"Chunzhu, are you lonely tonight?"
I'd barely gotten the door open when this woman just dropped to her knees at my feet. Thud.
Li Xiuhua, twenty-three. Everybody in the village called her the local knockout, and she was the only girl around who'd been to college. And now here she was, hanging on to my pant leg for dear life, looking up at me with this tear-streaked face.
Man, the way she was carrying on, I honestly thought she was about to jump me.
"Chunzhu, come on. Have a heart. Help me out here." Her voice was shaking. "Just get me pregnant. And for however long you're stuck out here in the sticks, I'll do whatever you want. Anything."
Get her pregnant. My brain just blanked. I nearly forgot how to breathe.
So this gorgeous woman was on her knees begging me to knock her up.
"I've got nowhere else to go." She squeezed tighter, tears dripping onto my shoes one after another. "Three years out here. I've starved. I've frozen. I sent letters home and never heard a thing back. I can't go home. The only reason I married a guy from this village was just to stay alive. And you know how that turned out."
She laughed, but it was an awful laugh. All hopeless.
"Wedding night, he's blackout drunk. Doesn't even lay a finger on me. Next day he goes hunting, takes a spill, and boom, paralyzed. Been lying on that kang almost a month now. Looks like he could kick it any day."
Yeah, I got it now. He was the family's only son. She hasn't given them an heir. The second he dies, they toss her out on the street.
"These mountains are full of wild animals. A woman like me gets kicked out, that's a death sentence." She stared me dead in the eye. "There won't even be anyone around to bury me."
Something twisted up in my gut. Not because I was going soft. It's just that these days, sleeping around will get you drowned in a pond. Get caught and you don't even get a chance to explain yourself. Trust me, I knew that better than she did. This was 1968, remember. Not the anything-goes world that came later.
"Chunzhu, I'm still clean." She could tell I was hesitating, and it freaked her out. Her face went white as a sheet. "My husband never touched me before he got paralyzed. In this whole village, you're the only one, a city kid, an educated youth. I couldn't even work up the nerve to ask anybody else. And I'd rather die than say a word."
I didn't say anything, but my heart was going a mile a minute.
This deal was way, way too risky, right?
I'd been stuck in this backward era for eighteen whole years. Went from a naked little kid to a grown man. I'd pretty much made peace with the fact that I was never getting some magic cheat code in this life. My whole plan was just to skate by on the little bit of future knowledge I had from my past life and quietly become a small-time rich guy.
And then:
Soul compatibility detected: 99.8%. Activation requirements met. Hunting Space System now online. Activate?
My eyes went wide. A system? Are you kidding me?
Eighteen years I waited for this day. So long the flowers wilted and died. And now is the moment it decides to show up.
Activate. Activate it right now. I screamed in my head, scared to death it would disappear if I waited even a second longer.
In times like these, when you can barely keep fed and clothed, this thing was my whole shot at a decent life. Talk about perfect timing.
But even with the cheat code in hand, knocking her up was still insanely risky. One slip and forget getting rich, not even God himself could save me from drowning in that pond right alongside her. This was a lose-your-head kind of deal. I couldn't risk it. Couldn't afford to.
I stayed quiet way too long, my eyes darting all over the place, and Li Xiuhua felt her heart just go cold, little by little. She gritted her teeth, and this desperate, no-turning-back edge crept into her voice.
"Chunzhu, help me this one time and I'll owe you my life. After this, I swear I won't cling to you. Won't cause you an ounce of trouble." She pushed on. "My little sister came out here with me. She's staying at the sent-down youth station. She's even prettier than me. Sweeter too. If you like her, date her, marry her, whatever you want. And if you're into the Russian look—" she steeled herself, "—there's a blonde, blue-eyed, half-Russian widow in the village. Real looker. I can hook you up. You won't be disappointed. I promise."
I just stood there, floored. She was putting everything on the table. Herself, her sister, everything she could think of.
But I still didn't cave. You get mixed up in something like this, it's like getting mud on a white shirt. You'll never scrub it clean, and it'll come back to bite you your whole life.
Li Xiuhua looked at my stone-cold face, and that last little spark in her eyes just went out. Next second, she stopped caring about anything. Threw away the last shred of dignity a girl's got, and lunged right at me.
When I woke up, she was already gone.
There was still a little bit of her warmth left on the kang. I got up to straighten things out, but I froze when I went to fold the blanket. My thickest mattress had been cut wide open.
I stared at that gash for a good long while, and then it clicked. Her in-laws had forced her over here last night. She was out of options. Slashing my mattress was her way of putting it all out in the open. This thing between us, no takebacks now. She was trying to tie herself to me for good.
I wasn't mad. If anything, it kind of got to me. For a woman to force herself into something that drastic — God, how bad had they pushed her?
On my way out, I grabbed the two pounds of leftover chicken from the kitchen and dumped it into a ceramic bowl. Came from the hunting space.
Yeah. I'd been reborn into 1968, out in northeast China. And my one and only cheat was the space tied to this axe. Any animal inside, I could drop in a single swing.
Yesterday was my first time on level one, and I bagged eleven chickens all at once. Kept what I needed, and buried the rest in the snowbank outside the courtyard wall. Winter in the Northeast is basically one giant freezer, but no matter how frozen it is, fresh meat's only good for a couple of days. I had to move it fast.
I already had a plan. Behind the Red Star Commune, down at the foot of the mountain, there was a black market. Three days from now the space would refresh, and I'd slaughter all ten of those hens at once and take them down there for cash.
But right now, the first thing I needed was a gun. I had to go grinding in the space a lot, plus head up the mountain by myself. Without a decent weapon on me, I just never felt safe.