The Overlord Flower's Guide to Intercepting a Woman's Wife's Death and the Male Lead&

Su Xingmian pretended to be startled awake, shrank back, and her back hit the rammed earth wall with a dull thud.

Her reactions were just right; a beat slower would have made her appear calm, while a beat faster would have made her appear alert.

He Yaozu took a step back, making room.

"I'm sorry I startled you."

He placed a bowl of porridge on the table, stirred it with a spoon, and gestured for her to eat.

Su Xingmian wiped the sweat from her forehead, slowly moved over and sat down, then lowered her head to drink her porridge.

He Yaozu sat opposite her, flipping through a book, his gaze occasionally sweeping over the top of the pages before returning to his own.

After finishing her porridge, Su Xingmian put down her bowl and, as usual, shrank back into the corner of the bed and hugged her knees.

He Yaozu turned two pages and looked up.

Who are your relatives?

"Grandma passed away this year."

Su Xingmian spoke softly, her fingers gripping the hem of her clothes.

"I'm all alone now."

She paused, as if hesitating whether to continue.

He Yaozu didn't urge him; his thumb slowly rubbed the rough edge of the cover.

Su Xingmian bit her lower lip.

Before my grandmother passed away, she arranged a marriage for me.

"But before I even saw them, I was... kidnapped by them."

He Yaozu tapped his finger on the table.

There were no further questions, and no words of comfort.

He is evaluating.

An orphan girl, with no relatives, no neighbors to care for her, and her fiancé far away, whom she had never even met.

Such people disappear from the world like a grain of sand falling into the Gobi Desert.

He Yaozu bent down and took out a magazine from a wooden box under the table.

The cover uses a type of printed font that Su Xingmian has never seen before, with curved horizontal and vertical lines, completely different from Chinese characters.

Accompanied by a vividly colored illustration, a golden wheat field stretches to the horizon, a tractor is parked on the edge of the field, and several people in work clothes stand beside it, smiling and holding ears of wheat in their hands.

He didn't hand it over.

It was just placed on the table.

Su Xingmian glanced at it out of the corner of her eye, paused for a moment, and then looked away.

That's too deliberate.

This wasn't just left lying around.

This is a test question.

She waited three seconds, allowing just enough time for her curiosity to build up, before reaching out to take the magazine.

Turn to the first page.

A page full of foreign characters flooded her vision, and she didn't recognize a single letter.

Su Xingmian looked past the dense text and landed on an illustration in the middle.

The tractor was drawn very large, taking up half the page, with mud on its wheels, black smoke billowing from its front, and a trail of churned black soil behind it.

She touched the painting, her fingertips rubbing against the ears of wheat.

"Mr. He, this painting is really beautiful."

She turned the magazine around so that the illustrations were facing her.

"The wheat in the picture looks really good; it's much stronger than the wheat in our village."

It's true that their village grows both rice and wheat.

The envy in her voice was perfectly captured, revealing a country girl's instinctive longing for a bountiful harvest.

Then she put the magazine back in its place.

Throughout the process, she flipped through four pages, spending time on the illustrations on each one.

Her gaze never lingered on those Russian letters.

He Yaozu suddenly spoke a complete sentence in a language that Su Xingmian had never heard before.

Her vowels were full, her consonants were crisp, and her final consonant rose slightly, giving her a rhythmic quality that defied easy categorization.

Su Xingmian's reaction was textbook blank.

She tilted her head, her mouth slightly open, and closed it after two claps.

She couldn't understand.

But the breath and duration of each syllable have been memorized in her mind and can be reproduced exactly as they were, without missing a single breath.

"Mr. He, you speak a foreign language?"

She paused, then leaned forward to look.

"It sounds so nice, like singing."

He Yaozu's mouth was slightly crooked, and his upper lip was raised.

This time I was genuinely amused.

He looked into Su Xingmian's eyes.

There was no speculation or probing in those eyes, only a pure and innocent gazing upwards.

He recalled 1964, when he was pursuing a girl from a performing arts troupe.

She was beautiful, but there was always something else in the way she looked at him.

It was mixed with sympathy for his background and consideration for the other person's future.

The girl in front of me is different.

At that moment, he was all she could see.

He Yaozu did not put away the magazine, but pointed at the tractor.

"Do you know what this is?"

"This is called a tractor. One tractor is equivalent to fifty cows."

His voice slowed down, like a rural teacher enlightening his students.

"The land over there stretches as far as the eye can see. Each family can own hundreds of acres. They use tractors to farm, so people don't have to bend over."

Su Xingmian loosened her knees a little and leaned forward a few inches.

"Wow."

He Yaozu pointed to another illustration, which depicted rows of neat buildings with flowers on the windows and snow-white walls.

"The workers' houses are all heated, so there's no need to burn firewood in winter. The houses are warm enough that you only need to wear a single layer of clothing."

"Really?"

Su Xingmian's tone carried just the right amount of longing.

She noticed that when Ho Yiu-tsu was talking about these things, his gaze was not on the magazine.

He was looking at her hands.

Su Xingmian slowly withdrew her hands, tucking them into her sleeves, as if she were afraid of the cold.

He Yaozu shifted his gaze, his tone remained the same, but his words took a different turn.

"When I was in the army, I had a comrade-in-arms."

"His family background is bad. They're small landlords."

His voice was very steady, as if he were telling someone else's story.

"But he is very capable; he excels at everything from writing reports and drawing topographical maps to developing training plans."

He paused for a moment.

"It was never mentioned in my entire life."

Su Xingmian noticed that his hand clenched and then relaxed.

This was the closest he came to being real during his entire disguise.

"It wouldn't happen over there."

He Yaozu put the magazine away and put it away properly.

"They're looking at what you can do, not who your father is."

Su Xingmian was, after all, a spirit, and didn't quite understand these intricate human politics.

If Zhou Bingheng were here, he would sum it up in two words: Soviet revisionism.

But Su Xingmian knew something else.

The way He Yaozu clenched and then loosened his fist just now revealed the deepest thorn buried beneath his shell.

She raised her head at the right moment.

"Did Mr. He serve in the military before?"

He Yaozu stopped moving, and the air in the stone chamber seemed to freeze for a moment.

He smiled, a smile so complete it was like a mask covering his face.

"I'm just a businessman who deals in goods."

Su Xingmian lowered her eyes and shrank her shoulders.

"I'm sorry, Mr. He, I shouldn't have said that."

The voice was very soft, carrying the apprehension of a child who has done something wrong.

He Yaozu glanced at her.

She stopped after asking the question, without dwelling on it or pressing for details, and even took a step back to admit her mistake.

His breathing became even again.

This girl is naive, but not stupid; she knows when to back down.

But they don't understand politics, let alone the outside world.

"It's too stuffy in here, do you want to go out for some fresh air?"

"Is it really possible?" Su Xingmian asked cautiously.

"certainly!"

He Yaozu turned and walked towards the door, raising his hand to push open the stone door.

Outside the stone gate, the dry wind carrying the salty, astringent scent of sand wormwood rushed in, and sunlight pierced through the oppressive darkness of the stone chamber.

Su Xingmian's eyes lit up as she followed behind.

Once outside, the dry air and abundant sunlight would accelerate the recovery of her demonic power, and she could also find a way to leave a mark on the old fox.

She doesn't have much time left.

He Xiu, it's time to take action.