Adelaide Sinclair woke up from hunger.

Her stomach was so empty it felt like it was twisting upward in waves, even worse than the throbbing pain in her forehead.

Then, all at once, a flood of images crashed into her mind—

The blinding light over an operating table. A nurse’s shrill scream. That man’s bloodshot eyes. And then the firelight bursting open in an instant.

She had come from an ancient martial-and-medical family, and in her former life she had served as an associate chief surgeon at a top hospital in the capital. A madman had blown her to pieces with a bomb.

So... where was this?

Adelaide muttered the words under her breath without thinking. The sobbing beside her stopped short, replaced by a hurried, trembling voice.

"Xixi, you’re awake? What did you just say?"

She struggled to open her eyes. Everything stayed blurred for quite a while before it finally came into focus.

What she saw was a mud-plastered wall, yellow and cracked, with most of the surface flaked away. Underneath, dark wheat straw was showing through.

The beams overhead were black with age, and cobwebs hung everywhere.

Under her was a dirt kang with only a thin layer of dry straw spread over it, hard as a plank. The quilt covering her was torn and filthy, gray-black with grime, split in several places, with old cotton stuffing poking out.

This was definitely not a hospital.

Adelaide Sinclair was completely stunned.

The woman beside her had only just stopped crying, but seeing her stare blankly after waking, she panicked and burst into tears again.

"Xixi, what’s wrong with you? Did you hurt your head in the fall? Don’t scare your mother like this... wuwu..."

Adelaide turned her head to look, and the sight of the woman gave her a jolt.

She looked to be around forty, yet both temples were already white. Her complexion was dark and sallow, and deep lines covered her face.

She was thin as kindling, so gaunt she looked as though a gust of wind might knock her over. Her coarse cloth clothes were patched over and over again. Most painful to look at were her hands, covered in cracks and chilblains, raw enough to make anyone wince.

Strapped to her back in a ragged cloth wrap was a little boy of about three. His eyes were shut in sleep. He too was tiny and painfully thin, his face waxy yellow, his hair dry and limp like dead grass stuck against his scalp.

The instant Adelaide Sinclair saw the child, her heart clenched so hard it almost stopped. Right after that, a sharp pain stabbed through her head, and memories that clearly did not belong to her came rushing in all at once, like a flood breaking through a dam.

She had actually transmigrated.

She had landed in a place called the Dayu Dynasty. The new Emperor had been on the throne for six years, under the reign title Yongli.

And now, she had become a peasant wife of the Hartley family in Qinghe Village. This "Adelaide Sinclair" had the exact same name as her, yet their lives were worlds apart.

From the day the original owner was born, just because she was a girl, she had been despised by her own father and grandmother. She spent her days swallowing every grievance in silence, timid as a little field mouse, never daring to resist.

In the Hartley family, the one who truly held power was the old madam, Amanda Whitfield. She had two sons and one daughter.

The eldest branch was Bernard Hartley's. He had a firstborn son, Clarence Hartley, who could study and was attending school in town. He was the whole family's hope, the old madam's treasure, the very apple of her eye. There was also a daughter, Millicent Hartley, a few months older than the original owner.

As for the original owner's father, he was Douglas Hartley of the second branch.

He had only this one daughter. In a household that prized sons over daughters, he had taken more than enough anger from his own mother, and when he could not bear it, he turned around and dumped it all on his wife and child. Beatings and curses came every few days as if they were nothing.

Then, when the original owner turned sixteen, something even more absurd happened. She saved a sickly poor scholar named Aubrey Sinclair by the roadside. By chance, old Madam Amanda Whitfield noticed the round jade pendant hanging on him, and greed rose in her heart on the spot.

To snatch that pendant in a way no one could openly criticize, she actually pushed Douglas Hartley into using "men and women must keep their distance" and "a girl's reputation matters most" as excuses, and forced that half-dead scholar and Adelaide Sinclair into a marriage.

On their wedding night, the old madam went even further. She drugged both of them and made sure the marriage became real in every sense.

The original owner remembered that night only in a blur. Not long after, she discovered she was with child, and later gave birth to a son, Oliver Sinclair.

One blow after another had nearly hollowed her out until she lived like a walking shell. The only things holding her up were little Oliver on her back, and her mother, Elara Hartley, the only person in that house who had ever shown her kindness.

This time, she had been driven to the back hill to gather firewood. She had wanted to pick a few wild fruits for Oliver, just so the child could fill his stomach a little. But she slipped from a tree, fell hard, split her head open, and was carried back by the villagers.

Not long after that, the original owner stopped breathing.