Chapter 3

Chapter 3

The Shen Family Mansion was divided into the East Building, the West Building, and the main house.

The main house was brightly lit. Servants were making the final preparations for tomorrow’s wedding. Guests stayed in the East Building, while the West Building had been sealed off for years. Outsiders only said it had fallen into disrepair and was unsafe. Shen Jianwei had brought me to the old mansion many times, but he had never let me go near the West Building.

I stood at the entrance to the West Building with the key in my hand, and suddenly remembered the first time I came to the Shen Family for dinner.

Xu Lingyi had personally ladled soup for me and asked for my birth date and hour. I froze for a moment, but Shen Jianwei deflected the question for me, saying young people these days didn’t care about things like that. Xu Lingyi wasn’t annoyed. She merely smiled and said, “Marriage is a major matter. Of course the horoscopes should be matched.”

Later, she gave me a shawl and said the lines of my shoulders and neck were beautiful, then asked me to try on a qipao. When I went into the fitting room to change, the zipper on my back got stuck. A maid reached out to help me, but her fingers suddenly stopped behind my shoulder.

In the mirror, I saw her expression change.

She had seen that red mole.

The next day, Xu Lingyi began urging us to get married.

Back then, I only thought she was a wealthy matriarch obsessed with appearances. Only now did I understand that what the Shen Family had valued was never me as a person, but the Life-Sealing Mark my grandmother had spoken of.

The lock on the West Building was very new, completely out of place against the old wooden door. I slid the key in, and with a click, an empty echo carried down the corridor. There was no dust inside. The floor was unnaturally clean, and the air held a mingled scent of disinfectant and sandalwood.

At the end of the third floor, a faint light was glowing from a room.

I pushed the door open and saw a bedroom arranged like a hospital ward.

A man lay on the bed.

He was painfully thin, his cheeks sunken, his body connected to a monitor and IV tubes. On the nightstand was an old photograph. In it, two teenage boys stood side by side beneath a locust tree. One had cool, aloof features and looked like Shen Jianwei; the other smiled with reckless confidence. That had to be Shen Mingche.

But the man on the bed was not dead.

On the monitor, his heartbeat rose and fell in slow waves.

Shen Mingche was still alive.

A chill crawled up my back.

Eighteen years ago, the Shen Family had announced to the public that Shen Mingche died in a fire. Every year on the anniversary of his death, Xu Lingyi went to a temple to offer lamps for him, and the media had even written articles about how she had “held up Shen Corporation after losing her son.” But the so-called dead eldest son was lying here in the West Building at this very moment, like an old object hidden away.

There was a nursing log on the cabinet beside the bed. I opened it. The earliest page dated back eighteen years, and after that, every few months, there was another entry about coma, convulsions, heart failure, and resuscitation. The records from the past two years were especially dense. On the final page, someone had written:

“Patient’s organ failure is accelerating. Conventional treatment is of little use. Madam Xu insists on carrying out the Life Substitution Ritual in three days.”

Three days later was tomorrow.

I took photos of the nursing log, then searched the bedside drawer. Inside were several medical records, two rubbings of the Ancient Marriage Contract, and a voice recorder. The recorder had no password. I pressed play, and the first voice that came through was Xu Lingyi’s.

“Are you certain that child from the Lin Family has the Chongming Fate?”

Another voice answered, elderly and hoarse. “A cinnabar mole behind the shoulder, born at the hour of zi on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, and her maternal grandmother is Lin Suyi. There is no mistake.”

Xu Lingyi said, “Mingche cannot wait much longer.”

The old man said, “The Ancient Marriage Contract must see blood. During the wedding ceremony, she must acknowledge Shen Jianwei as her husband. Shen Jianwei is the Yangyin, and Lin Zhaomian is the Life Lamp. Once the two are joined, Mingche will be able to wake.”

Xu Lingyi was silent for a long time before asking, “What will happen to Jianwei?”

“The Yangyin was always meant to be a substitute. Once Mingche wakes, his calamity of illness will naturally return to him. You raised him all these years for this very day, did you not?”

From the recording came the sound of a porcelain cup shattering on the floor.

I stood beside the sickbed, my hands and feet icy cold.

So Shen Jianwei was not the person being saved, either.

He was another sacrifice the Shen Family had raised.

Xu Lingyi had deceived everyone, saying she wanted to use my life to save Shen Jianwei. In truth, the person she wanted to save was her eldest son, Shen Mingche, whom she had hidden away for eighteen years. Shen Jianwei was the “Yangyin.” Once his name and mine were joined on the Marriage Contract, my life would first be sealed to him, then transferred to Shen Mingche through the Shen Family’s old rites.

No wonder Shen Jianwei had told me to come to the West Building.

He was not trying to prove his innocence. He wanted me to see with my own eyes that there were no winners in this scheme.

I kept searching through the drawer and felt a kraft paper envelope.

Inside was a yellowed photograph.

The photo showed three young women standing in front of the Shen Family Mansion. The one on the far left was Xu Lingyi. I did not recognize the woman on the right. But the woman in the middle, wearing a white dress, I recognized at a glance.

It was my mother, Lin Tang.

She had died in a car accident when I was three. I had very few memories of her. All I remembered was that she liked tying her hair with a blue ribbon, and when she smiled, her eyes curved like crescents. On the back of the photo was a line written in my grandmother’s handwriting:

“The night before Tangtang entered the Shen Family, photographed at the West Building. From this day on, Mianmian must never be allowed near the Shen Family.”

My fingertips went numb.

So my entanglement with the Shen Family had not begun with Shen Jianwei.

Footsteps suddenly sounded outside the door.

I quickly stuffed the photograph into my handbag, put the voice recorder back in its original place, and closed the drawer. The next second, the door was pushed open from the outside.

Xu Lingyi stood in the doorway.

When she saw me, the anger on her face slowly settled into calm instead.

“Zhaomian, you really are just like your grandmother. Disobedient.”

I straightened. Behind me was the unconscious Shen Mingche, and in my palm, I was still clutching that photograph.

“Aunt Xu,” I said, “the dead cannot be brought back to life, and the living should not be used as payment for another’s fate.”

She laughed softly.

“You think this is superstition?”

She walked into the room and tucked the corner of Shen Mingche’s blanket in, her movements as gentle as any ordinary mother caring for her sleeping child.

“Eighteen years ago, if your grandmother had not interfered, Mingche would have woken long ago. What the Lin Family owes me, it is time they repaid today.”