Chapter 121: Sleeping? Just Sleeping?

It snowed last night. Although the snow hadn’t accumulated, with the sun rising, even the frost had begun to melt into water, leaving the courtyard damp.

Some of the uneven ground had started to collect puddles.

No one knew where Lu Yuanbao learned it, but he came up with a clever solution: he gathered a bunch of small stones from the corners of the yard and used them to fill in the low spots, first laying down some soil, then topping it with stones.

That way, even if someone stepped on it, their shoes wouldn’t get wet.

Lu Yuanbao put his whole heart into the task. Even though his hands were red from the cold, he refused to stop.

Just then, Chen Fengying entered the courtyard and saw the scene.

“Yuanbao, working hard, huh? Oh dear, look at your poor hands, all red. How could Chu-girl let you do this?” Chen Fengying said, her voice full of concern.

Lu Yuanbao looked up and straightened his back. “I wanted to do it myself.”

“Even if you volunteered, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of work. Come on, stop and take a break. Go inside and warm up. Where’s Chu-girl? Where’s Commander Lu? Are they home?”

Seeing that Chen Fengying was about to head inside, Lu Yuanbao quickly stepped in front of her to block the way.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to go in—he knew Chen Fengying was a kind person. When Chu Yue wasn’t home, this auntie often looked after him and even gave him buns and dumplings to eat.

It’s just that… today was a special case.

“Shhh—Auntie Chen, quiet down,” Lu Yuanbao held up a finger to his lips in a ‘shhh’ gesture, signaling her to keep quiet.

Chen Fengying blinked in confusion and whispered, “What’s going on? What’s happening inside?”

Lu Yuanbao put on a very serious little face and solemnly replied, “They’re sleeping.”

To an adult, that meant something completely different.

It was midday. A married couple, leaving the kid outside, and the two of them alone in the room… sleeping?

Could that really be just sleeping?

Lu Zhanlin: It really was pure and innocent—just sleeping under a blanket.

Even if Lu Zhanlin said it himself, Chen Fengying wouldn’t believe it.

Upon hearing that, Chen Fengying’s expression changed slightly. She suddenly covered her mouth to stifle a laugh, then pulled Lu Yuanbao aside and said, “Sleeping, huh? Then we shouldn’t go in. I won’t disturb them, and you shouldn’t either.”

The two of them returned to the courtyard. Since she didn’t get to see Chu Yue, Chen Fengying felt her visit had been wasted.

Before leaving, she asked Lu Yuanbao if he wanted to come to her house to play—Da Zhuang could keep him company.

Lu Yuanbao shook his head and politely declined. He wanted to stay home and wait for Chu Yue to wake up.

Looking at the boy, Chen Fengying couldn’t help but feel fond and gratified. She patted his cheek and said, “Yuanbao, you’re such a good kid. No wonder Chu-girl treats you so well. Stay here and watch the house. Auntie Chen’s heading off. If your parents are still asleep in the afternoon, go knock on the door, okay? Don’t go barging in. Knock first.”

“Okay, I got it.”

Lu Yuanbao nodded, only half understanding.

Chen Fengying stood up and left. As she walked away, she muttered to herself, “They’ve been arguing all day, and Wang Chunling’s family still hasn’t come to a decision. Now Chu-girl isn’t around… what should we do…”

…

The next day.

For professional soldiers, the idea of a New Year’s holiday barely existed. Strictly speaking, Lu Zhanlin shouldn’t have been off yesterday either—he had taken a special leave for that day.

Early the next morning, Lu Zhanlin left the house to report for duty at the military camp. Everything went on as usual.

But over the course of a day and a night, word had spread throughout the compound about the utterly heartless thing Li Jinhua had done.

After all, a biological grandmother trying to “sell her granddaughter” for a hundred yuan was absolutely shocking.

Every sister-in-law in the compound, without exception, sided with Wang Chunling. Even the most timid, Xia Xiaolan, couldn’t help but spit in disgust at Li Jinhua.

“She’s an old beast!”

Yet despite everyone’s anger, under Li Jinhua’s tactics of crying, making a scene, and threatening suicide, there had been no real consequences—just like that, things were on the verge of being brushed under the rug.

Forget about Wang Chunling not being able to swallow that indignation, even the other women in the compound were outraged.

“That old hag Li even has the nerve to claim she was forced into it! What, someone held a knife to her neck and made her take the hundred yuan to sell her own granddaughter? Saying something like that—doesn’t she fear biting her tongue from the sheer nonsense?”

“Chu Yue, you weren’t there yesterday. You didn’t see the way that old woman threw a tantrum. First she screamed that Chunling stabbed her with scissors and tried to murder her mother-in-law. Then she cried about chest pain, hand pain, pain all over—acting like everyone was bullying a poor old lady and driving her to die. Honestly, she should just go knock herself out against a wall and be done with it.”

“Well, she should go ahead and do it! If Li Jinhua really had the guts to die that way, I’d immediately pay for her funeral and send a condolence gift!”

Chen Fengying, Zheng Yue’e, Xia Xiaolan, Huang Aifang, and several other women showed up at Chu Yue’s house early in the morning, as if prearranged, eager to share everything that had happened yesterday.

“Sigh… Chunling’s baby is only a few days old, still not even out of her confinement period. To find out on New Year’s Eve that her child had gone missing—how could she endure that? It’s heartbreaking. When I saw her yesterday, her face was deathly pale, sitting on the bed like a wooden doll, clinging to her baby and refusing to let go. I barely approached her and she flinched in fright. Just seeing her like that made me want to cry.”

Most of the women were married with children. Mothers understood mothers best—they could deeply relate to how important a child was.

Just thinking about it made them feel awful.

After hearing them out, Chu Yue asked a very important question:
“What about Company Commander Zhou? How did he handle it?”

At the mention of that, the women got even angrier.

Chen Fengying blurted out, “How else? He tried to smooth things over like always!”

Huang Aifang, a more mild-mannered type—not as blunt as Chen Fengying—tried to ease the atmosphere a bit:
“This really isn’t easy for Commander Zhou to deal with. On one side, it’s his wife; on the other, it’s her mother. If he really pushes Li Jinhua to death, he’ll never have peace for the rest of his life.”

“So what? He wants his mother, but not his wife? Then why did he even get married? Let him spend the rest of his life with that old hag Li Jinhua and stop ruining Chunling’s life.”

The situation was what it was, but the real difficulty lay in the fact that even the wisest judge finds it hard to settle family disputes.

Zhou Zhijian couldn’t offend his own mother and, therefore, couldn’t truly protect his wife and child—he could only try to maintain a “balance” between the two.

But… was it really balanced?

If Zhou Zhijian were truly a responsible son, he should’ve corrected Li Jinhua’s preference for boys over girls from the start, instead of letting the conflict between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law escalate to this irreparable state.

If he were a good husband, he wouldn’t have kept letting Wang Chunling suffer in silence. He should’ve protected his wife and daughter. When Chunling gave birth, she nearly died—wasn’t that lesson harsh enough?

But because none of that pain and danger ever landed on Zhou Zhijian, he never understood the hardship Chunling endured!

At his core, he was just a weak, spineless man.