Past Trauma

On the day I was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer, I lost the cat that Chi Zhou and his ex-girlfriend had raised together.

He said, “Xia Zhi, if you can’t find the cat, then don’t come back either!”

Later, I died out there and never returned to our home again.

When Nie Feng and I were about to file for divorce, he was in a car accident and lost his memory.

His memory was stuck eight years in the past.

Eight years ago, he loved me the most.

In the year I was desperately poor, I deliberately fed two of my fingers into the factory machinery and had them crushed, all for the thirty thousand yuan my grandmother needed for surgery.

The factory manager frowned with such pain that he wanted to compensate me eighty thousand yuan. I was too guilty to take it, so I only asked for thirty thousand.

Years passed. My grandmother had been gone for many years.

Then I saw a trending news report: the factory from back then had been swallowed by a fire.

The factory manager had died of a heart attack. His wife had vanished.

Their twelve-year-old son had been sent to an orphanage.

Looking at those helpless, terrified eyes on the screen, I poured the medicine I had been about to swallow down the drain.

Then… let me live once more.

For that thirty thousand yuan from back then.

On the day the divorce was finalized, I booked a high-speed rail ticket back to my hometown. A phone, an ID card, and a bank card with a meager balance were all I had left.

When the butler called to say the young master was crying for his mother, I finally understood that the son I had borne and his father loved the same woman.

Before the train left, I made one last promise: I would never disturb him again.

We had been together for three years, yet my girlfriend still couldn’t forget her first love.

There was a locked room in her house-a promise she had kept for him.

As long as he returned, there would always be a place for him in her home.

For his sake, she abandoned me time and time again.

The final time, I left nothing but a single breakup text and vanished without a trace.

Yet, she acted as if she had gone mad, searching the entire world for me.

Eventually, in a cemetery, she finally discovered the truth behind everything.

With bloodshot eyes, she pointed at the person in the black-and-white photograph-someone who bore an eighty percent resemblance to her-and interrogated me.

“Shen Yu, tell me-” “Every time you looked at me, who exactly were you thinking of?”

Dad didn’t like me. I knew this from a very young age.

Because I wasn’t the boy he wanted.

To have a son, he sent me away, saying, “Sons are the roots, and I don’t lack daughters.”

Never having been loved, I was upset about it for a long time.

But when it came time for him to need support in his old age, he said, “Sons are unreliable; daughters are the most caring.”

“Second Sister, when Dad gets old, it’ll all be up to you!”

The moment I received my fiancé’s letter breaking off our engagement, I headed straight for Cangzhou.

I was planning to demand a few dozen taels of silver as compensation for my wasted youth.

What I hadn’t expected was that he had fallen from being a prince’s estate adviser to a criminal slave.

He knelt on the ground, covered in blood and filth, looking so pitiful that anyone could do whatever they wanted with him.

“Are you buying or not? If you’re not, move to the back!”

The people there to buy slaves shoved me behind them.

I thought to myself in secret,

This isn’t me refusing to save him, okay? Other people pushed me out!

At once, I felt perfectly justified in turning to leave.

The seller was still urging the crowd, “Hurry it up! This is the last day! Anyone who doesn’t sell today gets dragged to the market and beheaded tomorrow!”

My steps paused slightly, and I tightened my grip on the purse hidden in my sleeve.

Just then, I heard a hoarse voice shout,

“My fiancée is here to buy me! The one with the shabby bamboo hat!”

Mom had a Leather Handbook that recorded every woman Dad kept on the side.

One of them, Aunt Wei, was marked in particular.

In Mom’s delicate handwriting, she had written: This is the little toy I’m leaving you. Enjoy this life to your heart’s content, my daughter.

After Mom died, that woman buzzed into my life like a fly.

And I swatted her straight down into hell.

Qi Zheng raised a hand and knocked over the insulated food jar I was offering him.

“I’ve already been forced to marry you. Do you really expect me to fall in love with you, too?”

Once that video was leaked, everyone knew: the newly risen top star had been forced into marriage, and I was the clingy leech he couldn’t shake off.

That night, after the shoot wrapped, everyone tacitly ignored the fact that I was still tied to a tree.

By the time I was rescued before dawn the next day, my legs were stiff.

I felt my way back through the dark, missed my footing, and fell off a cliff.

When I woke again, I had returned to four years earlier-and met someone who favored me openly and without hesitation.

Qi Zheng, however, was not happy about it.

It was the first time I had ever encountered something so bizarre.

A murder had taken place inside a residential home.

The suspect had more or less been identified, but there were still plenty of questions left unanswered.

As usual, I visited the residents nearby and started with the victim’s neighbor across the hall.

The man of the household was very cooperative.

I questioned him for twenty minutes, and he answered calmly and methodically.

Finally, I asked, “When was the last time you saw the victim?”

He said, “Last weekend. He invited me to go fishing.”

“Was there anything unusual about him at the time?”

“All I remember is that halfway there, he brought up something from the past…”

Then he told me about it: a story from when he was a child on classroom duty, wiping down the tiles at school. It had nothing to do with the case.

Just some trivial little incident that barely mattered.

But halfway through, he suddenly froze.

A moment later, his face went deathly pale.

“I understand now…” he muttered dazedly to himself.

“It’s out of control…”

“What did you say?”

“I’m sorry, Officer Lu. I’m tired. Let’s stop here for today.”

Without another word, he ordered me to leave.

No matter how many times I knocked, he refused to respond.

My colleague and I had no choice but to leave for the time being.

We went down to the first floor, walked out of the apartment building, and reached the car.

Just then, a gust of wind swept past, followed by a thunderous crash- Someone had fallen from the building and slammed hard onto the windshield in front of the car.

His half-open eyes met mine for a brief moment.

Then he died. It was the very witness who had been speaking to me five minutes earlier, the same man who had been so composed ten minutes ago.

There had to be something wrong here.

Now I needed to go back and sort through everything that had just happened from the beginning.