midsummer.

The constant chirping of cicadas made people feel uneasy and anxious.

The area along the small river at the east end of Qingshan Brigade is even more chaotic.

A female educated youth who had been sent to the countryside not long ago fell into the river, and her fate was unknown. Within minutes, the brigade leader, Song Guangming, developed several blisters on the corner of his mouth, and the person who went to fetch a doctor was nowhere to be found.

Song Guangming took a few more puffs of his pipe in frustration.

What kind of mess is this? When the educated youth were being assigned, he didn't want female educated youth. They were delicate, couldn't do any work, and caused a lot of trouble. They also tended to cause the village bachelors to not settle down and find partners in the village, but instead to think about marrying a city wife.

Don't they realize that city girls are so easy to marry?

In the village, the dowry for marrying a wife is at most fifty yuan, plus a few kilograms of sugar and eggs. If the conditions are better, a few feet of polyester cloth will be added. This way, you can marry a capable, hardworking, and fertile wife.

Those city girls, you can't marry them without a dowry of two hundred yuan and three turns and one sound. Besides, they can't lift a finger or carry anything. What's the point of marrying them?

Are we treating them like ancestors?

Song Guangming's third daughter-in-law was an educated youth, a city girl who caused chaos in the family. Of course, he couldn't tell outsiders these things. He turned his head and glanced at Xu Yan lying on the ground, feeling that he had another blister on his mouth.

The people gathered around secretly glanced at Xu Yan, who was lying unconscious on the ground, and discussed among themselves.

"Could he really be dead?"

"Maybe Zhang Guiying just checked his breathing and said he wasn't breathing?"

"Huh? Did she say that? I didn't hear her."

"Do you even need to hear it? Just look at the way she winked at the captain just now, you can tell that this guy probably has no chance."

"Mom, what do you mean it's hopeless?" A skinny, dark-skinned little guy, barefoot and shirtless, came over and asked.

"Nothing," the woman replied casually, then realized it was her son and her eyes widened immediately. "What are you doing here?"

Seeing her son trying to get closer, the woman grabbed him and took a step back, then slapped the little guy on the bottom. "I told you not to come over here, but you wouldn't listen. Is this something a child should see?"

Whether the little guy was genuinely hurt or afraid of being beaten again, he started howling at the top of his lungs, and his mother eventually scooped him up and carried him away.

When the others who were originally watching the show realized there was no more excitement, they turned their attention back to Xu Yan, the female educated youth who was still asleep.

"Judging from the clothes covering her, she must have been rescued."

"I think so too. But who would be so generous as to cover her with such fine clothes? I don't think I've ever seen anyone wear these clothes before, they don't even have a single patch!"

"It's not just that there are no patches, it's clearly a brand new outfit!"

"To be honest, this young Xu, the educated youth, is quite pitiful. She's as thin as a stick, and it feels like a strong gust of wind could blow her away."

"Who says otherwise? I saw her squatting on the edge of the field pulling pig feed to eat just a couple of days ago. How hungry must she be? Wang Ermazi from the west end of the village is so poor that he has never eaten grass. There are so many people in the educated youth settlement, why doesn't anyone share some food with her?"

"That's right, I remember when Xiao Xu, the educated youth, first came here, he was thin, but not this thin. How come he's gotten so thin after only staying in our Qingshan Brigade for less than half a year..."

The chatter never stopped, but the few educated youths standing nearby remained silent with grim expressions.

In particular, there were two female educated youths who, during their lunch break, instructed Xu Yan to go to the river to catch small fish to improve their meals.

Their guilty conscience and fear made their faces look even paler than Xu Yan's, who was lying on the ground.

“She won’t…” Qin Li uttered a few words in a trembling voice.

“No,” Zhou Jingjing was also scared, but then her expression changed again as she looked at the person on the ground with a rather malicious look. “It would be better if… he really died, since no one would know anyway.”

Xu Yan opened her eyes at this time.

Her head was still throbbing with pain, and no part of her body felt comfortable, especially her throat and airway, which burned intensely from drowning. But even that couldn't compare to the shock of the information she had recently received.

She has been here since 24 years ago.

On a bitterly cold winter day, he went out to take out the trash, slipped and fell, and died on the spot.

It was... very sudden.

Her soul was floating in mid-air as she watched the ambulance arrive and take her body away. In the cold hospital, when the doctor told her parents, who had been divorced for many years, the news of her death, she was still somewhat disoriented.

Is she really dead?

Before she could finish her thought, her body sank and she plunged headfirst into the water.

She... came back to life?

Xu Yan was even more confused.

However, she was not confused for long before she was rescued by a person who happened to be passing by the river. She was so confused at the time that she couldn't see what the person looked like, but she remembered that he was really strong and his five fingers almost broke her already thin and weak arm.

Thinking of this, Xu Yan raised his eyes and glanced around.

The people surrounding her, apart from a few who looked slightly stronger, were all very thin.

The sun grew stronger, and the cicadas' chirping grew louder.

As Xu Yan looked around, everyone around her was staring at her. The previously chattering crowd suddenly became eerily quiet, as if something had sealed their mouths.

until--

The little guy, who had just been caught and brought home but then sneaked back sometime later, asked, "Mom, didn't you say she had no chance? Why were her eyes moving?"

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