Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Zhao Peng’s face turned scarlet as he cursed, “Fuck off! How could a man possibly get pregnant-”

It didn’t take long for him to believe me.

He could clearly feel another life inside him, an overbearing presence greedily feeding on his flesh and organs.

He panicked. He hurled the vilest insults at me and threatened me until he was completely exhausted.

I chained his hands and feet to the bed and reminded him good-naturedly, “You’d better conserve your strength. What if you don’t have enough left when it’s time to give birth?”

My complete indifference finally made him realize that, absurd as it all seemed, this was real.

Zhao Peng was obviously terrified, yet he spoke as if he were bestowing some tremendous favor upon me. “Qianqian, take me to the hospital, and I’ll marry you immediately. Don’t I still have an apartment downtown? I’ll put your name on the deed too. Will that be enough?”

I used his fingerprint to unlock his phone. It contained countless videos, each more sickening than the last.

I stopped on one of them.

In a cellar, a girl who had failed to meet her fraud quota was being electrocuted.

Her screams were even more desperate and agonizing than Zhao Peng’s were now.

Because she had refused to scam the elderly, she’d been stripped naked and thrown into a cellar crawling with maggots.

I had watched this video countless times, but every viewing still felt like a knife twisting in my heart.

My finger traced the filthy little face on the screen.

“This is my younger sister, Song Xiangyi.”

Zhao Peng went pale with shock and immediately denied it. “She’s not your sister, I swear! Her name was Xiao Chun. She was just my ex-girlfriend! She was the one who took out a nude-photo loan and jumped to her death. What did that have to do with me?”

“We are born through borrowed wombs, so our appearance is inevitably influenced by the paternal host. Blood ties are something only your kind cares about. My foolish little sister…”

Even after living for so many years, she had remained convinced that people were inherently good. She wrote home to tell me that she had met an exceptionally kind young man in the city.

This man not only gave her love, but respect as well.

“He isn’t chauvinistic at all. Times have changed. Everything is different from how it was centuries ago.

“Sister, I truly want a real family of my own in this era.”

The paternal hosts we sought were always irredeemably evil men. That rule had been established a thousand years ago.

Dancing with darkness for so long had robbed me of the ability to trust.

Even so, I was happy for my sister. But soon, I began to sense danger between the lines of her letters.

Only two people from the village were allowed to leave every ten years.

Defying the village rules, I slipped out in secret.

I searched and searched, until at last, I found my sister at a funeral home.