Clerk Zhao leaned forward across the rough wooden table, fountain pen poised like a spear, awaiting her grateful submission. Urban registration, a state-allocated apartment, and five times the monthly grain allowance of a first-class field hand lay suspended on the tip of that brass nib. Fang Qinyu sank back against her stack of cotton quilts, her posture collapsing into absolute slackness. She pulled the patched blanket until it tucked neatly beneath her chin. "No," she said. Zhao’s pen jerked, tearing a minute triangular flap into the margin of the pristine contract. "Excuse me?" "The chairs in city administrative buildings have straight wooden backs," Qinyu explained mildly, adjusting her head on the buckwheat pillow. "They do not permit reclining. Furthermore, walking down three flights of concrete stairs every morning to reach a communal kitchen would drain my vital reserves before nine o'clock. The distance from the bed to the bureau desk exceeds thirty strides. It is an unviable habitat." Silence fell over the room, thick and suffocating. Zhao looked as if he had been slapped with a wet carp. His mouth worked twice before any sound emerged. "Young woman," Zhao stammered, his spectacles sliding down his nose. "This is an iron-rice-bowl appointment. The Commerce Board does not bargain for convenience! Did you hear me? If you do not relocate to supervise the technical schematics, this entire tractor refurbishment initiative dissolves. Zhou Hanchen will not receive a single fen from the county bureau!" Zhou Hanchen stepped forward from the threshold. The broad planes of his shoulders blocked out the midday glare pouring through the doorway. His hands, rough and calloused from midnight gear-turning, dropped onto the edge of the low table with a deliberate, heavy thud. "Then find another mechanic who can convert a three-phase stator using scrap wire and tallow," Hanchen said, his voice flat, gravel scraping over iron. "Because she is not leaving this room." Zhao pushed his glasses up with a trembling thumb. "Zhou Hanchen, don't be a fool! You are turning down state patronage for—for a nap?" "My wife does not travel well," Hanchen said. He reached down, calmly smoothing the corner of Qinyu's blanket where it had rumpled over her shoulder. His knuckles grazed her collarbone, warm and steady. "Her mind operates at full capacity only when her physical vessel remains unstrained. If the county needs her structural analyses, bring the blueprints here. I will execute the fieldwork, run the lathe, install the commutators, and manage the regional installations. She will remain in Wutong as the chief technical adviser, reviewing documentation from this exact bed." Qinyu gave a slow, approving nod from the pillows. "A stationary consulting node minimizes thermodynamic loss. He speaks wisdom." Zhao looked between the stone-faced youth and the cocooned girl, letting out a sharp sputter of disbelief. "A... stationary consulting node? And you, Zhou Hanchen, you would do all the manual repairs across three districts while she collects an adviser's stipend for lying down?" "I will do all of it," Hanchen said without hesitation. "Write the addendum. My labor, her oversight, local deployment. Sign it or leave the paperwork on the threshold and take your broken generators to the provincial capital for six times the price." Zhao stared at the young man’s stubborn jaw, then glanced down at the intricate capacitor sketch Qinyu had solved with three sentences of technobabble ten minutes earlier. He knew no other workshop within fifty li could decipher the foreign copper windings. Defeated, the clerk cursed under his breath, uncapped his ink bottle, and began scratching revisions into the parchment. "Insanity," Zhao muttered as he signed. "Absolute madness." From the corner of the room, a sharp, choked gasp broke the quiet. Fang Rulan stood pressed against the doorframe, her knuckles white where she gripped the peeling wood. Her face was the color of curdled soy milk. Her lips trembled, dry and cracked from months of volunteering for the pre-dawn manure brigades. She had blistered her palms, curried favor with every petty clerk, and broken her back in the mud—all to secure a future that was now being dropped into her sister’s lap like overripe fruit. "No," Rulan whispered. The sound rasped in her throat like dry husks. "No, no, no! This is wrong! That’s not how the chronicle goes!" Zhao paused, his pen lifting. "Comrade?" "She is a parasite!" Rulan shrieked, tearing away from the doorframe. Her braided hair, unwashed and streaked with straw, whipped across her sunken cheeks. "Don't you see what she's doing? She doesn't know anything about vacuum tubes or transmissions! She’s just lazy! In the first timeline, she died of a winter cough behind the granary before the reform even started! She wasn't supposed to marry him!" Xiaobo shrank behind Hanchen’s tall frame, clutching his brother-in-law's trouser leg. "Rulan, go home," Hanchen said, his voice dropping into dangerous quiet. "You've been in the sun too long." "You shut up, Zhou Hanchen!" she wailed, saliva flecking her lips as she pointed an accusatory arm at him. "You were supposed to suffer! You were supposed to be dragged through the mud, go broke, go to Shenzhen in rags, and sleep under bridges before building the electronics empire! I was supposed to be the one who stood by you! I was supposed to invest in the municipal bonds in 1984! I know about the textile boom! I know which state factories go bankrupt in eighty-six!" Two neighboring aunties who had been eavesdropping outside peeked through the doorway, their expressions twisting into open pity and horror. "Mercy," Auntie Ma whispered loudly from the threshold. "The heat has cooked the poor girl's brains. Listen to her—babbling about years that haven't arrived!" "All that volunteer digging for the model-worker ribbon," Old Man Sun clucked, shaking his head. "We warned the production chief. A body can only take so many double shifts on cold porridge before the spirit unhinges." "I am not crazy!" Rulan roared, her voice cracking into a jagged screech. She spun toward the villagers, her eyes wild, bloodshot veins spiderwebbing across the whites. "I died in a cold hospital room while the television talked about his wealth! I came back! Heaven gave me the second chance to take what belongs to me! I worked every hour! I hoed the north ridge! Why does heaven give everything to the slug who won't even sit up to eat?!" "Comrade," Clerk Zhao said, hastily gathering his papers into his satchel and edging toward the back wall. "This woman requires medical sedation. The commune clinic has valerian root—" "You don't understand anything!" Rulan screamed. Her crazed gaze snapped back to the bed. Qinyu was still there, completely unmoving, blinking lazily at a speck of dust floating in the sunbeam, entirely indifferent to the cosmic rage tearing through the room. That serene, effortless comfort snapped the final thread in Rulan's mind. On the low bench beside the door lay a harvesting sickle, its curved crescent blade ground sharp that very morning for the late sorghum cut. Rulan’s hand shot out. Steel glinted as she snatched the wooden handle. "If I can't have the fortune," Rulan spat, her voice dropping into a guttural, feral hiss, "you won't live to sleep through it!" She lunged across the narrow dirt floor, raising the curved hook of the blade straight toward Qinyu’s throat.

The Reborn's Meltdown