Chapter 4

Chen Jue closed his eyes, not wanting to dwell on things that weighed on his heart, and only continued reporting the good news: "This person has gone off for corvée labor, I don't know when he'll be back. That's not important. What I want to tell you today is something... big. I've left you a legacy—I'm having a kid myself. If you two knew, you'd be happy, wouldn't you?"

Chen Jue spoke hesitantly, since even he himself had only accepted this child three days later.

With that thought, Chen Jue continued to explain: "I know you two think I've lost my mind. Someone like me... has a really low chance of conceiving, so I also want to see—if it can be documented—I want to see if life can start another way.

If it succeeds, maybe our hospital's '520 In Vitro Embryo Research Project' could have a new direction of development, right, Dean Chen?"

Dean Chen, in another time and space, naturally wouldn't give him any response. Chen Jue waited for a while, and when he heard nothing at all, he closed his eyes, his face showing a grief nobody could see.

But the grief was gone in a flash, and a moment later he was back to being the blank-faced Chen Jue.

Chen Jue continued speaking to the medicine rack and the air: "Mom, Dad,

The reason I'm telling you all this is that I'm still alive—in another world. Don't worry, and take care of yourselves."

After finishing his words, Chen Jue lowered his head and looked at his belly.

Maybe Heaven, considering all the lives he'd saved, had given him another chance to live.

As for the child in his belly, he'd think of it as paying back a debt.

Chen Jue gently patted his stomach, and his stomach started growling again. The sun had only just risen above the treetops—judging by the angle, it was probably only 7 a.m.—and he was already hungry again. Being pregnant took a lot of energy. He wouldn't think about anything else now—first, he needed to eat.

Chen Jue prepared to find something to eat, but standing at the door of the kitchen, he didn't know where to begin. It wasn't that the kitchen was bare—it had everything it needed: a big stove hooked up to a smaller one, pots, pans, bowls, and ladles all present. Since there were no modern cabinets, everything was just sitting out. It was just that Chen Jue didn't know where to start.

For the past thirty years, he'd only known how to eat. In the kitchen, the only thing he could work was the coffee machine. As for the cooking utensils, he'd barely touched them except when Director Zhou came over to cook for him.

Chen Jue stood for a while, then went to gather firewood first and took inventory of the supplies. Actually, there was no need to deliberately take stock, because everything was clear at a glance.

The grain was stored in three vats as thick as water buckets, but the grain in them was almost gone. The coarse corn was only reachable if you bent down, the fine sorghum was just a thin layer at the bottom, and the grayish-white wheat flour was down to half a ladle.

So the original owner had been malnourished and had low blood sugar, because there simply wasn't much stored grain at home.

This Huo Lin was a hunter who didn't have much farmland. Moreover, in this lean season when the old crop was almost gone and the new one wasn't in yet, the other villagers didn't have much to eat either, so they were even less likely to sell him any extra grain. The herbs he gathered couldn't be sold, so he couldn't trade them for grain.

In the end, Chen Jue used a ladle to wash half a ladle of coarse corn grits for porridge—the kind of porridge Director Zhou had made for him.

In later times, people pushed eating coarse grains for health.

Chen Jue looked at the coarse grains and, based on the season here, roughly figured he was probably in central China, or maybe the north—which meant he wasn't too far from Beijing.

He wondered about Beijing...

Stop. Don't go there. Even if Beijing weren't far away, Director Zhou and Dean Chen wouldn't be there.

Chen Jue pushed down the bitterness in his chest, crouched in front of the stove, and struggled to light a fire with the tinder.

The tinder these ancient folks used wasn't like a match. Chen Jue blew on it for a good while before it caught. The farmhouse stove here was decades old and black with soot. Chen Jue didn't need to look in a mirror to know he was covered in dust and grime by now.

But he didn't bother with it. Although doctors tend to have some germophobia, when a person is hungry, such external concerns no longer matter.

He finally managed to get the fire going. Afraid it would go out, he added extra firewood, but before long, he smelled something burning.

There was no aroma of cooked grain—it went straight to a burnt smell. Chen Jue frantically lifted the thick wooden pot lid, and the burnt smell grew even stronger.

He couldn't even scrape it with the wooden spatula. It wasn't crispy rice at the bottom—it was burnt onto the pot.

Chen Jue sighed, holding the spoon.

He had originally intended to cook a bowl of corn grits porridge, but somehow it had all become dry rice, and the bottom layer was completely burnt.

The bottom couldn't be eaten, so he'd eat the top. He couldn't waste food.

A little burnt flavor was fine, wasn't it? Didn't it resemble the taste of coffee? Wasn't crème brûlée just like this?

He imagined the flavor of the porridge and forced himself to swallow.

But the food he swallowed didn't even make it through digestion before it all came back up.

"Ugh—"

Chen Jue barely managed to set the bowl on the low windowsill before he rushed to the corner, bracing himself against the wall and vomiting.

He wasn't being picky anymore, but the child in his belly was extremely picky. It refused to accept the half-cooked rice.

It was food he had worked so hard to make, but bad was bad. Even the child in his belly clearly despised it.

Fortunately, the chicken didn't mind. The rooster that had been faithfully perched in the tree saw Chen Jue vomiting, swooped down from the branch in a flash, used Chen Jue's back as a buffer, stepped on him to jump down, and gifted Chen Jue a chicken feather as payment for the landing.

Chen Jue was vomiting so hard he couldn't see straight, tears and snot streaming down his face, and didn't have time to pay attention to it.

By the time Chen Jue pulled the chicken feather from his head, the rooster had already finished eating the untouched corn porridge he had thrown up and had flown back up to the tree branch.

Chen Jue pointed at it with a trembling finger, but didn't even have the strength to scold it.

Sooner or later, he was going to kill that chicken.