When Qian Wanyin was taken into custody, Zhou Dana and Wang Jinzhi could not have felt more relieved. The heavy weight that had been hanging over their hearts for ages finally settled back in its place.
But before they could even catch their breath properly, a person stumbled and burst through their courtyard gate, yelling that Zhaodi was in trouble.
Zhou Dana cursed under his breath. Those two really were a pair of chaotic, troublesome fools, each more incapable of staying out of mischief than the other.
Wang Jinzhi’s mind went completely blank with shock. Her legs turned wobbly, and she stumbled and scrambled all the way toward the Wang family’s home.
Ever since Zhou Zhaodi had given birth to a baby girl, Wang Qingshan had never once treated her well. The two of them bickered every other day, so could it be that Wang Qingshan had laid hands on her again?
By the time she reached the entrance of the Wang family’s courtyard, the yard was already packed full of people, all whispering and chattering to one another.
Wang Jinzhi shoved her way through the crowd and darted inside, only to spot Zhou Zhaodi lying stiff as a board right in the middle of the muddy yard, her face as pale as a sheet of paper.
“What happened?!” Her voice trembled as she plopped straight down onto the ground, reaching out to pull Zhou Zhaodi up.
“Dear in-law!” Li Yuzhen was holding her granddaughter in her arms, her eyes darting away so that she could not bear to meet Wang Jinzhi’s gaze.
Old Man Wang was squatting by the wall, puffing on his pipe in silence. He did not make a sound until Zhou Dana stepped into the yard, then he slowly stood up, hanging his head dejectedly and calling out, “Village Chief.”
“How could a perfectly healthy person just pass out? Did Wang Qingshan hit her again?”
Zhou Dana did not even glance at Old Man Wang. His eyes swept over the crowd, but Wang Qingshan was nowhere to be seen. He furrowed his brows. “Where is Wang Qingshan?”
“He’s gone to get Zhao Qingjiang!” Right after Li Yuzhen finished speaking, Wang Qingshan walked quickly into the yard with a dark look on his face, leading Zhao Qingjiang along.
Zhao Qingjiang set his medical case down, squatted down right away, and felt Zhou Zhaodi’s pulse.
He then called out to Li Yuzhen, “Bring a lamp over here so I can get some light! I need to look at her eyelids!”
Li Yuzhen quickly stuffed her granddaughter into Old Man Wang’s arms, then hurried to the kitchen and came back out with a kerosene lamp.
In the dim yellow glow of the lamp, Zhao Qingjiang flipped Zhou Zhaodi’s eyelids open to examine them, then kept his fingers on her pulse. He looked up at Wang Qingshan. “How did she just suddenly faint when she was fine a moment ago?”
Wang Qingshan mumbled gruffly, his face flushing bright red. “When we were having dinner, she started yelling at me, and right in the middle of her cursing, she just keeled over!”
“Did you hit her?” Zhou Dana’s gaze sharpened as he questioned him sternly.
“Village Chief, Qingshan didn’t lay a single finger on her!” Before Wang Qingshan could even open his mouth to reply, Li Yuzhen cut in to defend him.
“We were just having a little spat over a trivial comment during dinner, and Zhaodi started pointing at Qingshan’s nose and screaming. The more she yelled, the more furious she got, and then all of a sudden she just went stiff and collapsed!”
Li Yuzhen was telling the truth.
At dinner, Zhou Zhaodi had started nagging at Wang Qingshan nonstop, spitting as she ranted.
“That good-for-nothing Li Chuntao is so unbelievably lazy! She just lazes around at home all day and never comes out to work the fields! There’s no one else in this village as lazy as her!”
Wang Qingshan could not stand listening to that, so he snapped back. “You stay home every single day too. How dare you talk about other people that way?”
“So what if I don’t work in the fields? I like it! I don’t have to go if I don’t want to!” Zhou Zhaodi craned her neck, raising her voice even louder.
“She likes it too! It’s none of your business to run your mouth gossiping about her!” Wang Qingshan was getting angry now too.
Zhou Zhaodi grabbed the broom from the table and hurled it right at Wang Qingshan’s head.
Furious, Wang Qingshan rolled up his sleeves and was about to hit her, but Old Man Wang grabbed him and pulled him aside.
Wang Qingshan did not even want to bother arguing with her anymore. He squatted down by the wall and drank his soup in silence.
But Zhou Zhaodi would not let it go at all. She stood in the middle of the yard, cursing at the top of her lungs, dragging up every single generation of the Wang family’s ancestors to insult them. She was frothing at the mouth by the time the neighbors started gathering around to watch the commotion.
The bigger the crowd got, the more fired up she became, and the more outrageous her insults got.
Finally, she pointed straight at Wang Qingshan’s nose and shouted, “Wang Qingshan! You’re always defending that hussy! Are you sleeping with her? Are those two kids she had yours?”
Wang Qingshan shot to his feet, his face turning purple as an eggplant. He roared at the top of his lungs, “Zhou Zhaodi! Shut your mouth right now!”
That yell made Zhou Zhaodi tremble all over. She stumbled two steps back, convinced Wang Qingshan was about to hit her.
But then she saw Old Man Wang rushing over to hold Wang Qingshan back again, and her courage came right back. She started cursing even more fiercely than before.
Right in the middle of her yelling, her body suddenly went rigid all over. Her face turned a dark, purplish red, her eyes rolled back, and with a heavy thud, she collapsed straight onto the muddy ground.
Zhou Dana and Wang Jinzhi did not say anything out loud, but deep down, they still did not believe that Wang Qingshan had not laid a hand on her. But they knew their own daughter’s temper perfectly well — she was no easy, docile person — so they did not press the matter any further.
“How did this happen all of a sudden? She never had any problem like this before!” Wang Jinzhi’s voice was breaking with tears as she reached out to touch Zhou Zhaodi’s face, which felt ice-cold.
Zhao Qingjiang furrowed his brows and pressed his fingers against Zhou Zhaodi’s temples. “I’m afraid her blood pressure spiked all the way to her head and caused this trouble!”
The crowd of onlookers burst into loud chatter right away. Some people sighed, “That’s what happens when you get so angry your internal fire surges straight to your head!”
“It was just a tiny little thing. Why get so mad over it? That’s so not worth it!”
Zhao Qingjiang pulled a sphygmomanometer out of his medical case, wrapped the cuff around Zhou Zhaodi’s arm, and started squeezing the rubber bulb to inflate it.
When he saw the reading on the dial, his eyes went wide with shock. He jumped to his feet. “Oh no! Her blood pressure’s shot through the roof! The systolic reading is 210!”
“Systolic blood pressure at 210?”
The second those words left his mouth, the whole crowd went dead silent. Everyone gasped in unison, and they all stepped back several paces, completely terrified.
Zhao Qingjiang rushed to get an intravenous drip ready, but Zhou Zhaodi’s arms were so plump that he could not find her veins no matter how hard he looked. In the end, he barely managed to get the needle into the crook of her elbow.
“Her blood pressure is dangerously high. If it bursts a blood vessel in her brain, she’ll be dead on the spot. All I can do now is stabilize her condition. Whether she pulls through or not depends entirely on her own luck.” Zhao Qingjiang wiped the sweat off his forehead, his tone heavy with worry.
Right as he finished speaking, Zhou Zhaodi, who was lying on the ground, suddenly started convulsing violently. Foam dripped from the corner of her mouth, and gurgling, strangled noises came from her throat. It looked like she was about to breathe her last.
The crowd was so frightened they stumbled back further, not daring to make a single loud sound.
Zhao Qingjiang did not waste a second. He tore open Zhou Zhaodi’s collar to let her breathe easier.
Then he pulled out the silver acupuncture needles he always carried with him, and quickly jabbed them into her renzhong point and the tips of all ten of her fingers, while pressing hard on her tiger’s mouth acupoint.
“Stop crowding so close! Move back, give her some fresh air!” Zhao Qingjiang shouted at the crowd.
Wang Jinzhi hurried back into the house, then ran out with a bowl of cold water. Zhao Qingjiang dipped his fingers in the water and gently flicked the cool liquid onto Zhou Zhaodi’s forehead and her temples.
After a little while, the gurgling noises in Zhou Zhaodi’s throat grew softer, her convulsions slowly stopped, and her eyelids fluttered before she let out a faint, weak groan.
Zhao Qingjiang let out a long sigh of relief, wiping the sweat off his temple. “Thank goodness… her blood vessels didn’t burst. It’s just a severe acute hypertensive episode. If we’d waited even a minute longer, her cerebral blood vessels would’ve ruptured, and not even a god could’ve saved her.”
The crowd finally relaxed, and everyone started talking again. “She really just cheated death! She almost died back there!”
“From now on, no one dares to go around screaming and cursing like that anymore. That’s treating your own life like it’s worthless!”
Zhao Qingjiang took Zhou Zhaodi’s blood pressure again, then said solemnly, “Her systolic pressure has gone down a little for now, but the root problem is still there. These next few days, she absolutely cannot get upset or angry again, and she can’t eat anything too salty. I’ll wrap up a few pills for her, and she needs to take them on schedule.”
He took a neatly cut square of old newspaper, wrapped a few white pills in it, and handed it to Wang Qingshan. “Every single morning right after she wakes up, make sure she takes one of these.”
Zhou Zhaodi made it through the scare without any real harm, and only then did Zhou Dana and his wife finally let out the breath they had been holding.
When it was time to leave, Wang Jinzhi held Zhou Zhaodi's hand and repeatedly urged her, "Zhaodi, what you had was high blood pressure. It's nothing short of a miracle that nothing serious happened this time.
You really need to change your temper from now on. Don't fly into a rage every time something comes up, it's terrible for your health!"
She then turned her head to speak to Wang Qingshan, "Qingshan, Zhaodi has a quick temper, so don't take it to heart when she gets sharp with you.
You two have kids at home, so be more understanding and patient with her. Talk things through properly whenever a problem crops up."
Zhou Zhaodi had woken up by then, but her head was still spinning so badly she could barely keep her eyes open. Deep in her heart, however, she was still so furious her teeth ached, so she just turned her head away and ignored them.
Over at the Zhou family's home.
Aunt Zhou had already finished all her washing up, and was keeping a big pot of warm water simmering on the stove. "Second son, I've heated up hot water for you. Go take a hot bath to wash away all that tiredness!"
"Alright, Mom, you go right back to your room and get some sleep. It's chilly out at night," Zhou Zhijun called back from the main room.
He took cold showers all year round, so he rarely used hot water. He scooped up a basin of cold water and poured it over his head to his feet, rinsing himself off thoroughly.
After he finished washing, he carried the warm water from the big pot over to the main room, then called softly toward the inner room, "Tao, there's hot water ready. Come out and wash up."
Chuntao had just gotten their two babies to sleep and laid them down in their crib.
Ever since the two babies were born, Aunt Zhou had been taking them to sleep with her every night.
But during the busy farming days a while back, Chuntao, feeling sorry for how tired her mother-in-law was, had the two little ones sleep in her own room instead, so she could get up at night to feed them and change their diapers.
Zhou Zhijun didn't want her to lose sleep over it, so he wouldn't let her get up at all at night. He took care of making the rice cereal and changing the diapers all by himself, and Chuntao only needed to lie in bed to breastfeed the babies.
When Chuntao heard Zhou Zhijun calling her, her face instantly flushed hot, and her heart started pounding so hard it felt like two little rabbits were bouncing around inside her chest.
The autumn crops had been harvested for over a month. Zhou Zhijun had gotten up before dawn and worked the fields until dark every single day, and he never even rested at night. Chuntao could not help but admire how incredibly strong and energetic he was, like he had endless stores of strength that never ran out.
Now that all the autumn crops had been fully brought in, and several days of heavy rain had fallen in a row, the fields were still too wet to plow. All that pent-up strength Zhou Zhijun had nowhere to burn off during the day was being poured entirely into their time together at night.
Chuntao was just about to step out of the room when Zhou Zhijun had already walked in.
"A nice wash will help you sleep better," his voice was low and thick, warm against her ear.
Right after the words left his mouth, he reached out to gently help her take off her outer clothes, swept her up into his arms in one smooth move, walked straight to the main room, and set her down carefully in the big wooden bath tub.
Warm water lapped over her skin. His movements were soft and careful as he washed every inch of her, slowly and gently.
Chuntao kept her head bowed the whole time, too shy to look up at him. She could only feel the man's breath growing heavier and hotter against her neck.
When he had finished washing her and dried her off carefully, he picked her up and carried her back to the inner room without a moment's delay, laid her softly down on the big bed...
