crab that had just shed its shell. This body’s muscle activation, its walking habits—everything needed to be relearned from scratch.
Too weak.
She was gaunt to the point of emaciation, so frail she barely had the energy to walk.
Ye Yu rested against the edge of the kang for a couple of seconds, took two more steps, and on her third, finally caught a thread of balance.
This body was so frail it couldn’t even slaughter a chicken, but that didn’t matter. In the apocalypse, she had crawled her way out of piles of rotting flesh; she could stand tall here all the same.
She raised her head to survey the room once more—the brick kang, a wooden table missing a leg, and a completely empty rice crock.
Guided by the original owner’s memories, she fumbled around inside a tattered cloth bag in the corner of the bed. Finally, she pulled out two tiny, shriveled sweet potatoes with darkened skin. This was the sum total of her food reserves.
Another sharp cramp twanged through her stomach, yet Ye Yu’s mind remained remarkably calm.
It was bitter, truly bitter; impoverished beyond belief, too.
Yet there were no zombies howling day and night, no constant threat of betrayal around every corner.
Outside the window, there was sunlight and the sound of the wind—a living, peaceful world of humans.
Compared to the apocalypse, this life was practically paradise.
As long as she was alive, a little hardship meant nothing.
Just as she was planning to head over to the production brigade to apply for a grain advance, deliberate footsteps echoed outside the yard, followed by two lukewarm knocks on the door.
“Ye Yu, you home?”
The wooden door was pushed open, and three people strolled in.
Leading the group was her uncle, Ye Dazhu, sporting a fake smile. Beside him was her aunt-in-law, Wang Cuihua, her eyes darting around the room like sharp hooks. Behind them trailed her cousin, Ye Baogen, rubbing his hands together with an eagerness he couldn’t quite conceal.
“Yu, you are home.”
Ye Dazhu cleared his throat, putting on the loving facade of an elder. “Your cousin Baogen is getting married next month, and the bride’s side asked for a roomier place. Look at you—a grown man living in such a large courtyard all by yourself is just a waste. Your uncle wants to borrow this ancestral house so Baogen can host his wedding for a few days. Just a brief stay; we’ll return it right after the event.”
Borrow the house?
Leaning against the doorframe, Ye Yu sneered inwardly.
The original owner had fallen for this exact trick multiple times. Borrow a cast-iron pot, and it came back with broken handles; borrow a bamboo basket, and it returned with a hole in the bottom.
This family’s entire operation ran on borrowing without returning. Now, they were audacious enough to ask for the house itself.
“No,” Ye Yu said, without even bothering to lift her eyelids, her refusal sharp and immediate.
The fake smile on Ye Dazhu’s face instantly froze. A flicker of resentment flashed in his eyes as he dropped his mask entirely.
“You ungrateful wretch!”
Wang Cuihua leaped forward right on cue, hands on her hips, pointing a finger straight at Ye Yu’s nose as she barked, “Your parents kicked the bucket early! Who fed you and clothed you all these years? Without us, you would’ve starved to death long ago! Now we’re just asking to borrow the house for Baogen’s wedding, and you refuse? You heartless, ungrateful scoundrel!”
Ye Baogen chimed in from the side, his fleshy face scrunched up in annoyance: “Exactly! You don’t care about family at all! Don’t you ever dream of scrounging a single bite of food from our house again!”
Fed and clothed me?
Ye Yu lowered her eyelids, hiding the mockery pooling in her eyes.
The original owner had been hounded into despair by this very family, ultimately dying on this brick kang without even a full meal to her name. To claim they had raised someone only to let them starve into a skeleton was the joke of the century.
“Finished?” Ye Yu finally looked up.
She didn’t offer aggrieved explanations like the original owner, nor did she resort to her usual deadbeat antics.
Her dark eyes were utterly quiet—like two bottomless icy pools, reflecting a cold, lethal stillness forged through ten years of blood and slaughter in the apocalypse.
Faced with that stare, Ye Dazhu shivered for no apparent reason and instinctively took half a step back.
“Get out,” Ye Yu said. Her voice was raspy and weak, yet it carried a chill that made their scalps go numb.
“You’ve really lost your mind!”
Feeling humiliated in front of his wife and son, Ye Dazhu stormed into the courtyard, reaching out to grab Ye Yu’s arm. “I’ll teach you some manners today!”
Instead of retreating, Ye Yu stepped forward.
Though this body was extremely weak, combat instincts were etched into her very bones.
Her eyes hardened. Her right hand shot out like lightning, clamping onto Ye Dazhu’s wrist with precision, and using his forward momentum, she gave it a sharp, ruthless twist.
Crack!
Ye Dazhu let out a agonized shriek. The force threw him off balance, slamming him hard against the courtyard wall and shaking loose a shower of dried mud flakes.
“He’s hitting people! The jinx actually dared to strike an elder!” Wang Cuihua shrieked.
Ye Baogen roared, lunging forward with a palm as big as a palm-leaf fan aiming straight for Ye Yu’s face: “You little bastard, I’ll kill you!”
Ye Yu deflected Ye Baogen’s arm with her left hand and drove her right shoulder violently into his chest.
The strike carried the explosive force honed in the post-apocalyptic wasteland. Ye Baogen’s hundred-and-eighty-pound frame was launched backward, crashing into the woodpile at the corner of the yard, snapping several logs and sending him howling in pain.
Ye Yu stood in the middle of the yard, the wind snapping the fabric of her coarse cotton shirt.
She was thin to the point of emaciation, yet her spine was razor-straight, like a sword freshly drawn from its scabbard.
“Try that again, and I’ll break your arms.”
Her voice wasn’t loud, but it was as cold as shards of ice.
Ye Dazhu clutched his wrist, Wang Cuihua’s face was pale with fright, and Ye Baogen lay groaning in the woodpile. The three exchanged terrified glances; not one of them dared to make another move.
“Y-You just wait!” Ye Dazhu spat out a hollow threat before dragging his wife and son in a frantic scramble out the gate.
The courtyard gate slammed shut with a heavy thud. Ye Yu leaned against the doorframe, cold sweat breaking out on her forehead.
This body was far too frail; those two simple moves had nearly drained every drop of her strength.
She looked down at her hands. Her fighting instincts were intact, but constrained by a malnourished body, she could barely exert thirty percent of her true power.
During that brief scuffle, she had felt her shoulder and core muscles failing to keep up with her mind—this body was nowhere near tamed.
She would need time to recalibrate, conditioning every muscle to obey her command.
Turning back into the room, she retrieved the two small sweet potatoes from the corner of the kang and brushed them off.
Swallowing unpeeled sweet potatoes scraped at her throat with grit, but Ye Yu ate slowly, savoring every bite.
Outside the window, the evening glow of spring filtered into the dilapidated mud hut. From the distance came the rumble of a tractor engine, accompanied by the blare of the village loudspeaker:
“Attention, comrades! The new batch of educated youths will arrive tomorrow! Everyone, please be prepared to welcome our comrades from the city!”
Ye Yu swallowed the last dry bite of sweet potato and slapped the dust off her hands.
She climbed back onto the brick kang, pulled the tattered quilt over herself, and slowly closed her eyes.
New educated youths or old ones—nothing mattered more than getting a good night’s sleep.