After taking some Rejuvenation Pills and Bone-Mending Pills for her splitting headache, Ding Yun, enduring the newly merged physical body, found a relatively safe corner in the extremely crowded room. Leaning against the bare wall, she began to sort through her memories.
The original body was born into an ordinary rural family.
She had three elder sisters above her and a younger brother and sister below. Their lives could only be described as impoverished. While not to the extent of having an empty house and no food for the next meal, it was generally a life of simple meals, barely enough to maintain subsistence.
As for the original body's standing in the family.
It could only be described as unloved by father, unfavored by mother.
After all, looking at the number of children and the gender ratio, it was evident that her brother was the most important.
The other girls were just incidental, born out of necessity. If infanticide were not forbidden, and if the family could barely maintain subsistence, it was questionable whether they would have survived, let alone enjoyed the intangible luxury of parental love.
From infancy, the original body rarely received parental care. In fact, it was no exaggeration to say that the original body survived entirely thanks to the care and attention of her two elder sisters.
They would feed her when she was hungry, and wash her diapers when she soiled herself.
When the younger brother was born later, things were different. The original body's parents did not trust their daughters to care for him.
They took care of him themselves.
They only left the twin sister, born with the younger brother, to the care of the original body and her three elder sisters.
Fortunately, regardless of the circumstances, local compulsory education was quite well-developed. The village head, captain, and others were also very serious and concerned. Coupled with the efforts of local school teachers and education departments to conduct full surveys of children not receiving compulsory education and urge parents to send them to school, the original body and her sisters, after much hardship, finally had the opportunity to enroll.
They enjoyed compulsory education.
But that was all they could enjoy.
As soon as they finished junior high school, the original body and her sisters dropped out of school one after another. Then, their parents packed them off to factories to work. Most of their wages had to be handed over. Meanwhile, arranged marriages were also being considered. Once successful, they would be married off for a bride price to save more money for their son.
The original body's sisters were actually not resigned to this fate.
They had even long harbored the idea of escaping their parents and working elsewhere. However, they were worried that if they left first, their younger sisters would be even more strictly controlled.
They might even be married off as soon as they graduated.
So, they endured, working diligently for several years and handing over their earnings for several years. It wasn't until the original body graduated from junior high school and started working at their factory that they took the original body with them and fled their hometown to work elsewhere, after she received her first month's salary.
As for the youngest sister.
They had to abandon her for the time being.
She still had about four years to go before graduating from junior high school. The eldest and second eldest sisters were already twenty-two and twenty years old, respectively, and their marriage partners had been decided by their parents. They only had to wait for the groom's family to provide the bride price before they could get their marriage certificates.
The two marriage partners were not great. One was thirty-six years old. His wife had died in childbirth a few years prior, and he now had three children. Marrying him meant becoming a mother to them immediately.
The other was twenty-four and intellectually challenged.
The only advantage, perhaps, was that they, or rather their families, were willing to pay a rather high bride price, which their parents were very satisfied with and readily agreed to.
They immediately seized the opportunity and began preparing for the weddings.
The original body and her four sisters really couldn't wait for another four years. So, they had to abandon the idea of taking the youngest sister with them. The four of them would leave together.
At worst, they could find a way to bring their sister later.
After escaping their parents' control, the four sisters quickly stabilized themselves in textile factories in another city through their collective efforts, gaining their own income and savings.
The eldest and second eldest sisters quickly found local men within a year or two. They felt the men were decent and married them.
The third sister, through her own diligent learning, found a different job. Only the original body, due to her young age, was not hired by many places because she was under eighteen. She had to temporarily stay at the textile factory. Although the sisters were not parting ways, their contact with each other indeed decreased.
From previously living and eating together.
It became meeting once a month or even every few months.
It was around this time that an employee at the textile factory won two million yuan in the lottery and quit his job. Then, the original body developed the habit of buying a few lottery tickets every time she received her wages.
She felt that spending a few yuan each month.
Buying a glimmer of hope for sudden wealth was worth it.
However, she didn't win any prizes in the following years.
In the year their four-year pact was to end, the original body and her sisters gathered again. They then secretly contacted their fifth sister, asking if she was willing to come out and work. They could find a way to bring her over.
However, the fifth sister refused.
Because in her second year of junior high, she had already "eaten the forbidden fruit" early, getting together with a boy from the third year. Although they hadn't been able to get their marriage certificate yet, they had already held a wedding ceremony and had a pair of twins, a boy and a girl.
The boy's family had good conditions. Although her in-laws were initially very displeased with her, seeing that she had given birth to twins, they were now nothing but happy.
She was currently in confinement, so she wouldn't be working.
The original body's sisters, though somewhat shocked by this news, had nothing much to say. Then, they all breathed a sigh of relief and felt a burden lifted from their shoulders.
For the past few years, the sisters had been carrying the responsibility and obligation of finding a way to bring their fifth sister over after four years. Now that their fifth sister's life was relatively happy, their inner guilt and burden naturally disappeared.
From then on, their contact as sisters became even less frequent. The four-year pact had tightly bound them together. Now that the four-year pact had vanished and ended, four of them were either housewives or working in unrelated fields.
They even had less common ground to discuss.
It was completely normal for their relationship to fade.
Afterward, the original body changed several jobs, but she persisted in buying lottery tickets. And her persistence paid off. In the year she turned twenty-four, she won the lottery.
After taxes, it was still around eight million yuan.
Upon receiving this money, the original body told no one. She immediately resigned and bought a house worth over a million yuan in her hometown. After renovation, she moved in.
Following that, she made a plan for the remaining money. Six million yuan was deposited into a five-year fixed-term deposit. After five years, she would receive nearly a million yuan in interest. The remaining forty-odd to fifty thousand yuan was sufficient for normal use for five years, absolutely no problem. After all, without having to pay any rent, mortgage, or car payments, one hundred thousand yuan a year was absolutely enough for daily expenses if she wasn't extravagant.
Her standard of living could even surpass that of most people.