Summer, 1966.

Sijiu City. State-run restaurant.

"My ma has had a hard life, her whole life!"

"After we get married, you’ve got to serve my ma like she’s your own. Whatever it is, you think of my ma first!"

Serena Holloway had just fought the zombie king to a draw. Her head was pounding, foggy and heavy. Hadn’t she already died?

She pressed a hand to her aching temple and looked up at the man talking.

The man looked decent enough, neat features and all, but there was something soft and fussy in his brows and eyes. Even his eyebrows were trimmed so carefully they looked almost delicate.

At a glance, he looked a bit refined.

But the way he talked didn’t match that face at all.

A flicker of impatience crossed his eyes.

"Did you even hear a word I said?"

"So that’s what a rich family’s young lady is like. Plenty of airs, but not a bit of proper manners."

Serena Holloway swept her gaze around. On the clean whitewashed wall were five big characters:

Serve the People!

The little blackboard listed the dishes: braised pork, braised fish, stir-fried shredded potato with vinegar...

The smell of hot food hung in the air, real stir-fried food, cooked fresh in a wok, not that messy pre-made stuff.

Serena Holloway swallowed hard.

Her mind was still struggling to catch up.

This definitely was not the apocalypse.

The air was clean. There wasn’t a single zombie in sight.

Could it be...

Had she...

Come to some whole other place?

Reginald Sutton frowned.

What was wrong with this woman?

Didn’t the Holloway family ever feed her?

He looked like a starving ghost, didn’t he?

So what if his family had money? So what if she was some rich young lady?

Her life was still a complete mess.

Still, that worked in his favor. A girl like that would be easier to control later on.

Reginald Sutton softened his tone, faked a bit of concern in his eyes, and forced himself to reach a hand toward Serena Holloway despite the disgust crawling in his chest.

But Serena Holloway had clawed her way through the apocalypse for years. Nobody got close to her that easily. Her arm came up in a flash, and she slapped him hard across the left side of his face.

Smack!

The sound was so sharp the whole state-run restaurant heard it.

Reginald Sutton’s left cheek puffed up like a steamed bun. He clutched his face and stared at Serena Holloway, stunned clean through.

"Ptui!"

Serena Holloway spat right at him.

"The Qing dynasty’s been dead and buried for ages, and now you want to preach filial piety to me? Don’t try that nonsense on me!"

"You say your mother has had a hard life? Was that because some daughter-in-law dropped from the sky to torment her?"

"It’s because you and your father are useless, that’s why she’s worn herself out like that."

"When you get up in the morning, your mother’s the one rushing around cooking and washing clothes. Do you even see it?"

"You stuff yourself full, dump your bowl and chopsticks, and walk off. She’s the one cleaning up the dishes and tidying the house. Have you ever lifted a finger?"

"And now what? You want a wife, so suddenly you remember what filial piety means? And you’ve got the nerve to dump that burden on some poor girl’s head?"

"If you’re really capable, go hire your mother ten, eight servants and let her live easy. That would be real filial piety!"

"Bah! Have some shame!"

The whole state-run restaurant fell dead silent. In those days, words like that hit like a thunderclap.

Quite a few married women felt their hearts jolt when they heard that, their eyes lighting up on the spot.

Deep down, they were dying to cheer for Serena Holloway.

What Serena said was exactly what they themselves never dared to think too hard about, let alone say out loud.

Reginald Sutton clutched his swollen cheek. Half his face had puffed up, a couple of teeth felt loose, and when he spoke, air leaked through his mouth, making his words come out slurred. "You crazy woman. If you won't serve your parents-in-law, then get lost to the frontier and go find Ethan Mercer. Go eat sand with him!"

"Hiss— is my face going to rot or what? It hurts like hell!"

Ethan Mercer?

The frontier?

Serena Holloway went stiff all over. Wasn't this the very novel she had once flipped through during the apocalypse when she had nothing better to do?

Military Marriage in the Sixties: Reborn and Cherished by Her Soldier Husband

In that book, there was a cannon-fodder rich girl, the male lead Ethan Mercer's fiancée, who had the exact same name as her.

When the original Serena was six, her mother died.

Less than a month later, her father married again, taking in a widow who came with a son and a daughter.

That stepmother raised the girl into someone timid and fearful, useless when hardship came, and so spoiled she looked down on the marriage arranged by her grandfather. No matter what, she refused to head to the frontier and suffer there.

Truth was, the man she called father now was not her real father at all.

Her biological father had been a businessman, and during an assassination attempt, he was badly wounded.

There had been a bodyguard by his side, a man who looked somewhat like him. Most days he stayed out of sight and only showed up at critical moments to take disaster for his employer.

But the moment that bodyguard saw her real father gravely injured, a wicked thought sprang up in his heart—why not take his place altogether...?

Back then, the original Serena was still a child. She hardly saw her father much anyway, and her mother had already passed when she was six.

So the bodyguard quietly slipped into the Holloway family without a sound and took everything that belonged to them.

Then, bold as brass, he brought his own wife and children into the house, and just like that they turned into Mrs. Holloway, Young Master Holloway, and Miss Holloway!

As for the original Serena Holloway?

That fake father didn’t dare go too far, afraid he’d give himself away. So he just kept her around like some extra burden, thinking he’d fed her for nothing anyway, and once she was grown, he could shove her off wherever.

The original Serena barely kept her life, but the fake father wanted to get rid of this hot potato as soon as he could, so he found her a man who looked decent enough on the surface—a homosexual man.

After she married into that house, she didn’t just live like a widow with a living husband, she also had to listen to her mother-in-law curse her every single day, calling her a hen that couldn’t lay eggs.

Later, when the reckoning came, her status turned awkward as hell, and that mother-in-law only ground her down harder, like she wanted to work her to death.

In the end, they threw her straight out of the house, saying she’d only drag their son down.

She had nowhere to go. Out on the street, traffickers drugged her, sold her off in the blink of an eye to the deep mountains as a wife for an old bachelor, and she died in childbirth.

Meanwhile, that fake father had gotten wind of things long ago. He cleaned out everything the Holloway family owned, took the stepmother and the two children, and ran off to Yangcheng to live the good life, spending Serena’s real parents’ property for the rest of his days.

Then there was the heroine in the original book. After being reborn, she knew the male lead had a bright future ahead of him, so she took the initiative to sign up for frontier support work. She even made the papers, praised to the skies like she was some precious flower.

After all sorts of twists and turns, the hero and heroine finally got together and lived happily ever after. The end, flowers and applause.

The more Serena Holloway read, the harder she cursed inside. The author of this book had to have something wrong with their values. How could a shameless squatter like that, a bastard who stole another man’s place, still end up living so comfortably?

Just to make the cannon fodder look more miserable?

Calling the man who killed her father “Dad,” living for years under the same roof as a pack of thieves.

And in the end, the family estate her real father and mother left behind all fell into somebody else’s hands.

Could there be a more miserable cannon-fodder girl anywhere in this world?

Serena Holloway had figured it out. This man was the blind date that fake father had lined up for her.

And he was one of those mama’s boys who never shut up about filial piety.

That meant the story was already close to the reckoning. The fake father had heard the whispers and was busy plotting to transfer away everything belonging to the Holloway family.

Heh.

That was the Holloway family property. All of it was hers. Whoever thought they could take it away?

Dream on.

Serena Holloway looked Reginald Sutton up and down, slow and plain.

A Hero fountain pen was clipped to his chest pocket, and a plum-blossom wristwatch sat on his wrist.

He had on a crisp synthetic shirt, black trousers, and shiny black leather shoes.

For these times, that counted as pretty decent.

The original Serena had standards, and ordinary families never even made it into her line of sight.

That was exactly why the fake father had picked Reginald Sutton.

And there was no need to guess—he definitely knew what kind of man Reginald Sutton really was behind closed doors.

If he wanted to dump the original Serena off for good, how could he possibly find her a decent husband?

Looks like she would have to find a chance to go to the Sutton house and take a proper look around.

Back in the apocalypse, Serena Holloway had both mental and spatial abilities.

Now her mental power had dropped back to level one, but her space was still there, still as big as a football field.

It even kept things fresh. She had just checked, and all the supplies she had stockpiled in the apocalypse were still sitting there untouched.

Serena Holloway had no intention of taking this kind of man for a husband. She was not about to become a beard wife.

In the novel, the male lead was described as tall and straight, broad-shouldered and strong-backed, with firm abs and eyes as sharp as a wild leopard’s. Exactly her type.

She had set her sights on that man.

Nobody was taking him from her.

"Serena Holloway! You’re done for. You actually dared to hit me? Fine, just you wait!"

Reginald Sutton threw out that vicious line, then turned and ran, fast as if something unclean were chasing him from behind.

Serena Holloway spat in disgust, then reached into her pocket, planning to get herself a solid meal.

She searched every pocket and did not find a single cent, not even one grain coupon or meal ticket.

"What the hell? How did the original owner even survive like this?"