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“You foolish woman! Long hair, short sense. Can’t you hope for something better for your son? If he comes with us, he might still have a chance to live. But if he stays with you here in the village, even if the rebels don’t kill him, he’ll starve to death.”
Xie Laoda held his sickly, starving nephew Xie Wuyang tightly in his arms, furiously kicking at his sister-in-law Zhou shi, who clung to the child’s legs, sobbing and refusing to let go.
“You call that kindness? Do you even believe yourself? You took all the grain with you. What are Jiu’er and I supposed to eat?”
Zhou shi hadn’t slept a wink the entire night. Her eyes were bloodshot, her hands bruised and raw, her hair a tangled mess from being yanked and pulled.
She screamed hoarsely at Xie Laoda, ignoring his violent kicks as she kept a death grip on her son’s legs.
“Be grateful we’re even taking the boy! You really are insatiable. What, do you expect us to bring along you and your daughter too? What are we supposed to live on, thin air?”
Li shi, Xie Laoda’s wife, and their eldest daughter were restraining Xie Jiu’er off to the side, preventing her from rushing forward to help Zhou shi wrestle Xie Wuyang back. Seeing Zhou shi still refusing to let go, they cursed her impatiently.
Xie Wuyang was trapped in his Big Uncle’s arms, unable to move. Tears streamed down his face in fat, silent drops.
He was terrified. Today, Big Uncle looked even more frightening than usual. But he was just too hungry—his frail little body was no match for Xie Laoda, a man in his prime. Struggling felt like scratching an itch.
“This family listens to me,” Xie Laoda barked. “Second Brother is most likely dead out there. Taking Wuyang with me is already doing him a favor, at least it leaves him a bloodline. Why should I drag along you and your daughter to waste food? Without you two, maybe the rest of us and our parents still have a chance to survive. With you, even if we don’t run into rebels, we’ll starve to death out there.”
As he spoke, he kicked Zhou shi again, this time landing a brutal blow squarely in her chest. She crumpled to the ground, unable to get back up for a long while.
Xie Jiu’er seized the moment. With all her strength, she broke free from her Aunt and Cousin’s grip, rushed forward, and snatched Xie Wuyang straight from Xie Laoda’s arms. Facing his murderous glare, she sneered coldly, “You expect us to believe Big Uncle is kind enough to raise Wuyang? Grandpa, Grandma—do you believe that?”
At the doorway, Xie Laohan and Xie Mother, already packed and ready to leave, heard her words. Their eyes flickered, but they said nothing.
In this time of chaos, life was unbearably hard for common folk. For the sake of a single mouthful of food, people could do anything. They knew exactly what Laoda was planning—but it wasn’t something they could stop, nor did they care to.
After enduring long-term hunger, who still had the heart to pity a grandson? All they could think about each day was how to survive just one more.
“Don’t try to make it sound noble—‘leaving a bloodline for my Father.’ Wuyang is just your last stash of food. Just admit you’re taking him so you can boil him for stew, and I’d almost respect you for being honest.”
As soon as Xie Jiu’er said this, Xie Laoda faltered, his confidence shaken for a split second. Seizing the moment, she kicked him hard right between the legs.
Xie Laoda’s eyes brimmed with tears from the pain, and his grip loosened instinctively. Xie Jiu’er grabbed her feather-light younger Brother and quickly retreated back into the house.
In front of his daughter and his Mother, Xie Laoda couldn’t clutch his groin without losing face. He gritted his teeth through the pain and cursed, “You little wretch! I should’ve salted you last month when you were half-dead, stuck you in a jar, and saved the strength to keep moving!”
Seeing her daughter succeed, Zhou shi scrambled to her feet, crawling and tumbling to the doorway to shield it with her body. “In times like these, we’re probably not going to survive anyway. But my child may starve to death—he will not be boiled and eaten. Just give up! I will never let you take him!”
“You want to eat us? You don’t have what it takes. If you’re leaving, then get lost already. Say one more word, and I’ll burn this whole place to the ground. Let’s see how you plan to survive without a single grain of food. I’d love to watch you figure out who else to salt and toss into a jar.”
As Xie Jiu’er spoke, her cold, venomous gaze swept across everyone from the main household, including Xie Laohan and his wife.
Xie Laoda’s two daughters instinctively took a half-step back, panic flashing in their eyes. In times this chaotic, nothing was unthinkable. Everyone in the village knew—just days ago, that simple-minded Taohua girl had been…
“Let Wuyang stay with his Mother!” Xie Laohan finally spoke, his tone urgent. “Everyone else has already gone. If we don’t leave now, we’ll be left behind.”
He stood at the doorway, peering out to see the villagers already a long way down the path. Anxious, he began urging Xie Laoda to move.
“Hmph! Stay behind then, and some outsider will get them anyway. Just one woman? In times like these, you really think you can protect those two siblings? Sooner or later, they’ll end up in the pot too.”
Xie Laoda spat a thick glob of phlegm at their feet, then turned and motioned for his wife Li shi, their two daughters, and his son—who was the same age as Wuyang—to get moving.
Xie Jiu’er held tightly to Xie Wuyang’s hand and stood with Zhou shi at the front gate. The three of them silently watched as the villagers pushed carts and carried bundles on their backs, growing smaller and smaller until they became a dark speck on the winding mountain road—and finally disappeared.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to fight for a share of the rations—they simply didn’t have any to spare. The entire main household, including the old couple, had barely half a sack of grain and one full sack of sweet potatoes to their name.
Seven people in total: five from the main family and the elderly couple. On the road, with constant marching and heavy physical strain, that little food wouldn’t even last a month. How could they possibly leave even a single bite for the orphaned and widowed second household?
Watching her two cousins walk nervously behind their Father, step by step as they left the village, Xie Jiu’er could already guess what fate awaited them. When the food ran out a month later, the first to suffer would surely be those two girls.
She and her Mother had already fought with everything they had to wrest her Brother from the strong hands of her Big Uncle—just managing that was already a stroke of luck.
Because she knew: if Wuyang had gone with them, he would’ve been the first one “taken care of.”
Now, this once-bustling village held only the three of them. All around lay nothing but bleak desolation. A hundred years of war had ravaged the land, cries of suffering filled every corner, and the horror of trading children for food was no longer a rare tale—it was everyday reality.
Zhou shi’s face was ashen. “Your Mother is useless. I’ve done everything I can just to keep you from being eaten, but I have no way to feed you. The three of us are probably going to starve to death here. I’m sorry. In your next life, don’t choose a worthless woman like me to be your Mother.”
With that, tears streamed down her face like a broken string of pearls.
Xie Jiu’er looked around at the crumbling village, a cold, helpless ache weighing on her chest. Still, she gathered her courage and urged Zhou shi on: “Mother, look at the deep mountains surrounding the village. There has to be food hidden in the forests. As long as we can move, we won’t starve. If we want to live, the first step is believing that we can survive.”
Zhou shi looked at her sixteen-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son and nodded slowly.
Yes—no matter how hopeless things seemed, for her children’s sake, she had to hang on. What if… what if they really did survive in the end?
After comforting her Mother, Xie Jiu’er’s stomach growled loudly in protest. Was there anyone more pitiful than her—a transmigrator with this much bad luck?
Just one month ago, while working on an archaeological dig with her professor, they had discovered an ancient scroll in a tomb—an unrecorded piece of lost history.
According to that scroll, near the end of a century-long war, the great general who would eventually bring peace and establish the Dazhun Dynasty—the future Qin Wang—had been gravely wounded and gone missing.