Ding Yun felt reassured and simply found an empty spot to sleep. However, her adoptive parents, Cang Hai and Cang Jin, were so worried they couldn't sleep at all. They quickly transformed into hamster-sized versions of themselves, their hearts in sync.
They scurried into the small hamster burrow beneath the kitchen.
And began to whisper.
"Wife, do you think what Xiao Yun said is reliable? Does anyone truly like her current in-between appearance?
We don't see people liking cows or bulls either!
Hasn't she been deceived..."
Perhaps after looking for so long, they had grown tired of her appearance. Cang Hai didn't find Ding Yun particularly beautiful, nor did he believe she could earn a lot of money. Thus, he remained relatively pessimistic.
However, he didn't want to discourage their daughter too much.
So, he hoped to find some validation from his wife.
"Well, it's hard to say. I think Xiao Yun is quite cute, but I truly don't know what others think.
And even if others find her cute.
Whether they would spend money on merchandise is another question."
Cang Jin had never encountered such a situation, nor had she ever thought about it before. She had no ideas.
After a while of discussing with worried hamster faces, they ultimately felt the matter was quite unreliable. Yet, it didn't seem like a scam, as their family had very little to be scammed of. Therefore, it was highly likely that their daughter had encountered two wealthy second-generation individuals who were merely playing around.
Perhaps they casually offered to invest a sum of money as a form of amusement.
Failure or success meant nothing to them.
It was even questionable whether they would genuinely invest; they might have just said it out of momentary excitement and forgotten about it later. But their foolish daughter had taken it seriously and quit her job outright to start a business.
Wasn't this asking for trouble for themselves, their daughter, and the entire family?
Thinking of this, Cang Hai and Cang Jin became even more distressed. They began to discuss intensely whether they should quickly persuade their adoptive daughter to find her job back and return to work, waiting for the promised investment to materialize before considering resignation.
Or should they start thinking about how their family would get by for the next few months without their daughter's income, and how to ensure the hundred or so children in their care wouldn't starve.
Although some of their older children, teenagers, were already trying to earn money through part-time jobs, they had inherited the hamster bloodline. This bloodline, besides granting incredibly good luck and developing storage spaces within their cheeks upon bloodline awakening, which allowed for higher earnings from labor, had other bloodline traits or abilities that were largely useless, or even became a burden.
For example, their inherited reproductive capability.
However, out of tens of thousands of hamster beastmen, perhaps not even one would awaken the storage space ability. Their bloodline-awakened children were clearly not exceptionally lucky, and coupled with the hamster bloodline being quite poor, their earnings from labor couldn't compare to the original Ding Yun's. Being able to secure room and board was good enough.
It was sufficient to reduce the family's burden, and they couldn't expect them to earn much to support their younger siblings.
Therefore, if they lost the original Ding Yun's three sources of income from her jobs, their family's fixed income, which was already insufficient for buying food, would be halved. At that point, let alone ensuring the children were six-tenths full, even three-tenths full would be difficult.
However, by the end of their discussion, they decided not to force Ding Yun to continue working to support her siblings. They were well aware that their adoptive daughter had already sacrificed enough over the years, and they had no right to demand more.
Even if they had shown her kindness.
That debt should have been repaid long ago.
Therefore, the result of their discussion was to first lower the family's food standard, changing from normal food to the lowest grade of nutrient solution. This way, even with halved income, the children wouldn't starve.
Because the lowest grade of nutrient solution.
Was already two-thirds cheaper than the cheapest food. If measured solely by the degree of hunger, after switching to the lowest grade nutrient solution, the children's satiety would even slightly improve.
As for why their family didn't eat this before.
It was because all beastmen on the entire beastman planet knew that the lowest grade nutrient solution was made from food scraps and waste materials. Some raw ingredients might even come from garbage dumps in various places, or from waste areas of food production factories. To use ancient terms, these were things that even dogs wouldn't eat.
Although it was advertised as being cleaned after processing.
No matter the advertisement, it was difficult for people not to feel disgusted.
Even if a basin that had contained vomit was scrubbed until it gleamed, one would still be reminded of the vomit it once held. Few people could calmly accept and continue to use it.
This was merely a container that had held something dirty. What about nutrient solution made from various waste materials?
Therefore, the lowest grade nutrient solution held a very low status on the beastman planet. It was so low that if people saw you eating it, it was equivalent to seeing you eating scraps from a garbage heap. No matter how poor her original parents were, they were unwilling to eat such low-grade nutrient solution themselves, let alone have their family eat it – something even vagrants wouldn't willingly consume.
But if there was no other choice.
If they were starving to death.
It seemed not entirely unacceptable. At worst, they could avoid people and eat it secretly. After all, being disgusted was better than starving to death.
Besides this, they also made another worst-case plan. If their adoptive daughter was scammed, and their family's income couldn't even afford the lowest grade of nutrient solution, then they would likely have to sacrifice the lives of another ten or twenty children.
That's right. Among the children who had died prematurely in the past, apart from a very few who genuinely died from accidents, the rest were deliberately and inadvertently caused to die by the family when times were particularly difficult.
There were too many children, and the emotional attachments were thus. If they couldn't even survive themselves, it was natural to sacrifice some.
Hamsters already had a habit of eating their young.
Their actions were not entirely against their nature.
However, this was something only they, the couple, knew. They would even use it to cry poverty to relevant agencies, claiming their living space was too small, they had too many children.
They were starving to death, or some children had already starved to death, and they used this to apply for various subsidies.
Those agencies, perhaps due to the negative implications, would reluctantly allocate some subsidies.
This way, they could weather the difficult times.
Of course, this was something they would only do out of absolute necessity. Since the original Ding Yun started working three jobs, they had never done this again. None of the children born later or those who had survived from earlier times had died prematurely again.
However, although they performed this act discreetly, the original Ding Yun's desperate efforts to work might have stemmed from her vaguely sensing that the premature deaths of her younger siblings in the past were abnormal and possibly related to extreme poverty in the family.
Her working herself to death to earn money.
Perhaps it was because she didn't want any more younger siblings to die prematurely.