In the county town of 1975, the streets were cold and empty, with only a few scattered pedestrians here and there, some riding bicycles, ringing their bells to make people give way.
At nine in the morning, a tractor pulling a cargo bed puttered into the county town, and the bicycles instinctively moved to the side of the road.
The tractor entered the town and pulled over by the roadside.
Once the tractor came to a stop, a young woman wearing a blue shirt with tiny floral print, her belly slightly swollen, held onto the cargo bed and slowly climbed down.
The young woman was tall and fair-skinned, drawing sidelong glances from passersby — pretty, yes, but far too thin, so thin that it was hard to tell just how many months pregnant she was.
Once Lin Shu had steadied herself, she reached into the cargo bed and took out a basket.
At that moment, the young man driving the tractor turned around and said to the three people getting off: “I’m heading to the fertilizer plant to load up, should take about an hour and a half to get back here. You all keep an eye on the time too, don’t be late.”
In this era, watches were a rare luxury, and there wasn’t even a clock to be found in the shops — people could only judge the time by the position of the sun and the length of shadows.
Lin Shu studied the shadow on the ground, roughly calculated the direction, and once she was sure of it, quietly committed it to memory.
Within this hour and a half, she had no idea whether she’d manage to find the person she was looking for.
Lin Shu had come to the town to find someone — to find the husband she had in name only, whom she’d never even met.
Just two days ago, Lin Shu had still been a twenty-first-century corporate drone. She’d only dozed off for a moment at her desk, and when she opened her eyes again, she’d traveled through time.
Lin Shu had transmigrated into the body of a sent-down youth named Wang Xue, with only a handful of patchy memories from the original owner of this body to go on.
From these fragmented memories, Lin Shu came to understand that this wasn’t a simple case of time travel — she had transmigrated into a book.
She had crossed into a novel she hadn’t even finished reading.
The setting was the 1970s, an era of scarce goods and insufficient food and clothing.
She had transmigrated into an era novel about a male lead’s rise from nothing — and had become the villain’s wife, doomed to die young.
Right now, she was six months pregnant.
The female supporting character was named Wang Xue. A few months earlier, she’d assumed the male lead was the son of a high-ranking cadre sent down to the countryside. Unable to bear the endless farm work day after day, and unable to stand going hungry, desperate to get back to the city, she’d drugged him, intending to force the issue and make it a done deal.
But through a twist of fate, it was the villain she ended up sleeping with instead — and got pregnant besides.
Once there was a child, it was too risky to get rid of it, so for the sake of her reputation, Wang Xue had no choice but to make the villain take responsibility.
But Wang Xue was an educated youth who’d always looked down on country folk, and looked down on the villain most of all — she thought him barely literate, coarse and crude. So even after they married, she never once gave him a decent look.
Not only that, but relying on the fact that she was pregnant, she stopped going out to work entirely, sleeping in until the sun was high every day, only ever washing her own clothes and cooking her own meals.
For the sake of the child, the villain endured it all.
Not long after, the villain and the male lead teamed up to speculate and profiteer on the black market. They hadn’t made much money before the crackdown on profiteering came down via the red armbands, and the villain got caught, while the male lead — protected by his plot armor — escaped unscathed.
After the villain was caught, he stood firm and never gave up the male lead, only entrusting him to look after his wife and unborn child.
Except the female supporting character, once so proud and haughty, grew despondent day after day once her family’s political status became a liability, and with poor nutrition on top of it, at over seven months pregnant, she went into premature labor — mother and child both lost.
By the time the villain returned after three years of labor reform, he found his wife and child gone, while the male lead, who was supposed to be looking after them, had gone and passed the newly reinstated college entrance exam, earning his way back to the city.
When the villain went to find him, the male lead wasn’t just living well — he’d already started a family, had a beautiful wife, and was about to become a father himself.
The seeds of the villain’s bitter resentment had already begun to sprout.
For his part, the male lead, feeling he owed the villain a debt, took him in, and the two of them ran a factory together.
But as time went on, the conflicts between them piled up more and more, until the villain turned dark, broke off on his own, and went head-to-head with the male lead to the bitter end.
This storyline was clichéd, over-the-top melodrama, but the romance between the male and female leads was compelling enough to carry it, and she wasn’t in the habit of skipping chapters, so Lin Shu had read all the way from the beginning to the latest update.
But who could have guessed that simply reading a novel would get her transmigrated into it?!
She spent two days in a daze before slowly coming to accept the reality of her time travel, and only then did she start racking her brains over how to survive in this era.
In an age when medicine was still so underdeveloped, getting an abortion wasn’t realistic — first, there was no money for it, and second, the technique for such procedures was still far from mature in this era, carrying all sorts of risks of infection.
But in an age of such material scarcity, an ordinary woman couldn’t raise a child well on hard work alone.
To keep herself alive, and raise a child on top of that — life was bound to be brutal.
In a situation like this, she’d need someone to lend a hand.
The villain was that someone.
Say nothing else — the simple fact that the villain was the child’s father meant he’d raise the child willingly, without complaint.
But the precondition was that the villain couldn’t end up getting arrested and sent to labor reform the same way he had in the original story.
She didn’t know exactly when he’d been arrested, but from what she recalled of the plot, it seemed to have happened while he was in the county town helping build dormitories for a textile factory.
In the two days since she’d transmigrated, she hadn’t once laid eyes on the villain. She’d run into a child while out and asked around, and only then learned that the villain really was in town right now, helping build the dormitories.
Barring anything unexpected, this was the very period during which the villain got arrested — though exactly which day, Lin Shu genuinely had no idea.
After weighing her options, Lin Shu decided that to be safe, she’d get up early on the third day and take the tractor into town.
Since the original body’s memories were so sparse, Lin Shu wasn’t very familiar with the county town.
She asked several passersby before finally managing to find the textile factory.
There was an elderly gatekeeper stationed outside the textile factory.
Lin Shu walked up to him and asked, “Uncle, I’m looking for someone.”
The old gatekeeper, lying back in a bamboo chair, heard her voice and opened his eyes to look at the newcomer. Seeing she was a pregnant woman, he didn’t give her any trouble and asked, “Who are you looking for?”
Lin Shu: “A temporary worker helping build the dormitories, named Gu Jun. I’m his wife.”
The old gatekeeper raised an eyebrow and said, “There’s a leadership inspection today, so the new factory building isn’t under construction — everyone got the day off. What’s wrong, your husband hasn’t made it home yet?”
Lin Shu was startled inside, though she didn’t let it show on her face, and replied, “We must have missed each other on the way. I’ll head back home and check. Thank you, Uncle.”
The old gatekeeper waved a hand.
Lin Shu turned and left at once, her heart uneasy.
Surely she couldn’t be this unlucky — today couldn’t really be the day the villain got arrested, could it?
Lin Shu couldn’t help but tense up.
She had to find Gu Jun, and fast — but where could she even start looking?
She remembered the novel had described where the black market was located.
It seemed to be somewhere nearby, someplace where even carrying a large bundle wouldn’t arouse suspicion.
A bundle…
Lin Shu’s mind suddenly cleared.
— The post office!
That was it — near the post office, carrying a big parcel would just look like a sent-down youth’s family had mailed something over, nothing to raise too much suspicion.
As Lin Shu searched for the post office, she noticed the road was full of people in olive-green military uniforms, red cloth pinned to their armbands with safety pins, moving about.
She didn’t even need to think twice to know what these people were there for.
Catching illicit relationships, catching speculators and profiteers — anyone who broke the law and regulations was fair game for arrest.
Minor offenses got a verbal lecture; serious ones got you dragged off and shot.
Lin Shu gave an involuntary shudder, her heart pounding its way up into her throat from the tension.
She had to find him, and quickly!
Along the way, Lin Shu passed several groups of people with red cloth pinned to their arms, all hurrying in the same direction, as if converging somewhere.
Lin Shu grew even more anxious, her footsteps quickening.
Perhaps it was the tension, or perhaps it was the bumpy ride all the way from the production brigade to the county town, but now her lower belly was starting to ache uncomfortably.
She endured the discomfort and searched for about twenty minutes before she finally found the post office — but there were several alley entrances nearby, and she had no idea which one to take.
She stopped in her tracks, closed her eyes, and thought hard for a good while before she recalled that the novel had described it as being across from the post office.
Lin Shu looked toward the other side of the post office and saw two alley entrances.
Reasoning that all the alleys probably connected to one another, Lin Shu picked one at random and went in.
The alleys wound in every direction, and Lin Shu wandered through them like a headless fly.
After walking for who knew how long, she spotted someone carrying a basket — and when that person noticed her, they made a show of covering the basket, which only made things more obvious. Lin Shu understood at once.
Without any hesitation, she headed straight in the direction the person had come from.
By the time she’d made her way around to the fork in the alley, Lin Shu saw three children crouched by the back door of a house, playing.
The children all looked to be around seven or eight years old.
Sensing someone nearby, the children all looked up at her, sizing her up from head to toe with wary eyes.
That settled it — these kids were keeping watch.
She walked up and said directly, “When I came in just now, I saw a lot of red armbands patrolling around — probably cracking down on the black market, catching speculators. Tell the others to be careful.”
Having said her piece, Lin Shu hurried off back the way she’d come, putting on the air of someone desperate to avoid trouble, so the lookout children would believe her.
She had no idea what the black market actually looked like, let alone where the villain might be hiding in this maze — by the time she found him, the red armbands would probably already be swooping in to make arrests, and for all she knew, they might grab her too as an accomplice.
With things this uncertain, spreading the warning was still the safer bet.
Lin Shu didn’t walk any further out — she waited anxiously right at the fork where she’d run into that person.
About five or six minutes later, Lin Shu saw people hurrying out.
None of them had anything in their hands — the goods had probably all been hidden away.
Everyone who came out shot her a wary glance, but with the red armbands weighing on their minds, none of them lingered, all hurrying off in a rush.
At last, after so much waiting, Lin Shu spotted a familiar face.
The person who appeared most often in the original body’s memories.
A tall, thin man with glasses, wearing a white shirt, fair-skinned and refined-looking.
She could sense that this person had mattered a great deal to the original body.
The man saw her too, froze for a moment, then quickly walked over to her.
That settled it — this had to be Gu Jun.
Though he was a bit different from the rough, burly man she’d pictured.
But now wasn’t the time to dwell on that.
Once he was nearly in front of her, Lin Shu didn’t say a word — she grabbed the man’s wrist and said urgently, “I just saw the red armbands, we need to go, now.”
Lin Shu tugged at him and turned to leave, but he didn’t budge — in fact, the man whose hand she’d grabbed yanked it back with considerable force.
Confused, she turned back around, and saw “Gu Jun” looking awkwardly toward someone standing off to the side.
Following his gaze, Lin Shu looked at the man standing nearby, and in that instant, she was struck by the sheer wave of masculine presence radiating off him.
That man had wheat-colored skin, stood about six-foot-one, with broad shoulders and long legs. Beneath his close-cropped buzz cut were thick, heavy brows, and below that, sharp, deep-set features.
Even without looking closely, you could sense the sheer strength of his build beneath his drab, dust-colored clothes.
The man was strikingly handsome, and his presence was overwhelming.
His face was dark as still water right now, his pitch-black eyes fixed on her with a cold, menacing stare.
For no reason she could name, Lin Shu felt a chill run down the back of her neck.
The man whose hand she’d just grabbed hurriedly explained, “Comrade Gu Jun, hear me out — I have no idea why your wife suddenly grabbed onto me, you have to believe me!”
Comrade Gu Jun?
Gu Jun?!
Lin Shu stared blankly at the dark-faced man standing before her.
So… she’d grabbed the wrong man?
Right in front of the original body’s actual husband, she’d gone and grabbed some other man?
