Father and Mother Lin had been wavering over whether to tell the truth, seeing their daughter angry, Father Lin could only sigh, turn, and go back inside. He soon came out again with a medical record book in hand.
“Muyan, Jiaojiao was ill. It’s not that we wouldn’t feed her, she had anorexia.”
Lin Muyan opened the records. They documented Lin Jiaojiao’s whole medical history, and besides anorexia, there were various psychiatric conditions.
“Jiaojiao has mental problems, and manic disorder, too?” Lin Muyan frowned, somewhat shaken. She’d known Shen Jiaojiao for less than two days, yet to her, Jiaojiao hadn’t shown the slightest sign of a problem, apart from being abnormally thin, she’d seemed a sunny, kind-hearted person.
【What a load of crap. How could Jiaojiao have mental problems? If you ask me, it’s this whole family that’s sick in the head!】
【Jiaojiao’s such a good kid. After the apocalypse came, she was calmer than anyone, kept the Shen family running smoothly. Even with this wretched green tea forever stirring up trouble, she never once showed any impatience, how could she have manic disorder?】
【This couple is disgusting, the moment they open their mouths they hurl a great bucket of filth at our Jiaojiao, and they can even produce a fake medical file. Looks like they anticipated the Shens coming after them and prepared in advance.】
The mother-insult level in the comments climbed again, every last one of them cursing the Lin couple.
Lin Muyan, however, didn’t see it that way. First, the records were utterly genuine, nothing like a forgery, and had they been faked, a simple check at the hospital would turn up the visit history.
Second, the records showed the hospital was the best public one in S City, among the foremost in the whole country, and the consulting physicians weren’t all the same person, their medical seals couldn’t be forged.
She didn’t believe her birth parents had the means to get a hospital that authoritative, with that many doctors, to fabricate fake records for them all at once.
Wiping her tears, Mother Lin asked, “Muyan, did Jiaojiao say something at the Shens’?”
“That child had ideas of her own. She always said she shouldn’t have been born here, that she ought to be a princess. At first your dad and I didn’t think much of it and tried to give her what she wanted. But little by little we realized something was wrong with her mind, she was forever fantasizing that she was a big star, a princess who couldn’t eat commoners’ food, and that’s how she came down with anorexia.”
“Your dad and I took her to the best hospital. The doctors said it was some kind of delusional disorder, that she needed medication to control it, but she wouldn’t listen, and it only got worse and worse…”
In Wang Yanqin’s telling, Shen Jiaojiao was a rebellious child with a princess complex but no princess’s fate, from delusional disorder to anorexia and later to mania, she’d spiraled out of control and begun lashing out at everyone in the Lin family.
Lin Muyan watched, stunned, as both her birth parents pushed up their sleeves and trouser legs to reveal bruises black and blue, and she was at a loss for words.
After a brief silence, the comments erupted into a fresh round of fierce debate.
Some began to doubt themselves, some insisted it was all fake, but more of them stood firmly behind Shen Jiaojiao, accusing Father and Mother Lin of being so vicious they’d pin injuries from their own marital brawling onto Shen Jiaojiao.
Amid the deluge of comments, Lin Muyan slowly formed a theory of her own.
These commenters might have a god’s-eye view, perhaps they knew how the future would unfold.
But every one of them stood on Shen Jiaojiao’s side, as if Shen Jiaojiao were the protagonist.
Before she’d entered, the comments had also said it was their first time seeing what the Lin household looked like, and that Father Lin rarely appeared.
What they knew of the Lin family, of Father and Mother Lin, they likely knew only from Shen Jiaojiao’s perspective.
Arriving at this, Lin Muyan went suddenly cold all over, her scalp prickling.
Her parents were very likely being wronged, Shen Jiaojiao had falsely accused her own mother.
Lin Muyan hastily cut Mother Lin off, urgently wanting the answer to one question.
“When did you find out Jiaojiao wasn’t your daughter?”
Father Lin picked up the thread. “About five years ago. Five years back, Jiaojiao’s health flagged badly and she needed a transfusion, that’s when we learned she wasn’t our biological child.”
“But your mom and I were baffled. How could the daughter we’d raised from infancy turn out not to be our own? We couldn’t make sense of it, not until the Shens came looking for us. That’s when it finally started to add up.”
Mother Lin’s eyes were rimmed red, remembering the day the Shens had stormed into the courtyard in a fury, she shuddered with belated fear.
She said:
“Twenty years ago I worked as a maid at the Shens’, a kitchen helper. I was already carrying you then, but I didn’t show, and I truly needed the money, the Shens paid very well, so I worked there, secretly pregnant with you.”
And then, later, she’d gone into labor all at once and secretly given birth in a Shen family storeroom. There was no hiding a thing like that, of course, and she’d been let go.
Who could ever have imagined her child would be swapped at that very moment.
Lin Muyan’s eyes went wide. The cruel baby-swapping scheme hadn’t been her birth mother’s doing at all, yet the children had been bizarrely switched, and neither side had noticed.
【Outrageous!】
【Beyond outrageous!】
Indeed, it was absurd. Lin Muyan could scarcely believe it herself, that something this preposterous could have happened to her.
【Make it up, go on, keep making it up. Who in the Shen family would swap their own child for some little maid’s baby? Do you even believe your own words?】
【Could it have been some other servant at the Shens’? Who’s to say not one of them had a dark mind, or a grudge against the rich?】
Silence!
The comments fell silent in an instant!
Lin Muyan paid them no more mind. Her head was a jumble now and she needed to think things through, so she told her birth parents she’d go to her room to rest.
Back in her room, door locked, Lin Muyan took out her phone, hesitating over whether to call Mrs. Shen.
She didn’t think her mom and dad were the sort to spin a grand lie, and if a story this bizarre were invented, that would be terrifying in its own right.
And as for the matter of Shen Jiaojiao, she felt she ought to warn Mrs. Shen.
After much hesitation, Lin Muyan pressed the number at the top of her list, still labeled “Mommy.”
But what came through wasn’t the expected ringtone, it was the cold recording: “Sorry, the number you have dialed is powered off…”
Lin Muyan’s heart sank. She quickly found Director Shen’s number and dialed, that one was switched off too.
They’d already blocked her.
Sniffling against the sting in her nose, Lin Muyan switched off her phone.
Probably the ordinary numbers in her contacts wouldn’t go through anymore either. And those contacts, those group chats, messages had in fact been popping up the whole time, the glaring red badge already at 99+, but she hadn’t the courage to open them.
Twenty years among the wealthy elite, and she knew all too well what they were like.
Now that her status was worlds apart from theirs, what friendships were left? She’d count herself lucky if they didn’t come around just to mock her.
After zoning out for a while, Lin Muyan thought again of that little sand-digging shovel, the one the comments called the “Golden Shovel.”
After some thought, she took the shovel out again, meaning to give it another try.
One thing she was now certain of: only she could see these comments, and their appearance had to mean something.
【What’s she taking the Golden Shovel out for now?】
The comments grew curious. Shovel in hand, Lin Muyan was suddenly struck by an idea.
She dug down into the concrete floor by her feet, and to her astonishment it gave way, a chunk coming loose with ease!
The next second, a small white orb of light appeared on the ground.
The comments exploded in an instant: 【Holy moly! She actually dug up a space!】