Chapter 35: Unexpectedly Saving Someone

Ye Zhiqiu’s body had been depleted for years. She had been following Jiang Nian’s guidance to correct some of her physical deficiencies, but the long-term damage wasn’t so easy to eliminate.

The first step in taking on an apprentice was to completely change her physical fitness.

Now that her identity had changed, the way she was treated was naturally different.

Jiang Nian gave Ye Zhiqiu her tasks and went up the mountain to find the herbs she needed to nourish her body.

Zhou Shugen saw Jiang Nian leave and dared to come over.

Ye Zhiqiu looked at Zhou Shugen’s strange appearance and asked cautiously after a while, “What do you want to do again?”

It was broad daylight, and even though it was getting cold, he, a grown man, was wrapped up from head to toe, only revealing a pair of eyes. It was clearly suspicious.

After hearing his words, a flicker of pain crossed Zhou Shugen’s eyes.

He raised his hand and removed the scarf from his face, revealing a face covered in bumps. It was full of pus-filled boils and looked very frightening.

Unlike the pimples that most people get on their faces when they are young, his face was like…

Ye Zhiqiu thought for a long time before she came up with a good description.

Yes, it was like the boils on a toad.

“How did you become like this?”

Ye Zhiqiu was startled and quickly took a few steps back.

She didn’t know if his condition was contagious. Even if Jiang Nian was a good doctor, she didn’t want to bring trouble upon herself.

“Xiaoju, Dad knows that the family has wronged you, but I really had no choice. If you hadn’t gotten my job and your aunt’s job taken away, we wouldn’t be suffering like this…”

He started by playing the emotional card, but Ye Zhiqiu was really tired of listening.

“Enough. I don’t know if you’re suffering, and it’s none of my business. But there’s one thing I need to correct you on, Zhou Shugen. All of this wasn’t caused by me, it was caused by you. If you hadn’t been fickle and abandoned your wife and child, my mother wouldn’t have died. You would still be working in the city, and you wouldn’t have been forced to come back to the countryside. All of this was caused by your own greed. Don’t just casually put the blame on me. And, I’m not called Zhou Xiaoju anymore. I’m called Ye Zhiqiu. From the day my mother died, you were no longer my father. From the day you sold me, you weren’t even a human being in my eyes!”

At least humans still have feelings. He doesn’t, and neither do they.

What hurt her the most was her grandparents. Zhou Shugen’s character had been proven many years ago, and no one thought he was noble.

But her grandparents had watched her grow up.

Over the years, her grandmother had been paralyzed in bed, and her grandfather only had a mouth. He didn’t do any manual labor. She and her mother took care of them.

The day she was tied up in the yard, her grandmother even looked out the window and persuaded her, saying that women should accept their fate and blame it on bad luck.

Ha!

She never thought she was unlucky. She thought she was very lucky.

They were the unlucky ones.

Look, she had left them and was able to eat and wear warm clothes. She could even learn skills from her master.

After hearing her words, Zhou Shugen instinctively wanted to get angry, but thinking about his purpose for coming today, he had to suppress the anger in his heart.

“Okay, you can call yourself whatever you want, and you can scold me however you want. Dad won’t be angry. But Xiaoju, after all, I am your father. You have to save me. That Jiang Nian doesn’t seem easy to deal with. I offended her because of you. She definitely won’t treat me. We don’t have any money to go to the city to see a doctor. Help me. Help me find out what she thinks and get some medicine to cure this illness. It’s not difficult, is it?”

He didn’t know if he was possessed. He suddenly got this condition. It was itchy and painful, unbearable.

The key was that it was embarrassing. The pus-filled boils had a foul smell when they were squeezed out. He had only been like this for a short time, and his wife couldn’t stand it anymore. She took the children back to her parents’ house in the city.

To him, it didn’t matter what Zhou Xiaoju was called or what her surname was. After all, she was a girl, and she didn’t need to carry on the family line. In his eyes, she was useless.

Besides, he was now in a bad mood because of his illness. He had a feeling that if this illness wasn’t cured, his family would fall apart.

But he was thinking too much. Ye Zhiqiu wished he would die, let alone save him.

Just then, Li Rui came over to ask her about some specific things. The two of them worked together to drive Zhou Shugen away.

Jiang Nian wasn’t motivated by a sudden surge of kindness to help someone. It was simply that, as a woman, she couldn’t bear to see women only end up being exploited.

It just so happened that Ye Zhiqiu stumbled into her life when she was bored, and she didn’t mind finding something to do.

Besides, she needed someone to take over her current tasks.

Although it was only a short time, she had already started to get tired of treating these minor ailments every day.

She was a person who liked to seek excitement, and she didn’t like a monotonous life.

Life is short, and she didn’t need to worry about making a living, so she naturally didn’t want to waste herself like this.

But it has to be said that, apart from other reasons, she really liked the environment here in Jianglin City.

Deep in the mountains, there was no one around, and all kinds of plants and animals were abundant.

This time she went into the mountains, not for plants and herbs, but for poisonous insects and tiger bones. If all else failed, wolf bones and deer bones would do.

She had told Ye Zhiqiu that her skills were not limited to medicine.

But a 16-year-old girl’s bones had already grown, and learning martial arts wasn’t easy. At her age, she needed the help of medicine, plus constant effort, to achieve anything.

Since she was now her apprentice, she would naturally try her best to be attentive. Otherwise, if she went out to cause trouble in the future, it would be a disgrace to her.

She didn’t know if there were tigers in these mountains, but she had seen wolves and deer. She had avoided them before because she didn’t need them and was too lazy to hunt them.

Now, it was difficult to find them.

Fortunately, after going deeper and deeper from noon to afternoon, she finally found a wild deer. While chasing it, she encountered two wild wolves.

After a fight, she was slightly injured, but she managed to collect the defeated wolves and deer into her space.

She applied some medicine to the scratches on her arm, and the journey back was more leisurely.

There was no one in the deep mountains, and there were many Ganoderma lucidum growing on the trees. She picked the ones with good quality and ignored the ones that weren’t good enough.

As for wild chickens and rabbits, there was already a large group breeding in her space. She was worried about not being able to consume them all, so she definitely couldn’t catch any more.

Suddenly, an idea flashed through her mind, and she thought it was pretty good.

Maybe she could catch some carnivorous wild animals and put them in there. That way, she could prevent the threat of overpopulation.

And in the future, when she needed them, she wouldn’t have to search all over the mountains.

This idea was simply brilliant.

She didn’t plan to leave for now, so she continued to wander around the mountains.

This time, she didn’t plan to kill them, so she collected them into her space when she saw them, which saved a lot of time.

It was just that the animals in the mountains were unlucky. Their homes, where they had been living happily, suddenly disappeared, and they inexplicably found themselves in a strange place, leaving them bewildered for a long time.

It wasn’t until late at night that she returned to the border of the mountain forest.

Just as she was about to leave, she suddenly heard a cry for help.

She frowned and listened carefully, making sure she hadn’t heard wrong, before heading towards the direction where the sound came from.

Yan Jin thought he was going to die today. Just as he was about to use all his strength and lose his last bit of consciousness, he suddenly saw a blurry figure approaching him gracefully.

His vision was blurry, and he couldn’t see the person’s face clearly, but he could vaguely tell that it was a girl.

The woman’s slender figure was a little hazy, as if she were a goddess descending from heaven to save him.

“Help me…”

He used the last of his consciousness to utter these two words.