She Only Cares About Cultivation

If Yishui (going by the alias Xiao Hua) hadn’t insisted last night, these guys would definitely have stood right there watching them consummate the marriage. They’d been driven out, sure, but even without looking he knew they’d be crouched under the wall listening in. He’d flipped her over and tormented her three times, didn’t stop until he’d worked her to the point of fainting.

He’d fallen asleep afterward, but with those people outside—how could they not know when she left?

So now rushing over to pin the blame on him was just pure bullshit.

"I busted my ass all night, was so tired I passed out. What the hell were you lot doing, eating shit? You let her slip away and I haven’t even settled that score with you, and you’ve got the nerve to come give me attitude?"

The Second saw things were going south and hurried out to smooth it over: "Is this really the time to argue? Shouldn’t we be finding her first?"

The brothers snapped out of it and immediately ran out to get help from the villagers.

"Relax, she won’t have gone far. After you worked her over all night with that bull of a body of yours, she’d be lucky to even walk out, let alone run. We’ll do it the old way—split into eight groups and search. Remember, when you find her, don’t hit first. She was definitely scared stiff last night and her body’s weak, and she’s that pretty—wouldn’t it be a pity if you beat her to death?"

...

Yishui stayed in the space for a while, and once she was sure there was no one at home, she jumped out and swept up all the grain, vegetables, baskets, sieves, bamboo strips, bamboo tubes, Firewood, iron wok, big water jar, clay oven pots, large machete and other daily necessities in their house, plus the money hidden in a dirt hole behind the house. The clothes and quilts were all too shabby, and all men’s, filthy as hell. She held back and looked them over again and again, but in the end she just couldn’t stand them and left them. Then she slipped straight into the bamboo grove in the back yard of this house.

She wanted a hot meal too, so even if she despised this family’s pots and bowls, she’d just have to make do.

As for what kind of reaction that man would have when he came home to four bare walls, the place stripped clean, she couldn’t care less.

There was only one road out of the village. The women in the village had no idea, while the paths used to confuse them added up to more than ten. One careless step and you’d fall into a trap.

In her last life the original owner had taken more than ten years to figure out the real road out of the village, so getting out wasn’t actually that hard—but for the moment she didn’t want to leave. She still wanted to save these women.

Liang Tian rarely spoke up while she was on a mission, but this time it couldn’t hold back: "Are you sure those women will be better off once they’re out of the mountains?"

Yishui froze. "What’s that supposed to mean?"

"I mean, right now it’s 1935. In another two years, mm-hmm?"

Only then did Yishui react. Most of these women were from other places. If she helped them escape, never mind how they were going to get home—just whether they could reach home in safety was already a huge question. Even though Sichuan Province had only a few cities bombed during the war, these women were from other provinces. What they would face back in their hometowns—no one knew better than she did.

In wartime, for women, one careless step and they would...

Yishui very much wanted to find herself a justification, but after wrestling with it for a long time, she still couldn’t come up with a reason to take them away.

This place was poor, and the men here were brutal enough, but at least here they had food and drink. Especially since most of them already had children—how many could do what the original owner did and kill their own flesh and blood?

Maybe, the only one who should leave this place was her.

Thinking this, she pressed her lips together. "Fine, I get it. But if I want to walk out of here, two or three months probably still won’t be enough."

It was summer, and the mountains were rich in resources. She felt it was very necessary to stock up on supplies before she left.

In the big mountains of Sichuan Province, bamboo groves were everywhere. Weaving all kinds of daily items out of bamboo had already become one way for them to make money, so every household’s yard was full of finished and half-finished products. All the finished and half-finished products in the Zhang family’s yard had been looted by her, and she’d also hauled off all their weaving tools. With the tools in hand and her own skills, and with so much bamboo in the mountains, if she prepared more raw materials for herself now, maybe in the future, when she was broke and desperate, they could tide her over.

So, while the entire village was scouring the mountains for her, she was crouched in the place they thought least likely—digging mushrooms, garlic mustard, wild scallion, scraping up earth skin and so on with a small shovel. If she happened across Plantago, dandelion, mugwort and other Chinese Herbal Medicine, she’d collect those too. That way, if she got sick in the future, at least she wouldn’t have absolutely nothing.