Chapter 1: and

"Six-year-old" Xu Yue rested her chubby face in her hands, looking up at the sky at a forty-five-degree angle, bright and melancholy.

She had transmigrated.

It was a very cliché, very melodramatic trope, but the reality of the past few days told her that all of this was true.

How should she describe the home in front of her?

Well, it was very "refreshing"!

A row of stones formed a foundation less than half a meter high, indicating that this plot of land was occupied.

There was no front gate to the house; walking in past a simple fence made of bamboo strips led to an open space and a dilapidated, tiny thatched hut.

Next to the thatched hut was a makeshift shed where a stove had been set up to serve as a kitchen.

The rice jar inside had been empty for ten days, with only a few chipped ceramic bowls sitting there.

At this moment, Xu Yue was squatting in front of this broken shed, contemplating life.

Had she committed too many sins in her past life?

Was that why God was playing such a huge joke on her?

But she had clearly been an outstanding, patriotic, and dedicated socialist youth!

Before transmigrating, she had been working overtime in a laboratory, diligently developing special medicines to help the masses escape the suffering of illness as soon as possible.

Logically speaking, this shouldn't be happening, right?

Could it be that she had committed too many sins in her *previous* previous life?

Thinking back on the magical experiences of the past few days since her arrival, Xu Yue couldn't help but fall into deep thought.

She vividly remembered the first night after she arrived. Her father, Xu Da, who had been lying in the main room, suddenly sat bolt upright from his deathbed and cursed loudly

"Damn this Heavenly Tribulation! I am a dignified Golden Core cultivator; how dare you strike your grandfather down into this mortal realm!"

The next day, her mother, Madam Wang—who had been out tirelessly foraging for food for the whole family—suddenly stormed into the house, radiating murderous intent.

In one hand, she carried a small bag of coarse rice she had scrounged from somewhere, and with the other, she grabbed her husband, who was lying on the bed doubting his existence, and slapped him across the face

"We are at such a critical juncture, yet you, a grown man, not only refuse to shoulder your responsibilities but are lying here wallowing in self-pity! Get up and start a fire to cook right now!"

Finally, under her father's stunned gaze, she added a comment about him dumping half a bowl of coarse rice porridge that morning

"If you were a soldier on my warship and dared to waste food like that, I would have shot you dead, damn it!"

Thus, at dinner that evening, Xu Yue shivered as she forced herself to swallow half a piece of coarse rice cake—which was almost entirely chaff and scratched her throat—washed down with the cold boiled water her parents had prepared.

Another day passed. Her hot-tempered mother took her simple-minded eldest brother, Xu Dalang, and her "cheap" father, Xu Da, out to forage, and they managed to catch a scrawny wild pheasant.

Unexpectedly, as soon as they returned home, twelve-year-old Dalang saw the chicken blood and suddenly went berserk. He became immensely strong, his eyes turned blood-red, and he let out inhuman roars, biting anyone he saw!

It took the entire family working together to tie him up.

Even then, it was only because they had been starving for days and lacked strength that they barely managed to subdue him.

But that wasn't the end of it. During the struggle to subdue her eldest brother, her eight-year-old sister, Xu Erniang, was knocked over and accidentally hit her head on the corner of the table, knocking her unconscious.

This sister hadn't made much of a fuss, but ever since she woke up, she had been very quiet. She just liked to pick up a stick and squat in the kitchen, "whooshing" it around while muttering something that sounded like a spell.

Occasionally, she would look over at her little sister, her gaze as if she had seen something interesting, so intense that it made the "merely six-year-old" little girl Xu Yue feel a chill down her spine.

At this point, Xu Yue knew that while other people's transmigrations were about experiencing life, her transmigration had started on Hell Mode!

Looking at the bright, glaring sun in the sky, Xu Yue stood up, supporting her knees with a mature air despite her childish face, and let out a sigh.

Forget it, forget it. She would go out for a walk to adjust her foul mood.

The entire Shanyang Commandery was suffering from a severe drought this year. Yangjiao Village, located within the jurisdiction of Shanyang, hadn't seen a drop of rain since April.

By the harvest season in August, ninety-nine percent of the farmers in the commandery had no harvest at all. The riverbeds were so dry they were exposed, and the villagers of Yangjiao had to go to Dawang Village, ten miles away, just to get water.

But that was only a stopgap measure. In reality, the villagers had started moving away in droves since late June, seeking a way to survive.

Those who could escape had already left; those who remained were the elderly, the weak, the sick, and the disabled who couldn't flee.

For example, the Xu family, and the family of the old man next door who had once been the richest man in Yangjiao Village, thinking he could survive the natural disaster, only to be slapped in the face by reality at lightning speed.

Right, the Xu family had once thought the same, which was why they had fallen to their current state.

The original owner's family really had a uniquely strange way of thinking!

Xu Yue sighed.

The world outside was chaotic. Following her "cheap" mother's instructions, Xu Yue had been obedient and hadn't gone out much these past few days.

On the few occasions she did go out, she didn't go far. When passing by neighbors, she would either hear a family sitting around a bare table preparing to eat Guanyin clay to commit suicide, or see a dilapidated house with its door wide open, revealing a stiff, dead corpse inside.

The first time she saw it, she was scared to death. But after the first time, she got used to it and became numb.

Living every day with four family members who she couldn't tell were human or ghosts, Xu Yue had long since trained herself to have a tough heart. A few corpses were nothing; they were much better looking than the ones soaked in formalin in the lab.

Xu Yue moved her thin, short legs over to the neighbor's house.

An old man, thin as a skeleton with deep-set eye sockets like a blind man, was leaning motionless against a broken wooden door frame.

Xu Yue opened her big eyes and tilted her head to look at him.

Because she was so thin, her head looked larger than her body, and her slender neck seemed unable to support it, but her large eyes were bright and sparkling.

She looked at the motionless old man in front of her, thinking he was dead.

However, when she stepped forward to check his breathing, the old man suddenly opened those sunken eyes, giving her a huge fright. She screamed in her heart

*A zombie!*

Seeing her face turn pale with fright, the old man let out a cackling laugh, his voice raspy and unpleasant, carrying a scent of death.

Xu Yue immediately realized that this old man wasn't dead yet.

Xu Yue reached into her pocket and pulled out a small piece of coarse cake, about the size of half an infant's fist. After hesitating for a moment, she handed over the cake she couldn't bring herself to swallow.

As soon as the old man saw the food, his dull eyes lit up. He snatched it and shoved it into his mouth all at once!

The ferocious, starving-wolf-like way he ate made Xu Yue regret it for a split second.

When people are hungry to the extreme, they will eat people. She was just a six-year-old child now, tender and crisp—wouldn't she be even more delicious?

However, her current body was too young, and her small brain was filled with useless thoughts like "hungry, hungry, hungry."

If she wanted to understand the specific era she was in, she had to rely on this old man who had traveled far and wide and seen the world.

Fortunately, the old man wasn't the type to have no bottom line. After a full meal, he had a bit more spirit.

Under Xu Yue's curious questioning, pretending to be "bored and wanting a story," the old man rambled on about the state of the world.

Only then did Xu Yue learn that the place she lived in was called the Daqing Kingdom, which had been founded over 300 years ago.

However, this dynasty, which had stood for over three hundred years, had seen its central authority gradually weaken due to factors like eunuchs meddling in politics and the interference of maternal relatives. Local powerhouses were rising, and the imperial court and provinces were in a state of chaotic infighting.

Now, foreign enemies were eyeing them from all sides. Some particularly vicious barbarian tribes were taking advantage of the situation to burn, kill, and loot along the Daqing borders, raiding in and out seven times a day, constantly teetering on the edge of war between the two nations, leaving the people in unbearable misery.

With the entire Shanyang Commandery suffering from a severe drought, the chaotic imperial court simply told the prefects to solve the problems themselves. No one cared whether this remote county under the Yanzhou Shanyang Commandery lived or died.

Never mind disaster relief grain; when the county magistrate heard the imperial court's order to "solve the problem yourself," he took his family and ran away the very next day to "solve his own problem."

Xu Yue rubbed her furrowed brow and looked up to sigh again.

This Daqing Kingdom was truly about to collapse!

The old man looked at the thin little girl in front of him with sorrowful eyes: "Ever since Dong Xing entered the capital, heroes have risen across the land. Those occupying states and commanderies are countless. Coupled with natural disasters, the people cannot make a living, and the dead are scattered across the fields..."

"This world... it really makes it impossible for people to live."

Dong Xing?

Who was Dong Xing?

Xu Yue had never heard of him.

She only knew that there was a Dong Zhuo at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty.

So, the era she had transmigrated into did not belong to any history she was familiar with.

However, the era of chaotic warlordism the old man described was similar to the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty.

If that was the case, Xu Yue really couldn't imagine what the future held.

From the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty to the Sui and Tang Dynasties, there had been a cold period lasting several hundred years. The average temperature at that time was 0.5 to 1.5 degrees lower than in modern times, and extreme weather phenomena like "cold winds in the sixth lunar month like winter" occurred.

Droughts, locust plagues, floods, epidemics...

Thinking about having to survive in such a harsh environment, Xu Yue thought to herself: *Let's just all perish together! I'm not living anymore!*

Starting a new book again!

I hope everyone likes it~

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(End of chapter)