TTLJDFL chapter 6

When Li Jin went inside, Qin Muwen was holding the baby in his arms, his face deathly pale, even paler  than right after he’d given birth.

There wasn’t a trace of color left in his lips.

And yet, even like this, he was still holding the baby with the utmost care, gently stroking the baby’s back as softly as he could.

Qin Muwen’s movements were clumsy and unpracticed, but they were filled with genuine affection for the child.

Li Jin smiled and said, “Looks like this baby really does recognize his father. The moment Daddy picked him up, he stopped crying right away.”

As he spoke, his hands didn’t stop moving, he was getting ready to make up the bed.

In this era, the cotton stuffed  quilts was genuinely substantial. Li Jin first pulled out a thin mattress pad and laid it across the empty half of the bed.

He felt this thickness was just right—not too hard, not too soft.

Li Jin weighed the thickness of the pad in his hands and decided that one layer would be enough.

Still, the cotton pads of this era were nothing compared to the soft mattresses of later times, so Li Jin borrowed two newly stitched pads from Li Daniu’s household.

Even laying both down together wouldn’t make the bed too soft, just  enough to not  hurt anyone’s back.

Li Jin asked, “Do you like a softer bed, or a firmer one?”

Qin Muwen froze for a moment, as if he hadn’t expected Li Jin to actually be speaking to him.”M-me?”

The young man’s voice was young and thin, and  having just given birth, it carried an extra softness to it.

It wasn’t delicate and clear the way a woman’s voice might be, but it gave off an inexplicable sense of quiet, steady, unhurried peace.

Li Jin didn’t smile often. In his past life, working in the environment of a hospital, partings between life and death had become commonplace.

When a patient passed away, the doctors certainly felt grief too, but they still had to gather all the data from the surgery and the patient’s death, sum up the cause, and pool that data together over time to help push the entire field of medicine forward.

At case review meetings where doctors went over the statistics, no one wore a smile, after all, these were all cases involving death.

But crying through a summary report would’ve seemed absurdly out of place.

So everyone had long since mastered the skill of keeping a straight face while delivering reports in a  professional manner.

So Li Jin genuinely couldn’t remember the last time he’d smiled.

But right now, watching the young man hold the baby so clumsily yet so gently, a smile crept onto his face without him even realizing it.

He smiled and ruffled the young man’s hair. “Of course I’m asking you, who else would I be asking, the baby?”

Beside Qin Muwen, the freshly made bed carried a scent of sunlight, giving off a wonderfully fresh feeling.

He said obediently, “This is enough.”

Li Jin didn’t press the matter further, there was still an extra pad available, and if the young man found it uncomfortable later, they could always add it then.

So he laid the clean sheets down, and then, like pulling up a radish, he lifted the baby right out of Qin Muwen’s arms.

The baby, looking utterly baffled: “???” What just happened?

Well, whatever had happened, crying seemed like the appropriate response.

Qin Muwen was also a little dazed. His biggest worry right now was that Li Jin might not like having a ger’er , might not care about his first child.

But looking at Li Jin’s attitude now, though he didn’t seem overly warm toward the baby, he certainly wasn’t cold either.

Li Jin bent down and said, “Don’t struggle.”

Then, with one hand supporting the young man’s back and the other hooked under the crook of his knees, he lifted him up into his arms.

Actually, Li Jin had held him this same way earlier, before the baby was born.

But back then, Qin Muwen had been tortured half to death by the pain in his belly and had no attention to spare for such details.

This time, he could clearly hear the man’s steady heartbeat, and could smell the faint scent of moisture still clinging to him from his recent bath.

That was when Qin Muwen suddenly remembered he hadn’t put his pants back on since giving birth.

The bedroom door had been shut the whole time,  but this movement stirred up a slight breeze, and Qin Muwen’s face flushed red to the tips of his ears.

Li Jin had Qin Muwen hold onto his neck while he cleaned him up below, and only then set him down on the bed.

There wasn’t a trace of teasing or impropriety in any of his movements.

Li Jin quickly finished making up the other half of the bed, then pulled the quilt over Qin Muwen and tucked in the corners.

Only then did he ask again, “Where are your clothes?”

The young man only owned two sets of clothing—one was what he currently had on, and the other was in the cabinet by the bed

Li Jin found it, sorted out which side was which, and reached under the quilt to help Qin Muwen dress, rustling around beneath the blankets.

The pants had clearly been altered, probably because his belly had grown so large before, the waistband had been let out entirely.

Once the young man was settled, Li Jin finally wrapped the baby in a diaper and swaddled him snugly.

It was currently June. Though the temperature ran a bit high, it was still far better than giving birth in the dead of winter.

If it had been winter, Li Jin would’ve had to think about buying more charcoal to heat the floor furnace.

With both the large one and the small one tucked into bed, Li Jin finally stopped and folded up the soiled mattress pad from earlier.

At a glance, this pad had clearly been used for many years, the cotton inside had been compressed hard and flat, and now it was stained with blood as well.

Washing and re-stuffing it would be an enormous amount of work.Li Jin decided to just take it apart and burn it as firewood.

Though he could cook, tidy up, and clean just fine, when it came to needlework, he was truly hopeless.

The only person in the household who might know how to unstitch and wash a quilt was probably the young man lying in bed right now, but he’d only just given birth. How could Li Jin possibly let him do that kind of work?

The household now had two brand-new mattress pads, which was more than enough.

Curled up under the covers, Qin Muwen felt countless times fresher and cleaner than he had just moments ago.

He wondered where on earth his husband had managed to find all these things…

Li Jin gathered up all the things the household no longer needed and carried them to the kitchen.

Having lived alone for so many years, keeping his rooms and surfaces clean and tidy was  a basic standard he held for himself.

Once everything was in order, Li Jin started trying to recall the “postpartum care guidelines” his teachers had covered back when he was still in school.

Something about how… a new mother’s emotional state needed to be carefully looked after.

Postpartum depression was nothing to joke about.

Li Jin went back into the bedroom. The baby, having cried a couple of times already, had fallen asleep.

The little face looked adorable, with a small cinnabar birthmark right between the eyebrows—utterly endearing.

But the young man still hadn’t fallen asleep. When Li Jin walked in, he blinked and looked over at him, then quickly averted his gaze the moment Li Jin looked back.

Li Jin sat down at the edge of the bed and started up a conversation. “Are you cold right now?”

The young man met Li Jin’s eyes and shook his head obediently.

“Is there anywhere else that’s uncomfortable?”

The young man shook his head again, this time adding a small, “No.”

“If your stomach hurts, you have to tell me. Don’t be shy, and don’t be scared.”

The young man looked at Li Jin, eyes wide open, and opened his mouth as if about to call out to him—but no words came out.

Right at that moment, a flash of images suddenly surged through Li Jin’s mind.

“Husband? Dear husband? Is that a title someone like you, a worthless wretch, is fit to use?”

The young man knelt on the ground, tears dripping down one after another. “I was wrong, I was wrong, I’ll never do it again.”

Then came another round of fists and kicks.

Li Jin thought, even as an outside observer, he could hardly contain his anger.

It was hard to imagine how the young man had endured all these years.
“My name is Li Jin, Li as in dawn, Jin as in a bright future.

You can call me by my name directly, or… you can call me ‘husband.’ Whichever you like.”

Li Jin didn’t apologize to the young man for the harm done to him over the past two years, because he understood that once someone has been hurt, an apology tends to feel especially hollow.

In moments like this, words were often the least useful thing of all.Better to make up for the wounds in the young man’s heart through actions instead.

Just as Li Jin thought he wouldn’t hear the young man speak, a soft, quiet name slipped out from his lips.

“A-Jin.”

Having said it, the young man closed his eyes, looking as if he wanted nothing more than to bury his face in the quilt.

He had no idea how Li Jin would react. He didn’t dare call him “husband” or “dear husband,” because he could sense that the Li Jin in front of him now was completely different from the Li Jin of before.

Qin Muwen wanted to use a new form of address to begin a new life.

He worried that using the old titles might stir up that violent side of Li Jin again.

He himself could go on enduring it, but the baby… the baby had only just been born, was still so fragile, and truly couldn’t withstand something like that.

Li Jin smiled and said, “I really like that name.”

The young man’s tightly wound heart finally settled back into place. He’d been holding himself so tense, and now that he’d relaxed, he quickly drifted off into a deep sleep.

Only then did Li Jin carefully take a look  of the household. The bedroom was roughly a dozen or so square meters, with a wooden plank bed built up against the wall.

At the foot of the bed sat a low cabinet, well made, it looked to be the most valuable piece of furniture in the entire household.

The cabinet had three tiers in total, holding a scattering of small odds and ends.

The soapberries sat on the inner side of the windowsill, conveniently placed for washing the dirty clothes he’d just changed out of.

There were no other cabinets in the bedroom, only two bamboo baskets remaining.

One held clothing, the other held an unfinished needlework project.

At the very bottom of the clothing basket, Li Jin also discovered seven or eight copper coins, he guessed the young man probably hadn’t had anywhere else to hide them, afraid that the original body would spend the entire household’s savings on liquor.

Li Jin left the coins untouched.

Li Jin felt he’d already recalled a small fragment of memory involving the original body and the young man together.

Which meant… it probably wouldn’t be long before he remembered the young man’s name either…

To ask him directly, face to face, for his name would be as good as announcing outright that he wasn’t the real Li Jin.

What Li Jin didn’t know yet was that the original body himself had never known the young man’s name either.

He’d never even thought to give the young man a proper form of address, as if he were simply a person who didn’t matter one way or another.

Li Jin decided to do the laundry first. He’d seen some of the village’s young husbands and wives carrying wash basins off toward the distance, and it reminded him of the river he’d glimpsed when he’d first been brought back on the ox cart.

“The villagers probably all wash their clothes down at the river.”

He gathered up his soapberries, wooden mallet (for beating the clothes clean), wash basin, and laundry, and set off, tagging along at the tail end of the group heading that way.