"Damn girl!"
Liu Ruonan felt dizzy and her whole body was in excruciating pain, as if being eaten by ants. An angry shout reached her ears. Before she could react, she felt something hit her leg hard, with great force.
Liu Ruonan suddenly felt pain in her bones and tried hard to open her eyes, but she saw a ferocious face glaring at her with a broom in his hand.
"It's already noon, and you're still lying in bed. What's the point of keeping a loser like you? You're such a fool, you can't eat enough and you can't do anything! Get up and clean the house. Liu Dazhuang will be here the day after tomorrow."
This man was Liu Ruonan's stepfather, named Xiangdong. Without even giving Liu Ruonan a chance to react, the broom head had already fallen on her with a crackling sound.
Unable to bear the pain, Liu Ruonan suddenly stood up from the bed, jumped off the bed, snatched the broom from Xiangdong's hand and threw it into the corner, then hurried out, leaving Xiangdong staring at Liu Ruonan's fleeing figure with a look of surprise...
Liu Ruonan ran a long way until she felt she had no strength left, then she stopped beside the cotton field. She squatted on the grass, her floral pants had been patched with countless patches, and her exposed skin was covered with bruises, new and old wounds, and scars.
Liu Ruonan was bewildered. She remembered being in the hospital, dying, having lived a life without children, all alone, and the man who saw her off in the end was still Zhuang Sheng, the man she had let down her whole life.
But what is going on now?
"Nannan, why are you sitting here?" A greeting came from her ear, bringing Liu Ruonan back to her senses. She turned around and saw two middle-aged women carrying hoes on their shoulders, looking at her with concern and slightly frowning brows.
"Auntie Gu, what year is it now?" This was the first question that popped into Liu Ruonan's mind.
Aunt Gu and Aunt Li next to her looked at each other, then turned to look at Liu Ruonan and said, "It's 1985! Child, what's wrong with you?"
Liu Ruonan didn't say anything, but just stared at the cotton fields.
"Mrs. Gu, look at this kid, Nannan. Could it be that that beast Xiangdong has beaten him silly? How come he doesn't even know what year it is?"
"Ah! It's pitiful for this child to follow Xiangdong!"
1985! The year Liu Ruonan turned eighteen, the year her stepfather forced her to marry that mentally ill man!
She lived a lifetime, but in 2018, she fell seriously ill and died. All of this was caused by her stepfather Xiangdong.
Liu Ruonan's father died in an accident before she was born. Her mother remarried to Xiang Dong when Liu Ruonan was two years old. At that time, Xiang Dong already had a daughter with his deceased first wife, who was three years older than Liu Ruonan.
Her mother was a famous beauty and virtuous woman in the village. Because of her mother, Xiangdong was nice to her and did not treat her harshly. But since her mother passed away when she was nine years old, her stepfather showed his true colors. He often beat and scolded her and did not allow her to go to school. The young girl had to carry a hoe and work in the fields from dawn to dusk.
Even then, Liu Ruonan would still put herself in his shoes, thinking that after all, she was not her biological child, and that her stepfather had done his utmost to support her after her mother's death. However, when she was eighteen, she learned that Xiangdong had sold her to Liu Dazhuang, a man from the same village whose family was relatively well-off, as his wife.
In that family, she suffered inhumane treatment. Liu Dazhuang was mentally ill, and whenever he became ill, he would beat and scold her, scalding her with hot water, hitting her with a stick, and using whatever he could get his hands on. He even pulled a knife on her once. If she hadn't run to the street and been rescued by Zhuang Sheng, she would probably have died at that moment.
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