CHAPTER 194: CHAPTER 194 ORIGINAL SIN 3

Let’s not even talk about whether she can escape. Even if she really manages to get out, in this day and age, there are quite a few human traffickers outside. If she’s not careful, she might get kidnapped and sold! Even if she can avoid the traffickers, Yun Shuangshuang can at most ensure her own survival. If she were to bring along Feng Jinyan, who’s still erratic, they wouldn’t even be able to leave this mountain village.

Although this village, due to its proximity to the town and the outside county, has residents who understand the law and don’t engage in buying wives or similar practices, with a simple folk culture, still, if Lin Shuangshuang were to ask someone to take her and her erratic mother to the town, no one would dare to agree.

No one would agree to let a few-year-old child take her erratic mother and leave the village to make a living. It’s practically a death wish. Doing so isn’t an act of kindness but rather a sinful act.

The most urgent thing for Yun Shuangshuang to do now is to find a way to get her mother released. Keeping her locked up for so long has deteriorated her health.

In her past life, Feng Jinyan’s health was already poor, always sickly. Unfortunately, at first, Yun Shuangshuang had no money to treat Feng Jinyan. At that time, Feng Jinyan herself was not clear-headed, and all she could do was cry out in pain.

The money Yun Shuangshuang earned was all spent at the hospital, yet it was just a drop in the bucket and couldn’t thoroughly cure Feng Jinyan’s illness. Without money to buy those expensive and effective imported medicines, during that time, Yun Shuangshuang was utterly overwhelmed, waking up every day thinking about making money.

Although Feng Jinyan was erratic, she wasn’t completely foolish. She knew that her constant medication and hospital visits made life hard for Yun Shuangshuang. Out of concern for Yun Shuangshuang, when she felt unwell again, Feng Jinyan would endure silently.

Yun Shuangshuang was too young, exhausting herself daily to earn money, not realizing that Feng Jinyan was hiding her condition in front of her. Poor people don’t have the means to indulge in preventive health checks when healthy, leading Yun Shuangshuang to genuinely be deceived by Feng Jinyan.

Seeing Feng Jinyan no longer crying out in pain, Yun Shuangshuang happily thought her mother’s condition had improved. Even when Feng Jinyan often caught colds, Yun Shuangshuang, inexperienced, didn’t know it was due to her deteriorating health, thinking it was just a lack of nutrition. She merely ensured Feng Jinyan had a meal with meat every day.

Not until Yun Shuangshuang had built up her business and earned enough money to have Feng Jinyan undergo health checkups did she discover that Feng Jinyan’s health had entirely deteriorated, beyond recovery, even with gradual care.

The reason Feng Jinyan’s health had deteriorated to such an extent was due to the illnesses she developed while being confined at the Yun Family.

Actually, Yun Shuangshuang had thought about notifying Feng Jinyan’s parents, her so-called maternal grandparents, to rescue Feng Jinyan, and then reconnect with her after she had the ability.

However, unfortunately at the time, technology was rudimentary without mobile phones, and she had no way of contacting them.

She knew their address in H City, but they had only moved there five years before she found her mother. What city they lived in and what they were doing before was never shared with Yun Shuangshuang, given the family’s disregard for her.

The only person who didn’t look down on Yun Shuangshuang and regained her consciousness, Feng Jinyan, had too many happy memories from her past life with her husband and family. She feared speaking of these would upset her youngest daughter, Yun Shuangshuang, who had lived a bitter life since childhood, so she never mentioned her past, let alone the city she lived in or her childhood home address.

If Feng Jinyan didn’t mention it, Yun Shuangshuang naturally wouldn’t ask. She genuinely didn’t like hearing about Feng Jinyan’s past happiness. Her mother’s joyful life had nothing to do with her, while she was part of her mother’s most tragic life, making her feel truly guilty, as if she shouldn’t exist.

Now, after being reborn, Yun Shuangshuang wishes she could rush to her past self who was full of escapism and slap herself hard: "How fragile! How self-deprecating and pretentious! If she had only asked then, at least now she could have rescued her mother from the sea of suffering earlier!"

After all, sending a letter or a telegram is much easier than trying to escape with someone who’s erratic, but oh, life gives no early warnings. Relying on outside help is out of the question now, so she can only rely on herself.

To release her mother from the room, she needs to have a say at home. How to have a say is simple – earn money! But Yun Shuangshuang’s body is too small to do any work, and therefore she cannot make money.

After thinking around, Yun Shuangshuang still can only follow the old path of her previous life, going up the mountain to find things to sell. However, this time, Yun Shuangshuang doesn’t plan to sell ordinary medicinal herbs as she did before. This time, she intends to sell valuable items.

The vegetation of the mountain that the village relies on is very rich, producing many herbs and various fungi, some of which are expensive, others cheap, including matsutake which in later generations was auctioned to a sky-high price but is now so cheap that no one cares for it.

There is another type of fungus, always extremely expensive no matter the time, and that is truffle. Truffles mostly grow beneath pine trees, oak trees, and chestnut trees, and it happens that the mountains in Yun Shuangshuang’s village are rich with these trees.

Harvesting truffles isn’t easy. Professional truffle hunters usually need well-trained dogs with a keen sense of smell to find truffles, while some use sows to locate them as truffles emit a scent similar to a boar’s hormones.

But Yun Shuangshuang doesn’t need to go through such trouble because she has a sense of smell as keen as a dog’s! This extraordinary sense of smell, rarely seen with a one-in-a-million chance among humans.

In her previous life, Yun Shuangshuang was able to expand her small food stall into a hotel thanks to her keen sense of smell. She could remember the taste changes at every stage of cooking to become a skilled chef. She specifically went to work as a helper in a five-star hotel kitchen to hone her skills.

While the chefs cooked, Yun Shuangshuang noted the order of cooking, as well as which spices to add at what flavor stage and when the dish tasted best when cooked.

By recording these and diligently practicing, Yun Shuangshuang mastered the skills of a five-star chef!

The hotel she opened thrived due to her craftsmanship, allowing guests to enjoy five-star culinary skills in a mid-range hotel at lower prices, naturally attracting a plethora of customers, especially returning ones.

After becoming wealthy, Yun Shuangshuang once learned truffle hunting from a truffle hunter who supplied her. At that point, Yun Shuangshuang was already a boss and wasn’t competing with them for business, so the hunter generously shared the truffle-hunting method.

However, Yun Shuangshuang secretly tried it herself later. The truffle’s smell is distinct and obvious, making it easy for her to differentiate and find truffles after remembering its scent.

This time, Yun Shuangshuang plans to use her nose to harvest truffles and earn money!