Chapter 42: Protect Yourself and Your Family
It was the first time she had witnessed what her grandfather often spoke of, and the sheer cruelty of it left her shaken.
She was neither a savior nor a saint, and she possessed no power to alter the course of an entire era. The only thing she could do was protect herself and her family. She resolved never to kick someone when they were down, nor to drag others into trouble—she would simply remain true to her own conscience.
Sheng Wanyan couldn’t bear to watch any longer. Powerless to help, she reminded herself that she was just an ordinary person who happened to have an extraordinary hoard of supplies. Furthermore, the political patrols wearing red armbands were lurking in the crowd, watching like hawks. They were practically waiting for someone to step forward and attempt a rescue so they could arrest them as accomplices and claim the credit.
Sheng Wanyan turned her bicycle around and pedaled away, refusing to entangle herself in these ideological struggles. Every era had its own rules; how to break them was the business of great historical leaders, not a temporal outsider like her.
The weather that month was exceptionally dry. The heat left everyone in the family visibly exhausted, and the oppressive air made it difficult to even swallow food.
Concerned for their health, Sheng Wanyan decided to pull a pound of dried mung beans and two pounds of rock sugar from her space. She put the mung beans to soak that evening so they would be ready to boil the next day, which was her scheduled day off. In this parched weather, a cooling drink was necessary to keep everyone’s throats from growing hoarse.
This was especially true for Father Sheng. He worked in a high-dust factory workshop full of airborne particulates and bacteria, and facing heavy steel machinery for hours on end took a severe toll on his respiratory system. If she hadn’t been secretly spiking the family’s drinking supply with the spiritual spring water from her space, she would have begged him to resign—though the current system would never allow for such a reckless career move.
Mother Sheng was in slightly better health, but her factory job required her to keep her head bowed over her work for hours at a time. As a result, her cervical spine was in terrible condition, leaving her neck and shoulders perpetually stiff and sore.
In her past life, Sheng Wanyan had been a brilliant medical student. She had studied clinical medicine at Harvard University, entering the top-ranked medical school in the world purely on her own academic merit. Her professors had widely recognized her as a medical prodigy, and the university had been eager to recruit her into their prestigious research institute upon graduation. Although she had ultimately taken over the Sheng Group as its president and paused her clinical career, she had never abandoned her studies, completing her credits to earn her doctorate at twenty-six.
Handling a minor issue like her mother’s stiff neck was incredibly easy for her.
“Mom, let me give you a massage,” Wanyan offered.
Mother Sheng lay face down on the bed, allowing her daughter to work on her neck. At first, the pressure felt intensely sore and swollen, but as Sheng Wanyan precisely targeted the correct acupressure points, the tension dissolved. The relief was so profound that Mother Sheng drifted into a light sleep, only realizing the session was over when she woke up in a daze.
Mother Sheng rolled her head from side to side. To her amazement, her neck felt incredibly loose and comfortable. The muscles were no longer rigid and rock-hard as they usually were.
“Oh, that feels so much better,” Mother Sheng sighed, rolling her shoulders.
“Let me know the next time it starts acting up, Mom.”
Mother Sheng nodded, a wave of maternal warmth washing over her. She couldn’t help but think that a daughter truly was far more considerate than a son. Her son, who was stationed away from home all year, had probably never even noticed that his mother suffered from chronic neck pain.
Far away at his military base, Sheng Wanze suddenly let out a massive sneeze and rubbed his nose. He grinned, assuming his mother must be missing him.
Currently leading a grueling night-training exercise, Wanze felt a sudden pang of grief as he remembered how Gu Tingxiao had ruthlessly eaten an entire jar of his homemade meat sauce. His little sister had stayed up late into the night meticulously preparing that sauce for him, yet Gu Tingxiao had greedily polished it off. The man was entirely shameless.
Meanwhile, Gu Tingxiao was currently plotting his next trip to Chengdu. Just two days prior, he had accidentally-on-purpose overheard Sheng Wanze inquiring about the background and character of the outstanding, unmarried young officers in the regiment.
The Sheng family was officially looking to match Sheng Wanyan. She was going to start going on blind dates.
Wanyan was twenty years old. Even if she wasn’t in a hurry to wed, her parents refused to delay her prospects any longer. Fortunately, Gu Tingxiao had his Aunt Gu Tong living central to Chengdu, which provided the perfect excuse for a visit.
He immediately wrote a letter to his aunt, subtly asking her to keep a very close eye on Sheng Wanyan’s dating situation. Stationed so far away, it took more than half a month just to travel from the base to Chengdu; he was terrified that some smooth-talking city boy would steal the girl of his dreams while he was stuck on duty. If she was courted by someone else while he was away, by the time he managed to secure leave, she would be completely out of his reach.
If Sheng Wanyan could read his mind, she would have told him he was entirely overthinking things.
However, the reality of the Sheng family’s matchmaking plans had left Gu Tingxiao so anxious that stress blisters were forming on his lips. He was completely focused on formatting his next vacation request. To ensure Sheng Wanze didn’t have the time to screen potential brother-in-law candidates among the officers, Gu Tingxiao calculatedly increased the intensity of the new recruit training schedules, burying Battalion Commander Sheng Wanze under a mountain of urgent paperwork and field exercises.
Wanze was suddenly so overwhelmed with military duties that he had absolutely no time to focus on his sister’s love life. Because he took his responsibilities with the utmost seriousness, the plan to find Wanyan a partner was temporarily shelved. There was no rush anyway; after all, he wasn’t the one panicking about her single status.
Sitting in her room, Sheng Wanyan suddenly sneezed several times in rapid succession. Am I catching a cold? she wondered, rubbing her nose. It seemed impossible in this sweltering summer heat. Shaking it off, she slipped into her space, mixed a warm cup of herbal Isatis root tea to ward off any illness, and turned in for the night.
The next morning, Wanyan got up early to brew the mung bean soup. She lamented the lack of modern appliances; if she had a refrigerator, she could have frozen the sweet soup into a chilled paste, which would have been incredibly refreshing.
She dumped the plump, soaked mung beans into a ceramic pot and set it over the coal stove to simmer. After half an hour of boiling, she stirred in a generous amount of rock sugar.
Watching from the doorway, Mother Sheng felt her heart bleed at the sheer volume of precious rock sugar her daughter was dumping into the pot. If it weren’t for the fact that the entire household had lost their appetites from the heat, she would have chased her out of the kitchen with a broom. She noticed her daughter’s cooking was undeniably delicious, but she handled expensive seasonings as if they were fetched out of the river for free. She was becoming far too extravagant; what kind of ordinary worker would dare marry a girl who spent money so lavishly? It truly was a sin.
Sheng Wanyan ladled out five portions into small bowls. To cool them down rapidly, she filled three large washbasins with cold well water and carefully nestled the small bowls inside. She kept the water level just below the rims of the bowls, ensuring not a single drop of well water contaminated the sweet soup.
For breakfast, Mother Sheng prepared a simple meal: two steamed sweet potatoes and a bowl of coarse cornmeal porridge for each person. Since it was a rest day, the family would be lounging at home. In this era of scarcity, food was precious; if you weren’t performing hard labor or exercising, you stayed still to slow your metabolism and stretch the food in your stomach to resist hunger.
On the farms, the villagers worked themselves to the bone in the fields every day, yet securing enough food to survive remained a constant struggle. Most rural families went to bed the moment the sun went down, purely to prevent their bodies from burning through their meager dinner. They tried to keep the food in their stomachs for as long as humanly possible. Compared to them, the Sheng family lived an incredibly comfortable life, restricted only by their official ration coupons.
While Sheng Wanyan cleaned the apartment, Mother Sheng gathered their heavy cotton quilts and carried them downstairs to air out in the sun. She settled onto a bench beneath a shade tree, chatting with the neighboring housewives while keeping a hawk-like watch on her bedding.
In this era, a thick cotton quilt with a large, unpatched cover was an incredibly valuable asset. If a thief managed to snatch it while she wasn’t looking, she would have nowhere to look for it, and replacing the materials would take months of saving coupons. She wasn’t an idiot; she refused to leave her property unguarded.
At lunchtime, Mother Sheng hauled the warm, sun-baked quilts back upstairs. Once the family finished their midday meal, there was nothing left to do, so everyone retreated to their respective bedrooms for a long afternoon nap.
Sheng Wanyan finished her cooled mung bean soup and quietly slipped out of the apartment. She walked until she found a completely deserted alleyway, ensured no one was around, and ducked into her space.
She immediately changed out of her clean city clothes, putting on a faded shirt and trousers covered in heavy, coarse patches. Sitting down before her vanity mirror, she ignored the basic black-market cosmetics she had used previously. Instead, using advanced theatrical techniques, she meticulously transformed herself into a weathered, haggard woman in her late fifties, her face covered in intricate age wrinkles, liver spots, and uneven acne scars.
