Shu Shu looked up, locking her eyes right onto the fleeting look of panic that crossed the woman’s face.
“…I’m telling you, kid, why are you messing around with a patient’s medication? Don’t you know how easy it is to contaminate pills like that? This imported specialized medicine is incredibly expensive!”
A tiny smirk tugged at Shu Shu’s lips as she asked, “Is this really specialized medication that treats chest pain?”
“Yes! What else would it be?” The woman in the lab coat cast a suspicious, sour look at her, then turned to Shu Lingchen to complain: “Xiao Chen, what’s up with your classmate? The second she walks in, she’s inspecting the medicine and sniffing it. Does she think I’m running a counterfeit ring or something?”
Without giving Shu Lingchen a chance to answer, she pressed on, “You’ve been getting medicine from me for how many years now? Has your Auntie Chu ever had a single issue after taking it?”
“No, no, not at all. You’ve misunderstood, Auntie Liu.”
Shu Lingchen was just as confused. He shot Shu Shu a bewildered look, silently signaling: Mom, what’s going on?
“Ah, my bad. I was just purely curious.” Shu Shu put on an innocent, well-behaved expression as she set the pill bottle back down. She then meekly pulled out her phone and aimed it at the payment QR code. “It’s 5,100 yuan in total, right?”
“Yes.”
Hearing the automated chime confirming the successful payment, the woman’s face finally relaxed.
But in the very next second.
She watched as Shu Shu, without a single moment of hesitation, exited the payment screen, swiped right over to the dialer, and decisively punched in three digits: 110.
Under Shu Lingchen’s stunned and the woman’s completely blindsided stares, Shu Shu pressed the phone to her ear and spoke clearly, “Hello, I’d like to report a crime. There’s a pharmacy here selling counterfeit drugs. Both the witness and the physical evidence are right here on the spot.”
As luck would have it, the local police station was right next door.
In less than two minutes, two police officers walked through the door. One of them had a body-worn camera clipped to his chest as he asked, “Who called the police?”
Just as Shu Shu was about to raise her hand—
“It’s a misunderstanding, Officer. It’s all a misunderstanding.” The woman in the lab coat beat her to it, stepping forward hurriedly. She shot Shu Shu a fierce glare before turning back to the officers. “This young girl is just playing a prank. She’s just a student who doesn’t know any better and can’t read a word of foreign languages, so—”
Before she could finish her sentence, Shu Shu picked up one of the pill bottles and rattled off a string of technical, pharmacological terms in perfect English. “Then why don’t you explain to me which one of these ingredients has the properties to treat chest pain?”
The woman’s voice cut off instantly. She stared at Shu Shu in sheer shock.
The look on her face screamed: How can she pronounce those drug names so fluently?
Isn’t she just a regular high school student?!
“Furthermore—” Shu Shu crossed her arms. “The actual pills inside these bottles have absolutely zero correlation with what’s written on the labels. They’re entirely made of vitamins. Please don’t tell me these are special imported vitamins meant to cure chest pain.”
As those words left Shu Shu’s mouth, the woman in the lab coat went completely pale. Her eyes widened, and a look of absolute terror took over her face. “You…” How do you know that?!
…
Even after they had been sitting in the lobby of the police station for a while, Shu Lingchen’s brain was still entirely blank.
Not long after Shu Shu finished giving her statement, an officer came out to inform them that the woman in the lab coat had cracked.
The pills in those bottles were indeed not some kind of imported specialized medicine for chest pain. The packaging consisted of empty bottles left over from some health supplements, and the pills inside were, in fact, just standard vitamins.
“This is too much!” Shu Lingchen bolted upright, his face beneath his messy bedhead turning a furious shade of livid. He clenched his fists so tightly his knuckles turned white, wishing he could march back in there and beat the woman to a pulp. “She really was a scammer!”
He turned to Shu Shu, his face filled with immense relief as he whispered, “Mom, you’re amazing. You actually saw right through it. If we had bought this and brought it back for Auntie Chu to take, something terrible could have happened! What a heartless, wicked woman!”
Shu Shu raised an eyebrow but remained silent.
She thought to herself: You poor dummy, things aren’t nearly that simple.
Just then, a commotion broke out near the entrance of the lobby.
“On what grounds are you detaining me? What crime did I commit?!”
The voice sounded incredibly familiar. Shu Lingchen spun around instantly, only to freeze. “Auntie Chu?!”
The person currently being “escorted” in by two female officers was none other than Mother Chu.
“Auntie Chu? W-Why are you here?”
An officer stepped forward and stated, “This individual is connected to an ongoing fraud case. We’ve brought her in for standard questioning.”
“…F-Fraud case?” Shu Lingchen was completely flabbergasted. His gut reaction was total denial. “How is that possible? How could my Auntie Chu be mixed up in a fraud case?!”
Unexpectedly, the female officer turned her gaze toward him. “Are you Shu Lingchen?”
Shu Lingchen blinked. “Yes, I am.”
The officer nodded. “Alright, come with us to give a statement. You are the victim in this fraud case.”
Shu Lingchen’s head was instantly flooded with question marks. “???” What on earth?
Shu Shu silently watched Shu Lingchen’s retreating figure as he walked into the interrogation room, looking so calm it was obvious she had anticipated exactly what was coming next.
Sigh.
Her idiot son had no idea he was about to receive a brutal, deeply profound life lesson.
…
Shu Lingchen was completely bewildered.
He sat blankly at the desk while the officer across from him opened up the questioning: “How long have you been purchasing this specialized medication from that pharmacy?”
Shu Lingchen did the math in his head. “…Almost eight years, I think. I buy it once a month.”
“And you never missed a month?”
Shu Lingchen answered, “Never.” How could he miss a month? This was Auntie Chu’s “lifeline medication.”
“How much does a single purchase cost you?”
“It’s always been five thousand one hundred yuan.”
“I see.” The officer’s fingers tapped away on the keyboard, logging the response. He continued, “This woman, Luo Ping—the person you refer to as Auntie Chu—what is her relationship to you?”
Shu Lingchen didn’t even hesitate. “She’s family. A maternal figure.”
“According to our records, there is no biological or legal relation between you two.”
“She’s still my elder.”
The officer pressed further, “Did you take it upon yourself to buy this specialized medication for Luo Ping, or did Luo Ping demand that you buy it for her?”
“…” Shu Lingchen knit his brows, thoroughly perplexed. “Wait, why are you asking me all of this?”
“Please cooperate with the questioning. Did you buy it voluntarily, or did Luo Ping ask you to?”
Shu Lingchen let out a heavy breath. “I bought it voluntarily. When I was a kid, I had a severe fever, and Auntie Chu caught a chronic illness from rushing me to the hospital in the pouring rain. She needs this medicine, otherwise her chest pain flares up. This is the least I can do for her.”
He wasn’t sure if it was just his imagination, but the moment he finished speaking, the two officers across from him exchanged a subtle, telling glance. When they turned back to look at him, their eyes held an unmistakable wave of pity.
Shu Lingchen: “???”
The officer turned his laptop around, tilting the screen directly toward Shu Lingchen, and said, “Take a look at this first.”
Utterly lost, Shu Lingchen leaned in to look.
The officer hit the spacebar, playing a recorded video. The setting was one of the police interrogation rooms, and the woman sitting in the center chair was none other than the pharmacy clerk in the white lab coat.
Selling counterfeit medication carried massive legal penalties. It was classified as a severe criminal offense, and if the consequences were bad enough, it meant serious prison time.
Evidently, the woman in the video had realized this too, as she was sobbing hysterically and screaming her innocence:
“I didn’t try to hurt anyone! This was all a setup between me and Luo Ping! She lied to that boy, Shu Lingchen, telling him she got sick from taking him to the hospital just so he’d come to my shop every month and drop five thousand yuan on ‘specialized medicine’! That medicine is literally just vitamins, and Luo Ping knew it the entire time!”