Adelaide Sinclair woke up from hunger.
Her stomach was so empty it felt like it was twisting upward in waves, even worse than the throbbing pain in her forehead.
Then, all at once, a flood of images crashed into her mind—
The blinding light over an operating table. A nurse’s shrill scream. That man’s bloodshot eyes. And then the firelight bursting open in an instant.
She had come from an ancient martial-and-medical family, and in her former life she had served as an associate chief surgeon at a top hospital in the capital. A madman had blown her to pieces with a bomb.
So... where was this?
Adelaide muttered the words under her breath without thinking. The sobbing beside her stopped short, replaced by a hurried, trembling voice.
"Xixi, you’re awake? What did you just say?"
She struggled to open her eyes. Everything stayed blurred for quite a while before it finally came into focus.
What she saw was a mud-plastered wall, yellow and cracked, with most of the surface flaked away. Underneath, dark wheat straw was showing through.
The beams overhead were black with age, and cobwebs hung everywhere.
Under her was a dirt kang with only a thin layer of dry straw spread over it, hard as a plank. The quilt covering her was torn and filthy, gray-black with grime, split in several places, with old cotton stuffing poking out.
This was definitely not a hospital.
Adelaide Sinclair was completely stunned.
The woman beside her had only just stopped crying, but seeing her stare blankly after waking, she panicked and burst into tears again.
"Xixi, what’s wrong with you? Did you hurt your head in the fall? Don’t scare your mother like this... wuwu..."
Adelaide turned her head to look, and the sight of the woman gave her a jolt.
She looked to be around forty, yet both temples were already white. Her complexion was dark and sallow, and deep lines covered her face.
She was thin as kindling, so gaunt she looked as though a gust of wind might knock her over. Her coarse cloth clothes were patched over and over again. Most painful to look at were her hands, covered in cracks and chilblains, raw enough to make anyone wince.
Strapped to her back in a ragged cloth wrap was a little boy of about three. His eyes were shut in sleep. He too was tiny and painfully thin, his face waxy yellow, his hair dry and limp like dead grass stuck against his scalp.
The instant Adelaide Sinclair saw the child, her heart clenched so hard it almost stopped. Right after that, a sharp pain stabbed through her head, and memories that clearly did not belong to her came rushing in all at once, like a flood breaking through a dam.
She had actually transmigrated.
She had landed in a place called the Dayu Dynasty. The new Emperor had been on the throne for six years, under the reign title Yongli.
And now, she had become a peasant wife of the Hartley family in Qinghe Village. This "Adelaide Sinclair" had the exact same name as her, yet their lives were worlds apart.
From the day the original owner was born, just because she was a girl, she had been despised by her own father and grandmother. She spent her days swallowing every grievance in silence, timid as a little field mouse, never daring to resist.
In the Hartley family, the one who truly held power was the old madam, Amanda Whitfield. She had two sons and one daughter.
The eldest branch was Bernard Hartley's. He had a firstborn son, Clarence Hartley, who could study and was attending school in town. He was the whole family's hope, the old madam's treasure, the very apple of her eye. There was also a daughter, Millicent Hartley, a few months older than the original owner.
As for the original owner's father, he was Douglas Hartley of the second branch.
He had only this one daughter. In a household that prized sons over daughters, he had taken more than enough anger from his own mother, and when he could not bear it, he turned around and dumped it all on his wife and child. Beatings and curses came every few days as if they were nothing.
Then, when the original owner turned sixteen, something even more absurd happened. She saved a sickly poor scholar named Aubrey Sinclair by the roadside. By chance, old Madam Amanda Whitfield noticed the round jade pendant hanging on him, and greed rose in her heart on the spot.
To snatch that pendant in a way no one could openly criticize, she actually pushed Douglas Hartley into using "men and women must keep their distance" and "a girl's reputation matters most" as excuses, and forced that half-dead scholar and Adelaide Sinclair into a marriage.
On their wedding night, the old madam went even further. She drugged both of them and made sure the marriage became real in every sense.
The original owner remembered that night only in a blur. Not long after, she discovered she was with child, and later gave birth to a son, Oliver Sinclair.
One blow after another had nearly hollowed her out until she lived like a walking shell. The only things holding her up were little Oliver on her back, and her mother, Elara Hartley, the only person in that house who had ever shown her kindness.
This time, she had been driven to the back hill to gather firewood. She had wanted to pick a few wild fruits for Oliver, just so the child could fill his stomach a little. But she slipped from a tree, fell hard, split her head open, and was carried back by the villagers.
Not long after that, the original owner stopped breathing.
And Adelaide Sinclair, who in the modern world had been blown apart in an explosion so completely not even bones were left behind, woke up inside this body.
Once she sorted through the whole mess, Adelaide Sinclair only wanted to throw back her head and curse at the sky—
Damn it all!
In the modern world, she had been the treasured daughter of a renowned family, a medical genius skilled in both Chinese and Western medicine, with a brilliant future ahead of her and a life as free as the wind. So how in the world had she ended up in this rotten place, turned into a bullied little peasant wife?
In her last life, she’d saved lives, treated the sick, racked up who knew how much good karma—so why couldn’t Heaven at least give her a better identity?!
Adelaide Sinclair shut her eyes in despair, so miserable she almost wanted to die all over again on the spot.
Forget it. Let it all burn. The sooner the better.
By her ear came her mother’s soft sobbing. It was thin and low, but it stabbed at her like needles, forcing her to face what was real.
Adelaide Sinclair took a deep breath and made herself calm down.
She opened her eyes and looked at Elara Hartley. Her lips moved. She wanted to call out, "Mother," but no sound would come.
In her former life, her mother had long since passed. She had never once known what it felt like to be loved by a mother. So that simple form of address felt strange to her, almost impossible to say.
Elara Hartley wiped at her tears and quickly asked, "Xixi, what is it? Are you hungry?"
Hungry—yes, very. So hungry her stomach felt like it was about to stick to her back.
Who knew how many days this body had been unconscious? Her stomach was completely empty, burning so badly it felt as if fire had swept through it.
Adelaide Sinclair nodded.
Elara Hartley forced out a faint smile, braced herself against the edge of the kang, and stood. Little Oliver Sinclair was still asleep on her back, sleeping deeply and sweetly.
"Mother will go get you something to eat right away. Rest first."
With that, she dragged her exhausted body out of the room.
Fighting the dizziness, Adelaide Sinclair slowly shifted herself toward the battered wooden table in the room.
On the table sat a cracked bronze mirror. It was an old habit from her days as a physician—she needed to check the wound on her forehead first.
But the moment she looked into the mirror, it was the face inside that caught her attention before the injury did.
The girl in the mirror was pale, painfully thin, her cheekbones jutting out at a glance. Anyone could see she had gone hungry for a long time. Yet because of that, her eyes seemed even more striking—clear as an autumn lake, lit with a touch of panic and a quiet, lively spark.
Her nose was straight and fine. Her lips were dry and dull now, but their shape was beautifully formed. Her whole face was plain and clean in that soft, elegant way, with not a trace of powder on it, yet it still made people want to feel sorry for her.
Adelaide Sinclair froze where she was.
Even though she had seen more than a few beautiful girls in the modern world, she still had to admit it—this face really was striking.
Then she thought of Elara Hartley and Douglas Hartley, both of them with plain, even somewhat rough features, and she could not help muttering inwardly—
Where on earth did this skip-a-generation beauty come from?
She stared into the bronze mirror for a while before finally noticing the strip of gray cloth wrapped around her forehead.
Slowly, she untied it. At once, a gash slanting down from her hairline came into view. The flesh had split open, the wound had been treated badly, and blood was still seeping out. It looked awful, enough to make anyone’s scalp tingle.
Adelaide Sinclair let out a quiet sigh.
If this had been in the modern world, she would have had every way to make this wound heal neat and clean.
But now... without rice, even the cleverest housewife could not cook.
All she could do was go up the mountain herself and try her luck, see if she could find some herbs to stop the bleeding and reduce the inflammation.
She truly missed that medical room of hers, the one that had everything.
The instant that thought rose in her mind, the hospital where she had worked suddenly appeared in her head with shocking clarity. Every corner, every instrument, every shelf looked vivid and real, detailed in a way ordinary memory should never be.
What... was going on?!
