The Crossing
“Wuwuwu… I won’t marry, I won’t marry him even if I die. Everyone in the Zhang’s family are almost penniless. If you let me marry into that family,aren’t you pushing me into the fire pit? Am I even your own child? Why are you so cruel?”
At noon, there was a sound of wailing from the house of Shen Debao, a villager in Kaoshantun. The one who was crying was Shen Ruomei, Shen Debao’s eldest daughter. At this time, she was sitting on the edge of the kang1. The tears that kept running down her nose broke her parents heart.
“The Zhang family is now not only poor, the old woman Zhang is not sick anymore. It’s so boring, tricky and troublesome. If I get married, won’t I have to let her die early just to get some money? What did you go for an engagement with them? Besides, you had to choose someone like the old Zhang family and who don’t get married to poor girls. How can you have the heart to push me there? Oh oh oh… my fate is so bitter…”
Shen Debao sat down on the bench dejectedly, watching his daughter crying so badly, feeling regretful and distressed in his heart.
He had just wanted to find a good husband’s house for his daughter. He originally selected the old Zhang’s family, just because the old Zhang’s really wanted to start a family as soon as possible. And then the wealth of the old Zhang family reduced, their big blue brick house burned out, and now they owed a huge debt!
If he had known this, he wouldn’t have taken the initiative to be in-laws with the old Zhang family even if he was killed. But now that the matter is already here, what could he do?
Seeing how tired his daughter was and that the crying had now lessened, Shen Debao soothingly said, “Mei-er, although the old Zhang family is not up to date now, your husband to be is still good, with a big waist and a round body. If you marry, you will not go hungry.”
When Shen Ruomei heard her father’s words, her lungs exploded, she stood up with a scream, and yelled: “Why won’t I go hungry? Should I eat chaff? I won’t be hungry even if I swallow vegetables, but is that the life for human beings? You want me to live that way for the rest of my life? Now I know, I’m definitely not yours, you just want to strangle me to death with a rope. Well, I will just chop myself into pieces and feed the animals, rather than marry into their family, oooooo…”
Shen Debao’s wife felt distressed when she saw her baby girl’s relentless way of wanting to die and she whispered to her husband, “Dear husband, since Meier disagrees with this so much that she wants to die, let’s cancel the marriage, and not force the child out, can we ?”
Shen Bao who was staring at his wife tiredly asked: “Can you come up with five pieces of silver dowry in a few days so that the people wont say that we go back on our word?”
With these words, she immediately shut up.
The husband was right. It is true that the family cannot afford to cancel the marriage. It was absolutely impossible to not marry him. When she had first got engaged, they wrote the paperwork with the matchmaker as the intermediary. Now what could they do!
When Shen Ruomei saw her parents like this, she knew that there was no hope of cancelling the marriage. She lay down on the kang and screamed with her neck held stiff. “You sold me! I’ll just go jump into the well…”
The sharp howling sound was heard by almost half of the people in the village, and Shen Ruolan, who was just a short distance away, naturally heard it.
Shen Ruolan, who was lying on her kang, rubbed her ears.
It was really annoying. After being in this body for three days, what she hears the most every day is the howling and death-seeking wails of her cousin, which makes her unable to recover restfully from her sickness .
But one thing she can be sure of is that her good cousin will not die, because generally troublesome people always want to live and the more she hesitates to end her life, the more she is absolutely reluctant to die, that is, she is simply yelling out to scare her uncle and aunt.
As for whether the uncle and aunt will be frightened by her or whether they can cancel the marriage, Shen Ruolan neither knows nor cares. And no matter how they decide, it wasn’t her problem. At present, what she cares most about presently, is her Small body.
The body she is in now is very weak and skinny. She remembers that when she first saw herself after transmigrating, the reflection almost scared her to death.
This body is thin and small, and even when sopping wet her weight won’t add up to 40 or 50 catties2. The area near the eyes are so thin that the eyes are sunken into the eye sockets, the cheekbones are protruding, the cheeks are deeply hollow, and the lips are dry, cracked and bloodless, the hair is yellow and sparse like a beard, and the body is as thin as a skeleton. How can someone see it and not get scared?
This is a case of typical severe malnutrition!
The African refugees that she saw on TV before were just like this. She had felt so sad when she had seen those refugees that she donated money and materials. But she never thought that she would become like this herself.
Apart from her appearance, Shen Ruolan searched for the memories left by the original owner, and finally knew why the little girl became like ghost.
It turned out that this little girl had a hard life. When she was three years old, her mother had run away with someone else. Her father was useless and fully drunk all day long. He hardly worked, let alone feed her and take care of her.
When her grandma saw her useless son’s inability to earn anything, she got so angry that she divided the family.
The little girl naturally lived with her father and her grandma assigned to them two small thatched huts built by the mountainside. Her useless father only drinks every day, not caring whether she lived or died.
Her grandparents, uncles and aunts all avoid her because of this and since she is a girl who loses money, they don’t pay much attention to her and let her fend for herself. If it weren’t for the kind villagers who would often give her something to eat, she’s afraid that she would have starved to death.
Even then, she still died. Because of long-term malnutrition and abnormally weak bones, a wind chill took her life in the end, and this ushered in the her from the modern times.
After counting, she realized that she has been in this world for three days and not once has she seen her cheap father. Nor has she seen her grandpa, grandma, uncles and aunts either. For three days, these people left a seriously ill child alone. Left alone at home like that, these people are really cruel, if it weren’t for her space that helped her to eat and drink, she would have become the first person to starve to death in the history of transmigration.
That’s right; Shen Ruolan has a space that was formed from a piece of black jade chessboard that she seized when she cracked a cultural relic theft case with her colleagues during her previous life. When the treasure was seized from the thief, she was shot and bled because of it. After bleeding on that piece, she somehow had this space.
This space is actually an enlarged version of the black jade chessboard. With the entirety of the space being divided into small grids like a chessboard. Different things could be stored in different grids. Because of the texture of the black jade, her space cannot be like the ones in books. The spaces in novels can be cultivated and upgraded, not to mention the beautiful scenery of mountains, rivers, lakes, and beasts. This can only store things in it and living things can’t be put inside. To put it bluntly, it is an invisible large warehouse.
In the last life, Shen Ruolan regarded it as a carry-on warehouse. The things that were frequently used and the valuables that she afraid of losing were all stored in it. If she had known that she would cross over into such a poor body, she would have done something more. You have to exchange the passbooks inside for a few bags of rice, noodles and oil to store in it. Now look at the large amount of empty grids. Looking at the empty space, she feels regret till her intestines hurt!
Hey, if she thought too much about it, it was just going to make her cry.
Shen Ruolan checked the little food that was left over in the space: a few boxes of leftovers that she had packed in the restaurant to take back home when she last ate outside, because the space has the function of keeping the food fresh, no matter how long ago it was put in. The food is as fresh as they were when they were just put in, so she could save on the refrigerator and she keeps all the food that were at home as well as the medicines and cosmetics that are prone to expiration.
There is also half a birthday cake, which she couldn’t finish eating and couldn’t bear to throw away on her birthday. There are also seven or eight eggs, some fruit milk, etc. But these things will not be eaten for a few days. If she didn’t make money soon , She is going to be starve again.
Feeling melancholy for a while, she tried to get up from the kang and walked slowly outside.
After three days of resting and taking some antibiotic medicine that was stored in the space, her body is much better than when she first came. At least when she got up, she was neither dizzy nor faint and she was able to walk freely. She wanted to go outside to see if there was anything. After all you can’t make money by just sitting and eating like this.
…
When she got outside, the sounds from the uncle’s house to the south had stopped. She wondered if Shen Ruomei was persuaded by the uncle and aunt, or if she was tired of crying and wanted to rest, it was quiet anyway.
The rare quiet made Shen Ruolan stop and look at her own yard.
Her yard is very large, the front and rear gardens add up to half an acre of land. Because her house is close to the mountain, there are no neighbors behind, so the back garden is much larger than ordinary people’s. But it’s still not much as it wasn’t taken care of properly. The weeds grew taller than the courtyard walls. In addition, there are no vegetables and there is neither any poultry such as chickens, ducks and geese nor any pigs. This makes the house look empty and gloomy. If she didn’t know better at first glance this would seem like an empty house.
The gate of the house is fenced, and it has long been in tatters. To the right of the gate, there is a small stack of firewood. On top of it, there is a mess of corn stalks, dried potato seedlings, twigs, etc. It was picked up by the former Shen Ruolan.
It is now at the end of October and winter was coming soon. The crops of every family are already harvested. There is a small pile of firewood in front of each household, ready to be burnt. The firewood pile of their family is sparse and wont be enough for the coming days.
After looking at the yard and garden, Shen Ruolan opened the gate and walked out staggeringly, preparing to walk around the village to see if there was any way to make money.
Kaoshantun got its name as it is located at the foot of Wolong Mountain. The village is not very big. There are about fifty or sixty households in it. Most of the villagers are named Shen, who belong to the same branch, like Shen Ruolan’s uncle and aunt. They all live in this village, but don’t interact with her.
As she was walking, suddenly a clump of soil fell on her.
“Dirty monkey, eat the soil, look at the ground and cry!” Shen Ruolan felt a sudden pain, but when she looked back, she saw a boy half her age around five years old hitting her with muck.
1. ancient bed
2. 24-30 kgs
Pls update and ty for translating only one with the right proper eng Trans for this novel.
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