Wen Moxue said, "I'm afraid that things might change over time, and I won't be able to guard against them all."
Lu Yuan nodded, "Okay, I understand."
They didn't say exactly when, and then they walked away.
This made Wen Moxue very anxious.
He stamped his foot at the departing figure before entering the educated youth settlement.
When Lu Yuan returned home, the house was empty.
Although the Lu family's house was made of adobe, it was not small.
There are three main rooms, with the central room being the main hall and the rooms on the east and west sides.
The room was divided into four smaller rooms by partition walls.
The kitchen is behind the main room, and meals are eaten in the main room.
The house also has two courtyards, one in the front and one in the back.
The front yard is surrounded by a fence that is more than a meter high, and it is about 70 or 80 square meters.
The backyard is actually just a small plot of land for personal use.
The family's vegetables depend entirely on this land throughout the year.
Their toilet is located between the house and their private plot of land, making it very convenient to fertilize the vegetable garden.
Dig a pit two meters deep, and put a few wooden planks on top. Then surround it with a fence and cover the top with thick straw.
A luxurious and unique toilet was completed.
Lu Yuan lived in the front room on the east side. This room was the brightest and best located of the four rooms.
It wasn't because he was the most favored one in the family.
On the contrary, he was the least favored person in the family.
He was the child of Lu Guoqing's ex-wife. The year he was born, war was raging everywhere.
To escape the war, their family hid outside. When An Ding returned to the village, only Lu Guoqing came back with the children.
According to him, his wife died outside.
Less than a year later, Lu Guoqing married Zhang Yuping, a widow from the next village.
When Zhang Yuping married into the family, she brought with her a one-year-old daughter.
She later had a son and a daughter.
The eldest daughter is four years younger than Lu Yuan, and the youngest son is a full ten years younger.
Zhang Yuping is a person who always puts on a show. In public, she always appears as a kind mother and virtuous wife. Only she and Lu Yuan know what she is really like in private.
In order to gain a good reputation and make everyone think that she treats her stepson Lu Yuan better than her own son, she makes sure he has the best of everything.
For example, this room.
He was given the best room in the house.
In reality, this stepmother used a variety of methods behind the scenes.
The most common thing is not to feed him.
Often during mealtimes, she would secretly instruct him to go out and do something, and when he returned, the food would have long been gone.
They also criticized him for being immature, saying he would run out to play during mealtimes.
The family couldn't possibly cook another meal just for him, so he would have to go hungry.
Sometimes, when they were really hungry, they had no choice but to steal food from their families or snatch food from other children in the village.
He wouldn't listen to beatings or scoldings, and that's how his reputation for being a reckless scoundrel spread.
Later, when he got older, he realized that stealing was wrong, so he often went to the mountains to find food on his own.
He resented Zhang Yuping's secret mistreatment, so he refused to work in the fields to earn work points and only cared about grabbing food when it was time to eat.
His reputation for being lazy and good-for-nothing spread once again.
He's 20 years old this year. In the countryside, someone his age should have already started planning to get married.
But with such a bad reputation, no decent family would want to marry such a scoundrel.
Zhang Yuping was even more ruthless, and the people she asked to introduce her to were either ugly or had bad reputations, or even widows whose husbands had died.
It's easy to imagine what kind of people these are, and how could Lu Yuan possibly be interested in them?
Some time ago, Zhang Yuping asked her sister-in-law to introduce a young widow to Lu Yuan. The young widow had just lost her husband and was pregnant.
They wanted him to become a father unexpectedly. They even said that the baby looked just like their own, and that he'd gotten a free child who would be filial to him in the future, so he'd be the one who got lucky.
Lu Yuan's teeth ached just thinking about it.
That's good. Now that Wen Zhiqing is willing to come, he can also protect him from his stepmother's schemes.
It's a win-win situation for both of them.
After entering my room, I found a clean set of clothes, changed out of my wet clothes, and started tidying up the room.
The girl was worried that things might change if she waited too long, so she wanted to bring her over tonight or tomorrow.
My room is practically a doghouse. My stepsister only helps with laundry, but rarely tidies up the room.
It wasn't that the other person was unwilling, but that he didn't like her coming into his room.
There was still a strange smell in the room, so he opened the window to let it air out.
I found a basin and a rag, filled the basin with water, and wiped down the kang (heated brick bed) and the furniture in the room.
There wasn't much furniture, just a desk and a cabinet.
On the desk were a slingshot and several old elementary school textbooks.
Other things, like clothes, food, and all sorts of other odds and ends, were all put in the kang cabinet.
I took everything out of the cabinet and organized it. I only had a few clothes, and only two sets to change into each season. Then there was a stiff quilt.
There must have been food inside before; there are still some food scraps in it.
He also found 1.26 yuan and a grain coupon for one jin (500 grams).
The money and tickets were wrapped in several layers of a notebook and stuffed into the pocket of the cotton coat.
This was all his possessions.
According to his memory, he had saved up every penny of these from a young age.
He had known for a long time that Zhang Yuping was two-faced and disobedient to him. He knew that this stepmother was unreliable and worried that she would not help him get a wife in the future, so he secretly started saving money.
I saved up the one or two cents I received during holidays and sold a lot of my old school textbooks.
Sometimes, you can go up the mountain to find some wild fruits and take them to the city to exchange for a few cents.
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