Traveling through an ancient military camp: Bao'er's survival song

Li Bao'er, a grown woman, still found it hard to accept becoming a man. While the old man was driving, she tentatively touched her crotch, only to find it still empty…

Li Bao'er was confused. This time, she cautiously guessed, "Did I transmigrate into the body of a flat-chested woman or a castrated man?"

The wooden cart stopped in front of a small courtyard in a mountain village.

The old cart driver shouted from outside the fence post: "Balu's wife, Balu's wife, I've brought my second son back! Come and see what's wrong with him?!"

A woman of about forty years old ran out, followed by a young girl.

The woman rushed to the car and began frantically searching Li Bao'er, checking her inside and out, and asking anxiously, "What happened? Why are you back? Xiao Bao, what happened to you? Didn't you go to the army camp to report for duty?"

Li Bao'er tentatively called out, "Mom?"

The woman quickly replied, "Mom's here, Mom's here!"

The old man driving the cart pulled the woman aside and whispered what had happened: "On the way here, Erxiao suddenly started crying loudly and kept clutching his chest." The old man imitated the scene vividly, pounding his chest like a gorilla. "I thought he was choking, but then I remembered he hadn't eaten anything! Then he just stopped talking and became dazed. I wondered if Erxiao was weak and had bumped into something unclean on the way."

The old man glanced at Li Bao'er, who was still sitting in the car, dazed and ignoring his sister who was circling around him. He quickly reminded the woman, "Why don't we find a shaman to call back the soul of the second son?"

The woman thanked the old man profusely and even slipped him a copper coin at the end. This old man earned a meager living by helping villagers up and down the mountain. Although he hadn't managed to get his second son to his destination, he had still put in a lot of time and effort.

Li Bao'er, helped back to the house by the woman, lay on the kang (a heated brick bed), wrapped herself in a quilt, and curled up into a ball.

There were sounds of children and women talking outside.

"Mother, what's wrong with Second Brother? Isn't he going to find Eldest Brother?"

“Sanya, be good. Your second brother isn’t feeling well. Go to the east end of the village and find Granny Li to come and take a look at him.”

The sound of the child running faded into the distance, and the curtain of the inner room was lifted. The woman gently walked in, carrying a steaming bowl: "Second son, I made you some sugar water. Would you like some?"

At this moment, Li Bao'er's mind was in a mess because she noticed that the child called her "Second Brother".

Although Li Bao'er immediately comforted herself that it would be more convenient for a man's body to travel to ancient times than for a woman's, she still couldn't quite accept it.

Seeing that Li Bao'er remained silent, the woman sighed softly, placed the bowl on the bedside table, and turned to leave.

"Mother!" Li Bao'er called out to the woman.

The woman turned around in surprise.

"Mom, talk to me." Li Bao'er carefully changed the word "Mom" to "Mother," the same word Sanya used.

"Hey, hey! What do you want to hear your mother say?" The woman hurriedly sat down on the kang (a heated brick bed).

"Just talk about anything, tell me about home, I want to hear my mother's voice."

Amidst her chaotic thoughts, Li Bao'er quickly came up with a plan. Since she was already here, she might as well make the best of it. Her primary task now was to survive as this woman's son, which meant she first needed to understand the current situation.

But asking rashly would easily give her away. Li Bao'er remembered how her own mother would bring up all the old stories about her and her father from eight hundred years ago while she was mopping the floor, so she decided to try to get some information about the original owner of this body through the woman's monologue.

The woman, who initially tried to find things to talk about, gradually became more natural and fluent in her speech, rambling on and on about this and that.