Chapter 29: Blackmail

In the backstage of the studio hall, the smug Liu Xianhe was grabbed by the collar by Ming You, whose face was frosty, and pinned against the wall. “Liu, I’ve tolerated you once or twice, but that doesn’t mean I can tolerate you a third or fourth time, endlessly. You’d better not challenge my bottom line.”

Seeing Ming You flare up in anger, Gu Xirui was first startled. Then she thought to herself that this arrogant kitten’s claws weren’t fully dulled after all.

If she hadn’t been inseparable from Ming You during classes and meals, she would have suspected that Ming You had been “tamed” by someone.

“Ming You, I’m pursuing you with real sincerity. If you don’t like roses, you can have other flowers—just tell me straight.” Liu Xianhe grinned shamelessly, raised both hands in surrender, but actually rubbed salt in the wound.

“Sincerity?” Ming You curled the corner of her mouth in a sinister smile. This damn hypocritical “sincerity”—she had used it on Yan Ningxi last weekend too. “999 roses, and the packaging can’t be cheap. That must have cost several thousand yuan, right?”

She released Liu Xianhe’s clothes, patted her hands as if they were dirty, then picked up the microphone. “Since everyone loves gossip, I’ll dispel the rumor myself as the person involved. I, Ming You, would never give a guy like Liu Xianhe—a man of poor character, no redeeming qualities, thinning hair, sickly thin, low class, and shamelessly persistent—so much as a single glance. If he really had the nerve to send 999 roses, I’d accept them and treat the whole class to a rose foot soak.”

“Rose foot soak? That’s a good idea.” Gu Xirui was amused by Ming You’s plan. She walked to her side and soothed her. “Come on, if we’re any later, the cafeteria will be out of sweet-and-sour ribs.”

“Mighty Sister Yu!” Ming You’s classmates shouted in unison from below the stage.

Humiliated, Liu Xianhe’s face twisted dramatically. He stepped forward to demand an explanation, but Lin Yiyang held him back. “Are you stupid or just dumb?! You pick a fight with the department belle in public? Don’t you know how popular she is? No matter what you say or do, you’re just shooting yourself in the foot—no one will back you up.”

“Miss Lin is a sensible person.” Ming You paused as she passed them and tossed out the praise.

Who was Ming You?

Would she let a mere clown get under her skin?

Liu Xianhe’s petty, disgusting little tricks paled in comparison to the madness Ming You had unleashed on her own.

“Miss Ming, speaking objectively, your roast of Liu Xianhe was the highlight of the whole event today.” Lin Yiyang would rather see Ming You become a laughingstock for failing to deliver on the rose foot soak than Liu Xianhe mocked for his roses. “When you snag the national championship, share a few with me too.”

“I’m not close to you.” The implication: no rose foot soak for you.

As they left the studio hall, Ming You took the two bouquets and certificate from Gu Xirui’s arms. “Xirui, did you get any photos from the final group shot? Send me one.”

Suddenly empty-handed, Gu Xirui blinked, then laughed. “Something’s really off with you lately, Miss Ming.”

“…”

“You never used to ask me for photos. I’d just send you the good ones.” She opened her photo album, swiped through, zoomed in on one, and lavished praise. “You look amazing in every shot—perfect posture and expression. How about this one where Lin Yiyang blinked?”

Ming You leaned in for a look. Lin Yiyang stood to her right, caught mid-blink. Rather than “blinded,” it looked more like she was rolling her eyes.

She thought to herself: That girl had seriously pissed off Gu Xirui.

“Send whichever you like.” After all, she wasn’t posting the photo publicly—it wouldn’t ruin Lin Yiyang’s “class flower” image.

…

The same Saturday, the same city.

Yan Ningxi took the high-speed rail to Hengyuan early that morning. It was the date she had set with Chen Xuemei at the start of the month.

She took Chen Xuemei and her son Li Qin to the nationally renowned neurology department at People’s Hospital for a check-up. Then she treated them to lunch, went shopping, bought each of them several outfits, and picked up some local specialties.

Yan Ningxi covered all the day’s expenses.

A little after five in the afternoon, Yan Ningxi dropped the two off at their hotel. “There are restaurants nearby. Grab something if you’re hungry. I’m heading back—take the medicine as prescribed.”

Chen Xuemei reached out to touch her, but she sidestepped.

Yan Ningxi had spent twenty-two years in the most primal world of raw emotions—joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness. It was Chen Xuemei who, flying the flag of repentance and atonement, used despicable tactics to teach her the meaning of “disgust,” “hatred,” “life’s impermanence,” and “the world’s unpredictability.”

She had lived all those years without ever imagining she would one day feel these two emotions, more complex than mere anger. Chen Xuemei wasn’t just despicable—she was malicious.

“Xixi, thank you so much for today. You took Li Qin to the doctor and bought all this stuff for us mother and son. It must have cost you a fortune.”

Chen Xuemei rubbed her hands together, then slapped the back of the scrawny teenager beside her a bit too hard. She scolded him, “What, are you mute? Standing there like an idiot? Thank your sister quick! Study hard, remember her great kindness, and when you grow up, get a job, make money, repay her double. I’m talking to you—are you deaf or do you have no mouth?”

The skinny boy said awkwardly, “Thank you, sis. I… I’ll study hard, and someday…”

Cold as ice, Yan Ningxi glanced first at Chen Xuemei, then at Li Qin. “I’ve told you: call me Teacher Yan.”

She had no little brother. She only had her parents.

She turned, hailed a cab, and said, “To the train station.”

Chen Xuemei was Yan Ningxi’s biological mother—and the sinner who had given birth but abandoned her.

Chen Xuemei dropped out of vocational high school before finishing. She rebelled, left home, and went to work in a factory. At seventeen, she started dating an out-of-town guy from the same factory. They shacked up, she tasted forbidden fruit for the first time, and predictably got pregnant.

At first, the man was thrilled. He patted his chest and promised to take responsibility for her and the baby. Once the child was born, they’d send it back home for the grandparents to raise. In two years, when they hit legal marriage age, they’d get hitched, fetch the kid, and live together. By then, the child would be old enough for the factory kindergarten.

But when she was more than eight months along, the twenty-year-old vanished without a trace. Chen Xuemei searched high and low, but he was gone.

After leaving home, Chen Xuemei rarely kept in touch. She shared neither good news nor bad. She had no face, no courage to tell her parents about the baby.

As her due date approached, she squatted outside the welfare home almost daily, memorizing familiar faces day after day. It was her own flesh and blood, after all—she couldn’t raise it, but surely someone could.

Alone in a rundown rental in a demolition zone, she had no money for a proper hospital or a birth permit.

She even fantasized about delivering the baby herself, like those social news stories—no fuss, no one the wiser. Give birth quietly, then drop the child off at the welfare home quietly.

But when the day came and the pain became unbearable, she dialed 120 anyway.

It was a life-or-death matter. No money, no permit—the hospital wouldn’t just let her die.

The baby wasn’t full-term and weighed only 2.3 kg.

The day after the birth, Chen Xuemei left a note authorizing the welfare home to take the child and vanished.

When the little girl was three months old, a childless teacher couple in their late thirties adopted her. To give the child a healthy environment, keep it confidential, and spare her gossip growing up, they both transferred to another city.

Chen Xuemei, who had been in hiding for months, waited until after their move before dragging herself back home destitute to start over.

She never tried to find the father again—she treated him as dead. She never considered retrieving the child; she knew she didn’t deserve to.

If her second child hadn’t developed epilepsy, and if her husband hadn’t ended up with a lifelong disability from joining a high-interest loan debt-collection brawl, she never would have tracked down the daughter she had abandoned—the one now old enough to graduate college—to beg for financial help.

Chen Xuemei found Yan Ningxi just as she started her first year of grad school, right after her twenty-second birthday, and right after losing the mother who loved her most.

Her foster mother, Liang Hui, was a high school history teacher who was diagnosed with a serious illness shortly after retiring. Years of shuttling between hospitals drained the elderly couple’s savings.

Fueled by her thirst for life and reluctance to leave her husband and daughter, Liang Hui battled the disease until her sixties but didn’t survive her birthday.

Yan Ningxi, still reeling from her mother’s death, was suddenly plunged into another bottomless pit.

She would never forget Chen Xuemei showing up disheveled at her dorm, bursting into tears at the sight of her—or the terror of seeing the paternity test results at the hospital, the vortex of fate hitting her hard.

Science didn’t lie.

She had no choice but to accept her fate and face the cruel reality alone.

During that time, missing classes due to illness was routine.

But she figured out a lot of things. Like why she had never really resembled her parents since childhood. Why her parents and relatives on both sides rarely visited all year round. Why there was no family group chat. Why she had never even swept the ancestors’ graves on Qingming…

The answer to every “why” boiled down to one thing: her parents’ decision to adopt a child with no blood ties hadn’t won the approval of the elders.

Her parents had sacrificed far too much for her.

It was more than she could ever repay in a lifetime.

Armed with the paternity test, Chen Xuemei legitimately cloaked herself as the “loving mother.”

She didn’t resort to crying, wailing, or threatening suicide to squeeze money out of Yan Ningxi. She didn’t loudly invoke the grace of birth to morally blackmail her. Instead, she repeatedly pinched Yan Ningxi’s “soft spot,” indirectly carrying out one blackmail after another.

—Your mother has passed. Your father has a pension and a house—no worries there.

—Your father is an educated man. If he learned you ignored your little brother’s illness, what would he think?

—If I weren’t desperate, I’d never disturb you and your foster parents for the rest of my life.

—Abandoning you was my sin. I’m the criminal. But your brother is innocent. You’re innocent. I’ll go to hell after I die and face my punishment.

—The doctor said Li Qin’s epilepsy is hereditary. His grandmother later confirmed someone in the ancestors had it too. I sought you out because I’m scared you carry it as well—get checked early, don’t overwork, avoid too much stress, get more rest.

Yan Ningxi didn’t buy Chen Xuemei’s fake concern and wasn’t afraid of the harassment. But she feared Chen Xuemei going to her father for money, feared her ruining her parents’ reputation. That would truly make her an unfilial child.

So from that point on, one-third of her earnings went into Chen Xuemei’s pocket, one-third to her father’s account, and only the remaining third was for her own living expenses.

This month, she had overspent badly. Her card balance was down to four digits.

But the doctor said Li Qin’s condition couldn’t wait any longer.

“Clinically, epilepsy is usually treated conservatively via craniotomy to excise the epileptic focus, costing around 50,000 to 60,000 yuan—relatively affordable. Full cure rates are low, but most patients see some effect. If it recurs later, a neurostimulation implant surgery is needed. The surgery alone runs 70,000 to 80,000, and a full set of implanted devices costs about 200,000—imported ones even more. All told, you’re looking at a minimum of 300,000 yuan.”

300,000 yuan wasn’t astronomical for many families. But for Yan Ningxi—with her part-time gigs, scrimping and saving, refusing to be exploited—it would take two or three years to scrape together.

Her mother had hoped she would go into teaching, convinced that it was one of the best career choices for a girl among a hundred miles—stable and respectable with social status, plus winter and summer vacations, and a salary and benefits that weren’t bad at all, enough for her to live comfortably on her own. Her parents both had retirement pensions and didn’t need Yan Ningxi to support them.

It wasn’t until the second semester of her senior year in high school that Yan Ningxi finally made up her mind to apply to a normal university. Because she had discovered the medical records her mother had hidden away.

Heaven had stripped her of the chance to repay her parents’ kindness in raising her, yet it demanded that she support Chen Xuemei’s entire family.

How absurd. How cruel.

And how despairing.

Ding.

Ding.

Ding.

The timely phone notification sound pulled Yan Ningxi out of her boundless painful memories. After unlocking the screen with her fingerprint, she once again savored the pleasure of the delightful ringtone, the pleasing avatar, and the heartwarming message.

That round red moon over the sea, shrouded in dark and heavy clouds, no longer felt oppressive in her eyes.