Chapter 1: From Hell to Heaven

Chapter 1: From Hell to Heaven

"She’s my flesh and blood, and I raised her. Don’t I have the right to make decisions for her?"

"I’m her mother. I gave her life. Even if I decide to sell her, she’d still have to obey me!"

"Really, she’s defying me now! Talking back to me! I don’t believe I can’t control her!"

"..."

A shrill female voice outside was cursing non-stop.

Ye Qing completely ignored the noise outside, staring blankly at the girl in the mirror with a swollen cheek.

Her hair was dry and yellow, her face pale, her body frail—a clear sign of malnutrition.

Yet Ye Qing couldn’t help but crack a smile.

The moment she did, the pain from her wound made her wince and instinctively suck in a cold breath.

But it didn’t dampen her good mood.

Because she had traveled through time, from the apocalyptic world to the early 1970s, becoming a sixteen-year-old girl.

After a decade in the apocalypse, facing global disasters and a chaotic world, every survivor lived in fear, not knowing when the scythe of death would fall upon them.

Ye Qing was no different. She felt she was on the verge of breaking down.

But she never expected that just when she was about to collapse, fate had mercy on her and sent her back a hundred years.

Looking out at the gentle morning sunlight and the lush trees downstairs, her eyes welled up with excitement, almost bursting into tears.

Compared to the devastated wasteland of the apocalypse, this era was heaven to her.

Even if the times were tense and resources scarce.

It couldn’t be worse than the apocalypse, right?

So even though her current situation was difficult, Ye Qing couldn’t help but feel ecstatic.

The original owner of this body was also named Ye Qing, born into a working-class family in Shen City.

The original body had an older brother and sister, and a pair of younger twin siblings.

As the eldest son, Brother Ye Zhi Gao held an undisputed position in the family.

Sister Ye Hong was sweet-mouthed and clever, always able to make the elders laugh and gain attention.

The twins, Ye Zhiyuan and Ye Xia, were the youngest in the family and the only set of twins in the entire building. They were pretty and did well in school, adored by everyone.

The original body, being the third child, was a quiet and dull girl who only knew how to work hard. Naturally, she became the marginalized one, bullied and neglected by the family.

Since the age of five or six, the original body had been taking on household chores—laundry, cooking, cleaning—everything.

But even so, she never gained the affection or attention of her parents.

Any delicious snacks at home were never for her;

The meat dishes on the table, her siblings would fight over, but if she dared reach for them, she’d be scolded;

Her clothes and shoes were all hand-me-downs, patched over and over again.

If it weren’t for the fact that leaving the third child uneducated would look bad, her parents might not have even sent her to school, preferring to keep her home to work.

This time, it was even more outrageous.

A policy came down encouraging educated youth to go to the countryside. Each family was required to send at least one child.

Coincidentally, the eldest brother and sister above the original body were perfect candidates. The elder brother had graduated from high school a year ago and hadn’t found a job yet, and the elder sister was about to graduate soon.

Logically, either of them could go, and it definitely shouldn’t have been the third child, who was still in junior high.

But the mother, partial to her eldest son, decided to give her own job at the soap factory to him to take over.

The elder sister, Ye Hong, was also cunning. Seeing the situation, she quickly found herself a boyfriend, the son of the neighborhood committee director. She even promised her family that once she married into the director’s household, they could help find a suitable job for her younger brother, Ye Zhiyuan.

It was a promise that everyone knew was unlikely to come true, but the mother believed it wholeheartedly.

She had already given her job to her eldest son, but her youngest son was also thirteen. In another two or three years, if he couldn’t get into high school, he’d need a job.

But nowadays, jobs in the city were hard to come by. With her and Old Ye’s limited abilities, how could they easily find a job for their youngest son? They couldn’t just give up Old Ye’s job, could they?

Her job at the soap factory was unskilled, and she probably wouldn’t get a promotion or raise until retirement, so giving it to her eldest son was no big deal.

But Old Ye was different. He was only in his early forties and could still work for more than a decade. He was already a team leader in the workshop, and if he played his cards right, he might even get promoted again.

The mother wasn’t stupid. If her youngest son took over Old Ye’s position, he’d have to start from the bottom of the workshop, earning the lowest wage. When she compared that to keeping Old Ye as team leader, it was clearly more advantageous to keep him in his position.

Just as she was worrying about her youngest son’s future job, her eldest daughter promised to help. It was like a weight was lifted off her shoulders.

And in her heart, the mother also calculated that if her eldest daughter really married into the neighborhood committee director’s family, the entire Ye family would benefit.

First, having an official relative would raise the status of the Ye family in Yanpond Old Street. Maybe with some help from this relative, Old Ye could even get a promotion at the factory.

Second, the economic conditions of the neighborhood committee director’s family would be much better than theirs. Once her daughter married into that family, she could secretly support and subsidize her natal family.

No matter how she looked at it, this was a marriage that would benefit the Ye family greatly.

Given that the eldest daughter had such enormous utility value, Mother Ye was naturally not foolish enough to send her down to the countryside.

Thus, it became inevitable that the unlikable third daughter, the original body, would be the unlucky substitute to go in place of her older siblings.

Even though the original body was only sixteen years old, it was no issue to Mother Ye.

In her eyes, among all the children in the family, the third daughter was the most proficient in household chores. This dead girl had always been dull and timid, and such a personality would never lead to great success in the city. Instead, going to the countryside for farm work seemed most fitting.

Without consulting her third daughter, Mother Ye directly submitted Ye Qing's name to the neighborhood committee.

It wasn't until early that morning, when the revolutionary committee arrived to deliver the notice of going to the countryside, that the original body realized she had been betrayed by her family.

Furious and wronged, the original body argued with Mother Ye on the spot, only to receive not an explanation or comfort, but a hard slap across the face.

Moreover, the entire family stood by Mother Ye's side, accusing the third daughter of being selfish and unfilial.

Father Ye even went so far as to say that if the third daughter refused to go to the countryside, she should leave the Ye family and they would never recognize her as their daughter again.

Overwhelmed with anger, the original body retreated to her room, where she coughed up blood and suffered a sudden heart attack, dying on the spot.

And that was when Ye Qing took over the body.

Feeling the still-irregular heartbeat of her new body, Ye Qing instinctively placed her hand on her chest.

In the next second, a light green glow surged from her palm and flowed into her chest.

As her heart was enveloped in warmth, Ye Qing's heartbeat gradually stabilized, and her breathing became much smoother, leaving her feeling light and comfortable.

Ye Qing couldn't help but sigh in relief, feeling immensely grateful.

Fortunately, her wood-type ability had crossed over with her.

The body had actually been born with a congenital heart condition, but it hadn't been particularly severe at birth, so the Ye family hadn't noticed the abnormality.

However, over the past decade, the original body had been subjected to much hardship—overworked with household chores and severely malnourished. As a result, her heart had been operating under tremendous strain.

This time, due to the betrayal by her family and the fear of being sent to the countryside, the original body's emotions were so overwhelmed that her heart condition flared up, leading to her sudden death.

Ye Qing had awakened her wood-type ability in the third year of the apocalypse. However, since the wood-type belonged to the healing category, its combat effectiveness was lacking. It took her many trials and tribulations over ten years in the apocalypse to barely raise her ability to level two.

Now, having crossed into this special era, her wood-type ability had regressed to its initial state.

Still, even in its initial state, she could temporarily stabilize the body's condition.

However, to fully cure the congenital heart disease, it would take at least a year or two of careful treatment and regulation with her current abilities.

Ye Qing calculated in her mind.

It seemed she needed to quickly raise the level of her wood-type ability.

Otherwise, once she went to the countryside and had to work in the fields every day, the high-intensity labor would be too much for her current physical condition.

Over the course of seven or eight years, Ye Qing had figured out two simple and primary methods to upgrade her wood-type ability.

One was absorption, and the other was catalysis.

Absorption, as the name suggests, involved absorbing wood-type energy. All plants contained vitality, which served as her energy source.

Catalysis meant accelerating the germination and growth of plant seeds.

When the ability within her body was rapidly depleted to a critical point, it became possible to break through the bottleneck and achieve an upgrade.

These two methods, though simple in theory, were luxuries in the apocalypse.

Due to global cataclysms, after successive disasters like acid rain, ice storms, extreme cold, constant daylight, high temperatures, earthquakes, and endless nights, nearly all plants on Earth had become extinct. Only a few survivor bases had small reserves of plants and seeds in artificial sheds.

These remaining plants and seeds were humanity's hope for survival and were incredibly precious. Naturally, they were not something a low-level ability user like Ye Qing could access.

So later, in order to upgrade her ability, Ye Qing had to join teams of ability users searching for supplies, trying to find opportunities to obtain plants or seeds.

However, due to her limited combat strength, she had nearly lost her life many times, and the instances where she actually found plants or seeds were few and far between.

It could be said that every single day of those ten years in the apocalypse had been an immense struggle for survival.

But now, in this parallel dimension, things were different.

Ye Qing felt like a rat that had fallen into a grain storage—she was on cloud nine.

Things that had been impossible to obtain in the apocalypse were now everywhere in this dimension!

A single glance out the window revealed lush greenery as far as the eye could see.

To Ye Qing, this was truly like stepping from hell into heaven!

As for the "mess" left behind by the original body—being schemed into going to the countryside—Ye Qing not only didn't mind, but actually saw it as a blessing.

In the apocalypse, she had dreamed every night of finding an unpolluted piece of land where she could grow crops and raise flowers. Now that fate had given her this opportunity, she felt she could laugh even in her sleep.