Chapter 38

Chapter 38: Retaliation

Leaning hard on his crutch, Tang Da Fu took a few slow steps across the yard.

At first, every movement looked like it cost him. But as he repeated the path, his face loosened—less grimace, more focus.

Li Tao Hua kept an arm under his elbow and snapped the moment she saw him push himself. “A few steps is enough for today. You can’t rush recovery. If you fall again and injure that leg, you’ll truly be crippled.”

Tang Da Fu gave her a helpless smile, voice soft and eager to please. “Wife, even if my leg heals, it’ll still be flawed. Don’t dislike me, all right? I’ll do whatever you say.”

From the kitchen, Qin Hui Yin heard them and shook her head as she worked.

She’d read about love-brained emperors, princes, and CEOs. This was the first time she’d seen the farming-household version—fawning devotion in patched clothes, still shamelessly sincere.

On the cutting board, cold shredded rabbit took shape under her knife. She worked quickly, teaching Tang Lu Wu as she went.

“Cut it thinner,” Qin Hui Yin said, guiding her hand. “The thinner it is, the more it soaks up flavor.”

Tang Lu Wu nodded, concentrating.

Between them, the awkwardness that used to cling to every sentence had thinned. They were starting to feel like sisters in truth, not just in name.

Maybe it was the way shared hardship forced people to lean on each other.

Or maybe it was simply that Qin Hui Yin refused to let anyone in this house keep swallowing fear in silence.

As they worked, Qin Hui Yin spoke casually, as if she were only filling the quiet.

“Sister Lu Wu,” she asked, “do you still remember your mother?”

Tang Lu Wu’s knife paused. “Yes.” She nodded, but her eyes lowered. “It’s blurry now. I’m almost forgetting what she looked like.”

“And when she was alive,” Qin Hui Yin asked gently, “what was Uncle Tang like with her?”

Tang Lu Wu’s throat bobbed. “Like Teacher Wang and his wife,” she said after a moment. “My father wasn’t different from most men in the village. He did field work. He provided what he was supposed to provide. But he never touched chores at home. And he never… coaxed my mother, the way he coaxes Auntie Li.”

She tried to smile, but it came out bitter. “Sometimes I think about it. My mother bore him three children. Why wasn’t she worth… that kind of warmth?”

Qin Hui Yin’s knife slowed.

She’d meant to grow closer to Tang Lu Wu, to talk like sisters. She hadn’t meant to pull old grief to the surface.

But Tang Lu Wu was already there, standing in it.

“Yin Yin,” Tang Lu Wu asked softly, almost like a child, “are pretty women happier?”

Qin Hui Yin looked at her. “What do you think happiness is?”

Tang Lu Wu’s lashes trembled as she answered. “Happiness is being like Auntie Li. Having someone who cherishes you, loves you, pampers you… protects you.”

Qin Hui Yin wiped her hands and leaned against the table, meeting Tang Lu Wu’s eyes. “Then your happiness depends on someone else’s heart.”

Tang Lu Wu frowned. “Isn’t that how it is?”

“What if a man loves you at first,” Qin Hui Yin said, voice steady, “and he gives you everything. And then one day he meets another girl and decides she suits him better. He stops loving you and loves someone else instead. Then what?”

Tang Lu Wu went still. “I… I don’t know.”

“If a woman builds her whole happiness on a man’s sincerity,” Qin Hui Yin said quietly, “that’s the saddest gamble in the world. I won’t let someone else choose me. I’ll choose my own happiness. I want men to feel lucky to be chosen by me—not the other way around.”

At the doorway, Tang Yi Xiao stood with a broom in his hands, frozen mid-step.

His expression was blank, but his ears were red.

For a second, he looked like he wanted to remind them that their coming-of-age ceremonies were still years away.

But he didn’t say anything. He just backed out as silently as he’d come.

Next door, at Tang Jiang’s house, Madam Wang’s voice rose, sharp with glee.

“Kids’ dad! Big news!” she crowed. “Song Zhi Xing fell into the latrine pit and swallowed half a bellyful of shit and piss! Nobody dared pull him out. His wife had to pay 30 wen to hire the neighbor, Song Jue, to haul him up!”

A man’s voice asked, wary, “Is he all right?”

“Who knows?” Madam Wang laughed. “You know his wife—stingy as anything. She won’t hire a doctor.”

The Tang family exchanged glances, the gossip landing like a strange gift.

After what Song family’s second uncle had tried to do to Song Rui Ze, it was hard to feel sympathy for that household.

Then Madam Wang’s voice turned nasty again, swinging in a direction it always swung when she ran out of new targets.

“What are they cooking again next door? Eat, eat, eat—that’s all they do. Up to their necks in debt and still stuffing their faces. Are they in a hurry to get reincarnated?”

A man sighed. “Enough. Stop poking into other people’s affairs. They’re not eating your food.”

“Sure,” Madam Wang snapped. “They have food, and I had to marry a useless coward who can’t even get me one good bite—”

Tang Jiang didn’t argue. He never did.

The Dam Worksite matter came up again in their quarrel, as it did in half the village these days.

Tang Jiang’s son worked as an assistant at the blacksmith shop and almost never came home. The old couple lived in the village with their daughter. Logically, they could afford the two taels, but they didn’t want to spend it. Going to the Dam Worksite meant three meals a day and wages, too—on paper, it sounded like a bargain.

These days, Qin Hui Yin wasn’t going into town to set up a stall. She moved around the village more, and the place felt oddly lively—lively in the way a pond got lively right before a storm.

On her way past Song family’s second uncle’s fenced yard, she heard shouting again.

“You damn bastard!” a woman screeched. “They were fine last night, and now all the chickens are dead first thing this morning! Song Zhi Xing, you useless man—did you feed them something they shouldn’t eat?”

Song Zhi Xing’s voice snapped back, humiliated and furious. “When did I feed them anything? Didn’t you feed them those rotten eggs you brought back from your parents’ home yesterday?”

“I’ve never heard of rotten eggs poisoning chickens to death!”

“Then I didn’t do it either,” he shouted. “If you want to blame something, blame those rotten eggs!”

The argument continued, but Qin Hui Yin didn’t linger. She adjusted her back basket and headed up the mountain.

She found wild wood ear mushrooms, picked wild fruit, and dug up bamboo shoots. The forest smelled rich and damp, the kind of scent that stuck to your skin.

While she was digging for shoots, a fat bamboo rat darted out of a hole.

“Huh—” Qin Hui Yin’s eyes brightened. She lunged after it without thinking.

Her foot slid.

The ground vanished beneath her.

Cold rushed up her spine. A trap.

Her mind flashed through the worst possibilities—sharpened bamboo spikes at the bottom, hunting pits meant to keep prey from climbing out.

If she fell straight in—

Before terror could fully bloom, a hand clamped around her arm.

With one hard pull, she was hauled back onto solid ground.

Qin Hui Yin stumbled, heart pounding, then looked up.

Song Rui Ze stood there, expression unreadable.

“Song Rui Ze,” she breathed. “Thank you for saving me.”

He didn’t respond. He just shifted his shoulder pole and walked deeper into the mountains as if nothing had happened.

Qin Hui Yin hesitated only a second.

Then she jogged after him. “Song Rui Ze—take me with you. There are lots of good things deeper in. I want to look.”