If the matter hadn’t been brought up, it would have been fine—but the moment it was, Qin Cheng’s face turned livid, the veins at his temples throbbing violently, and his anger surged from his chest straight up to his throat. ”This is all your fault! A doting mother ruins her son! If you hadn’t raised her so badly, how could Shen Zhiyao have had the gall to sell her job and sneak away like that?”
Qin Cheng had gone to the Wen family looking for Shen Zhiyao, only to hear from Wen Shaobin that Shen Zhiyao had taken back the Seagull-brand watch he’d been given and all the other things she had bought for him.
On this point, she hadn’t said a single word to him, her father.
He never saw the things, and he never saw the money.
How dare she!
A sense of foreboding rose within him, so he rushed straight to the cotton mill—and the result was obvious.
No money, and the girl was gone. He had come up completely empty-handed.
Then he came home to find mother and daughter indulging in their pipe dreams. How could he not be furious?
Who knew when that adopted daughter had suddenly come to her senses? Turns out she’d been clinging on all this time just to lull them into complacency!
The once-lively living room fell instantly silent, so quiet you could hear a pin drop.
Then, all that could be heard was everyone’s quickening breathing.
“What did you say?”
“Shen Zhiyao sold her job and ran away?”
Jiang Ailian and Qin Xiaohui exclaimed in unison.
“She left the place that bore and raised her, and she has no job—where could she possibly go?”
Jiang Ailian couldn’t make sense of it no matter how she thought, muttering to herself, “How could this be… How is it possible…”
Qin Xiaohui, meanwhile, had turned to stone.
At that moment, Qin Hao suddenly thought of something and went straight to the room Shen Zhiyao had shared with Qin Xiaohui.
After rummaging around for a long while, he came out holding a letter.
Qin Cheng took it and tore it open impatiently. There were only a few words inside.
“I’ve returned to the Shen family.”
Shen Zhiyao couldn’t be bothered to write more. For this family, even a few extra words would be a waste of her ink.
The debt of gratitude she owed for being raised—she and her birth parents had long since repaid it in full.
Her birth parents had scraped together money from every source and wired four hundred yuan to the Shen family.
For people who lived at the mercy of the weather on an island, that was a fortune. It must have emptied their savings—they’d surely borrowed from everyone they could.
The beautiful bubble of Qin Xiaohui’s fantasies burst instantly. Her face deathly pale, she sank limply into a chair, her soul seemingly leaving her body.
The whole point of her returning to this family had been the urban household registration, the engagement swap, and then the job at the cotton mill.
And the most crucial thing, the one that would secure her footing and put her above everyone else, was the job.
The urban household registration depended on her parents.
The engagement swap depended on her fiancé.
Only the cotton mill job was something she could truly claim as her own achievement.
And now, the job was gone?
She had been far too soft-hearted. She should have long ago thrown a fit—crying, wailing, and threatening to hang herself—to force Shen Zhiyao to hand the job over!
After a moment, she asked, unwilling to give up, “Mom, Dad, who did she sell it to?”
The implication behind her words was clear to Qin Cheng and Jiang Ailian: if it were an ordinary person, they could simply deny everything.
After all, they were Shen Zhiyao’s parents.
If the matter hadn’t been raised, it would have been fine—but the moment it was, Qin Cheng’s face turned even more ashen. His lips moved dryly as he slowly forced out a few words, “Zhao Fengying’s daughter. Qian Fang.”
Jiang Ailian collapsed backward onto the sofa.
It was over. This was someone they could not afford to offend.
“Mom…” Qin Xiaohui tugged gently at her arm, tears streaming down her face. “You said back then that this job was absolutely going to be mine. Can’t you—?”
“No!”
Before she could finish, Jiang Ailian cut in decisively, exhaling a mouthful of stale air, looking as if she had aged several years in an instant.
Director Zhao of the Women’s Federation—her husband, Qian Dehou, was also a leader at the machinery factory.
Qin Hao raised an eyebrow. “Mom, Dad, I don’t get it. You’ve always despised Shen Zhiyao and wanted her to get lost, right? Now that she’s gone, why are you unhappy instead?”
With Shen Zhiyao gone, he felt like even the air was fresher.
No one would boss him around anymore. Tomorrow he’d go to the arcade—he hadn’t played the slot machines in ages.
Qin Hao had hit the nail on the head, but Qin Cheng and Jiang Ailian only felt that this son of theirs was truly a lost cause.
Before, there had been Shen Zhiyao. What would they do going forward?
Rely on Qin Xiaohui, who didn’t even have a job?
With her gone, that monthly subsidy was gone too.
Their family had been the first in the whole dormitory building to get a black-and-white TV, but they both knew it—the husband and wife were each more extravagant spenders than the other.
It was over. Everything was over…
Seeing the Qin parents slumped on the sofa, Qin Xiaohui, though her own heart was in turmoil and she felt utterly despondent, still had a flash of venom in her eyes.
Fool. Shen Zhiyao, you really think good days are waiting for you back there?
In her previous life, she had clawed her way up with all her might, only to live an ordinary, unremarkable life.
It was all her adoptive parents’ fault, and those three burdens—each one sicker than the last, each more useless than the last.
And she blamed that uniformed man betrothed to the Shen family too… He’d made it sound so nice—telling her to reject the engagement for the sake of her dignity—when really, he just didn’t want to marry her himself.
One after another, they had ruined her, leaving her no choice but to marry some penniless farmer just like her adoptive parents, and in the end, she never even left the island.
That uniformed man—in her previous life, so many women had thrown themselves at him, but he never looked at a single one, ultimately devoting his entire life to the country.
Shen Zhiyao returning to the Shen family wouldn’t escape the same fate—a broken engagement and marriage to a farmer.
Just wait and see!
At this moment, Shen Zhiyao was sitting on the green-skinned train, the warm breeze drifting toward her.
The sun was shining brightly outside the window, and the train wasn’t moving fast.
The glow of the setting sun danced on her long, thick lashes, and there was light in her eyes.
She figured the village would only have old book stalls.
Before leaving, she had made a point of picking out a batch of books at the Xinhua Bookstore.
Now, flipping through brand-new books, smelling the scent of fresh ink, bathed in warm sunlight—this was what it felt like to be alive.
She closed the book, her eyes calm and clear.
According to Qin Xiaohui, her birth parents had two older brothers and a younger brother, each with their own problems.
But to Shen Zhiyao—a female doctor from the 21st century and Professor Yu’s most prized protégée—none of them were problems.
Her brothers’ illnesses could simply be cured, that was all.
As for the engagement with the Shen family?
Shen Zhiyao propped her soft, fair cheek on her hand and pondered for a while.
Qin Xiaohui said the man was 1.9 meters tall and could kill a bear with one punch—and had done so right in front of her.
Facing the Qin couple, she had sobbed pitifully, terrified by the sight of his blood-covered face and icy eyes back then.
That didn’t sound scary at all—if anything, it sounded heroic and imposing.
Shen Zhiyao pressed her lips together and thought about it seriously.
She’d see how things went. Unless the man was devastatingly handsome.
Otherwise…
An engagement she didn’t want? She’d just break it off.
Having made up her mind, she buried herself in her books again.
Around her, the noise and chatter went on and on.
Even with a letter of introduction from a leader, buying a ticket at the last minute hadn’t gotten her a soft sleeper berth with better privacy, but a hard sleeper wasn’t bad either—perfectly acceptable.
The chatter of many people could just be treated as background noise.
At that moment, a gentle, refined voice spoke up, “Comrade, please show me your ticket and letter of introduction.”
Hearing this, Shen Zhiyao looked up.
It was a female train attendant with delicate features, her hair in two braided pigtails, wearing a uniform that gave her a somewhat dashing air.
Shen Zhiyao knew this was the routine ticket check, so she fished her ticket and letter of introduction out of her army-green Liberation bag.
The attendant compared them, her delicate brows furrowing slightly. “Comrade Shen Zhiyao?”
An old man passing by suddenly stopped, leaning on his cane, and slowly crouched down as if to rest.
At the sound of that name, his eyes, calm as an ancient well, stirred.