"Are you hungry? Your sister-in-law brought you some eggs..."

She knocked on the door softly, her voice barely audible.

There was a rustling sound coming from the woodshed, followed by a dull thud as a heavy object fell to the ground.

Zhang Chuntao pressed her ear against the door and heard heavy breathing inside.

Trembling, she pulled out the stolen key and quietly opened the iron lock on the wooden gate a crack.

Morning light shone through the crack in the door, revealing Li Xiaorou's face as white as paper, with dark circles under her eyes, and the blood at the corner of her mouth had congealed into a purplish-black color.

Zhang Chuntao gasped. That was from her mother-in-law hitting her with a broom yesterday. Her sister-in-law's teeth were broken and blood splattered on the ground.

What are you doing?

Li Xiaorou's voice was hoarse like sandpaper, and her sinister gaze was fixed on her sister-in-law's face.

Zhang Chuntao then realized that her sister-in-law probably hadn't slept at all last night; she was curled up next to the woodpile, clutching half a sharp shard of porcelain in her hand.

"I heard you went out and made a lot of money? That's what my sister-in-law was thinking..."

She instinctively took a half step back, but then greedily braced herself against the crack in the door.

Suddenly, a dog barked in the distance, followed by Li's mother's cursing voice and the sound of her slippers shuffling along.

Li Xiaorou trembled and suddenly burst through the wooden gate, trying to rush out.

Zhang Chuntao hurriedly grabbed her sleeve: "Wait, don't run! Tell your sister-in-law what to do..."

"roll!"

Li Xiaorou turned around and slapped him across the face!

The sharp crack was particularly jarring in the early morning.

Zhang Chuntao staggered backward, her embroidered cloth shoes tripping on the threshold, and she fell backward.

She first felt her bottom hit a wood-chopping stump. Before the excruciating pain even reached her brain, she heard her mother-in-law's heart-wrenching scream: "Blood!!!"

Time seemed to stand still.

Zhang Chuntao stared blankly at her sister-in-law's retreating figure before feeling a warm liquid welling up beneath her.

The light blue trousers were quickly stained dark red, like spilled cinnabar ink, winding out hideous patterns on the muddy ground.

"Ahhh! My child!"

She seemed to have finally found her voice, letting out a mournful wail that sounded inhuman.

She crawled towards her grandmother by digging her fingers into the cracks in the stone slabs, completely unaware that her fingernails were splitting.

A trail of bright red bloodstains stretched out, freezing into ice on the permafrost.

Upon hearing the noise, Li Jianguo rushed out of the house barefoot. When he saw the pool of blood beneath his wife, his legs went weak and he knelt on the ground.

He trembled as he reached out to help Zhang Chuntao, only to see his wife suddenly freeze, a blurry mass of flesh sliding out from between her legs and falling into a pool of blood with a thud.

Zhang Chuntao looked down at the already formed fetus, making a soundless noise in her throat.

She mechanically bent over and gagged, but only vomited a few mouthfuls of yellow fluid.

By daybreak, Zhang Chuntao had already been taken to the commune health center.

She lay on the stretcher, the quilt beneath her soaked in blood, forming hard scabs.

Li's mother kept pinching her philtrum the whole way, afraid that she wouldn't wake up.

The midday sun shone through the window covered with newspaper, and Zhang Chuntao finally opened her eyes.

The white walls made her dizzy, and the smell of disinfectant made her nauseous.

She moved her fingers, touched her flat stomach, felt the pain below, and suddenly let out a whimper.

"Chuntao, you're awake?"

"When the police come to question you, don't say anything out of line..."

Li Jianguo sat on the edge of the bed, a fake smile plastered on his unshaven face. He quietly pinched her thigh, causing Zhang Chuntao, who was immersed in grief, to shudder in pain.

Two uniformed police officers stood at the foot of the bed.

The younger one was flipping through the medical record book, while the older one was writing something down in a small notebook.

When Zhang Chuntao saw the words "miscarriage at five months of pregnancy" in red on her medical record, her vision went black.