She actually saw Lu Weiwei.
What is she doing here? Lu Amian found it strange. After all, this is not a town, and it is a day and a night away from Lu Family Village. Lu Weiwei's appearance here could not be a coincidence.
Lu Amian led the donkey to a corner and carefully observed the situation.
Lu Weiwei first approached these unfamiliar villagers and asked them questions. She could vaguely hear things like, "Did the Meng family really marry a new bride?"
After receiving a positive reply, Lu Wei smiled even more brightly.
"Yes, yes, her family was worried and asked us to come and visit..."
Lu Weiwei received directions to Lu Amian's house, but she didn't rush to set off. To be precise, Lu Weiwei was still immersed in waves of blissful dizziness.
It all started with a dream she had a few months ago.
These dreams are all very strange. In one dream, she was actually a character in a storybook, and her daily life was a series of plays performed for the people in the Heavenly Palace. The storybook originally said that Lu Amian married Zhang Shusheng, and the two were very loving after their marriage. Zhang Shusheng loved his wife his whole life. Even the Zhang family, which was originally the most disciplined, broke the doctrine that "women are not allowed to go out and show their faces in public" because Lu Amian wanted to go out and sell tofu.
Lu Weiwei, however, married Meng the blacksmith, a man of strange and unpredictable temperament. He even abandoned her on their wedding night, leaving her feeling utterly humiliated and nearly smashing up the bridal chamber. Not only that, but after the marriage, he was incredibly dull and boring. Meng's mother was also nagging and annoying, and his younger sister was lazy and gluttonous. Unable to bear it any longer, she threw several tantrums, and now her husband doesn't even come home anymore! He spends his days in that noisy, rusty blacksmith's shop.
If that was tolerable, then her intermittent dreams, including one about the Meng family suffering another catastrophic disaster a year later, were far from trivial. And it was precisely at this time that Lu Amian, who had married into the Zhang family, passed the imperial examination and became a scholar!
Lu Weiwei initially didn't believe in these strange dreams, but as time went on, she increasingly felt that everything in the dream was indeed going to happen in reality!
Left with no other choice, she tried every means to get close to Zhang Shusheng and secretly urged Uncle Lu to marry A Mian off as soon as possible.
She had initially feared some unforeseen complications, but everything went much more smoothly than she had imagined. By sheer coincidence, Lu Amian actually married into the Meng family, the blacksmiths. On the night of the wedding procession, Lu Weiwei slept soundly through the night.
I never had that dream again.
Perhaps she... really did change her fate. Lu Weiwei thought to herself, but she was still a little uneasy, so she made up her mind to see for herself whether Lu Amian had indeed married into the Meng family.
However, Lu Amian was completely unaware of her thoughts. She was only puzzled as to why her cousin was coming to visit her after she had only been married for a day.
After racking her brains, Ah Mian finally came up with a reasonable guess:
—It must be that her father regrets letting her take Adou away, and now he's sending Lu Weiwei to her door to take her donkey back!
Thinking of this, Lu Amian quickly led the donkey away along an inconspicuous dirt road.
She planned to go home after Lu Weiwei left, so she strolled around more leisurely.
Soon, the new village, "Qingshan Village," began to take shape in her mind.
Qingshan Village was much larger than Lu Village, and was the largest of the nearby villages. The other villages were almost all small villages composed of a single clan, just as most of the villagers in Lu Family Village shared the surname Lu. However, Qingshan Village was a village established by the government, and the original dominant surnames of the village were unknown. Decades ago, it was home to a large number of displaced people, hidden households, wounded soldiers, or simply farmers who had heard of the land being allocated here because they could not make a living.
Lu Amian quickly discovered the advantages of this place. As the name suggests, Qingshan Village is indeed backed by a big mountain, and there is a stream at the foot of the mountain where the grass grows exceptionally lushly.
Unlike Lujia Village, which only has some small earthen slopes, Adou can run around freely here.
Lu Amian was unprepared and dared not go into the mountains. But she let Adou eat and drink to her heart's content while she went to look for wild vegetables and small fruits.
Unfortunately, the villagers have already harvested almost everything that could be found at the foot of the mountain.
If she could go deeper into the mountains, she could gather some mountain produce that could be sold, and then Adou could carry it to the city to sell.
However, even if Ah Mian was stupid, she knew that there were very scary and fierce animals in the mountains.
A wolf with gleaming green eyes, a giant bear taller than a towering tree when standing, and a nimble tiger and leopard hiding among the branches and fallen leaves...
A little A-Mian and a little A-Dou went in, but it wasn't even enough to fill their teeth.
She only dared to gather firewood at the foot of the mountain.
"Huh?" Lu Amian found some stones on the riverbank while picking them up.
Stones are everywhere, nothing rare. But these stones, sculpted by the river over the years, have a smooth surface and come in all sorts of strange shapes, making them quite beautiful.
As A-Mian walked, she picked up stones. When she held them up to the sunlight, some of the stones revealed beautiful reddish-green hues.
This stuff is neither good for eating nor for wearing, yet she's the only one who's so enthusiastic about picking it up.
With no one around, and finding the stones on the side not pretty enough, she took off her shoes and socks, rolled up her trousers, and stood in the stream picking up dozens more stones before reluctantly returning to the bank.
The stones were a bit heavy for her to carry, so she put them in the baskets on either side of Adou's back. Adou, having eaten and drunk her fill, swished her donkey tail contentedly.
Seeing that it was already dark and the aroma of food wafted from every household, Lu Amian suddenly felt a sense of unease.
She didn't do any work or cook dinner at home all afternoon; she just ran out to play all afternoon. Who knows what will happen when she gets back?
The closer she got to home, the more uneasy she felt. Suddenly, she caught sight of a locust tree and felt like she had found a lifeline.
Lu Amian immediately grabbed her basket (one of her dowry items) and climbed the tree to break off branches. Although locust flowers are edible, adults wouldn't bother to pick them; it wasn't worth wasting their labor. Amian was the lucky one.
She picked a whole basketful in one go and went home happily.
When I arrived at my doorstep, I discovered that there was a lively scene to watch.
Meng Jing stood at the door, utterly impatient: "We already told you, she's not here! Why would we lie to you?"
Lu Wei smiled amiably, "Little sister, I just asked a couple of questions and chatted a bit, why are you so angry?"
Lu Weiwei rolled her eyes inwardly. The Meng family was indeed as she had described in her dream—they were not easy to deal with at all and didn't even know the basic etiquette of hospitality.
However, Meng Jing also wondered to herself, "If they're here to visit relatives, why would they come empty-handed?"
"What's wrong?" Lu Amian slowly walked over.
"Ah Mian, I just stopped by to drop by and see you, didn't I?" Lu Weiwei's gaze swept over her from head to toe, and seeing that she still looked confused, she immediately understood. "It's good to see that you're alright, it's good that you're alright..."
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