Seeing this, Lin Cuiying, holding her two children, looked at the village head and said, "Uncle Village Head, the three of us can't stay in a house like this for even a day longer."
"What do you want?" The village head frowned.
"Divorce!" Lin Cuiying said.
Everyone was shocked, and some even suspected that Lin Cuiying had gone mad.
Divorce?
Throughout history, there has never been a case of a daughter-in-law divorcing her mother-in-law. Isn't that a huge joke?
"This..." The village head's pipe hung in mid-air for a long time, and the back of his hand, with its prominent veins, was tanned with mottled brown spots by the sun.
He glanced at the scars on the two girls' legs and let out a hoarse sigh.
The jujube tree in the corner of the courtyard rustled and cast shadows. Suddenly, Sun's daughter-in-law kicked and crushed the remains of a wasp on the ground. "If you ask me, Lin's daughter should be left to raise her child alone!"
These words immediately caused an uproar among the crowd.
Aunt Li, gripping a washing mallet, poked Granny Wang's nose: "Look how you've ruined the child! Your second son has only been gone a few years ago, and you have the nerve to mistreat a widow and her orphan!"
Granny Wang's triangular eyes glared at Lin Cuiying, when suddenly she met Lin Cuiying's fingers as she stroked the burn scar on Daya's neck.
The old woman shuddered, remembering how fiercely that jinx had beaten them, and swallowed back the curse that was stuck in her throat.
"Our Wang family..." Liu, with her pig-faced expression, only managed to utter half a sentence before her tongue was frozen by the cold wind that Lin Cuiying swept over.
The burning pain from the wasp stings still lingered on the back of her neck, and now it felt even more stinging than when she was stung at noon.
The village head's pipe suddenly trembled, and ashes from the pipe fell onto his blue cloth shoes.
The sound of cicadas drifted over from the distant locust grove, and the jujube leaves filtered dappled sunlight onto his hunched back.
"What do you have to say, Wang family?"
Granny Wang's withered lips twitched twice, and her cloudy eyes suddenly flashed with a sharp light: "Born to be members of the Wang family, will die as ghosts of the Wang family!"
Sun's daughter-in-law crushed half a wasp's remains with her foot, her cold laughter startling the sparrows under the eaves. "So, you're planning to sell them again, mother and children?"
Just as Lin Cuiying was about to explode, the system's mechanical voice exploded in her mind: "Host, collapse!"
Her knees suddenly buckled, and she fell sideways toward the millstone.
The hem of her coarse linen skirt brushed against the cracked pumpkin flesh, and her temples, covered in chicken feathers, glistened with sweat in the sunlight.
"Mother!" The two little maids threw themselves at Lin Cuiying, their voices trembling with tears.
Lin Cuiying held the two little girls protectively in her arms, while digging her fingernails fiercely into the wound on her palm.
The intense pain caused tears to well up in her eyes, which mingled with sweat and splashed onto the bluestone slab, leaving dark marks.
Sun's wife, quick as a flash, grabbed her shoulder and cried out, "Heavens! Are you trying to kill me?!"
Using the strength of the Sun family's daughter-in-law, Lin Cuiying casually spread her blood-stained palm out in the sun.
Crimson blood seeped into the cracks of the millstone along the grooves, startling Aunt Li into gasping, "What a tragedy! My palms are riddled with sores!"
The system was screaming in my head: "Host, you're being too stingy! This body is already malnourished!"
Before the village head could even lift his pipe, Granny Wang and Liu, their faces swollen and purple, pushed their way through the crowd, shouting, "She's miserable? When I was being stung to pieces, nobody said a word!"
Granny Wang wiped her snot with her sleeve and spat in front of Sun's daughter-in-law, the foul-smelling spittle splattering onto the edge of the millstone. "What are you pretending for..."
Aunt Li's washing mallet slammed down on Liu's toe with a "thud," she said, "You got what you deserved..."
"Enough!" The village head suddenly stood up straight, his cloudy eyes sweeping over everyone in the courtyard before finally fixing his gaze on Lin Cuiying. "Are you truly determined?"
“Uncle Village Head, my mind is made up.” Lin Cuiying lowered her eyes and hugged the two girls even tighter. “Moreover, I’m taking Daya and Xiaoya with me.”
Granny Wang's withered, twig-like hands dug desperately at the moss on the courtyard wall, a piece of plaster escaping from under her fingernails. "Dream on!"
Wang Fugui suddenly spat out a mouthful of yellow phlegm from the corner, his greasy sleeve brushing against his bulbous nose. "Pah! You little brat, you've been eating the Wang family's rice for years, and you think you can just take her away like that?"
Daya is eight years old this year, and Xiaoya is almost six. They usually help their mother with chores.
"Da Ya goes to the village entrance to fetch water before dawn, carrying wooden buckets!" Aunt Li's washing mallet pounded the bluestone slab, sending sparks flying. "In the dead of winter, when ice shards cut your toes, have you ever given you a piece of cloth to wrap your feet?"
Sun's wife grabbed Da Ya's thin, straw-like braid, the purplish-red burn scar on the back of her neck glistening in the sunlight: "Last month I saw her cooking on a stone slab on the stove, and hot oil splattered all over her arms!"
Even Xiaoya would go out every day to collect dead branches, and each time she carried back a load of dead branches that was taller than her.
"Last month during the wheat harvest, the bundles of wheat that Daya carried were heavier than those carried by a donkey." Sun's daughter-in-law poked a hole in the patch on Wang Pozi's sleeve with her fingertip. "She secretly drank half a bowl of rice soup at noon, and you whipped her with a bamboo stick until she was covered in blood!"
Lin Cuiying stroked Da Ya's large, calloused hands with her fingertips. The eight-year-old's palms were so calloused they could wear through a hemp rope.
Last winter, while washing clothes in the snow, the little girl's ten fingers swelled up like carrots. At night, she held her younger sister and cried without daring to make a sound.
With her cheeks swollen, Liu muttered, "What kind of maid doesn't do chores...?"
"I just saw the little girl fall into the ditch while carrying a basket of pig feed the other day!" A woman in an indigo blouse emerged from the crowd. "The bamboo strips cut her neck raw, and the old woman still complained that the bottom of the basket was covered in mud!"
Lin Cuiying suddenly choked up. When her fingertips touched the old, uneven scar on the maid's wrist, the original owner's memories churned in her skull like boiling oil.
In the dead of night, in the ice-cold woodshed, a five-year-old girl huddled in a pile of straw, shivering.
The original owner knelt down, pulling at Granny Wang's trouser leg to beg for mercy, his bruised knees crushing the frost flowers on the ground.
"Mother..." Da Ya suddenly buried her face in her clothes, her thin back pressing against her chest with pain.
The little girl's scalding tears seeped into the scar on her neck, and in a daze, they overlapped with the excruciating pain of the original owner being burned by a branding iron in her memory.
A sharp system alarm screeched against my eardrums: "Host's emotional value is overloaded! Immediate action recommended..."
She bit her tongue hard, the metallic taste of blood mingling with the lingering sorrow of the original owner, exploding between her teeth.
A gray-white image appeared on my retina—a woman, exhausted and dying, curled up in the corner of the kang (a heated brick bed), with two warm little bodies pressed against her bleeding chest.
"Protect..." The original owner's shaky pupils reflected the drafty window paper, "Protect..."
"Don't be afraid." Lin Cuiying suddenly tightened her arms around Daya, her lips brushing against the still-healing burn mark on the back of Daya's neck.
The salty, fishy taste seeped into the lines of my lips, and I was shocked to realize that I was tasting the blood that the original owner had spat out on her deathbed.
This is not the kind of emotion she should be experiencing.
But when the little girl put her chapped little hand into her palm, the festering wound suddenly burned with unbearable pain—the original owner had been desperately digging into the splinter on the edge of the kang before she died, her ten fingers a bloody mess but she still refused to let go.
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