Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The tide of public opinion on the trending searches shifted rapidly.

A friend of Zhou Jinyan’s stepped forward to clarify, stating that I was not his girlfriend.

“President Zhou helped her pay her family’s medical bills out of pity back then. He never expected her to cling to him like a leech, constantly trying to throw herself at him to climb the social ladder. As for that meal in the photo, President Zhou only met her to make things clear once and for all.”

Zhou Jinyan then authorized the release of several photographs.

Some showed me working as a promoter in a bar, being harassed by customers. However, the camera angles made it look like I was playing hard to get.

There were also photos of Lin Jia dining with investors.

Finally, there was the photo of the two of us in the café.

Someone reached a conclusion: “So Lin Jia lost her role, held a grudge, and teamed up with this bar girl to spread rumors? Lu Sisi is so pitiful.”

My phone number was leaked.

Tens of thousands of abusive text messages flooded in.

People even dug up my identification documents and demanded that the university revoke my diploma and degree on the grounds of moral depravity.

Meanwhile, Lu Sisi emerged from the storm of public scrutiny completely unscathed.

The following evening, she gracefully posted a photo of a diamond ring on her Weibo.

“Engaged.”

In the comments section, countless people offered their congratulations.

The cyberbullying against me, however, only intensified.

For several days, I didn’t dare turn on my phone.

Zhou Jinyan never returned.

My stomach issues flared up again, so I decided to head out to the hospital to pick up some medication.

Instead, I was forced into a white van.

In an abandoned factory by the sea, I saw Lu Sisi, who had also been kidnapped.

Her expensive gown was covered in dust and torn to rags. Her meticulously styled, silk-like long hair was as disheveled as withered grass.

She glared at me with resentment, hissing, “You again!”

I pursed my lips. “I should be the one saying that.”

“What right do you have to speak to me like that? You penniless trash!” Lu Sisi shrieked. “Ah Yan doesn’t love you at all! If you didn’t look like me, you wouldn’t even be qualified to stay by his side as a substitute!”

She had lost her composure. The star who was always high and mighty had been abducted in the most brutal fashion and locked in a dust-filled factory. She couldn’t even get a drop of clean water.

She cursed, threatened, and tried to bribe them, but her efforts only earned her kicks and punches from the kidnappers.

After two days of this, Lin Jia appeared.

I sighed. “I guessed it was you.”

She looked at me with a beaming smile. “See? You look out for Zhou Jinyan, but he doesn’t give a damn about your situation. Now that both you and Lu Sisi are here, I’m curious-if he can only save one person, who will he choose?”

In truth, the answer to that question didn’t even need testing.

So, when the sound of sirens wailed from the distance and Lin Jia, along with the men she hired, hurriedly pushed me toward the edge of the cliff, I simply gave Zhou Jinyan a calm look.

He didn’t even look at me. His eyes were fixed on Lu Sisi. “Sisi, don’t be afraid.”

The usually arrogant Lu Sisi burst into tears. Sobbing, she called out Zhou Jinyan’s name over and over. “Save me, Ah Yan!”

I watched the white foam churning beneath the cliff and said nothing.

Lin Jia asked me, “Aren’t you going to struggle?”

“No,” I said softly. “I’m a little tired.”

They seemed to say something else, likely negotiating terms or the like.

The pain in my stomach grew sharper. Layer after layer of cold sweat broke out on my forehead and back. Finally, I heard Zhou Jinyan’s voice.

He called my name. “Yu Ning.”

“I’ll save you too. Look at me.”

“Lift your head and look at me.”

I didn’t look up. I only heard Lin Jia’s cold sneer.

“It’s not that simple. Zhou Jinyan, I worked hard for so many years to get to where I am, and you ruined everything. You have to pay the price.”

A sudden force hit me from behind.

My body felt light, followed by the weightless sensation of falling. The white waves before my eyes rushed closer.

Lu Sisi’s screams gradually faded from my ears.

I realized belatedly that she had pushed both Lu Sisi and me down at the same time.

Before the seawater swallowed me, I heard Zhou Jinyan call my name one last time.

It was a voice I had never heard from him before-filled with immense terror and despair.

“Yu Ning!!”

–

(Zhou Jinyan’s Perspective)

Three days after Yu Ning fell into the sea.

His secretary called to report that the search and rescue team still hadn’t found her.

The golden window for rescue had passed; she was likely dead.

“Miss Lu has arrived from the hospital. She’s waiting outside for you.” She looked at Zhou Jinyan hesitantly. “Do you want to see her?”

He stood before the floor-to-ceiling window, watching the darkening sky outside. It took a long while before he spoke.

“No. Tell her to go back and rest.”

As soon as he finished, Lu Sisi pushed the door open and walked in, staring at him coldly. “What is the meaning of this? Are you going to blame Yu Ning’s death on me?”

She had abrasions on her cheekbones and a long gash on her arm, which was currently wrapped in gauze. But compared to Yu Ning, whose life was currently uncertain, these injuries were minor.

Zhou Jinyan avoided her gaze, his tone flat. “No. You should go back and rest.”

Lu Sisi didn’t leave. She stood her ground, her eyes reddening as she looked at him.

“You regret it, don’t you?”

“Regret what?”

“Regret getting engaged to me. Regret that the person you caught that day… wasn’t her!”

Zhou Jinyan pursed his lips and remained silent.

Lu Sisi understood immediately. “Zhou Jinyan, get one thing straight-she was just a cheap substitute who debased herself for money!”

She was clutching her Hermès bag, a pink diamond ring on her finger. Her entire outfit was worth over a million.

For some reason, Zhou Jinyan’s mind drifted back to the first time he met Yu Ning.

In that dimly lit bar, amidst the blurred neon lights and chaotic revelry, she had been wearing a faded white shirt, her hair cut very short.
A customer once tried to flirt with her, stuffing a tip down her neckline.

She calmly took it out, tucked it carefully into her pocket, and even thanked him.

In those eyes of hers, it seemed as if a fire was burning.

It was the same later on.

For the sake of three hundred thousand, she had taken the initiative to come to his door and throw herself into his arms.

When he heard scandalous rumors about Lu Sisi, he would vent his anger by deliberately tormenting her during their intimacy.

Through the many moments she was forced to bend her spine, the fire in her eyes might have dimmed briefly, but it never went out.

Zhou Jinyan admitted that he had looked down on Yu Ning at first.

His life and hers were as far apart as two different worlds.

That first chaotic night, he had practically pinned her down to vent his emotions.

Yu Ning hadn’t made a sound, enduring it all. Only in the dim, flickering shadows of the lamp, her eyes remained downcast, her eyelashes trembling violently as if she were enduring immense pain.

The next morning, she asked him if she could have a sum of money.

“Just consider it a loan.”

Zhou Jinyan felt even more contemptuous. At least among the female companions he’d had before, none had been so impatient to reveal their ulterior motives.

Even so, he asked, “How much?”

“Three hundred thousand.”

After she spoke, she paused, then added somewhat awkwardly, “If you could give me a few tens of thousands more, that would be fine too-just as a backup.”

His pen stalled on the checkbook.

He suddenly found it absurd.

The breakup fee he had casually tossed to his previous girlfriend was more than ten times the price Yu Ning was asking for.

In fact, he should have realized back then that she was different from those people.

She hadn’t approached him out of vanity.

She had approached him because she was at the end of her rope.

Later, he discovered many wounds on Yu Ning’s body-scars of varying depths.

She didn’t care much, saying that she had to walk mountain paths to get to school when she was a child. Sometimes it rained, she would fall, and scars were left behind.

Later, Zhou Jinyan thought back countless times. That sharp, brief pang that had suddenly flared in his heart back then should have been the beginning of falling for her.

He had simply forced himself to ignore it.

He had loved Lu Sisi for so many years. She was like a flower that had always been meticulously cared for, untainted by a single speck of dust; it was only right for her to be arrogant and prideful.

But Yu Ning…

She was like clear lake water.

She always followed him silently, accepting all the deliberate difficulties he and his friends threw her way.

The more they looked down on her, the more those bright eyes reflected their own meanness and wretchedness.

Zhou Jinyan was sometimes restless and anxious.

Because he felt he had never truly possessed her.

She only stayed by his side because she was forced to-for the sake of money, for the sake of the ‘kindness’ that ridiculous three hundred thousand had bought.

He knew she would secretly read books in places where he couldn’t see her, as if she were constantly preparing to leave him.

That thirsty, passionate gaze she had when she read-he had never received it for a single second.

He only wanted Yu Ning’s eyes to hold him, even if it was with dislike or hatred.

And so, one wrong step led to another.

Ten days after Yu Ning fell off the cliff.

Everyone said it was impossible for her to have survived.

His friends tried to persuade him: “Forget it. It’s already happened. Don’t ruin things with Sisi over a dead person. Besides, didn’t you say she was just a substitute?”

Zhou Jinyan looked up.

His eyes were bloodshot.

Lu Sisi was crying beside him.

She questioned him: “The news of Lin Jia going to prison has already been released. If you announce the cancellation of the engagement now, aren’t you telling everyone that you were just acting with me?”

“Ah Yan, are you really not going to consider my career?”

At this time, she still called him Ah Yan.

Using a gentle, mournful tone, her eyes held a look that invited pity.

Zhou Jinyan suddenly realized that Yu Ning had never called him by such an intimate name.

At first, she called him President Zhou. Later, under his orders, she was only willing to go one step further and address him by his full name.

Polite to a fault, and utterly distant.

Zhou Jinyan began to dream of Yu Ning frequently.

In his dreams, he hadn’t humiliated or looked down on her, nor had he used the debt of gratitude to keep her by his side. Consequently, her attitude toward him grew gentler, and she was willing to let down her guard and call him “Ah Yan.”

He would go to the research institute to pick her up from work, a large bouquet of roses hidden in the car.

She would accept the bouquet with a bit of surprise and finally give him a sincere smile.

But when he woke up, there was nothing.

By the bedside lay the books Yu Ning had read, the papers she had written, and the experimental results she had secretly researched.

That was her world, and he had never entered it for even a moment.

Three years passed like this.

One day, while watching the news, he caught an inadvertent glimpse of a press conference for a foreign scientific research achievement.

There was a figure in the corner that looked slightly familiar.

Zhou Jinyan stood up in shock, almost thinking he was still in a dream.

He asked someone to investigate. The other party replied quickly: the person wasn’t named Yu Ning; she was a doctoral student majoring in life sciences at a university abroad.

As if falling from a warm, illusory dream, Zhou Jinyan stared out the window in silence for a long time.

Only then did he say, word by word, “She’s still alive.”

Yu Ning’s body had never been found.

That meant there was always a slight chance of survival, no matter how pitifully small.

Zhou Jinyan began to search the world for her, starting from that cliff.

Where that sea area flowed, who had been there, the large and small hospitals nearby.

Time and again, hope flared up, only for him to watch it be extinguished with his own eyes.

He was being driven mad by the torture of this repeated back-and-forth.

For two whole years, he found nothing.

But he still held a sliver of hope in his heart, still waiting.

Waiting for the day in the future when she would be willing to appear before him.

Perhaps it would be out of hatred or for revenge, but even that wouldn’t matter.