Holding a basin, she went to the bathhouse to wash up. After bathing, she gathered her clothes and returned to the dorm to do laundry, only to notice bloodstains on her undergarments along with some leftover evidence of pleasure.
Her roommate woke up, stretched lazily, and happened to glance over. “Mengzhi, didn’t your period just finish not long ago?” Girls always keep close track of their menstrual cycles.
“Maybe it just didn’t clean out properly! There’s been too much going on lately, and I haven’t been in a good mood!” Cheng Mengzhi could only try her best to mask her guilty conscience. Fortunately, the dim lighting made things hard to see clearly. Chen Donghua didn’t press the matter, picked up her mug, and headed out to brush her teeth.
After finishing her bath, doing the laundry, and wrapping up everything, Cheng Mengzhi lay down on her bed to sleep. Anyway, she was suspended, so she didn’t have to go to work.
According to the original plot, Cheng Mengzhi would make a huge fuss, forcing Xu Jingyun to marry her. Lin Shuyan’s reporting would be swept under the rug, and Cheng Mengzhi would never return to her former post, ending up living in the military family quarters relying solely on her man’s salary. Xu Jingyun earned over 170 yuan a month. He was educated, capable, and rising quickly through the ranks. In the original story, after her husband got into trouble, the original host took almost ninety percent of his money. Desperate to buy a job to avoid going to the countryside to suffer hardships, she was tricked and sold off to a remote mountain village instead.
Now, in this special era and after having transmigrated over, Cheng Mengzhi’s top priority was to clear her name. Her own salary at the military unit was sixty yuan a month—more than enough to live a very comfortable life. Going to the countryside to starve and freeze was a miserable norm she wanted no part of.
With those thoughts, she drifted off to sleep. Because the size was a mismatch, Cheng Mengzhi’s body was genuinely in a lot of discomfort, and she had to be extremely careful every time she tossed and turned.
She slept until noon. When her roommate came back for a midday break and saw that Cheng Mengzhi was still asleep, Wen Qi grabbed her basin to head out for a shower. Unintentionally, she caught sight of the marks on the neck of the still-sleeping Cheng Mengzhi. A flash of bewilderment and shock crossed Wen Qi’s eyes, but she quickly recovered, pulled the quilt up to cover her neck, and left as if nothing had happened.
By the time evening rolled around for dinner, Cheng Mengzhi changed her clothes and walked toward the cafeteria, relying on the original host’s memories. Her walking posture felt off, so she gritted her teeth, forcing herself to look completely normal to avoid drawing suspicion.
As luck would have it, just as she reached the cafeteria entrance, she saw the female protagonist approaching while pregnant, her face full of smug triumph. She seemed to be broadcasting: Even if I’m pregnant with another man’s child, Lin Shuyan still loves me and is willing to marry me.
Their eyes met, and Cheng Mengzhi caught the provocation lurking in the other woman’s gaze! Flesh and blood could only take so much. Call her a protagonist, but she was basically the ultimate green tea bitch—it must have taken generations of tea-selling ancestors for her to cultivate this level of supreme green tea behavior, managing to get pregnant and still marry a man like Lin Shuyan without anyone minding.
“Comrade Cheng probably has fewer and fewer chances to eat at the military cafeteria,” Qin Junyao said with a sneer, tinged with a hint of smugness.
Cheng Mengzhi suppressed the anger burning in her eyes. She might have transmigrated into a cannon fodder character, but that didn’t mean she was going to let the female protagonist bully her. In other novels, the cannon fodder bullied the protagonist; now that she was the cannon fodder, it was time to turn the tables.
“Exactly! If you hadn’t framed her into losing her virginity to Political Commissar Bai in the first place, how could you have ended up married to him and missed out on Battalion Commander Lin for a whole year?” chimed in Li Xiaohua, Qin Junyao’s little follower from the cultural troupe. With a clean family background and parents who were dual-income workers living in a nearby residential compound, Li Xiaohua was always gifted nice things by the female protagonist, making her fiercely loyal. She was always the first to step up and tear into the original cannon fodder character. Every single time, the original host had been thoroughly schemed against and framed by the protagonist, leading many people to believe that she had resorted to any means necessary to win over Lin Shuyan.
“Lost my virginity to Political Commissar Bai!” Cheng Mengzhi let out a cold laugh, her gaze turning razor-sharp as she looked at Qin Junyao. “Do you think that because I won’t make a scene, whatever you say goes?” “Does your late husband know you’re spinning stories like this? You say my days eating at the cafeteria are numbered, but I’d say your chances of getting married are running out too. Next time you tie the knot, tone down the tea-art act, lest you end up pregnant with a second child and forced to marry yet another man within a year.”
Qin Junyao was taken aback by Cheng Mengzhi’s sharp retaliation. Seeing her turn pale with shock, Cheng Mengzhi exaggeratedly covered her mouth in feigned astonishment. “Oh, I’m so sorry! I shouldn’t have said that! What if you end up having a miscarriage?! Next time you remarry, it won’t be a second child anymore—it’ll be your first!” “Though, will you even be able to marry a battalion commander next time? After all, your first husband was a regiment political commissar, your second was a battalion commander, so… then your next match would be a platoon leader, followed by… an ordinary citizen, and finally a beggar!”
Realizing she was being heavily insulted, Qin Junyao snapped angrily, “Is this the kind of upbringing you have, talking to people like this? I happen to be a revolutionary martyr’s widow.”
The original host had indeed been terrified of making a scene. After her father was persecuted to death and her mother implicated, she had always endured bullying and framing within the military unit in silence. But Cheng Mengzhi was not the original host. Staying silent and enduring it all until the end wouldn’t change a tragic fate anyway.
“That’s right! How am I talking nonsense?!” Li Xiaohua pointed angrily and accused, “You drugged and framed Junyao, causing her to miss out on Battalion Commander Lin, and now you show no remorse and still resort to verbal abuse!” “Political Commissar Bai was such an upright man. If he had known I drugged him, he definitely would have made me pay the price. Yet he didn’t do a single thing at the time—only for you to start talking about it after his death. What you’re really trying to tell everyone is that Political Commissar Bai coveted my beauty, and even knowing I was framed, he turned a blind eye just so he could force me to marry him!”
Cheng Mengzhi’s words made Qin Junyao’s face drain of color. What a heavy crime to pin on someone!
“You’re talking nonsense! We were both victims, harmed by you! Old Bai didn’t say anything because he was soft-hearted.” Qin Junyao never expected Cheng Mengzhi’s personality to have completely flipped today. The military was still conducting a secret investigation; nothing had been made public yet. The old Cheng Mengzhi had feared trouble above all else—feared being targeted, feared things getting out of hand and implicating her mother. Her mother was still locked up at home and not even allowed to move around freely.
“Nonsense? How am I talking nonsense! Qin Junyao, aren’t you just betting that I won’t make a fuss, so whatever you say becomes the truth? Drugging? Let the discipline inspection committee check if I have any record of purchasing drugs! And what about those letters and money you sent to your witnesses, filling them with lies about me? When Battalion Commander Lin calls your former sister-in-arms to verify things, she’ll undoubtedly swear up and down that I’m the one who did the drugging, sealing my guilty verdict once and for all!”
Word by word, Cheng Mengzhi cornered Qin Junyao. Slowly, the panic on Qin Junyao’s face vanished, replaced by a cold smirk as she retorted, “Cheng Mengzhi, even if your doom is at hand, you’re still struggling and trying to bluff! Don’t you want to stay in the military unit? Then get down on your knees and beg me, and maybe I’ll go ask Shuyan to withdraw the report.”
“I wonder how Political Commissar Bai’s parents, far away in Beijing, would feel if they knew their son was being slandered like this,” Cheng Mengzhi drawled nonchalantly. She didn’t dare step too close; if Qin Junyao tried to frame her by falling down and losing the baby, she’d be completely screwed.
At the mention of Bai’s parents, Qin Junyao remembered how strongly her parents-in-law had opposed their marriage from the very beginning. “Lost my virginity to Political Commissar Bai… If I blow this wide open, what will people think? Would a man who died a heroic death ever withstand this kind of slander? Qin Junyao, I don’t even know Political Commissar Bai, though I do happen to know Uncle Bai—my father saved his life back in the day. You need to understand that a lean camel is still bigger than a horse! If I decide to ask Uncle Bai for help, do you think he’ll back me up?”
According to the original host’s memories, Political Commissar Bai’s father and the original host’s father had been colleagues, and her father had even been the elder Bai’s superior officer. The pitiful original host had been terrified out of her wits after witnessing her father being denounced and targeted with big-character posters. Her mother constantly sent telegrams and wrote letters urging her to keep her head down, work hard in the unit, and avoid bringing trouble to the leadership. Traumatized and blindly following her mother’s advice, the original host had chosen to swallow every insult and endure the female protagonist’s bullying.
Cheng Mengzhi’s eyes drifted down to Qin Junyao’s belly. “You’d better pray that whatever’s in your stomach turns out fine, otherwise your parents-in-law wouldn’t even be sending you money! Their son hasn’t even been dead for three months, and you’re already in such a rush to marry Lin Shuyan. If it weren’t for the fact that the baby in your belly is the Bai family’s only remaining bloodline, I’d have walked over here and slapped you across the face already.”
“Qin Junyao, whether I did anything to wrong you or not, you know the truth better than anyone. I’ll give you two days. I don’t mind blowing this wide open and letting everyone see how you dumped Lin Shuyan the moment he got injured, rushed to marry Political Commissar Bai instead, and then—once your long-term meal ticket was gone—invented a smear campaign against me just to win Lin Shuyan back!” “And if the final investigation proves I did nothing wrong, and that Lin Shuyan was the one who filed the false report… guess what kind of price he’ll have to pay?”
A sharp, murderous glint flashed in Cheng Mengzhi’s eyes. Holding her aluminum lunchbox, Qin Junyao stared fiercely at Cheng Mengzhi, her face as pale as a sheet. Cheng Mengzhi had spent years navigating the corporate world; she had these petty little schemes figured out inside and out.
“Cheng Mengzhi, even if you threaten me into getting Shuyan to withdraw the report, he will never love you again! You two are completely impossible!” Qin Junyao shot back with a final threat.
What a joke. She didn’t even want a scumbag like that—a greedy dog who wanted the best of both worlds, basking in the thrill of being chased while refusing to let go of his pure white moonlight.
Cheng Mengzhi let out a soft, mocking chuckle. “Let me thank you in advance. I don’t want the love of a scumbag anyway. Qin Junyao, no matter how much you try to squeeze me out in front of others or what kind of reputation you pin on me, you listen to me carefully: you’ve got some hidden items stashed away at home. If anything happens to me, I’m dragging your entire family down with me.”
As she turned to leave, Qin Junyao’s face twisted in alarm. Hidden items? Could she possibly be talking about the gold? Getting caught hoarding gold in this era was a massive, dangerous trouble.
“What hidden items? You two don’t even live in the same house!” Li Xiaohua, completely clueless about what Cheng Mengzhi was alluding to, stared at Qin Junyao with a puzzled expression.