Chapter 1.2
Zhong Youyou rose from the bed and went to the restroom, placing herself in front of a mirror and staring right into it. A young woman stared back at her. She wore a loose hospital gown, her right hand was wrapped in gauze, while her left hand held traces of needle marks. Her complexion was pale, and her delicately branched out blood vessels could be clearly seen under her skin, their greenish purple colours contrasting her malnourished skinny arms.
What was really odd was her face. It had heavy makeup caked on it as if she had planned to go out clubbing, but it had been done horribly. Somehow managing to be even more of a mess was her hair. It was dyed in the colours of a rooster’s feathers and stuck straight up at odd angles, while other parts of the hair curled around her face.
Fortunately, however, that was where the issues ended. She wasn’t a lost cause just yet.
Based on the timeline, ‘Zhong Youyou’ was a character who was currently in her first semester of the third year of high school.
The original owner of the body had displayed a very rebellious attitude. She had made it a decision to hang around with gangsters in a bid to make up for the attention she lacked at home, and a few days back, had been spotted by Meng Shixuan as she met up with her gangster friends who had been waiting for her at the school gate.
Meng Shixuan had stepped up and tried persuading her not to associate herself with such shady people and instead focus on her studies, but the gangsters, obviously not happy to hear such words, had shoved her away. They hadn’t cared a single bit about whether or not she was a heavenly maiden of the fairer sex.
Naturally, the delicate and frail Meng Shixuan fell to the ground after the shove and sprained her wrist. Her brother — Zhong Xiyou — noticed her plight and immediately rushed over, and as he helped her up, leveled a furious glare full of disgust at ‘Zhong Youyou’. The sheer cold that had been evident in his haze had caused her blood to run cold.
Later that day, when she returned home, her mother, face full of disgust and anger, had been the first to greet her. Her father had stepped forward as usual and smoothed things out; though by no means did that mean that he cared about her. It was quite the opposite really — he cared so little for her that he did not want to see any reactions to her actions. Her brother, on the other hand, had met her with pure indifference.
She had known that after the past three years, Zhong Xiyou had more or less come to recognize her as his sister, however, that day’s events led to all of her hard earned affection running down the drain.
Even though Meng Shixuan hadn’t suffered any major injuries, when her mother saw her swollen arm, she’d felt appalled. In her rage, she hadn’t held back as she spun and rushed towards ‘Zhong Youyou’ before planting a harsh slap on her cheeks. She had then sent her to her room without food to reflect on her actions.
At the end of the day, ‘Zhong Youyou’ was still their biological daughter, so her parents wouldn’t really beat her up. But that didn’t mean that the servants of the villa missed their chances to toy with her. After coming to the realisation that the family didn’t care at all about her, they decided to stop treating her as a fellow human being and started sending her leftovers to eat.
The original ‘Zhong Youyou’ had been as stubborn as a goat, and so after receiving it, she’d dropped the food bowl to the ground, smashing it to pieces. After picking up one of the pieces — a particularly sharp piece, she’d made a cut on her right arm by herself. “Isn’t it just a small arm injury? I’ll give it back to her! Is that enough?” She had ridiculously thought that by hurting herself she could get her biological parents to pay more attention to her.
Unfortunately, her actions only frightened their mother, and so she was immediately sent to hospital. Even then, however, she still hadn’t felt any distress, only boredom and impatience.
During the few days she had spent lying on the hospital bed, three meals were delivered to her each day by the servants, but no member of the Zhong family had so much as stopped by to observe her situation.
No. Meng Shixuan had visited her once, an indescribable look within her gaze as she had looked at ‘Zhong Youyou’ and asked her, “can’t we just get along?”
As she recalled all of this, Zhong Youyou felt anger build up in her stomach at the stupidty that ‘Zhong Youyou’, the original owner of her current body, had constantly displayed.
‘With so much money, why do you care about her fiancé? What scummy father, scummy mother, scummy brother? What’s the point of fighting with the heroine for their attention?’
She put the card away and lifted her head from the quilt, still fighting the urge to scream. This was ninety million dollars! She had been an orphan in her past life, and had always worked hard and relied on physics competitions of all kinds to get scholarships to survive the hard life before she graduated from college.
She had never seen so much money in her life!
With $90 million, she would have been able to add an extra portion of beef to the beef noodles and two more eggs to the pancakes!
Just thinking about it made her happy enough to roll around in bed.
As for the Zhong family and the heroine, she had also thought about that.
‘If I can’t fight, can’t I still hide?’
The Zhong family wasn’t very pleased with her, anyways, so she could simply move out to live in school after her recovery. Whether she returned here once a semester or not, 90 million was more than enough for her to live well!
While lost in her thoughts, Zhong Youyou suddenly noticed the door to her room slide open. The door’s opening was puzzling, as not only did she not expect any visitors, it was pushed open so lightly that it seemed like whoever was on the other side was afraid to wake her.
As the door finally opened wide enough, the one who quietly walked in was a boy in his seventeenth year of life, his clear and handsome features very similar to Zhong Youyou’s.
At the moment, his handsome face which usually displayed a mix of indifference and impatience whenever he had to deal with her was stained with anxiety. He walked towards her bed with large strides, but suddenly stopped some metres away and froze on the spot. As he stood and stared, the nervousness coming from him was palpable. For some reason, he didn’t dare to get closer and so he continued to look on, holding onto the hem of his clothes as he did like a child who had made a mistake and was afraid of the coming punishment.
Zhong Youyou had never expected that a member of the Zhong family would be the one to visit, so she’d quickly closed her eyes when he stepped in. Luckily, she’d acted quickly enough that he didn’t notice that she was already awake.
As she withdrew into the depth of her thoughts, she couldn’t help but wonder to herself,
‘Why is he here now? What’s the point? He isn’t here to scold me again, right?’
She felt his stare bore into her. The persistent feeling made her scalp tingle.
Zhong Xiyou, indeed, continued to stare at his sister without blinking, and gradually, his eyes reddened.
He had never thought that he would be reborn.
On the day that his father made his will, the four members of the Zhong family, plus ‘Zhong Youyou’, had embarked on a journey together. The journey was ill-fated, however, as they ran into a truck on the highway. When the car rolled over, Zhong Xiyou had felt his intestines roll with it and had struggled to hold back the urge to vomit.
The pain had come quickly, and just as quickly was his forehead drenched with blood.
With his blurred vision, he had seen that biological sister of his, the one whom he had hated the most, desperately struggle to rescue them. She had struggled and eventually managed to drag him and his parents out from under the car. However, while she had succeeded in dragging them to the side of the road, her body gave out in the end.
Burnt and drenched with blood, ‘Zhong Youyou’ died that day after saving them all…
But at the same time, Zhong Xiyou had also seen Meng Shixuan, who had been seated in the passenger seat at the time and was the least injured, push open her door and run away.
The sister whom he had protected since childhood, had escaped on her own and left them to die.
Zhong Xiyou had always known that Meng Shixuan wasn’t courageous and easily frighten, but at that moment, his heart turned cold.
Zhong Youyou had died to save them, but how had her family treat her? With indifference, disgust, and impatience. As Zhong Xiyou remembered all that he had done, or rather, all that he had failed to do, he felt so guilty that he wished he’d just drop dead. And as he saw his sister’s pale face and thin appearance at this moment, he felt it prick him like needles.
His second sister had always been on the thin side. She was already skinny and slender when she had first entered the house. And as he looked at her figure which had now grown even thinner, Zhong Xiyou was certain that the servants had not been serving her proper food. The gauze on her right hand still had blood oozing faintly, showing just how deep she had cut that day.
As Zhong Xiyou observed all of this, he suddenly felt as if he had been stabbed several times in so many locations that it was hard to tell where exactly the pain was.
Because he remembered, that day he had taken Meng Shixuan away from the school gate and also glared fiercely at his second sister. It wasn’t that he hadn’t seen the look in his second sister’s eyes at that time; the panic, the helplessness, the hurt, the desperate look of someone who just wanted to be saved.
He had seen it.
But he had ignored it.
And it wasn’t just that one time. The time she had hit rock bottom and gone to the hospital for an abortion, she had looked at him with those same desperate eyes, and he had ignored her.
Just like every other time she had looked to him for saving.