Chapter 3
Mom stepped between me and my new dad, looking embarrassed. “Ningning, don’t be silly. He’s not your father!”
Huh?
If he wasn’t my dad, who was?
Then she turned to the man, utterly cold. “And you’re an idiot too, believing everything a child says! Leave. I don’t want to see you right now.”
The man left our home wailing.
I’d never seen a grown man cry so pitifully.
The second the door shut behind him, Mom’s whole manner changed.
From icy indifference to perfect tenderness.
The speed of that transformation… She deserved a Best Actress award.
As though nothing had happened, she looked down at me. “Long day at school, Ningning? What would you like for dinner? I’ll make it.”
“Mom, who was that man?”
“Hmm? What man?”
“The man who was just here!”
“Hmm? What man?”
That was my mom.
A beautiful woman who’d mastered switching personas and playing deaf.
That night, I remembered the black reader.
I opened it. There were only two novels on the shelf.
One was The City’s Greatest Genius, starring Dad.
The other had a slightly odd title: A Delicate Beauty: The Tycoons’ Possessive Love. The woman on its cover looked exactly like Mom.
Of the ten men surrounding her, the one in a suit at the front looked exactly like Dad.
…
With extremely complicated feelings, I opened the novel.
Unsurprisingly, Mom was the heroine.
Strangely, every man in the book seemed unable to control himself as soon as he saw her.
As a fourth-grader, I didn’t understand what they were unable to control.
Still less why the screen was full of little censor boxes…
“Waves of indescribable feeling rose in Jiang Yimeng’s heart. She opened her eyes hazily, only to discover that she had…”
And for some reason, the more little boxes I saw, the more confused I became.
Once I knew both my parents were protagonists,
I became certain there had to be a novel somewhere—
Starring me.
Ideally, its world would have magic, and I wouldn’t be a Muggle.
Time travel would be good too. I wanted to go back to the Tang dynasty and become a wandering martial hero.
At the very least, I should get Dad’s deal: an ordinary world, extraordinary powers for me.
But I searched for years. My shelves kept filling up, and not one book had a heroine named Long Ah Ning!
Damn it!
The author writing me must be too obscure.
It certainly wasn’t because Long Ah Ning wasn’t born to be a protagonist!