Chapter 14

◎Leave. I’m tired.◎

Even after hanging up, Liang Shi could barely process what had happened.

She couldn’t even remember how she’d managed to muddle through the conversation with Madam Liang before ending the call.

Still, she changed her ringtone right after hanging up.

Way too agitated.

If someone called while she was asleep, it might actually scare her to death.

After changing the ringtone, Liang Shi dug through the original owner’s phone. Memos, cloud storage, shopping apps, WeChat contacts, Weibo, she turned everything upside down.

The original owner’s memos had only three entries.

“Run. Run far away.”

“Sacrificial rite. Hah.”

“Who would ever be a good child? Die.”

Three baffling lines that had nothing to do with each other.

Each one was dated the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but the years were different.

The first was 2019.

The second was 2020.

The third was 2021.

And it was now 2023.

This phone had been with the original owner for years.

The fifteenth of the seventh lunar month was a strange date. Everyone knew it was the Ghost Festival, the day the gates of hell were said to swing wide open.

Liang Shi hadn’t been superstitious before, but now she’d transmigrated into a book and met the system. Her life was already this bizarre, so adding a few more bizarre elements didn’t seem impossible.

The most important part was the mention of a sacrificial rite.

Sacrificing to whom? What were the offerings?

She had no idea.

The original owner had a particularly bad habit: she almost never saved contact names. The address book had no one besides family. But the SMS inbox contained messages from plenty of unknown numbers, like the one she’d seen earlier about swapping wives.

She was completely lost. She had no idea who any of them were.

And the original owner’s names for family members were all abbreviated to a single character.

Only Xu Qingzhu’s was different. Her contact name was “A-Zhu,” followed by the phone’s built-in tree emoji.

Judging from these little details, it seemed the original owner genuinely liked Xu Qingzhu?

That kind of behavior was something only a girl deep in the throes of infatuation would do.

But if she liked Xu Qingzhu and had already married her, why couldn’t she be aboveboard about it?

It was baffling.

Maybe because Xu Qingzhu wouldn’t let her touch her?

But Liang Shi remembered this part from the book. After being kidnapped, Xu Qingzhu had developed post-traumatic stress disorder and was terrified of physical intimacy. On their wedding night, a drunk Alpha had tried to force herself on her, and Xu Qingzhu ended up in the hospital that very night.

That same night, the intoxicated Alpha had slept with a beta.

Both were cannon fodder. The book never gave them names.

But once Xu Qingzhu sobered up and learned the truth, she never let the original owner touch her again.

Their relationship was ice cold.

The original owner had tried countless tricks to get Xu Qingzhu into bed, but all had come to nothing. Finally, on the advice of her fair-weather friends, she resorted to pheromone suppression.

One of those friends had said: Omegas, once marked, become obedient. After the first time, she’ll be begging you to touch her.

The original owner was a playboy with tons of bad-news friends. She had close to a hundred WeChat groups, and every one of them was full of dirty talk.

Some groups had only Alphas, and the conversation was always about omegas: which club someone hit today, what kind of girl they picked up, how she felt, what new tricks they tried in bed. Some people even shared explicit images.

Liang Shi scrolled through the chat history, then cleared all the messages and left the groups.

She left over a dozen in a row.

Other groups included omegas and betas. Everyone was chatting aimlessly, mostly flirting and crossing the line.

Some omega profile pictures were swimsuit shots or maid outfits.

Liang Shi wondered: had the country’s anti-pornography campaigns never reached this corner?

Even in an ABO world, there was still a complete social system.

The novel’s author had built the setting on the foundation of the real world, so many aspects were similar to the world Liang Shi originally knew. The differences were the ABO-specific genders and privileges.

And the addition that this world had seen rapid civilizational development, a declining birth rate, and a law that forbade terminating pregnancies.

Liang Shi frowningly repeated the same routine.

After leaving over eighty groups in succession, her WeChat blew up.

A flood of people came asking what had happened, why she’d suddenly left. She stared at those unsaved contacts and fell into thought.

Should she… delete them too?

She thought about it but decided against it.

She did delete the omegas and betas whose profiles were clearly there for dirty talk.

This was her account. She didn’t want to see that kind of filth.

Even her Moments feed was full of photos that were practically nudes.

Quite… eye-searing.

Liang Shi checked Weibo next and found the original owner had never posted. Her browsing history was clean too, suggesting she rarely used the app.

The cloud storage, however, was a different story.

She had a one-terabyte cloud drive membership, and it was essentially filled with small videos.

Back in her old world, Liang Shi had watched such videos out of curiosity, but they were all normal, aesthetically pleasing clips.

She clicked on one of the original owner’s videos and nearly threw up within the first few seconds. Extremely graphic, filled with gore and violence.

Liang Shi shut it off immediately and wiped the entire cloud drive clean in one go.

For a moment, she felt like she was scrubbing an account.

Erasing the traces of that person’s life and replacing everything with her own.

But the future was hers to live.

By the time she finished, it was past one in the morning. Exhausted to her core, Liang Shi lay there unable to sleep.

Life held too much uncertainty. The completely unfamiliar environment kept her mind wound tight, and she suffered from insomnia.

She lay there letting her thoughts wander for a long time before finally drifting off without knowing how.

She woke the next morning to an empty ward.

She went downstairs to check on Xu Qingzhu. She was still asleep, so Liang Shi went outside the hospital for breakfast.

After eating, she returned to the ward and slept.

Nurses came and went. Liang Shi didn’t notice.

She was too tired and desperately needed rest.

Liang Shi slept for a full day and a half before her energy finally returned.

She discharged herself and drove the car to the dealership, swapping it for a white Porsche.

By the time she returned to the hospital, it was afternoon.

She went up to the tenth floor and headed for Xu Qingzhu’s room. Standing at the door, she heard cheerful laughter inside.

She hesitated about going in when Zhao Xuning spoke from behind her. “Go in if you’re going in. If not, don’t block the way.”

Liang Shi: “…”

She pushed the door open and entered. The laughter inside died instantly.

Bai Weiwei rolled her eyes the moment she saw her, dripping with sarcasm. “Oh, look who it is. The Eldest Miss of the Liang family. Aren’t you afraid this place will dirty your shoes?”

Liang Shi didn’t respond. She only looked at Xu Qingzhu and asked gently, “Feeling any better?”

Xu Qingzhu nodded, murmuring a cool, flat “Mm.”

“No time like the present.” Bai Weiwei said. “The civil affairs bureau’s still open. Why don’t you two go get the divorce certificate right now?”

Liang Shi immediately said: “Who said anything about us getting a divorce?”

“Eldest Miss Liang, if you won’t divorce, we’ll see you in court.” Bai Weiwei stood up to face her. “Our A-Zhu isn’t someone you can push around. I’ve consulted a lawyer. Even within a marriage, forcing an omega into bed or forcibly marking an omega is illegal.”

Liang Shi: “…”

It wasn’t like she’d done any of that.

But what could she do? The original owner had committed the sin.

“I have no such intentions,” Liang Shi explained.

Bai Weiwei snorted coldly.

Liang Shi’s phone buzzed. She pulled it out to see a voice message from Qiu Zimin.

She opened it intending to convert it to text, but accidentally hit play.

Qiu Zimin’s voice rang out through the ward. “Cangyue Restaurant tonight at seven thirty. Don’t be late. Even if you’ve changed your mind, you’ll have to explain it to Zhou Yi’an yourself. I’m not going to…”

Liang Shi fumbled frantically, finally hitting pause.

But everything that needed to be heard had already been heard.

The faces of everyone in the ward darkened.

Liang Shi immediately said: “Xu Qingzhu, I can explain.”

But Xu Qingzhu simply lay down and pulled up the covers. Her voice was flat. “Leave. I’m tired.”

Liang Shi: “…”

At this rate, she’d never reach eighty luck value in this lifetime!