Zhao Xiulan felt a pain in her forehead. She woke up and found herself lying in a dilapidated room with yellow muddy walls and a dull color.
There was a small cabinet beside the bed. The bed was made of wooden planks with a thatch underneath it, and it was covered with a thin dark and moldy quilt.
There was also a strange smell that lingers, which made her head dizzy and heavy. She wanted to get up, but her body was so weak.
Where am I?
Her forehead was suddenly painful again and the memories that did not belong to her emerged in her mind.
She had transmigrated! The owner of her current body was also named Zhao Xiulan. She was now in the year 1960, just in time for the famine happening across the country.
The original owner lived in an ordinary family in the countryside, with a total of five family members—father Zhao Weiguo, younger sister Zhao Xiuzhu, stepmother Ma Yumei, stepsister Li Lijuan, and a baby in the womb of the stepmother, who had not yet been born.
In this era of scarcity of supplies, the Zhao family, like most other families, needed to work and earn work points. Every year, the production brigade would distribute the provisions according to the accumulated work points of each family. However, since the beginning of the Great Famine of China in 1959, the harvest of foodstuffs had declined sharply, and there were not much foodstuffs that could be distributed every year. In addition, the Zhao family had a large population but little labor, so her life was not good.
The original owner had a very difficult life in this family. Her own father was under her new wife’s thumb and her stepmother didn’t like her. Most of the time, she couldn’t have enough meal and was enslaved to work. The original owner was seventeen years old, but because of frequent starvation, she seemed to have not grown up yet. Her whole body was thin and skinny, which looked like she had no flesh on her body. Long-term malnutrition had caused her complexion to be sallow, her hair to be dry, her head to be big but her body to be small, and her eyes to be sunken.
***Original translation is from enchantesstranslations.com. Please read it on the translator’s website.
In spite of that, Xiulan was still happy because of this transmigration.
Compared with the turmoil and hardships of the 1960s and 1970s, and the suffering of the original owner after being bullied, the apocalypse she lived in before was even more hopeless.
The apocalypse did not only have the shortage of water and food, but you also had to defend against the attacks of various zombies. Compared with the danger that the apocalypse may put you in at any time, this era was at least safe. She didn’t need to worry about the danger of zombie attacks, so she could sleep peacefully.
Suddenly, after thinking of these things in general, Xiulan quickly took a look at her space.
Great! Fortunately, her space was still there.
This space suddenly appeared in her body before the apocalypse. The time inside was static, so the things she put inside would stay exactly in the same condition, and it would not change no matter how long it had been there.
At that time, the rumors about the apocalypse were also raging online. With the sudden appearance of the space, Xiulan made preparations in advance and spent half a year hoarding supplies all over the country.
The space not only stored enough foodstuffs for twenty people to eat for decades, such as rice, flour, and cornmeal, but also some daily necessities, clothes, quilts, various fruits, vegetables, stewed vegetables, and cooked food.
Beef, lamb, pork, chicken, and other meats were also stored in large quantities in the space.
She also went to the countryside to buy hundreds of thousands of catties of native eggs; and she also went to the seaside cities to buy hundreds of thousands of catties of fish, shrimps, and other seafood.
Being afraid that some delicacies would not be available due to the approaching apocalypse, various kinds of barbecues, hot spicy foods, rice casseroles, and fried skewers were stored in hundreds of thousands of servings.
Snacks and milk teas were even more essential, so she had bought thousands of servings as well.
Oil, salt, sauce, vinegar, tea, daily necessities, et cetera, everything that she could think of had been purchased and stored in large quantities in the space.
The environmental sanitation in the apocalypse was extremely poor, so some self-defense tools and medical supplies had to be prepared.
In this way, Xiulan basically had everything in her space.