After the frail beauty went to the countryside, she went crazy with scientific research.

Chapter 371, Episode 0401: Even the most hateful person has a pitiable side.

Xiaolin's mother's disappearance was purely accidental.

Back then, people didn't flee from house to house. For safety on the road, there were bandits and highwaymen everywhere. They fled from south to north, basically like Tang Sanzang's journey to the West. The eighty-one tribulations were an understatement.

Therefore, refugee groups are usually organized, with people from one or several villages traveling together. This is the best option, both for safety on the road and for mutual support after settling down in the north.

Xiaolin's mother was switched at birth during a chaotic encounter with highway robbers.

A young couple from Ankang Village, near Beijing, took their four-year-old daughter to visit her parents in the north. On their way back, they were unlucky and encountered bandits robbing refugees who were fleeing. In a panic, the young couple instinctively picked up their child and ran, each grabbing one child and also taking away Xiaolin's mother, who happened to be running next to them.

After the young couple ran to a safe place and calmed down, good heavens, there was a baby here!

How to do?
Go back?
No, I wouldn't dare. There are knives and guns over there. I might not even survive if I went back.

But you can't just take someone's child away for no reason.

So the young couple waited there for more than an hour. The husband went to check and confirmed that the bandits had left and that there were still refugees searching for their relatives. Only then did the two of them take their child and go to find them.

Sometimes, coincidences just happen. Uncle Liu's father was injured while resisting bandits, and his mother, who was already in poor health, collapsed from the shock. The village chief organized everyone to leave quickly, and Uncle Liu, a half-grown child, was completely disoriented. He instinctively pushed his parents to follow him on the road.

And so, the two sides missed each other.

Fortunately, the young couple were kind-hearted. After waiting for two days, they realized that the girl's family had either left and were not coming back, or had perished. Their family was well-off; otherwise, they wouldn't have traveled so far north to visit relatives. For them, having another child was just adding more chopsticks to the family. Besides, it was their fault that the child had gotten lost from her family. So, they took the child home and adopted her.

They also gave the child a very nice name—Ye Linlang.

The young couple's father was a veteran, their eldest brother was a soldier, their sister-in-law was a member of an arts troupe, their husband worked in the commune, their wife worked in the Women's Federation, their younger brother was also a soldier, and the wife he later married was also a soldier.

Ye Linlang grew up in such an environment, learning the ideology of the revolution and practicing military boxing taught by her uncles. Unsurprisingly, when she turned seventeen, she became a proud soldier.

Unfortunately, when Ye Linlang was twenty-seven years old, as a communications soldier, she sacrificed her life in a battle to protect the communications equipment with her own body in order to ensure the normal operation of communications.

Ye Linlang married a soldier when she was twenty-five years old. Even more tragically, her husband also died in the same battle.

The couple left behind their fourteen-month-old son, Xiaolin.

Xiao Lin was born in his father's hometown on the northern frontier. At that time, the war situation was urgent, and the couple went to the front line when the child was less than a month old. They didn't even have time to tell Ye Linlang's family about the child's existence.

The fallen soldiers are entitled to a pension, and the state will also help raise the orphans of martyrs until they reach adulthood. Xiao Lin's grandparents have long since passed away, and his uncles are afraid that Xiao Lin will be taken away by the Ye family. If that happens, they will not only lose the money they have received every month for the past eighteen years, but they will also lose their pension.

Therefore, they concealed Xiao Lin's existence from the Ye family.

The two families took turns 'raising' Xiao Lin, one taking half a year and the other taking half a year.

It's called "raising children," but the reality is that they not only receive money, but also have someone do the housework. All they have to do is keep them from starving. And when they're in a bad mood, they have a free punching bag.

Kobayashi grew up in such an environment until he was eighteen years old.

He came of age, and the state's responsibility to raise him came to an end. The money stopped, and then both his uncles and aunts kicked him out. The villagers didn't know that Xiao Lin was still receiving a monthly allowance. His uncles were willing to take turns supporting him, and they even thought the uncles were good people. Although Xiao Lin had to do almost all the work his family did every day, wore tattered clothes, and was often injured, he still lost his life.

Some people took pity on him and secretly helped him out.

The village's former Party Secretary was one of them. After Xiao Lin was driven out by his uncles, he went to find Xiao Lin.

Their village was so remote that it was only a ten or twenty-minute walk from the border, but far from the commune. It was difficult for news from the outside world to reach their village, or even the commune that managed it.

The old Party Secretary was also unaware of the existence of child support payments, although he had heard about them in other places when he attended a meeting at the commune.

Even after hearing it just once, the old Party Secretary couldn't be sure if they had it there, so he never dared to say anything.

However, Xiaolin remembered that his maternal grandfather's family was remarkable. When Ye Linlang got married, his uncle and his family had made an appearance in the village. Their imposing presence made the villagers think they were high-ranking officials.

This is also why no one mentions Xiao Lin's maternal grandparents' family in front of him. The villagers all thought that the Ye family looked down on their son-in-law from the countryside, and by extension, looked down on Xiao Lin, their nephew from the countryside. So after Ye Linlang's sacrifice, they never appeared again, clearly unwilling to care about Xiao Lin anymore.

The old Party Secretary had the same idea, but the child had been kicked out and had nowhere to go. Although the child was now eighteen and able to support himself, the old Party Secretary felt that he should still tell the child about his maternal grandparents' home, to give the child some choice.

Perhaps there was a misunderstanding back then?

Perhaps after all these years, Xiaolin's maternal grandparents' family will be able to accept him?

That's near Beijing, much better than their remote mountain village.

After much internal struggle, Xiaolin finally decided to go to Beijing to visit her maternal grandparents.

He needed to confirm two things:

1. Is it true that the government has always been providing child support?

2. Did his maternal grandparents also think he was a jinx and therefore not want him?

But he had no money, and the old Party Secretary was also poor. In the end, he carried the few naan breads that the old Party Secretary had given him and walked out of the mountains on his own two legs.

Upon arriving in the city, he couldn't speak the language and was illiterate. Forget about finding a job to earn some money; even finding out which direction Beijing was was a difficult task for him.

Fortunately, he was lucky. Although he encountered many troubles along the way, he also met many kind people. It took him two years, sometimes on his own two legs, and sometimes with the help of kind railway police officers who paid out of their own pockets to give him a ride. Finally, he set foot on the land of Beijing.

Then the problem arose: he didn't know where his maternal grandparents' home was, he only knew that his mother's name was Ye Linlang, and that several members of his maternal grandparents' family were in the military.

Two years of wandering on the road were not without their benefits. He learned Mandarin, though not very fluently. He learned to read newspapers, broadened his horizons, and even managed to save up about ten yuan in his pocket.

The day Uncle Liu met him was the second day after he arrived in Beijing. He was preparing to go to the newspaper office and use the ten or so yuan to place an advertisement to find his relatives.

Unexpectedly, before the newspaper even published the story and before they could find their maternal grandparents' home, they ran into their maternal uncle.