Little Tales of the Strange

A wooden plank bed, a tattered cotton quilt, two sets of clothes, a desk, some writing tools, and a four-legged stool with a badly injured, limping leg—this was everything he owned.

“So this is all my worldly possessions? Rather poor, I must say.”

Feng Yuan surveyed his surroundings with a slight frown, then closed his eyes to acquaint himself with his own circumstances and the nature of this new world. The person whose soul he had crossed into was also named Feng Yuan, a scholar by title, but penniless. His only item of value was the black robe on his body, which had not been washed in a year and had originally been white.

He was, as of two weeks ago, an orphan. “Half-a-month orphan”—that is, his parents had died just half a month ago, having slipped and drowned in the river. Now, he had no other relatives; all were dead. He was, in every sense, the last of his line. If not for this soul crossing, the original Feng Yuan would not even have had the chance to be the last—because, mere moments before the crossing, he had starved to death.

Yes, starved to death—not by suicide from grief after his parents’ passing, but literally from lack of money and food. Such a death was cruel indeed. As a transmigrator, Feng Yuan could deeply sympathize, for he too had often gone hungry as a child. He well knew the agony of hunger; to him, nothing in the world was worse. Worse still was seeing friends post pictures of midnight feasts on social media while he starved.

Whenever such people appeared in his feed, Feng Yuan would curse them, block them, and then