When dawn was about to break, the morning light shone through the gaps between the windows.

I curled up at the foot of the bed in the corner of the wall, watching the man sleeping soundly.

Last night, when his hand reached over, my heart felt like it was about to leap out of my chest. Fortunately, before this bastard could touch me, he had fallen into a deep sleep.

Wine mixed with jasmine root has a strong hypnotic effect, especially since he was already drunk.

This little trick I heard about when I was a kid helped me at a critical moment. However, even though the man beside me slept like a dead pig and my physical and mental exhaustion made me extremely drowsy, I still couldn't fall asleep.

As a man, I don't have worries about losing my innocence or virtue, and these things aren't that important in contemporary society anyway. But dignity is important, and here, our dignity was trampled into the mud.

But under the current circumstances, I could only survive in a miserable state.

Days surprisingly passed by one after another.

Unexpectedly, my owner, Zhuzi, was not like the other villagers; he wasn’t a violent, rude, and unreasonable beast. He was a beast with a taste for romance and liked extremely long foreplay, so I could always wait for the wine I fed him to take effect.

During this period, maybe moved by my daily obedience and compliance, I gradually gained permission to go outside and look around, instead of being locked in the house daily. I gained some understanding of this remote, crude village located deep in the mountains.

The village I was in had an ironic name—Dequan Village. The village's staple industry was sapling cultivation; almost every family contracted a few acres of mountainous land. However, due to the isolated transportation and rapid changes in market structure, the saplings cultivated here could no longer meet the market demands outside, causing the villagers to become poorer and the village more backward, falling into a vicious cycle.

Additionally, the deeply ingrained preference for sons over daughters resulted in an imbalanced male-to-female ratio in the village, with very few adult women. Desperate to continue their family lines, the villagers had no choice but to buy women from human traffickers.

My owner, Zhao Tiezhu, was the person in the village responsible for liaising and trading with traffickers from outside.

He had been trafficking humans for a long time and had great prestige in the village. All the women in the dozen or so households in the village were his handiwork. Of course, this didn't include those who committed suicide, were accidentally beaten to death, or disappeared due to other reasons.

Although I was very obedient, as time went on, my “uncooperative” belly caused Zhao Tiezhu’s shrewish mother to increasingly despise me. All the housework was thrown at me—cooking, feeding pigs, and laundry. I began to get closer to the women in the village.

Here, the women who could go out and do laundry by the river, other than the native-born locals, were all obedient “merchandise” like me. These women were either tortured to the point of numbness or had accepted their fate after giving birth to a child.

Among these women, there was one named Huang Sijia who left the strongest impression.

She was trafficked to the village many years ago. Initially, she resisted to the point of death, like the woman Zhao Laoer bought, but over time, she stopped resisting and even started to integrate into the village, helping villagers persuade newly trafficked girls to accept their fate and become breeding machines.

She even betrayed others multiple times, informing the men to catch runaway girls promptly.

She enjoyed the sense of recognition she got from betraying others; she relished the feeling of being acknowledged for bullying others.

But all that came to an abrupt end when I arrived.

Because of Zhao Tiezhu, I would often encounter girls who had been captured after trying to escape. Faced with their stubborn but desperate faces, these country hicks had no other way but to insult and severely injure them.

But I, with just a few words, could make these girls obediently give up on escaping and become docile lambs.

Zhao Tiezhu once asked me what I said to them, but I just told him it was my secret.

Not only do I have secrets, but Zhao Tiezhu also has secrets.

That afternoon, as usual, I finished washing the dishes and was cleaning in the yard.

Perhaps it was too hot, the piglets in the pigsty were a bit restless, pacing and grunting.

Afraid that these noises would disturb Zhao Tiezhu’s troublesome old mother, I went over to calm them.

But at that moment, under the noon sun, I glimpsed an upturned gap under the hay in the pigsty.

Through the gap, a pair of eyes were staring at me...