With that thought, Yuan Si propped herself up on her elbows and sat up. Just then, the door opened again, and Yuan Si finally saw the original owner's second sister.
"Little Si, you're finally awake! If anything had happened to you here, how would I ever explain it to our mother?" Seeing that her little sister was truly better and could even sit up, Li Yuan'ai felt a sense of relief. She wasn't entirely lying. This sister was their mother's late-in-life child, doted on almost as much as their little brother. Otherwise, the girl would never have been allowed to do whatever she pleased.
Li Yuan'ai was not without jealousy or resentment toward her mother's blatant favoritism. But that old lady was a force to be reckoned with. If she dared to utter a single word of protest, her mother would show up at her door ready for a fight. For various reasons, she had ultimately let her little sister stay.
She was still deeply dissatisfied that her little sister was here freeloading instead of earning work points back home. She didn't dare say anything to their mother, so her only outlet was to occasionally let her dissatisfaction show to her little sister. Of course, she was only doing this because she was taking advantage of the girl's young age, thinking she wouldn't notice a thing.
After a round of fussy pleasantries, Li Yuan'ai told Yuan Si to keep resting. She said that since Yuan Si was still weak from her illness, she shouldn't get off the kang bed, and that she would have Li Aiping bring her dinner later.
Yuan Si had just lain back down on the kang bed when she remembered she was still thirsty. The mother and daughter's interruption had made her forget.
The thought made the thirst unbearable. She got out of bed, slipped on her shoes, and walked toward the door.
Just as she pushed the door open a crack, the hushed voices of the mother and daughter drifted in.
"Mom, I'm not bringing Little Aunt her dinner later. You promised, you do it," Li Aiping grumbled, displeased. "Every single day... I don't have a job, but I'm never idle. I don't complain about serving Dad, you, and my brothers, but now you want me to wait on some little girl? I can't stand it. Why should I? I'm not a servant."
"What's the big deal? How tiring can it be to bring your little aunt a bowl of congee? Don't be so lazy," Li Yuan'ai scolded her daughter while starting to light the fire.
They lived in staff housing provided by their work unit—a row of connected, earthen-red brick houses, which were quite decent for the era. The house consisted of two rooms with a central hall used as a kitchen. With so many children, they had modified the largest room, dividing it into two smaller ones. The inner room was for the daughter, which was where Yuan Si was now staying. The outer section was Li Yuan'ai and her husband's room. The room across the central hall belonged to Li Yuan'ai's three sons.
The Li family seemed to have a gene for fertility. Starting with the matriarch, Zuo Daya—the mother of this body Yuan Si now inhabited—she had given birth to seven children in her lifetime, five of whom survived: four girls and one boy.
The eldest daughter, Li Yuanyi, had five children of her own—one girl and four boys. The second daughter, Li Yuan'ai, and the third daughter, Li Yuanshan, each had four. Li Yuan'ai's family had one girl and three boys, while the third's had all boys.
The Li family also had a son, Li Yuanbao, who was not yet married and had left to become a soldier at the beginning of the year. Then there was Yuan Si, the late-in-life daughter. Her nickname was Little Si, a homophone for "four" that played on her given name.
The mother and daughter were talking in the central hall, and their voices were very low. Logically, with a large room separating them, Yuan Si shouldn't have been able to hear anything from that distance. However, Yuan Si was a Spiritual Power User. Although her transmigration had knocked her superpower all the way down from Level 9, it couldn't change the fact that she was a Spiritual Power User. Her senses were simply sharper than an ordinary person's.
"Just one bowl of congee? But Little Aunt hasn't eaten in three days," Li Aiping said. For some unknown reason, she was actually speaking up for Yuan Si.
Li Yuan'ai was silent for a moment before replying, "Your little aunt is small, just a six-year-old child. One bowl of congee is enough to fill her up. Your brothers are growing boys; they'll cry out if they miss even a single bite. Besides, your little aunt hasn't eaten in so many days. It's not good for her stomach to eat too much at once. It's better to let her recover slowly. Tell her that when you bring her the food later."
Listening from the other room, Yuan Si frowned. 'It seems the memories were right. The original owner's second sister isn't someone who understands sisterly affection at all. In fact, she's the most calculating child in the Li family.'
She pulled the door open forcefully. The hinges let out a loud CREAK, and the voices in the central hall immediately fell silent.
"Second Sister, I'm thirsty. Is there any hot water in the thermos? I'll get a cup to drink," Yuan Si said in a flat tone.
"Oh, you want water? Why didn't you say so earlier? Alright, don't you move. Get back to bed, I'll have Ai Ping pour you a cup." Li Yuan'ai peeked out from the central hall, urging Yuan Si to go back to her room. Her expression was a little unnatural.
"Okay, fine. I'll go back to my room, then. I don't have much strength," Yuan Si said before turning around and heading back inside.
Lying on the kang bed, she listened to the sounds outside. A full five minutes passed before Li Aiping finally came in carrying a cup of hot water.
"Little Aunt, here's your water. I'm putting it here. They're still cooking outside, so I'm going back to help." Li Aiping set the cup down and left.
Yuan Si didn't mind her attitude. She sat up on the kang bed again, picked up the cup, and began to drink, sip by sip.
When school let out, the house grew lively. Li Yuan'ai's three boys were Li Aiguo, 15; Li Aidang, 14; and Li Aijun, 10.
At the dinner table, Li Aijun looked at the basin of cornmeal congee and cried out unhappily, "Why are we eating this mush for all three meals? Can't we have something different? My brain is turning to mush from all this mush! How am I supposed to study? I want to eat white rice!"
"I want to eat white rice, too, but we'd need to have some first. And you're complaining? Go look at other families; they can't even get this," Li Yuan'ai said, glaring at her youngest son, though she picked up a strip of pickled radish and put it in his bowl.
It was March, the lean season between harvests. The cabbage and potatoes they had stored for the winter were all gone, so now they had to make do with pickled radish strips.
And Li Yuan'ai was right. This was the most difficult period since the founding of Hua Country. Although the natural disasters were only just beginning, the signs were already apparent in the countryside.
It was precisely because people back home were already going hungry that the Li family's mother had sent her youngest daughter to stay with her second. In the current situation, the cities were better off than the countryside. At least city workers could use their grain ration books to buy food every month. No matter what it was, they wouldn't starve to death.
But the cities had their own difficulties. In Li Yuan'ai's household, for instance, only the two adults worked, and Li Yuan'ai was only a family-dependent worker. Although the children also received rations, they were all growing, ravenous boys. The family's monthly eighty-plus catties of grain was simply not enough to fill everyone's stomachs.
Given that her own children weren't getting enough to eat, it was no wonder that no one in Li Yuan'ai's family was happy to see Li Yuansi, a freeloader from back home, show up.
Li Aijun had already eaten three big bowls of cornmeal mush but was still not full. The basin on the table was already empty. "Mom, I'm not full."
Li Yuan'ai's heart ached for her son, but there was nothing she could do. "Still want to be full? You should be glad you're not starving. Hurry up and go do your homework."