TCFSRMR |Chapter 10

When Yin Zhaodi took the basket and chased after her, Liang Cuiping had already gone so far that there was no sign of her shadow, and for a moment she found it a little strange.

That Liang Cuiping was the kind of person who loved money as if it were her life. How was it that today she had been like a whirlwind, not only sending over the peaches and apricots, but even not wanting the basket?

When she turned back, she happened to run into Old Lady Shi, who was coming out of the kitchen carrying noodle dumpling soup, so she hurried over to give her a hand.

Leaning over, she saw that in the bowl in the old lady’s hands there were two beautiful fried eggs floating, and the old lady had also scooped in a large spoonful of brown sugar. The sweetness of the brown sugar together with the fragrance of the fried eggs made Yin Zhaodi smack her lips unconsciously.

The noses of the children were each more sensitive than the last, and they rushed straight out of the room:

“Grandma, give me a bowl…”

“Mom, I want some too…”

“Everyone gets some, everyone gets some.” The old lady smiled until her face turned into a chrysanthemum.

Seeing how happy the children were, the bit of heartache Yin Zhaodi had felt over wasting eggs vanished without a trace, and she spat a smile:

“Do I usually short you of food or drink? One and all, you’re like starving ghosts who have just been reincarnated.”

The children, though, had no time to answer. One by one, they hugged their bowls and started wolfing the food down.

No matter whether it was brown sugar or fried eggs, those were all rare treats. Usually they only got to eat one boiled egg on their birthdays.

They ate slurping and gulping, looking just like a nest of piglets scrambling for food. Especially the twin brothers Shi Nan and Shi Bei, whose little faces were practically buried in their bowls.

“Yingying can eat too.” Seeing that Shi Ying still looked a little restrained, the old lady simply picked it up, stuffed it directly into Shi Ying’s hands, then took the last bowl and put it by Shi Heng’s side. “Hengheng can eat too.”

Shi Heng, however, acted as if he hadn’t heard, still lowering his head, as if he wanted to bore a hole in the ground with his stare.

Looking at her grandson, who was thin as a skeleton, the old lady’s eyes filled with a kind of indescribable sadness.

Even a fool knows to eat. She did not expect her grandson to be clever in this life, but he should at least eat, shouldn’t he?

Just as she was thinking about how to coax Shi Heng into eating a bite, over there Shi Ying had already jumped down from the small stool:

“Older brother, drink soup.”

As she spoke, she went to pull Shi Heng’s hand.

The next moment, the old lady nearly burst into tears, and in excitement she turned to Shi Zongyi and said:

“Old man, look, look quickly…”

Shi Zongyi also strode over quickly. Seeing his grandson being held by Shi Ying and unexpectedly obedient, he was so excited that even his beard kept trembling:

“Good, good.”

Ever since he married the old lady, Shi Zongyi had no idea how many mocking remarks he had heard. But even if everyone said he was not right in the head, that he had actually brought a woman with a big belly into the house and even treasured her like some priceless gem, Shi Zongyi had always cherished his old wife deeply.

The saying that when you love the house you love its crow applied to him too, and he also treated Shi Guoan as if he were his own child.

As the first male grandson under his knee, when Shi Heng was born, Shi Zongyi was just like every grandfather in the world, so happy he could not close his mouth.

In the end, though, this grandson turned out to be foolish.

After that, all sorts of rumors started spreading. Some said Shi Guoan was so hard命 that he brought disaster to his relatives, some said that Shi Zongyi himself carried bad luck in his fate and brought it to others…

Although Shi Zongyi was clumsy with words and did not know how to argue back, when he was alone he could not help feeling secretly upset.

Right now, seeing that Shi Heng really did react to Shi Ying, not at all like usual when he seemed to be just an empty shell, with his soul not even here, Shi Zongyi’s excitement was no less than the old lady’s.

“Baby brother isn’t a fool, oh.” 001’s electronic voice suddenly sounded in Shi Ying’s mind.

Shi Ying naturally knew this too. In that information-rich era in her previous life, a child like her older brother had a beautiful and sad name, and that was “the children of the stars.”

As if worried that Shi Ying did not understand, 001 added another line:

“He just has the world he likes.”

Children like that also existed in the interstellar world. As long as you guided them and helped them find the world that belonged to them, some of them could also create glory that belonged to them. At the very least, living a whole life as an ordinary person was also no problem.

“How do you guide them?”

001 instantly went silent.

In the future interstellar age, there were naturally all kinds of high-tech, highly precise instruments, which combined with the child’s brainwaves and daily life to help make judgments, and then guided them step by step.

The child-rearing systems specially equipped for children also had this function.

It did not.

Aside from the general textbooks used by interstellar schools, it had nothing else.

Mm, today was another day of self-reproach because it was too useless.

Not wanting Shi Ying to be too disappointed, it said:

“The books I gave you before, let him look at those.”

Shi Ying fell silent again. To be honest, it was a little embarrassing. At any rate, in her previous life she had also gone to a top university, but when it came to the so-called elementary school textbooks in the system’s mouth, aside from literature and history related material and other books on interests and special skills, the science-related ones were basically like looking at a heavenly book.

Compared with the current textbooks in Huaguo, the interstellar general textbooks were undoubtedly much richer.

They were simply all over the place, with everything included.

Thinking like this, 001’s suggestion did not seem impossible either.

It was just that there was still one difficult problem. For 001, unless what it had previously stored inside was a physical item, such as culture medium and other environment-related things, or things directly collected in like the wheat from the self-retained plot before, otherwise it simply could not get the physical item out.

As for those books, even Shi Ying could only browse them online. There were no physical books to be had.

If she were to ask Shi Ying to memorize them and retell them to Shi Heng, that would be making things far too difficult for her. There was also this: they wanted to guide Shi Heng to find something he was interested in, and compared with Shi Ying’s dry retelling, the immersive reading effect online was undoubtedly much better.

“I’ll think of a way.” After dropping those words, 001 went quiet and concentrated on tinkering.

Over there, Shi Guoan and Miao Xiuxiu had also finished tidying the room.

Their family of three lived in the east room. It was called the east room, but in fact it was just less than two adobe rooms built next to the main house.

Originally, Shi Guoan and Miao Xiuxiu lived in one large room, while Shi Heng lived alone in a small room.

Now that Shi Ying had come back, Shi Guoan thought of clearing out their room. Then the two of them would live in the small room, while the large room would be partitioned in the middle, with one room for each of the two children.

But today the time was too tight, so there was naturally no time to partition anything. Besides, the couple felt very uncertain about Shi Ying, afraid that if they woke up tomorrow, the supposed return of their daughter would turn out to be just a beautiful dream they had made. Right now they were practically staring at their daughter without blinking.

How could they bear to let her sleep alone?

Seeing that Shi Heng was also very attached to Shi Ying, they were afraid he would not be willing to go back to his own room either. So the four of them simply slept together.

Miao Xiuxiu quickly took off her shoes, carefully attended to every nook and cranny on the heated kang bed, brushed it clean with a chicken-feather duster, and finally laid down four pillows across it.

The two children were in the middle, while the two of them protected them from either side like guardian deities.

Looking at the two children lying side by side in the middle, Miao Xiuxiu’s tears fell again. Even Shi Guoan was full of mixed feelings.

After all, she was still a child. Shi Ying had also been very tired today, and almost as soon as she touched the bed, she fell asleep.

No one knew how long she had slept, but she was woken by 001 in her mind:

“Baby, baby…”

Shi Ying opened her eyes at once. Before she could even speak, 001’s dispirited voice followed:

“Baby, I’m sorry. Hurry and go back to sleep.”

How could it be some unqualified parenting system? It was simply the worst one, wasn’t it?

It had actually forgotten that a baby’s age was when sleep needed to be replenished the most. How had it gotten so excited that it woke the sleeping baby?

“I’m not sleeping anymore… System, did you find a solution?” Shi Ying was also keeping in mind the matter of helping Shi Heng find a direction he was interested in.

“Mm… but only temporarily…” 001’s tone was clearly still a little guilty. Just now, it had used all its strength before finally managing to tinker out a hotspot-sharing function. But as the saying went, it was too trashy, so the hotspot it could share could only target Shi Heng, which was not the main problem. The troubling part was that the time window was uncertain, and the things it could share were even more limited.

There was only that batch of elementary and middle school textbook content. As for any other function, there was none at all.

If Shi Heng was not interested in the content of the textbooks, then it really would not have any method at all.

“You mean, it can be shared now?” Shi Ying was quite happy.

“Mm… you follow the steps I say, first hold onto older brother’s hand…”

As long as the first hotspot sharing succeeded, afterward so long as the two people were within the distance allowed by the system, Shi Heng could automatically connect at any time.

Shi Ying rolled over and hugged Shi Heng’s arm.

Shi Heng clearly slept very lightly. Tugged like that by Shi Ying, he opened his eyes at once and instinctively wanted to pull his hand away. But when he saw clearly that the one hugging his arm was Shi Ying, his hand dropped again, letting Shi Ying hold him in her arms.

“Brother Guoan, look…” A thin voice sounded. Who else could it be but Miao Xiuxiu?

Unlike before, when the couple had been lying on either side, at this moment the two of them were each sitting on a small stool by the bed, leaning in close to a single dim lamp, watching their pair of children without blinking.

The scene of Shi Ying rolling over and hugging Shi Heng’s arm had been fully seen by the couple. If this were in another household, it would be nothing more than a trivial matter, but the two of them were so excited they could hardly contain themselves.

Shi Guoan smoothed Miao Xiuxiu’s hair and gave an “mm”. Whether it was because the night wind was cold or because he had caught a chill, his voice sounded distinctly hoarse.

“What should we do about that family of Niu Erzhu’s?” Miao Xiuxiu carefully tucked in the blankets around the two children and said in a low voice, “And Liang Cuiping…”

Today Yingying’s reaction when she saw Liang Cuiping was clearly off, and besides, she and the Liang family had a grievance.

Among the educated youths sent down to the countryside, Miao Xiuxiu was the best-looking one, and because of that, she was not just any kind of popular.

The one circling around Miao Xiuxiu was not only the educated youths at the youth station, but also Liang Cuiping’s younger brother, Liang Mingwei.

Liang Mingwei felt that he had studied through middle school, so he counted as half an educated person, and his older brother Liang Mingjun was a technician at the machinery factory, who had already gotten the connections worked out for him and would soon be able to enter the factory.

Carrying this sense of superiority, Liang Mingwei directly began a forceful pursuit of Miao Xiuxiu.

Even though Miao Xiuxiu sternly refused, Liang Mingwei firmly believed that Miao Xiuxiu was playing hard to get, and he kept pestering her without stopping. Once, when Miao Xiuxiu was washing clothes by the river, Liang Mingwei came up to harass her again and directly grabbed the underclothes she was holding in her hand, saying he would help wash them. In her panic, Miao Xiuxiu fell straight into the rushing river.

At the critical moment, it was Shi Guoan, who had happened to come home from demobilization that day, who saved Miao Xiuxiu, and also beat up Liang Mingwei.

That was also the beginning of the two of them budding feelings.

When Liang Mingwei saw that the woman he had taken a fancy to had actually been snatched away by the wild seed and hanger-on Shi Guoan, whom he had always looked down on, he nearly exploded with rage. Yet Shi Guoan’s popularity was far better than his, and besides, Shi Guoan was tall and broad. Facing Shi Guoan, Liang Mingwei could get nothing but a beating.

With nowhere to vent all that anger, Liang Mingwei turned around and went straight into his lover’s room. Unfortunately, he was caught red-handed by the man’s husband, who then turned around and sent him to the police station. Once the charge of hooliganism came down, how could Liang Mingwei not end up in prison?

Strictly speaking, in the whole matter, Miao Xiuxiu was clearly the victim. In the end, though, Liang Cuiping’s family was unreasonable and actually came to hate Miao Xiuxiu and Shi Guoan as a couple. Especially Miao Xiuxiu. Every time Liang Cuiping saw her, she never had a good face. It was as if Miao Xiuxiu had not married her younger brother and had instead committed some unforgivable heinous crime.

“Don’t worry, leave this matter to me…” Shi Guoan put his arm around Miao Xiuxiu, his lowered brows and eyes carrying a bit of murderously cold severity in the night.

He had been born with thin family ties, and his relatives were his life, especially this pair of children before him.