Chapter 3

Chapter 3

My cousin contacted every colleague and friend they knew.

Every single one of them insisted they had never known anyone named Shen Haixin. They had never even heard of him.

Especially Shen Haixin’s close friend-the one who had gotten the wrong call that night. His name was Chen Dongzhao.

“Lady, stop going crazy at me. What exactly are you trying to do?”

My cousin demanded, “The only reason I know you is because Haixin introduced us. Without him, how would we ever have met?”

Chen Dongzhao sounded like he was on the verge of a breakdown.

“I’m your client! I bought insurance from you. Did you forget that?”

My cousin insisted, “Why would you come to me to buy insurance? Haixin sent you to me so you could help me hit my sales quota.”

Chen Dongzhao cursed and hung up.

“Lunatic!”

“There’s no talking sense with you!”

For more than a month, my cousin quit her job and devoted all her energy to finding Shen Haixin.

But the more she searched, the more hopeless she became.

Aside from herself, and the lonely three characters of Shen Haixin’s name sitting in her phone contacts, no one remembered him.

It was as if he had never existed in this world.

By the end of her search, even my cousin herself could not help suspecting that there was something wrong with her mind.

Maybe she had imagined a boyfriend and made the whole thing up herself.

Off to the side, Ling Ling secretly nodded and winked at me. Her meaning was obvious. She thought so too.

“Cousin, actually, having psychological issues doesn’t mean you’re insane. Society puts so much pressure on people these days. You don’t have to-”

“I have proof!”

My cousin cut Ling Ling off and pulled a stack of papers from her bag.

She took a deep breath. Her hands were trembling badly.

“Its existence is enough to prove that none of it was my hallucination.”

She flipped through the papers and slapped one down on the table.

It was an ultrasound report from the hospital, and the words on it were clear as day.

Nine weeks pregnant. Singleton. Intrauterine pregnancy.

Ling Ling screamed in shock, then instinctively clapped a hand over her mouth and said in a trembling voice, “Cousin! You’re… you’re pregnant? Whose child is it?”

My cousin stood up.

She was very thin and wearing a loose dress. Now, she used both hands to tug the dress back hard, pulling the fabric tight against her body and revealing the full curve of her waist.

There was already a slight bulge at her lower abdomen.

Tears fell from my cousin’s eyes again.

“Exactly. Whose child is it?”

“If Shen Haixin doesn’t exist, then who is his father?”

Only then did I realize this matter was not as simple as I had thought.

At first, when my cousin had been recounting everything, I had subconsciously assumed the same thing as Ling Ling-that she might have some kind of mental problem.

Because no matter how hard I racked my brain, I could not think of any demon, ghost, or monster with enough power to alter so many people’s memories.

Ever since I was little, I had followed my master all over the country. You could say I had seen plenty of strange things involving gods and ghosts.

Spirit possession, ghost walls, and even what had happened last time in Ling Ling’s hometown, when an evil presence entered dreams and made every young woman believe she had fallen in love with someone in her sleep.

A ghost itself was a kind of magnetic field. It could influence the human brain and make people hallucinate.

The stronger the ghost, the wider the range of its influence.

But not even the most powerful ghost should be capable of erasing an existing household registration from the public security authorities, right?

Government offices were naturally brimming with yang energy, impervious to evil. Shen Haixin, as a person, must not exist.

And there was no way so many people’s life trajectories could be altered either.

That meant the only problem had to be with my cousin.

But she was pregnant.

I stared hard at my cousin’s stomach.

Ghost fetuses did exist in this world.

But so-called ghost fetuses were the result of fetal qi being disturbed by yin evil or deathly energy, putting the fetus in a state between yin and yang.

It did not mean the child’s father was a ghost.

Humans and ghosts could not conceive children together.

Just like clouds in the sky and fallen leaves on the surface of the water. When the wind blew and the clouds surged, the reflection on the lake might make it look as if the leaves were hidden among the clouds.

But between them, there would never be any true intersection.

The child’s father had to be a normal man.

I gave Ling Ling a look.

“Let’s step outside and talk.”