"Stella, we’re getting on the train any minute now. Carrying cash on you isn’t safe. Hand it over, I’ll keep it for you."

"Trust me. Once you’re with me, I’ll make sure you live well from now on!"

The harsh, noisy voices hit her head-on. Stella Mercer snapped her eyes open, dazed.

What she saw was an old train station straight out of the seventies. People were everywhere, wearing imitation military caps, knockoff army jackets, and Zhongshan suits.

Where was this? Wasn’t she in the hospital, dying of late-stage cancer?

A man stood right in front of her, greed written all over his face.

"Hurry up and give it to me!" Chuck Merritt stuck out his hand, looking openly impatient.

What was wrong with this woman? She was already running away with him, and she was still this guarded?

Stella Mercer was completely lost, but some instinctive alarm rose in her chest. She refused coldly, "No need. My money stays with me."

Getting turned down in public, Chuck Merritt’s face darkened at once. "Don’t be so shameless when someone’s trying to be nice to you!"

He reached straight for her, trying to snatch the money off her by force.

"What are you doing?" Stella Mercer recoiled in fright.

Just as Chuck Merritt’s hand was about to brush her clothes, a sharp gust of cold force swept in.

A tall, straight-backed man strode over fast. His movements were clean and ruthless. Even with a crutch, his strength didn’t weaken in the slightest. He drove a brutal kick straight into Chuck Merritt.

There was a heavy thud. Chuck Merritt was sent flying and crashed to the ground, unable to get back up for a long while.

Stella Mercer was scared stiff. She stood rooted to the spot, her whole body locked up.

The man who had appeared out of nowhere had a tall frame, severe brows, and a face cold enough to cut. The pressure coming off him was intense. Even leaning on a crutch, he carried the kind of menace that warned strangers to stay away.

And who was this now?

Chuck Merritt lay sprawled on the ground, scared and furious all at once. He pointed at Stella Mercer and shouted, trying to clear himself, "Victor Harlow! This has nothing to do with me!"

"It was your wife who couldn’t behave herself! She came on to me first! She insisted on dragging me away with her! I just lost my head for a second and almost did something stupid! It’s all her fault!"

People nearby all turned to look.

Stella Mercer’s heart pounded so hard it felt like it would burst. For one wild second, she honestly thought she’d been trafficked by some kind of scam ring.

No. She had to run.

She instinctively turned, planning to slip away from this mess while nobody stopped her.

But the moment she took one step, a strong hand shot out, grabbed her arm with perfect accuracy, and yanked her back.

The force was sudden and fierce. She lost her balance and lurched forward, her forehead slamming hard into Victor Harlow’s solid chin.

A sharp pain exploded through her body. Her vision went black, and she lost consciousness on the spot.

And this time, the moment she fainted, the missing memories crashed into her head all at once.

So that was it. She hadn’t been kidnapped by scammers.

She had transmigrated.

She had been an orphan to begin with, and with terminal cancer, she hadn’t had long left anyway.

She had just donated her fortune—tens of millions—to the state, and then, in the blink of an eye, she’d ended up inside a period novel called Rebirth in the Seventies: Tea Talk for the Stepmother.

She had become Stella Mercer, the wife of the story’s major villain, Victor Harlow. Funny enough, her own original name had also been Stella.

In that period novel, neither Victor Harlow nor the original Stella had wanted this marriage.

Victor Harlow’s family was dirt poor, poor enough that the house practically rang hollow. There were elderly people, sick people, and a whole heap of mouths depending on him alone. Some days they ate, some days they didn’t.

Being poor was bad enough, but the Harlow family was also a complete mess. One couldn’t tell right from wrong, one was so biased it was absurd, another was selfish to the core...

The whole household was like a pit full of bitter water.

The original Stella was already in her twenties and still unmarried, all because she’d been dumped by a fiancé years ago. The blow had hit her hard, and she got stubborn, dead set on finding someone better than the last man.

She picked and picked and missed every good option, and in the end, she picked herself right into becoming an old maid.

Then someone set her up and she fell into the water.

Victor Harlow had also been trapped in the same scheme and fallen in, and while he was there, he pulled her out too.

Stella’s mother was probably desperate to marry her daughter off, so she turned around and forced the original Stella to marry him, while also forcing Victor Harlow to take her.

But the original Stella had only one thing on her mind—making her former fiancé regret losing her. A man like Victor Harlow, with no family wealth and a crippled leg that needed a crutch, wasn’t even close to what she wanted.

So after the wedding, she never let Victor Harlow touch her.

She was convinced he had schemed against her on purpose and forced her into marriage. In her mind, she was a flower stuck in a heap of mud.

So she ran off with another man. Before leaving, she borrowed money all over the village, from this house and that house, and she borrowed plenty of it too—high-interest money, no less.

She had done it on purpose. She meant to run and leave all that debt for Victor Harlow to shoulder.

But Victor Harlow was the major villain of the novel. Someone like that was never easy to provoke.

In the original story, members of the Harlow family had caused the deaths of the grandparents who had raised him by hand.

Victor Harlow paid back every grudge. He didn’t even spare his own father or stepmother. In the Harlow family, almost everyone who had ever bullied those old two ended up ruined by him.

Before the marriage, everyone said Victor Harlow wasn’t worthy of the original Stella.

So after the marriage, she ate well, lazed around, and openly made him lose face in front of others. In private, she looked down on him even more.

Victor Harlow’s stepmother and his two younger half-sisters had never stopped talking badly about Stella Mercer behind her back.

Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law already had enough trouble getting along. And this one was a later wife, while those two sisters weren’t even from the same mother.

The original Stella wasn’t the kind to swallow her anger either. She liked making a face and throwing fits.

If you looked down on me, well, I looked down on you too.

But she couldn’t outtalk them, and she couldn’t beat them in a fight either. In the end, all that bottled-up anger got dumped onto Victor Harlow.

A wife like that—disrespectful to her elders, careless toward her sisters-in-law, and not taking her own husband seriously—what family would tolerate it?

Who would want a daughter-in-law like that?

As time passed, the original Stella’s reputation in the village went completely rotten.

When she got caught trying to elope and was dragged back to be beaten, not even her own family stood up to speak for her.

On the contrary, the villagers all thought Victor Harlow ought to teach her a proper lesson.

Around here, whenever a disobedient wife had to be dealt with, people always relied on a man’s fists. If she got beaten, everybody thought it was only natural.

Only now did Stella Mercer fully understand it. The man trying to take her money was Chuck Merritt from the novel—the heartless bastard who had tricked the original Stella into eloping.

And the one who had dragged her back was Victor Harlow.

She had no idea what had happened to the original Stella, and she had no clue why she herself had been pulled into this book.

But she had finally gotten a new body and another chance to live, so she had to cherish it.

Thinking of the situation she was in, Stella Mercer’s heartbeat picked up again. This was exactly the point in the plot where the original Stella tried to elope and got caught at the train station.

She had fainted just now, and right now she was still slung over Victor Harlow’s shoulder.

Stella Mercer knew perfectly well that disaster was about to fall on her head.

Her fists clenched quietly.

She absolutely could not sit and wait to die.

They had reached the entrance of the village.

"Victor! Not bad at all. You really managed to catch this woman and bring her back!"

"Victor, hey—what if there’s been some mistake? Did she really run off with somebody? You’d better make sure before saying anything."

"She hangs around those educated youths all day long. I could tell ages ago. She’s the slutty type, can’t keep herself in line."

Half-conscious, Stella Mercer finally came properly to her senses. All kinds of messy voices poured into her ears. She shuddered, and in an instant she was fully awake, fully aware of the atmosphere around her.

The looks coming from all directions—disgust, contempt, scorn—stabbed into her like needles.

Even though she had expected it, Stella Mercer’s first reaction was still to shut her eyes for a moment.

This was too humiliating.

A lot of these people had watched the original Stella grow up. How was there not a single one willing to say a word for her?

Was her popularity really that terrible?

Victor Harlow had been carrying her for at least an hour, maybe more, and his breathing hadn’t even gone ragged.

So there was no point trying to break free by force. If hard wouldn’t work, she had to go soft.

Stella Mercer quickly steadied herself, put on a weak, pitiful front, and spoke in the gentlest female voice she could manage.

"Could you put me down first?"

She was hoping to stir at least a shred of pity in him.

Men, when faced with a soft, fragile little woman like this... didn’t they usually go easy?