Chapter 32

“I didn’t, I didn’t say anything.”
Seeing Auntie Wang grinding her teeth, those two brows of hers drawn together like thick black crayon in an upside-down “八”, Bai Xinmei shut up at once.
Bai Xinmei mumbled like a shy little daughter-in-law that she didn’t really have any more demands, then quietly stuffed some of the rare treats Song Jinping had given her, chocolate and beef jerky, into Auntie Wang’s hands.
Leaning close to her ear again, she whispered, “He has to have a solid family background. I’ve still got Niuniu to raise.”
The moment Wang Cuilan saw those two things, her eyes lit up, and she immediately took the matter two degrees more seriously.
She thumped her chest, guaranteeing she’d find her a man from a well-off family. For the sake of the chocolate and beef jerky, she even added,
“Don’t you worry. With that little face of yours, I, Wang Cuilan, promise I’ll find you someone loaded. I’m not bragging, but in these ten li and eight villages, who doesn’t know my name? I’ve been matchmaking for years, and I’ve got plenty of these in my hand.”
She made a gripping gesture with her fingers.
Bai Xinmei blinked her big eyes. “Plenty of what, Auntie?”
“You’re so slow. Obviously, I mean news about all the unmarried ones in ten li and eight villages, girls waiting to marry, widows looking to remarry, widowers wanting to take another wife… All of them. All right then, you just stay home and wait. When I’ve got something, I’ll come find you.”
As Wang Cuilan stepped over the threshold, Bai Xinmei, afraid she’d forget, repeated herself, and even emphasized something else.
“Auntie, he also has to be handsome. If he really looks too awful, then forget it.”
At that, Wang Cuilan’s legs gave a little wobble, her mouth twitching. This was the first time she’d seen a little widow remarry and throw out even more conditions than a maiden girl.
At least one big matter seemed settled.
Some time later, while she was waiting at the Qin house for news, Bai Xinmei sat in a chair, watching Niuniu play in the yard, and suddenly realized, she’d never talked to her precious daughter about this whole remarrying business.
Spring was almost here; Niuniu would be four soon. She wasn’t just a clueless baby anymore.
She crooked her finger. “Niuniu, come here to Ma.”
No one knew where Niuniu had dug up a little stick. Hearing her mother call, she wobbled in from outside, running happily.
When Bai Xinmei saw her daughter’s dirty, smudged face and the chicken-poop-stained stick in her hand, a pang of sorrow flashed through her eyes.
Niuniu really had suffered. If her grandparents were still alive, if the Bai family were still standing, how could her daughter spend every day in a village playing with livestock? She should be sitting in a little car, wearing pretty dresses, studying with a lady teacher fresh back from overseas.
Her decision was right. She would marry again, and she needed a man with a good family. She had to get to the city.
“Niuniu, do you miss your dad?”
Qin Sisi tilted her tiny head, thinking. Dad? Then she suddenly perked up.
“I do, I want Dad. If I have a dad, then Niuniu won’t be a bastard anymore. So happy!”
She tossed the stick away and clapped her hands nonstop, delighted.
Bastard?! WHAT?!
The word almost blew Bai Xinmei’s lungs apart. Her pretty oval face nearly twisted out of shape with anger.
Niuniu was just over three. She probably didn’t even know what “bastard” meant. Obviously someone had said it in front of her.
“Who said that to you?”
Bai Xinmei scooped her daughter up, her voice soft but firm.
A flicker of remembrance crossed Niuniu’s little face, so similar to her mother’s. She chewed on her fingers for a long while, trying to remember who it had been. She could sense Ma was angry.
“It was Big Niu and Little Niu next door. We were playing by the river and they said, ‘Niuniu, bastard.’ Then Big Sis Da Ya started fighting them. Big Sis Da Ya said she was gonna rip their mouths off. Niuniu fought too, we were really fierce!”
What?
That damned Wu Genzi. It had to be the adults at his house who’d taught their kids to say that.
Bai Xinmei slammed her palm down on the table. The old camphor-wood table let out a long creak, and her eyes instantly filled with tears, it hurt like hell.
“Ma, Niuniu will blow on it for you.”
“Niuniu, how about Ma finds you a dad?” she coaxed. “Then no one will bully us anymore, and you can go to school later, too.”
This time she was determined, full of lofty ambitions.
“Ma, the dad you’re gonna find for Niuniu… is it Uncle Song?”
Huh? Why would Niuniu think she’d pick Song Jinping? Even with ten lives, she wouldn’t dare.
In the original plot, after the bed-climbing incident, Song Jinping had been forced by pressure to marry Bai Xinmei, but emotional abuse, gossip, and public shaming had never let up. When it was time to return to the city, he’d constantly blocked the conditions for Bai Xinmei to follow.
So Bai Xinmei had ended up cheating. In truth, that cheating had been engineered by Song Jinping himself. That way, he could righteously divorce her and remain untouched.
Sigh… how could she dare to hook him now…
As for mission progress, the male-lead department’s guy was still stuck at the final stage. Whether he could finish remained to be seen. For now, at least, her audience rating was higher than his.
The system had even shown her that Song Jinping’s favorability toward her was at 50 now, not low at all. In the end, she might not lose.
Besides, she’d analyzed him thoroughly. At his core, Song Jinping was cold and distant, rarely opening his heart to others and hating over-eager enthusiasm.
Her current approach, neither too warm nor too cold, just “friends first”, was actually doing pretty well, judging by the steadily rising favorability.
Just as Bai Xinmei was about to explain all this carefully to Niuniu, a loud voice called from outside the yard:
“Bai Xinmei! Bai Xinmei! Come quick, quick! Your father-in-law and mother-in-law and Wu Genzi are fighting in the private plot. You better hurry or the team leader will be here!”
Bai Xinmei shot to her feet. She warned Niuniu to stay put in the yard and not run around, then hurried out to see what was happening.
All the way there, she kept wondering how it had come to blows. What could have started it? But with Wu’s family calling her daughter a bastard, holding both old grudges and fresh rage in her chest, she instinctively decided it had to be the Wu family’s fault.
Halfway down the path, she even picked up a convenient “weapon”, a thorny wild rose cane. If things got ugly, she’d have something in hand.
If the late Lord and Lady Bai and Qin Yuanzheng could see her now, they’d click their tongues in both admiration and distress. Compared with the girl she’d been, her temper was like a completely different person.
Maybe that was what happened when you became a mother, a mother becomes strong.
She was bristling like a wild rose bush, all spikes and barbs, and just a bit petty and vain, because she was no longer that eldest miss of the Bai family who never needed to worry about rice, oil, and salt.
By the time she arrived, this was the scene:
The women of the two families were yanking each other’s hair, flinging every filthy insult they knew, cursing each other’s parents, faces streaked with blood. The men of the Qin family and the Wu family were squared off with hoes and kitchen knives, and at any moment, someone could die.
Bai Xinmei had never seen anything this deadly before. Her legs trembled under her.
“I’m telling you, from this row of cabbage seedlings back, every inch of soil is our Qin family’s private plot!”
“My ass! You filled in the boundary ditch and pushed the soil line into our field, so your land is more and ours is less. You just want to steal our land!”
“Bullshit! Which eye of yours saw me fill in that ditch? Clearly you are the one trying to encroach on the Wu family’s land!”
Bai Xinmei felt dizzy, but after listening for a while she pieced it together. It was a dispute over whose private plot was whose. But the Wu family were so shameless, there was no way her father-in-law and eldest brother-in-law were in the wrong.
Both sides were about to really go at it. Should she join in? It was terrifying, those women’s faces were covered in blood. She imagined her own face like that and quickly shook her head. What about helping Father? But the men all had hoes in their hands.
She looked down at her “weapon,” the thorny rose cane, and cold sweat trickled down her back. Quite a few villagers had gathered to break up the fight, and another circle of people were just watching, including a couple of educated youths.
[Charge! I’ll send the streamer a rocket if she goes in. Once this live clears, I’m giving a full 20 points!]
[Go! Go! Beat them up!]
[Don’t be a coward, streamer! Time to slap the scum!]
Suddenly the barrage on her screen exploded, everyone egging her on to jump into the brawl, dangling the promise of max scores once this world’s stream ended.
Humans are always most fascinated by blood, drama, and violence.
The system also advised her not to waste the chance. The live feed recorded everything; with everyone talking like this now, even if they backed out later, the default would still be a high score.
So Bai Xinmei gripped her “weapon” and decided to start by helping Li Zhaodi. She whipped the Wu women with the thorn cane, the barbs stinging like needle pricks and making them howl.
The scene, however, was unexpectedly comical. Several people who’d come to help had to fight back laughter. They knew this was absolutely not the time to be amused, but still, after so many years of seeing Bai Xinmei act like a refined young lady, who’d have thought she could be this fierce?
The two Wu women lunged at her, but were quickly dragged back by Li Zhaodi and Old Madam Qin.
Suddenly, a half-grown boy charged out, brandishing a hoe, swinging straight down at her.
The timid onlookers squeezed their eyes shut. This is it, they thought. Someone’s going to die.
Bai Xinmei had her back turned. Li Zhaodi saw it happen head-on and shrieked, trying to shove her out of the way, but someone had a grip on her and she couldn’t move.
“Ah!!! Someone’s gonna die!”
By the time Bai Xinmei realized something was wrong, it was too late.
Even the livestream audience couldn’t bear to watch.
Just then, she was yanked violently backward and slammed into a broad, warm chest. A man’s muffled groan of pain rang in her ear.
Wang Shuisheng looked down at the woman in his arms. Her long, thick lashes trembled like cicada wings, her eyes squeezed shut, her fair delicate face full of panic, curled up against his chest like a small, frightened animal.
For a moment, he even forgot about the wound in his arm.
“Someone’s gonna die! Ah! Team Leader, Team Leader! Wu Genzi, you just wait!” someone screamed.
The team leader, hearing the ruckus, ran over at once, dripping sweat.
When he arrived and took it all in, he realized they’d nearly had a fatality. If Wang Shuisheng hadn’t yanked Bai Xinmei back and blocked the blow with his arm, that hoe would have gone straight through her skull.
Thank heaven no one had died.
He roared, “All of you, stop this goddamn nonsense right now!”
Turned out the boy with the hoe was Wu Genzi’s younger brother. Seeing his family getting the worse end of things, he’d rushed in swinging like an idiot.
The team leader strode over and slapped the boy hard across the face. “Are you trying to kill someone, you little bastard?! Murder costs a life, have you got a death wish?!”
Bai Xinmei was scared half to death. Only when the team leader roared did she realize she was still in someone else’s arms. She lowered her voice and said, “Thank you… for just now. You can let go now.”
Only then did Wang Shuisheng snap back to his senses and quickly release her. He’d actually been holding her this whole time… he didn’t even know her name… or whether she already had someone…
Bai Xinmei also saw that a big chunk of flesh had been gouged out of Wang Shuisheng’s arm by the hoe. It was a bloody mess. Guilt surged through her, but she had no idea what she was supposed to do. She could only keep thanking him over and over, then apologizing over and over.
Tears rolled down like strings of pearls, her pretty face full of post-disaster panic and relief. It made people ache just to look at her.
The pain in Wang Shuisheng’s arm was so sharp his lips had gone white, but for some reason, he still wanted to comfort this girl. He forced out a crooked smile. “It’s nothing. A chunk of meat in exchange for a life, worth it.”
Over at the post office, Song Jinping had just sent off a letter when he heard the news and went completely blank.
Someone almost died…
Comrade Bai had taken a hoe to the head…
Was she dead…?
The moment he heard, his whole body went ice-cold. His thoughts scattered, his chest ached like someone had jammed a fist into it, and he could barely breathe. His lips actually trembled. Without even putting down what he was carrying, he ran straight for the private plots.
Who did this?!