"Okay. Okay. Don't suffocate Shen Zhiqing. Shen Zhiqing is waking up!"
After bending down for a whole morning, a wave of dizziness swept over Shen XingShen before everything went dark. It felt as if he had only passed out for a moment, yet when his eyes fluttered open, a crowd had already gathered around him.
His eyes met the playful gaze of the energetic girl he often encountered. She flashed him that same teasing smile as he let out a groan. A sinking feeling told him this was not good. He hadn't even had a chance to make a decent impression, and now he was sure to be branded as the useless newcomer who couldn't do any work.
"Cousin, I'll take you to the clinic."
"No, go back to work. I'll take him to the clinic." The team leader waved people away."Go away! Go away! All of you go back to work!"
But the team leader was also swamped with his own task, so Shen Miaomiao, the resident freeloader, bravely threw herself as a sacrifice.
"I'll do it."
With a single, effortless motion, she scooped him up horizontally and marched off. She carried him as if he weighed nothing at all.
Shen Xingshen clung to her instinctively, his eyes wide with shock as he stared wide-eyed at Shen Miaomiao, the tips of his ears turning red with embarrassment.
"You! You! What do you want to do?!"
The team leader jumped to his feet, while the other villagers suddenly found the ground and the sky endlessly fascinating, refusing to even glance and bear witness.
See no evil, see no evil.
"Little ancestor!" Team leader Shen cried out.
Don't do it!
If you want to kidnap a husband, don't do it in broad daylight!
"This…" Lu Xia, with some amazement in her tone, asked in doubt, "Are female comrades here this strong?"
"Is that the point?" Lin Li struggled to voice.
That girl has no regard for her reputation! Lin Li wanted to say she was shameless, as that image really burned her eyes. But! B-but the girl was helping a comrade!
An old educated youth shook his head. "The comrades here are… strong-willed."
Another talkative educated youth continued his unspoken words. "They are very fierce and unreasonable."
"How unreasonable?"
They saw their fierceness, but have yet to grasp the extent of the country folks' unreasonableness.
"As long as they can take action, they won't waste time talking. And when they have disagreements, they even fight among themselves."
"....."
"I heard that the villagers have been fighting the invaders and the mountain bandits. They say that almost all the men, women, and even the young and the old in the village know some skills. You know," he mouthed, "martial arts."
In the northeast, the folks are known for their strength and ferocity. Many have either tangled with bandits or been bandits themselves. These bandits don't necessarily mean bad people, but their experience indeed made them untamed and wild.
After years of living on the knife's edge and being forced to fight in order to survive, they naturally picked up all sorts of rough-and-tumble, low-level skills. As these skills were handed down, so too were some old habits. Gradually, these have been engraved into the bones of their descendants.
Even when they become good people after the founding, some people still think they are barbaric.
With the already fierce reputation of this area, the Marching brigade still stood out among the other brigades in terms of fighting power. According to the old educated youths, this reputation was shaped by the villagers' additional experience of fighting against the invaders.
Someone gestured at Qian Feng. "Tell your cousin to be careful. On normal days, it's enough to have a thick skin to get along with the villagers, but the old accountant's daughter is currently looking for a husband."
Qian Feng was dumbfounded, thinking his cousin wouldn't be that unlucky to be targeted in just a few days.
Wei Shen, on the other hand, acted as if someone stepped on his tail and jumped. "Looking for a husband?!"
. . . . .
Shen Miaomiao is indeed looking for a husband.
At nineteen, she was already considered a leftover old maid in the countryside.
Although no one will point in her face in fear of getting plummeted to the ground, nothing can stop some mean people from talking behind her back and poking at her parents' hearts.
Shen Miaomiao was born and raised as a native of this era, but she also has another set of memories from a faraway future. That modern parallel world descended into chaos and ultimately welcomed the apocalypse.
She perished in that era just after reaching adulthood.
Her childhood there played out like a typical melodrama: a child of divorced parents, where the original one was left behind and never quite fitted into either of their new families, becoming the unwanted one and was often passed around from relative to relative until the world came to an end.
Adding the initial chaos of the apocalypse, where betrayal was as common as breathing, and dying before she ever tasted her first romance, her first life taught her one thing: marriage is a giant pitfall!
Just look at the modern era, with its romantic schemes and hundreds of strategies for building harems, each trick more cunning than the last and perfected throughout the evolution of humanity. Even as a child, she picked up a thing or two about marriage scams drifting through the web.
Sure, the older generation was known for staying together until their hair turned white, clinging to the idea that marriage was eternal. But after being kicked back to the starting village as a baby, Shen Miaomiao saw that most couples just made do with each other and muddled through, thinking that divorce was shameful. In fact, there were no less shameful things in those marriages. They just never admit it, not even if caught red-handed.
Well, these days, being caught means eating peanuts, so they desperately won't admit it even more.
But, see! That's the point! Even with the threat of eating peanuts, they still dare to chase after the excitement of this dangerous, thrilling sport.
Shen Miaomiao doesn't buy the chanting of the elders about the good and whatnot of marriage, but as a native, she knew there was no escaping it—and honestly, she didn't feel like putting up a fight.
Isn't it just finding a cohabitant?!
Knowing just how deep this pit could be, she refused to wait around to be shoved in. She would rather leap in on her own terms and take matters into her own hands!