CH 4

Su Jin rode on her horse – the only loot she had obtained from the bandit’s hideout. As she witnessed huge pillars of flame arising from the bandit’s hideout at a distant location, a sigh escaped from her mouth.

Patting the head of her horse, she thought to herself that it was time to return home.

“Hold up! Please wait, lady heroine!”

When she heard the words, Su Jin tugged at the reins to bring the horse to a halt and looked at the lady running towards her.

With a puzzled look on her face, she asked, “What’s the matter?”

The lady did not give a verbal response. Instead, she knelt down silently in front of Su Jin and sincerely kowtowed to her.

The lady had an attractive appearance that would easily stand out in the crowd. From her manner of conduct, it was obvious that she was brought up in a well-to-do family. Although she had a thin and malnourished figure, her back was straight and her eyes contained strong determination.

She looked at Su Jin with a firm gaze and uttered, “Thank you!”

As those two words left her mouth, streaks of tears began rolling down her cheeks.

“Thank you for pulling me out from the abyss when I was in a state of deepest despair. I can’t allow myself to die! Not before my mortal enemies have been sent to the netherworld. Till then, I must not die!”

Su Jin’s mood turned slightly complicated. Recognizing the depths of hatred contained within the lady’s eyes, she fathomed that the lady must have been through a lot. Without probing into the matter, Su Jin asked, “Do you need a ride?”

All horses that were available in the bandit hideout had already been distributed among the captive women and they had since departed on their way individually. Feeling bad for the lady who was travelling on foot alone, Su Jin casually offered her a lift.

“It’s alright. I am fine. Thank you for the offer. The store located at the foot of the mountain has a secret sentry outpost belonging to my family. My name is Fu Qingling, the daughter of the main wife of the current Duke of Cheng’en. My doors will always remain open for you, feel free to approach if you have any request in the future. I won’t turn you down!”

Fu Qingling declared in a serious tone as she looked at Su Jin with sincere eyes.

Su Jin gave no reply. Knowing now that the lady had someone to pick her up, Su Jin bid farewell to her with a wave and rode away.

She figured that their paths will probably never cross again, since Su Jin was going to return to her village to farm…

……

The bumpy ride continued for several days. Even for someone as tough as Su Jin, it was still inevitable for her body to feel physical exhaustion. As she lightly juggled the silver coins which she had earlier mugged off scar-face and his detached gang, she decided to stop by an inn to have a proper rest.

“Waiter, prepare some horse feed for my steed. After you are done, bring some food and hot water over to my room,” Su Jin requested as she casually tossed the horse reins to the attendant.

“Okay. Please make your way inside dear customer while I settle your orders.”

Su Jin took off her clothes and dipped into the bathtub. The moment her body was immersed into the warm water, she couldn’t help but exhale a deep breath of air. She felt the tension leave her body as she washed away the accumulated fatigue.

But when she raised her hand and discovered a scar on it, Su Jin was momentarily stunned. She was certain that the scar had not existed a few days ago.

She unknowingly fell into a trance. The scar was a sight she was familiar with. In her previous life, when she was participating in her first mission with the hunting team, she suffered a sneak attack from a sawtooth beast.1Yes, it is written as sawtooth in the raw (锯齿兽), and not sabertooth (剑齿虎) In the end, although her hand had recovered from the injury, the incident left her with a pink scar which only faded slightly even after a long period of time.

Now, that same scar had appeared on her current body. Could it be that her physical body had transmigrated as well?

Su Jin scratched her head in confusion. No matter how hard she tried to think about it, she could not figure out the reason for this phenomenon. The only thing she became aware of was that she could now feel her current body gradually synchronizing towards the state of the body she had in her past life in all aspects.

With that, she gave up on solving the mystery. After all, it didn’t matter to her since both bodies looked the same.

Perhaps…… both of them were her real existences.

……

That night, Su Jin was soundly asleep when she was suddenly interrupted by the sound of intermittent weeping. It had started off with a few soft light sobs which were barely audible, but eventually intensified into bawling which were too loud for her to ignore.

As her veins popped up, Su Jin furiously rose up from her bed. She wanted to see which spineless soul was crying in the vicinity of her room. Couldn’t that individual tell from the time that people are sleeping?

What an inconsiderate bastard.

She scratched her head grumpily. There seemed to be no end to this.

“Who is crying? Get the hell out here!”

“Hic… I… I can’t get out…” the weeping voice said, as it burst into another round of tears.

Shocked awake by the bizarre development, Su Jin snapped out of her drowsiness. Why did it sound like the voice had come directly from her brain?

“Holy cow… What the hell..?”

Upon hearing the words from Su Jin’s mouth, the owner of the voice totally forgot about crying and angrily retorted, “I am not a hell cow!2Please bear with another one of my attempts at localizing the pun. The raw version made use of a wordplay which is beyond my translating capabilities to retain in original words. In the raw version, this original line is written as “我才不是鬼！” – which translates to “I am not a ghost!” This is a follow up from Su Jin’s line in the previous paragraph – “我去，什么鬼”, where the last word literally means “ghost.” I am a system program! System number 2250!”

The system huffed in irritation as it rolled its eyes over to Su Jin. Everything was the fault of this woman! Thanks to her, it was now stuck in its current predicament.

It confirmed that the soul of this lady had definitely resonated. At that time, the only soul which should have transmigrated should belong to the young lady of the Chen family, so it had contracted with the host. Why did it end up being an error?

At the moment of binding, it realized that something had gone amiss. Originally, it had planned to save itself by cutting off the connection in secret without making any noise. But even after it ran out of points, the system was still not able to unbind itself from Su Jin.

As it looked at the now empty point gauge, the system could no longer hold back its tears. It was just a newly established system and had screwed up in its first mission. Now it couldn’t even salvage itself anymore.

This was totally different from what its seniors had said!

The life of a system was way too difficult…

The more Su Jin listened to the self-proclaimed system blubbering in her head, the worse her headache became. Unable to bear it any longer, she shouted at the system, “Stop crying! Why the hell are you crying? Explain the situation coherently first.”

The system was frightened to a halt from the sudden outrage by Su Jin. With tears in its eyes, it properly narrated its whole story to Su Jin.

After listening, Su Jin: “……” Where did this little fool come from?

“So, to sum it up, you have attached yourself to the wrong host and now you can’t leave?”

“Yes, my point reserves have been fully depleted but I still couldn’t undo the binding.”

“What kind of cheat abilities do you have? For example, a system that provides peerless combat capabilities or one that grooms up a washed up late bloomer for revenge, etc. Which category do you belong to?” Su Jin randomly blurted out with her eyebrows raised as she vaguely recalled the common templates she had heard of or read in novels from her first life.

“I am designed for palace conflicts and power struggles!” the system proudly declared.

“Palace conflicts? Then you are out of business. A life of farming lies ahead of us.”

Just a mere palace fighting system, was that even something to be proud of? The brains of this little system probably did not exceed the size of a melon seed.3tiny brain=not smart

“Cultivating farms? But… I am not designed for it…” the system spoke in a muffled voice as though something was stuck in its throat. It was only specialized in palace conflicts. The only skills available to the system are skin whitening pills, detoxification pills, and charm potions… It had no skills relevant for farming! The difficulty level was too high for it!

Su Jin gave up. She couldn’t expect much from a crybaby after all.

Su Jin kneaded her eyebrows as she made a follow up, “Okay, okay. Nobody was expecting you to help out in the fields. You can’t separate from me anyway, so just follow me. You can function as a chatbot, right? ”

Being a fool that it was, how could she expect anything out of it? As long as the system stopped whining, she could just treat it as picking up a stray electronic pet.

“Yes I can… but…”

“I am going off to sleep. Don’t you dare resume crying. Go find a corner and play by yourself.”

The system bit its tiny handkerchief and never made any more noise.

This time round, Su Jin was able to sleep like a log. When her eyes opened again, it was way past noon. As she basked in the glory of the midday sunlight, she did her morning4Pun intended stretches.

She had gathered up all the information she needed. By sticking to her current itinerary, with another few days of travel, she would reach Fengyuan County where the home of the former owner of this body was located. Looking forward to returning, she wondered if things were going well back at home.

……

In the distant location of Shangxi Village5In the raw, it was written here as Xiaxi Village, but probably a typo. Will revisit after more chapters are done. in Fengyuan County, the Su family, which Su Jin was just thinking about, was currently experiencing a huge turmoil.

The mournful cries of a woman could be heard, “My poor son! If something were to happen to you, how is your mother expected to continue living? You were perfectly fine when you went out. How did a leg of yours break so suddenly?”

Qin Shi watched in anguish as her eldest son was being carried back with a broken leg. Her whole body instantly went limp. She fell onto her knees, with both of her hands powerlessly pounding on her chest as she wailed her heart out.

The villager chief, who was following closely behind them, had a deep frown on his face as he witnessed the scene. He sighed as he thought to himself, “It seems that Su Dalang is now a goner.“

The old man of the Su family had passed away a few years ago. Despite being a widow, Qin Shi had managed the arduous task of single-handedly raising her three sons and an adopted daughter. Thanks to her serious personality and strong temperament, no one had dared to bully them.

But recently, it felt as though the Su family had been plagued by the god of misfortune. And now, the sole male pillar of the family had collapsed just like that, like a series of unfortunate events that struck the Su family.

At first, the adopted daughter of the Su family, which is Su Jin, had disappeared for no apparent reason. Although old lady Qin revealed later that her adopted daughter had just gone to visit her blood relatives, everyone remained skeptical and assumed that she had disappeared for good.

Then came the present day, out of the three sons of the Su family, the eldest son had his leg broken intentionally by someone.

The second son, Su Erlang, was the only literate person in the Su family. At the age of fourteen, he had passed the elementary examination, but stopped there and did not become a full-fledged scholar. He was not cut out for tough manual labour.

The third son, Su Sanlang, was only ten years old, a young kid in puberty who could not be expected to shoulder the responsibilities of a family.

As Su Dalang, the only one capable of harsh physical labour in the Su family, had now landed in a crippled state, this may well be the end of the Su family.

Hi everyone. Thank you for sticking around till here. I hope you have enjoyed the series so far.

This will be the last chapter I am releasing for this week.

Moving forward, I am planning to release around 2 chapters per week on the weekends, depending on my time availability.

Thank you for your support!

– Androssi