Li Lanxiang regained consciousness amid a sharp, piercing cry.
The sound was thin and weak, yet like a needle, stabbing at her groggy mind with each note.
She wanted to lift her hand to press her throbbing temples, but her arms felt as heavy as if filled with lead.
Her eyelids were also heavy, and it took great effort to pry them open just a crack.
The light was dim and murky, carrying the smell of dust.
The roof was pitch-black, with wooden rafters barely showing their original color beneath the thick thatch, which had yellowed in places.
The walls were uneven mud bricks, darkened near the ground by moisture.
Where was this?
Wasn’t she—just a moment ago—taking her last breath in her old home, the one she had waited in her whole life only to leave empty-handed?
Before she closed her eyes, the leaves of the old locust tree outside had turned yellow, fluttering down one by one.
And that person, standing by her sickbed with his white-haired wife and grown children, had looked at her with complicated eyes. His lips moved, but in the end, nothing came out.
Her lifelong “waiting” had turned into a desolate joke.
But now…
Before she could even think it through, a vast, unfamiliar torrent surged into her mind without warning!
Countless fragmented images, sounds, and emotions collided, violently pressing against the memories that belonged to “Li Lanxiang.”
Among them, the face of a distressed woman was especially clear.
Those brows and eyes…
They bore a striking resemblance to her own when she was young.
The woman’s lips trembled, her eyes filled with reluctance and pleading, as she looked at her again and again:
“Please… please… take good care of my children… Dahan, Zhuzhi, Xiaocao… and my newborn granddaughter… I beg you…”
Her voice was like the deepest obsession, wrapping around her, then dissipating like smoke, merging into the flood of memories.
As the plea faded, the torrent became orderly, quickly settling and spreading out, forming a complete and concrete life.
This woman’s name was also Li Lanxiang.
And now, she lived in a dynasty she had never read about in history—the Dajing Dynasty.
This was Kaoshan Village, a small settlement tucked in a mountain hollow.
She was the wife of the hunter Wang Dashan. The family had no farmland, only a small vegetable patch behind the house to supplement their food.
They lived in a west-side mud-brick house, with a separate kitchen and a pen for livestock, forming a tiny courtyard.
In the pen was a half-grown black pig, whining in hunger.
The yard held eight clucking hens, the source of salt, threads, and needles for the family.
Her husband, Wang Dashan, was a taciturn man with a slightly hunched back. He wasn’t home at the moment, likely gone into the mountains to hunt, hoping to get extra meat to nourish their daughter-in-law after childbirth and to trade for grain and money.
Their eldest son, Wang Tiezhu, nineteen, was like his father—quiet and diligent. He had married Liu Xinghua from a neighboring village.
She was the mother of the baby girl crying in the room, just a few days old.
The youngest son, Wang Shizhu, ten, was at that restless, greedy age, always eating his father’s hard-earned food.
Their daughter, Wang Xiaocao, seventeen, had married three months ago into the Li family two mountains over. She had heard that her in-laws treated her well, but the journey back home was far and difficult.
As for this original Li Lanxiang, three days ago, when her daughter-in-law Liu Xinghua went into labor and the household was in chaos, she had rushed to the kitchen to heat water, only to trip over the threshold and hit the back of her head hard against a stone block, immediately losing consciousness.
Now, upon waking, her shell had been replaced by this old soul—a soul that had waited over seventy years, worn out by life, and faded to the point of exhaustion.
With her memories integrated, the dull pain in her head remained, reminding her of this inexplicable “rebirth.”
Outside, the baby’s cries had softened into small sobs of grievance. Liu Xinghua’s tired, low cooing could be faintly heard.
Wang Shizhu’s voice could be heard in the yard, scolding the chicks for trying to sneak into the kitchen.
Everything was noisy yet real, carrying the scent of earth, firewood, and faint milk—a world utterly different from her lonely, memory-bound final years in her previous life.
Li Lanxiang—
Now she had to fully accept this identity—
Slowly, very slowly, she exhaled a murky breath.
The invisible breath that had sustained her for decades in her former life, only to finally collapse under its weight, seemed to dissipate into her 1995 autumn home.
Here, in the body of this farmer woman, just over ten years past ten, who had worked hard all her life yet met an untimely death, in this humble but lively courtyard, a new kind of “breath” surged.
It was the urgency of survival, the cries of an infant, the imminent return of family, the chores of feeding the pig, tending the hens, and watering the vegetables.
The Li Lanxiang who had wasted her life on empty promises was dead.
The Li Lanxiang who “came back to life” for a heavy charge must now open her eyes and stand.
Her fingers twitched slightly, attempting to bend. Her knuckles were stiff, her palms thick with calluses.
She slowly moved her arms, propping herself up on the hard earthen bed. Using the instincts of her original body and the stubborn resilience of her soul, she slowly pulled herself out of that darkness, a darkness carrying both death and rebirth.
The cloth wrapped around her forehead throbbed painfully. Her vision was still blurry.
She turned her head toward the wooden lattice window, covered with old paper, letting in a faint glow.