OBS Chapter 925 Whose fault is this?
Chapter 925 Whose fault is this?
Chapter 925 Whose fault is this?
"Madam, this is your share."
The man, wearing a miner's hat and leather gloves, had a voice as beautiful as heaven as he placed the bread, which smelled of wheat, into the paper bag in her arms.
"Thank you, thank you."
The man smiled warmly: "You're welcome, you deserve it."
Anna had to admit that this was the most handsome man she had ever seen; even with his face covered in black ash, his striking good looks were undeniable.
She hurriedly left the group, glanced at Lujinichina who had been lying by the wall, only to find that she was no longer there. After asking passersby, she learned that it was Ms. Natasha who had revived her.
She couldn't help but turn back to look at Ms. Natasha, who was still distributing bread. She was speaking gently to the people around her, saying, "We are a team that stands up for the poor. Anyone in need can come to us. We are here so that you will no longer be bullied."
"There really is such a team."
Like a blade of grass basking in the faint light filtering through the gaps in a towering tree for the first time, Anna felt a warm glow in her heart, as if even the chill of February winds no longer stung her bones.
But then he worried that these well-meaning people would certainly not be let off by the Tsar's military police.
May the Holy Mother bless them.
She clutched the bag tightly to her chest and hurried home with quick, short steps.
The old wooden door creaked and groaned in the wind.
Anna pushed open the door and exclaimed happily, "Mom, sister, I got bread! It weighs more than three pounds! A kind officer also gave me a stack of rubles. I can use it to buy lots of food on the black market later."
No one responded.
The house, which was barely warmer than outside, felt like a giant icebox, deathly silent. Even my sister's usually heart-wrenching cough had disappeared.
Anna's joyful mood plummeted.
She stepped into the narrow attic, the warmest place in the house. On the tattered mattress stuffed with newspapers, her sister's eyelashes were covered with ice, her small body was curled up, and her lips were purple like frozen berries.
"Masha, it's alright, Masha, your sister brought back bread."
A sense of foreboding arose in her heart. With a sob in her voice, she called out to her younger sister and reached out to touch her sister's face, which was as cold as ice floating in a water tank.
Anna then noticed that Martha's eyes were half-open, her pupils were dull and unfocused.
No, please, please.
A woman's weak voice came from inside the house: "Cough, is that Anna? Anna, look at our poor Martha, she hasn't coughed in so long."
Anna wiped away her tears, forced a smile, and went into the inner room.
The mother lay in the haystack, wrapped in a military overcoat that her father had sent back from the front lines. It had two bullet holes in it, revealing the thin cotton and straw inside. She was forcing her eyes open and looking around.
Seeing the paper bag in Anna's arms, a sliver of light returned to her cloudy eyes.
“Masha is fine, Mom. I brought back some bread. I’ll go cook some porridge right away.”
She tried to force a smile, but her face, almost frozen stiff, was congealed by dried tears and snot, and she couldn't manage to make one.
She quickly turned around and went to get the axe.
She chopped apart a chair with only one leg left, stuffed the firewood whole into the stove, lit the last match and ignited it with newspaper, then picked up an axe, smashed the floating ice in the water tank, and scooped out a pot of ice water.
He then took the bread out of the paper bag and chopped it open with an axe.
Debris flew everywhere, and the axe blade got stuck on a pebble, preventing her from splitting the bread. So she smashed it with all her might.
One, two, until I was completely exhausted.
She gathered the bread crumbs mixed with sawdust and threw them into the still-unheated pot, stirring them constantly with an iron spoon that had been bent from pounding ice floes.
The water in the pot wouldn't boil for a long time, only emitting a faint white steam. Anna was so anxious that she knelt down by the stove and blew air into the stove door.
Sparks and black ash splattered onto her face, but she was completely unaware.
"Mom, the porridge is almost ready, it'll be ready soon."
She kept murmuring to herself, and the tears she had been holding back for so long finally burst forth.
The glistening tears, reflected in the flickering firelight of the stove, seemed to illuminate Martha's figure.
The thin and small Martha kept crying out in bed, "Sister, I'm so hungry!" "Sister, I'm so cold!" She had taken the warmest cotton coat in the house, but hadn't been able to bring back the bread in time.
She wiped her face, suppressing her surging emotions, and picked up a spoon to scoop up the slightly warm, thick porridge.
The water was still not boiling, and a layer of sawdust floated on top.
She poured the sawdust back into the pot and hurriedly carried the porridge into the inner room: "Mom, the porridge is ready, come and drink it."
She helped her mother up from her thin back, which was practically skin and bones, and used a small spoon to scoop up some porridge and bring it to her mother's mouth.
Her mother opened her mouth very slowly and swallowed with great difficulty. Even though Anna had already rinsed away the sawdust floating on top, the bread she brought back was still hard to swallow.
When she ate the fifth spoonful, her mother started coughing violently, spitting out a mouthful of bloody saliva onto Anna's hand. The hot blood droplets landed on Anna's cold hand, burning her so badly that she shuddered.
"Mom, please, please stop coughing."
The mother's symptoms were the same as Martha's.
The neighbors said it was "a plague in winter".
It first starves a person's stomach and intestines, causing the stomach walls to rub against each other like sandpaper and bleed; then it freezes the last bit of warmth in the bone crevices, causing the joints to swell like steamed buns; finally, it travels along the bloodstream to the heart.
After coughing for a while, Mom suddenly seemed to realize something and grabbed Anna's hand with her bluish-gray fingertips.
“Take care of yourselves and Martha. When your dad comes back, good times will come. He said he got a... cough, George Medal.”
Anna nodded, but tears streamed down her face like broken beads, falling onto her mother's withered hand.
The mother's hand slowly loosened, her head tilted completely into Anna's arms, and her last breath fell into Anna's neck, taking away the last trace of warmth from her body.
Only then did the porridge on the stove begin to bubble.
Anna held her mother in her arms, her expression blank; the hard, sharp bones seemed capable of tearing through her clothes.
Outside the window, a biting wind blew, emitting a mournful cry.
The girl went to the attic, picked up her light-footed younger sister, placed her in her mother's arms, and poured half a bowl of thick porridge back into the bubbling pot, staring blankly at the rising steam.
She wanted to cry, but couldn't; it felt like a stone was stuck in her chest.
She picked up the bowl of porridge and filled it to the brim for herself.
The porridge, covered in sawdust and bran, was indeed hard to swallow, but she ate it quickly and hurriedly until her belly swelled up into a small ball. Then she used a spoon to scrape the bottom of the pot clean and licked it clean.
After finishing her meal, she turned off the stove.
There's hardly any fuel left in the house; we even had to take the four legs off the bed the day before yesterday to boil water.
The room, having lost its only source of heat, became cold again.
She went back into the inner room, squeezed into the arms of her mother and sister, curled up, and stared blankly into space.
Why couldn't you wait for me a little longer?
Why didn't I get up earlier yesterday to queue up?
Why can't the factory manager let his mother take over after she works so hard every day and gets exhausted?
"Blame me."
"it's all my fault."
She murmured to herself.
But then, a cold voice rang out in the empty room.
"this is not your fault."
"Who?"
"Who's out there?"
Appearing before Anna was a coal miner. He took off his hat, revealing long, snow-white hair, and wiped the soot from his face, revealing a delicate young girl's face.
"You can call me Fringilla."
"Are you working for Ms. Natasha?"
Anna's vision suddenly brightened: "You're a spellcaster too, aren't you? Please, save my mother and sister!"
The female miner gave a cold laugh, revealing a pair of sharp little tiger teeth.
“I was drawn here by the intense power of despair you exude. I thought you were a promising talent, but after what happened, you still think about relying on others.”
"Please."
"I am willing to pay any price."
Seeing the pleading look on the girl's face, the female miner's expression finally softened: "I am not a god, I cannot bring people back to life. Even if I could, what would be resurrected would be a ghoul. If you had asked Nia Natasha to come sooner, there might still be hope."
“My family said that there is no savior, and don’t expect any gods or emperors. If you hate someone or want to take revenge on someone, you have to rely on yourself.”
The female miner snapped her fingers, and a goblet filled with blood appeared in her hand.
"If you've come to terms with it, drink it; if you intend to continue to passively accept it, pour it out."
She gave Anna a deep look, then turned and transformed into countless small bats, flying out like smoke through the large hole in the roof.
If it weren't for the goblet filled with blood-red liquid still there, Anna would have thought it was a hallucination.
She stared blankly at the crystal-clear liquid in the wine glass, recalling the words the other person had left behind.
Whom do I hate?
"Whom do you want to take revenge on?"
Her emotions were ignited; self-blame, pain, and sorrow instantly transformed into intense resentment: "I hate, of course I hate, I hate the Tsar who started this war, I hate those penny-pinching factory owners, I hate those hoarding capitalists and noble lords."
“I’m not lazy. I’ve done everything I could. I’ve gone to every corner of the city to collect firewood, to the Neva River ten kilometers away to break ice and fetch water, and to fight with men for a piece of birch bark. This world has never given people like us a way to survive.”
Without hesitation, she picked up the glass and drank the rusty-tasting liquid in one gulp.
The next moment, her vision transformed into a blood-red world.
On the table beneath the wine glass, a line of small characters reads: “Come to No. 133, Carpenter's Alley.”
Anna's body began to convulse, and the remaining liquid in the wine glass became increasingly sweet and tempting, even sweeter than the Texas maple syrup her father had sent back last year.
(End of this chapter)