Chapter 29 : Playing the Hooligan

She thought it was the wind that blew the window, but then she realized that couldn’t be right. The Jiang family’s house was in the center of the village, with solid houses in front and behind, so where could the wind be coming from?

Jiang Li turned over and got up, grabbing the stick that was holding the door. Her heart pounded as she held her breath and hid at the foot of the bed.

Sure enough, after hearing no movement in the room, the window slowly opened and a dark shadow stepped onto the windowsill.

He landed at the window with a thud, then groped his way to the bed in the dark and reached his hand into the bulging quilt.

Jiang Li shouted loudly, and the stick in her hand fell on his head mercilessly.

Er Laizi only felt a sharp pain in the back of his neck. Before he could even scream, he fell to the ground with a thud.

The man lay motionless on the ground. Jiang Li touched his forehead, which was covered in cold sweat.

When the candle in the room was lit, a familiar face suddenly appeared. He had a bald head, yellow skin, squinting eyes, and was curled up on the ground like a shrimp. His nose and face were swollen. It was Er Laizi, the same man she had seen earlier that day.

It was obvious what a grown man would want to do sneaking into a girl’s room in the middle of the night.

Stealing is not a serious crime, but the real concern was that someone had set their sights on Jiang Li and the things left by her mother, wanting to take both her and her property.

Jiang Li’s cold sweat continued. She had been careless.

The houses in the village were close to each other, so if one household farted, the others could smell it.

She received a pension, and the team leader had given her a job as a scorekeeper. Both of her parents had passed away, and her relationship with her uncle’s family was bad.

In the eyes of the villagers, she was like a hot commodity left by the roadside, and anyone could take a bite.

First, it was Guo Haifeng, then Er Laizi.

How many others shared the same idea?

If she hadn’t been lucky enough to wake up and hadn’t happened to have divine powers, would she have been forced to marry someone like Er Laizi?

Jiang Li was filled with anger and hatred. She bit her lip, found a straw rope to tie his hands and feet, and then groped in the dark for a kitchen knife.

She held her breath, cut Er Laizi’s tattered clothes into strips, and smashed his knees hard with a large stone.

Then she dragged the man to the cesspool at the entrance of the village like a dead dog. Er Laizi woke up once during the process, and he only dared to beg for mercy in a low voice. He was knocked unconscious again by Jiang Li with one punch.

With a thud, Er Laizi was thrown into the pit, and he gulped down a few mouthfuls of filth.

Jiang Li returned to the house in the dark. After such an incident, she didn’t dare to sleep and stayed awake until dawn.

When the sky was just beginning to light, a scream that pierced the sky came from the toilet at the entrance of the village, “Catch the hooligan!”

“You shameless bastard! How dare you squat in the toilet and peek at a girl using the restroom? Don’t you know who I am?”

The speaker was the daughter-in-law of a butcher in the village, known as the tigress, Zhang Sanniang.

When she first got married and moved to Dashuping, she was bathing in the pond on the back hill. A few ignorant boys peeped at her. Zhang Sanniang held them down one by one and made them immerse themselves in the pond to rinse the vegetables. They were so drowned they rolled their eyes.

That wasn’t all. She grabbed the bastard by his ankle and dragged him back to the village to settle the score with his mother.

She took her tall and strong man and sat in front of people’s doors, cursing them for three days until each family compensated her one dollar.

Zhang Sanniang picked up the dung shovel and began hitting Er Laizi on the head, landing each blow accurately.

After being drowned all night, Er Laizi was unrecognizable and didn’t even have the strength to shout for help.

The aunties who were watching, their noses pinched from the stench, didn’t even go to the toilet and cheered Zhang Sanniang on, “Beat him, the shameless little hooligan.”

“This guy must be a vagrant. He doesn’t look like he’s from our village.”

“Someone come and pick him up and have a look!”

“It’s disgusting. Whoever wants to go can go, but I’m not going.”

Someone threw a hemp rope into the pit and tied the other end to a tree. Er Laizi pulled with all his might and climbed up.

“Why does he look like Er Laizi?” Someone recognized Er Laizi by his iconic protruding mouth and big buck teeth.

“Go find his mother and come over to recognize her!”

Er Laizi’s mother came running over, wiping her tears. She found her child dying and was speechless. “God damn it, who beat my Er Laizi like this? Is there any law in the world?”

Zhang Sanniang slammed the dung shovel into the ground and said, “I hit you, what’s wrong?”

“He was hiding in the toilet and peeping. I was lucky I didn’t poke his eyes out. Even if you report it to the captain, I’ll still be right.”

“Mom, I didn’t peek!”

Er Laizi was trembling, and an unknown yellow and white object came out of his mouth.

The crowd all took a step back, and some of the clean-loving young wives vomited on the spot.

“What were you doing squatting in a woman’s toilet so early in the morning?” Zhang Sanniang frowned and glared at him, wishing she could eat him alive.

“Someone deliberately knocked me out and left me here.”

“Who hit you? Why did they hit you instead of others? I think you are lying! You are too old to get married, and you are just peeking at women’s butts.”

“Whoever looked at my wife’s butt? I want him dead!”

The butcher came over with a butcher knife in his hand, full of murderous intent. Er Laizi subconsciously shrank his neck and crawled behind his mother twice.

“The captain is here!”

“What are you doing here so early in the morning?”

“Er Laizi, what mistake have you made again?” Jiang Baoshan was extremely annoyed. It was this Er Laizi again, an old bachelor who spent all day teasing cats and dogs and flirting with young wives in the village.

“You are committing a serious crime of hooliganism. You refuse to change your bad habits. I think you should be sent to a farm for reform!”

“Captain, you can’t do that. Er Laizi is my only child. If he goes to the farm, I won’t live!” Er Laizi’s mother cried bitterly.

“Captain, I promise that he will be well-behaved in the future and will never dare to do it again, Captain…” Er Laizi’s mother knelt down and banged her head.

“Mrs. Zhang Sanniang, what do you think?”

Zhang Sanniang glanced at Er Laizi’s mother with red eyes. If the roots of this village were cut off, there was no telling what crazy things Er Laizi’s mother might do.

Luckily, she discovered Er Laizi just as she unbuckled her belt, so no one saw her nakedness. Never mind, just think of it as her bad luck.

“Captain, I will listen to you.”

Jiang Baoshan breathed a sigh of relief. He didn’t want to create a gangster to be sent to the farm for reform and ruin the reputation of the production team.

“Er Laizi, you have to compensate Zhang Sanniang with one dollar and dig ditches for the team for a whole winter. You have to bring your own food, but you don’t get any work points. Next spring, you will carry manure to fertilize the fruit trees on the hill behind the village.”

Digging ditches and applying manure are both hard and tiring jobs. Anyone who does them will suffer a lot. Er Laizi suffered a lot this time.