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When Song Xiaozhu woke up, all she had were the young lady's jumbled memories. As for the days when the young lady had thrown money around like dirt, she hadn't enjoyed even a single second of them.

The old man smoking a long-stemmed pipe outside the shack was called Bai Jing.

He was filthy from head to toe, even his eyes yellowed and cloudy. Even if someone peeled off a layer of his old skin, his internal organs probably wouldn't have anything to do with being "clean and fair," either.

Yet his name was Bai Jing.

And he was the one who had saved Song Xiaozhu when she lay at the foot of Garbage Mountain with a persistent high fever.

Old Man Bai had laid out the terms very clearly for Song Xiaozhu.

First, antibiotics were expensive. She had used three bottles and had to repay him thirty.

Second, he didn't feed freeloaders. Song Xiaozhu could either work hard scavenging for money or get out and feed the wolves.

Third, a life-saving debt should be repaid with marriage. Once Song Xiaozhu turned eighteen, she would become his wife.

At the last condition, a curse rose to Song Xiaozhu's throat, but she forced it back down.

She was living under his roof and eating his food. She would endure it.

Besides, this body was only sixteen.

She refused to believe she would still be in this rundown shack two years from now.

Bai Jing finished a pipeful of tobacco and ambled back inside. His hair was dry and yellow, ash clung to his beard, and the smell of smoke mingled with grease on him was even more pungent.

It had been a week, and Song Xiaozhu still hadn't gotten used to his slovenliness.

Old Man Bai raised his eyelids and tipped up his chin.

Song Xiaozhu served him a bowl of "mush."

Old Man Bai gave her a sidelong look.

The corner of Song Xiaozhu's mouth twitched. "Please enjoy, sir," she said politely.

Only then did Old Man Bai puff out his whiskers and begin slowly sipping the mush.

Song Xiaozhu waited until he finished and cleared away the bowl and chopsticks before serving herself a bowl. She sat in a corner and sipped it slowly.

She had been drinking this stuff for several days. It tasted strange, like half-cooked cornmeal, with bits of odd wild greens mixed into it. It wasn't exactly tasty, but it filled her stomach.

Even a bowl of wild-greens mush like this was a rarity in the scavenger community.

Even the shack she found so objectionable was, in many scavengers' eyes, a good place to live that sheltered them from the wind and rain.

After finishing his wild-greens mush, Old Man Bai yawned and looked at Song Xiaozhu. "Hurry up and get to work. You still owe me thirty bottles of antibiotics."

Song Xiaozhu lowered her gaze obediently. "Understood."

Old Man Bai yawned repeatedly, his loose, drooping eyelids struggling to stay open. "No slacking off or cutting corners. If you fail to earn fifty cents again today, you won't get dinner."

Song Xiaozhu dutifully agreed. "Mm."

Quite satisfied with her "obedient" manner, Old Man Bai waved her away.

Song Xiaozhu ducked out of the shack. Outside were a gray sky, tightly packed shacks, and muddy streets running alongside stinking gutters.

This was the scavenger community outside the Fortress, a slum utterly beyond the imagination of Li Siyuan, who had never set foot outside the Holy City.

Even Song Xiaozhu had only seen scenes like this in films and television.

Back then, separated by a screen, she couldn't smell the garbage heaps and stinking gutters or feel the strange, prickling itch of the foul air against her skin, much less have to guard against the ill-intentioned looks cast her way by the drifters of Garbage Mountain.

The people roaming Garbage Mountain were drifters at the very bottom of this world. If Bai Jing hadn't taken her in and given her a foothold in the community, there was no telling what someone with Li Siyuan's delicate skin and pretty face might have suffered.

Now that Song Xiaozhu had taken over Li Siyuan's body, she had darkened her skin, dirtied her hair and face, and dressed in rags to blend into her surroundings.

Even so, small, thin, and clearly lacking strength, Song Xiaozhu was someone people could bully with impunity on Garbage Mountain.

So Song Xiaozhu avoided crowds as much as possible and tried not to draw anyone's attention.

The work Bai Jing had given her was simple enough. Their shack was very close to Garbage Mountain, just over three hundred meters from the reeking garbage heaps.

Song Xiaozhu's job was to find discarded items in the garbage that could be exchanged for money, such as wastepaper, plastic, glass, textiles, scrap metal, discarded electrical appliances and electronics, and large pieces of discarded furniture.

The last two were "treasures" Song Xiaozhu had no chance of finding. People already had their eyes on those things.

Large pieces of discarded furniture could fetch at least five yuan at the recycling station, and old appliances and electronics fetched considerable sums too. As for scrap metal, there was plenty of rusty sheet iron and huge iron frames, but the former sold for about as much as plastic bottles and was harder to dig out, while the latter couldn't possibly be budged by one person without equipment such as welding tools or a crane.

Bai Jing's rule for Song Xiaozhu was that she had to bring back at least fifty cents a day.

What did that mean?

Yesterday, Song Xiaozhu had found twenty plastic bottles and a reasonably intact windowpane. She took them to the recycling station and received a total of twenty-five cents.

And that alone had left Song Xiaozhu dizzy, her vision swimming and her legs cramping.

Garbage Mountain was enormous, a full dozen or more stories high. Looking past it, she could just make out a towering wall that rose into the clouds.

That was the source of Garbage Mountain, the fortress known as "Ink City."

A single wall divided two utterly different worlds.

Inside the city were secure homes for citizens. Outside was the crowded scavenger community, a gathering place for people at the bottom struggling to survive.

In Li Siyuan's memories, even the fortress of Ink City counted as a "slum," let alone this scavenger community that clung to Ink City and barely scraped by.

Song Xiaozhu didn't feel quite such a drastic fall. She had only been an ordinary person to begin with.

Still, at least she used to earn ten thousand a month.

Now, she was tearing her hair out over fifty cents.

Song Xiaozhu didn't dare go where there were lots of people. The result of avoiding the crowds was that the garbage here was extremely poor quality. Anything worth even a little had already been taken by other scavengers, leaving only scattered odds and ends that were difficult to dig through.

Song Xiaozhu had made a rough note of the recycling prices yesterday. One intact plastic bottle was worth one cent. To get fifty cents, she would have to collect at least fifty bottles.

An hour of rummaging would yield about three or four bottles. Fifty would take sixteen hours.