When she first married Lu Guoheng, her mother had given her a small box containing a green jade pendant.
It was said to be a family heirloom passed down through generations.
Upon hearing it was an ancestral treasure, Song Jinhe immediately stored it away with utmost care after receiving it.
After all these years, Song Jinhe couldn’t quite remember where she had hidden the necklace.
She turned the entire room upside down searching, finally discovering the box stuck underneath the bed.
Holding the box, Song Jinhe immediately breathed a sigh of relief.
Thank goodness—she had worried that the pendant might have already been lost at this point in time.
An unconscious smile spread across Song Jinhe’s face as she reached to open the box.
The next second, her smile froze solid.
Because the box was completely empty—there was nothing inside.
Song Jinhe’s mind went blank, feeling as if all the blood in her body had frozen.
In the courtyard, Lu Xiaoran, seeing that no one was paying him any attention, began wailing even louder.
Zhou Yufen pushed open the front door and saw her precious grandson squatting on the ground crying—her heart clenched painfully.
“Oh, my dear grandson! Who bullied you? Tell Grandma, and I’ll go settle scores with them right now!”
Her heart aching, she quickly hurried over and pulled the squatting Lu Xiaoran to his feet.
Seeing her, Lu Xiaoran immediately threw himself into her arms as if seeing a savior.
“Grandma, my… my arm hurts, my whole body hurts…”
He was crying so hard he could barely speak clearly, breaking Zhou Yufen’s heart.
Zhou Yufen looked down at his arm, seeing the bruised red and purple marks, feeling both heartache and anger.
“Who was the damned bastard that hit you! Tell Grandma quickly!”
Lu Xiaoran immediately pointed toward the house and tattled: “It was that bad woman! She hit me!”
“Dad went with Aunt Qingying to the hospital to see Ya Ya, and she got angry, then came back and took it out on me!”
“Grandma, you have to teach her a lesson for me! Better yet, beat her to death!”
By the end, Lu Xiaoran’s voice had risen sharply.
Zhou Yufen had initially thought some village brat had hit her precious grandson, never imagining it would be Song Jinhe.
Her anger flared up instantly, and she directly grabbed a firewood stick from the ground, shouting furiously.
“Song Jinhe, you damned home-wrecker! Good-for-nothing! How dare you hit my grandson! This old lady will fight you to the death!”
She charged into the house with the firewood stick, about to push open the door when it opened on its own.
Song Jinhe stood in the doorway, her face frighteningly grim.
She ignored Zhou Yufen, her eyes fixed intently on Lu Xiaoran who had run into the room, her voice like frozen poison.
“Lu Xiaoran, where is my pendant?”
Lu Xiaoran had entered the room to watch his grandmother punish the bad woman, but upon suddenly being questioned, his eyes immediately panicked.
Even when she was hitting him earlier, the bad woman hadn’t been this angry.
The burning, stinging pain still lingered on his body. Lu Xiaoran swallowed hard, finally hiding fearfully behind Zhou Yufen.
“W-what pendant? I’ve never seen it, I don’t know.”
Song Jinhe’s expression turned even uglier.
The guilt in Lu Xiaoran’s eyes couldn’t lie—the pendant had indeed been taken by him.
In her previous life, that pendant had been lost by Lu Xiaoran and was never found, right up until her death.
This wasn’t just a regret for her—it had become a deep-seated anguish.
Given a second chance at life, Song Jinhe’s urgency in finding the pendant was to preserve it properly and remedy the regret from her past life.
Unexpectedly, the pendant was still lost because of this ungrateful wretch.
Song Jinhe clenched her fists, her eyes filled with extreme unwillingness.
No, she couldn’t give up now!
Judging by the timeline, Lu Xiaoran had taken the pendant just in the last couple of days.
There was still hope of getting it back.
Zhou Yufen watched Song Jinhe’s grim expression and suddenly felt that Song Jinhe seemed different from before.
But no matter how different she was, she was still the daughter-in-law of the Lu Family.
When a daughter-in-law made a mistake, it was her duty as the mother-in-law to discipline and scold her as needed!
Zhou Yufen glared, spat on the ground, and began to berate her.
“I used to think you were filial and obedient—who knew you had the heart of a snake!”
“If you can’t win Guohang’s affection, that’s your own incompetence. Why take it out on my precious grandson?!”
“If I don’t teach you a lesson today, you’ll think you can do whatever you want!”
After finishing her tirade in one breath, Zhou Yufen swung a firewood stick at Song Jinhe.
Song Jinhe dodged and grabbed the stick with one hand.
Zhou Yufen had wronged her many times, but Song Jinhe had no time to settle scores with her now.
With a sudden forceful tug, Song Jinhe wrested the stick away. Zhou Yufen stared in shock, stumbled, and fell to the ground.
“Aiyo! What a sin! A daughter-in-law hitting her mother-in-law!”
Zhou Yufen lay on the ground, clutching her sprained waist and wailing incessantly.
“Grandma!”
Seeing his grandmother on the ground, Lu Xiaoran immediately clenched his fists.
“How dare you hit Grandma! I’ll bite you to death!”
His eyes red with rage, he lunged forward to bite her.
Song Jinhe grabbed him by the collar and slapped him hard across the face.
Lu Xiaoran was stunned. He covered his face, frozen for several seconds before bursting into loud sobs.
He couldn’t understand—they had come to confront his mother, so why were he and his grandmother the ones getting hurt?
“Shut up! If you keep crying, I’ll hang you from the tree in the yard and beat you!”
Song Jinhe’s patience had run out the moment she discovered the pendant was missing.
Her face cold, she issued the warning, the stick in her hand radiating menace.
Terrified, Lu Xiaoran immediately fell silent, tears streaming resentfully down his face.
Song Jinhe looked at him and said coldly, “Lu Xiaoran, I’ll ask you one last time—where is the pendant?”
Lu Xiaoran guiltily lowered his eyes, his gaze shifting as he prepared to lie.
“If you dare lie, I’ll hang you from that tree right now.”
Song Jinhe saw through his intention and calmly added the warning.
Lu Xiaoran trembled with fear.
Today’s Song Jinhe truly frightened him. Still young, he couldn’t keep his mouth shut like he would in the future.
Once scared, he spilled everything like beans from a bamboo tube.
“It was Ya Ya. After she heard our family had a jade pendant, she said she’d never seen anything like it and wanted to see it for herself.”
“So I showed it to her…”
A surge of anger choked Song Jinhe’s chest. She took a deep breath, suppressing the urge to strangle this ungrateful wretch, and asked word by word:
“And then? Did you give her the pendant?”
Lu Xiaoran shook his head immediately. “No, Ya Ya said the pendant wasn’t pretty and wasn’t worth as much as a few pieces of White Rabbit milk candy.”
“So I traded the pendant to her for a few pieces of candy.”
Song Jinhe took another deep breath.
She had learned all about the cunning of Liu Qingying’s daughter in her past life.
Even at such a young age, she was just like Liu Qingying—skilled at feigning weakness and scheming against others.
With that kind of personality, if she truly thought that pendant wasn’t worth much, why would she use a few pieces of candy to trick Lu Xiaoran?
Liu Qingying and her daughter were of one mind—since Ya Ya had taken the pendant, it must now be in Liu Qingying’s possession.
The thought that the pendant she had searched for many years in her previous life had been in Liu Qingying’s hands all along filled Song Jinhe with fury.
She grabbed Lu Xiaoran and vented her anger by hitting his back with a stick.
“Let that teach you to mess with my things! Let that teach you to take the milk candy! You ungrateful waste of money!”