Chapter 1 Finally Escaped
Chapter 1 Finally Escaped
Jiang Mengyu finally escaped.
For ten years, as a shared wife in the deep mountains, today she finally found a chance to escape from Tiger Valley.
Ten years ago, when she was still a high school freshman, she overheard Mom talking to Dad about arranging her marriage after she graduated from high school. Realizing that she had already self-studied the high school curriculum, she approached her teacher, explained her situation, and asked the teacher to let her take the university entrance exam.
The teacher, feeling sympathetic, allowed her to take the exam—and she actually passed. But unexpectedly, being accepted into university became the start of her nightmare.
When she received the admission letter, her parents, who had always either hit or yelled at her, surprisingly bought food and drinks to celebrate her university acceptance. She thought that her parents had finally recognized her efforts.
During the toast, after her little sister offered her a small cup of homemade sweet wine, she lost consciousness.
The next time she awoke, she was in a sealed truck, having been sold into Tiger Valley to be a shared wife to a pair of brothers.
Thinking of the wine her sister had given her, she understood—she had been tricked by her sister. No, that was wrong; Dad and Mom were there, yet they did nothing to stop it.
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This meant that the wine her sister toasted with must have been their idea!
She remembered that when she first got the admission letter, Mom had told her to give up her university spot to her little sister.
She refused at that time.
Throughout these past sixteen years, Dad and Mom favored her sister. As daughters of the same family, she toiled from dawn to dusk while her sister did nothing.
Her sister wore fine clothes and ate well, while she only got her sister's leftovers and hand-me-downs.
But her parents said, "You're the older sister, you should always let your younger sister have her way," so she accepted it.
She could comply with everything her parents wanted, but not university—that was her way to escape from the marriage Mom had arranged, so how could she agree to give it up?
Now that she thought about it, refusing to relinquish her university place was probably why they sold her into the deep mountains, to allow her sister to take her university spot and probably also to use the money from selling her to pay for her sister's travel expenses, right?
During these ten years, she often wondered: Why, being their daughter too, was her sister a treasure but she just grass? Why destroy her life to benefit her sister?
It just didn't make sense to her!
So, from the day she was sold to Tiger Valley, she had been plotting her escape and wanted to confront her parents: Why did they do this?
There were only thirty-eight families in the whole village of Tiger Valley. Because of poverty, no woman was willing to marry into this village; nearly every household had a bought wife.
It was said that the human traffickers not only provided wives but also "maintenance" services.
If a wife ran away, the human trafficker would take responsibility for finding and "reprimanding" her, then return her to the buyer. This "maintenance" continued until the bought wife had a child.
After learning that traffickers provided such maintenance, Jiang Mengyu seemed resigned and did not attempt to escape lightly.
After she gave birth to a boy, the two brothers relaxed their supervision over her.
Later on, when villagers returned from working outside and talked about the outside world, her two "husbands" also wanted to earn money, starting with one going out, and eventually both leaving.
Due to the bond with their child, neither thought she would run away.
However, Jiang Mengyu, yearning for freedom, chose her child's birthday night to spike some orange juice with a sleeping aid for her mother-in-law and child. Once the two slept, she took the bundle she had prepared and fled.
Don't call her heartless, for the child was taken care of by the mother-in-law from birth, raised in an environment of "watch your mother, don't let her run away," devoid of a normal child's feelings for their mother.
To her, that home was a prison and her son a jailer—so leaving her son gave her no guilt.
After running all night, exhausted Jiang Mengyu finally escaped the vast mountains. Seeing the road leading out of the mountains, she took a deep breath of relief: she had finally escaped.