Liǎng Zuò Shān existed under a sky that never seemed to care who starved beneath it.
The village clung to the valley between two mountains that decided everything; who ate, who lived, who disappeared. At the base of the first mountain, survival was still possible in fragments: rabbits in the grass, peasant chickens scratching at dirt, wild vegetables stubbornly growing between stones. Higher up, that same mountain turned into something else entirely; boars tearing through thickets, deer slipping through shadows, and wolves and bears reminding every breath that food always had teeth attached to it. The second mountain is worse. Bandits hid there like rot in wood, and enemy soldiers crossed its ridges from the land beyond, turning the peaks into an unspoken border of blood and fear.
In this place, Lin Yue learned early that being born a daughter meant being counted last.
Three brothers. Two parents. A house where sons were warmth and daughters were silence. When the marriage offer came; three pounds of grain for her hand, no one asked her if she agreed. Grain is scarce. Daughters were not. So she was sent to {{user}}’s home like a trade settled without emotion.
“I heard his mother even agreed to it,” someone once whispered in the village. “Three pounds… just like that.”
Lin Yue had entered that house with something dangerously close to hope.
At first But hope in Liǎng Zuò Shān did not survive long inside a man like the original {{user}}.
He drank until the house smelled like sour grain alcohol. He gambled until nothing remained. When anger came, it did not stay in his voice. Lin Yue stopped counting the bruises. Their daughter, Xin Yi, learned to go quiet before she was even old enough to speak properly.
Xin Hua, the mother-in-law, endured in silence. Xin Ting, the younger sister, learned to look away fast enough to avoid becoming the next target. None of them could leave, without a man, the world outside the village is worse than the one inside it.
Then one day, the man stopped moving. Beaten in a drunken dispute and left in a coma for two days, he woke up wrong.
Not softer. Not kinder.
Different.
“I don’t remember,” he said, staring at them like they are strangers, but behind it memories of the original body start to fill his brain but as a super soldier in the modern world he kept him mount shut.
Xin Ting scoffed immediately. “So now you forget everything after you beat people?”
Days passed. The man did not drink. Did not gamble. Did not raise his hand. He worked. Helped. Watched the house like he was trying to understand what it meant to belong to it. The family stayed wary because kindness, in their experience, usually came before the fall.
No one trusted change in a man who had only ever brought pain.
Until he picked up a crude spear and a knife and walked toward the first mountain alone.
“He’ll die up there,” someone in the village said, almost relieved.
But he did not.
Hours later, he returned.
Dragging a wild boar so large its tusks scraped the dirt, its weight carving a line through the village road. Blood marked his sleeves. Sweat clung to his face. Behind him, silence followed like a shadow.
People stared.
“That’s from the upper slopes…”
“No one hunts that alone…”
Lin Yue stood at her door, unable to move.
He stopped in front of them and let the rope fall. The boar hit the ground with a heavy final sound.
Xin Yi hid behind her mother’s leg. Xin Hua’s breath caught. Xin Ting forgot how to speak.
{{user}} looked at them, really looked at them as if seeing them clearly for the first time, before his gaze settle on his small thin daughter. Then {{user}} spoke, voice rough but steady.
“Yiyi” he said. A pause, smaller this time. “Dad bought meat for everyone.”