Chapter 6

The car drove toward the city center, the air extremely quiet, with only the sound of Shi Yi's occasional coughing audible. But she seemed to be extremely exhausted, and even the sound of her coughing was hoarse and weak.

After a while, Shi Heng suddenly spoke faintly:

"Why didn't you tell Chu Yehan?"

Shi Yi gave a bitter smile, "Tell him what, the truth? Heh, at this point, what meaning does the truth have? Besides, cough, cough... even if I said it, he wouldn't believe the words of a murderer..."

"That's not what I'm talking about," Shi Heng said coldly while holding the steering wheel.

"Not that? Then what is it?" Shi Yi frowned in confusion.

"It's... the fact that you saved his life when you were little. Have you forgotten?"

Shi Yi hadn't actually forgotten; she had indeed saved Chu Yehan once, or to be precise, she had saved both his sister Chu Mengrou and him.

She remembered it was the year she was 10; her grandmother was still alive then, and that day happened to be her grandmother's 80th birthday. Her grandmother had been very good to her while she was alive, so she was also brought over for the meal.

The banquet hadn't started yet, and guests were constantly arriving to wish her a long life. Shi Yi wasn't allowed to enter the venue, so she had to play alone in the back garden in boredom. Just then, a cry of alarm suddenly came from not far away, "Oh no, someone fell into the water!"

After the child shouted, they ran off in a hurry to call the adults.

Only Shi Yi was left in the garden.

Shi Yi was proficient in swimming and jumped in without hesitation. It was only after she got into the lake that she realized it wasn't one person who had fallen in, but two.

It must have been Chu Yehan who fell in first, and his sister Chu Mengrou, in her anxiety, jumped in as well, forgetting that she couldn't swim at all.

Shi Yi dove in, first dragging Chu Mengrou to the shore, and then hurriedly went back into the water to save Chu Yehan.

Although Chu Yehan was a year younger than Shi Yi, he was a boy after all, tall and sturdy, while Shi Yi was thin and small due to long-term malnutrition. She used all her strength to finally drag Chu Yehan up from the bottom of the water.

Chu Mengrou was fine after reaching the shore, but Chu Yehan's breathing was barely perceptible because he had been drowning for too long, and his eyes were tightly closed.

Chu Mengrou panicked and called her brother's name several times, but no one answered. It was Shi Yi who decisively placed Chu Yehan on the ground and, imitating the adults, gave him artificial respiration breath by breath, blowing air while pressing on his chest. After a full ten minutes of emergency treatment, Chu Yehan finally woke up.

At this time, the adults also rushed over, and Shi Yi quickly stood up, wanting to turn and leave.

Chu Mengrou shouted for Shi Yi to stop, her eyes full of gratitude, "Little sister, what is your name?"

Shi Yi knew that she was the daughter the Shi family didn't want, and the Shi family didn't want others to know of her existence, so she casually said, "I'm not from here, just passing by."

After saying this, she turned and ran away.

However, this scene was still seen by Shi Heng, who had rushed over.

After returning to the orphanage, Shi Yi developed a high fever that night, and because she wasn't sent to the hospital in time, it later developed into aspiration pneumonia.

She remembered that she stayed in the hospital for a month before being discharged, and her lungs were left with a chronic illness; whenever the weather got cold, she often couldn't breathe and was always coughing.

Thinking about it now, fate was truly ironic—the two people she had saved anonymously back then were precisely the two siblings of the Chu family.

"Heh, what's the use of saying it?" Shi Yi smiled self-deprecatingly, "People would rather believe that coal is white than believe that a murderer was once a hero who saved lives."

After saying this, Shi Yi leaned her head against the car window and closed her eyes in exhaustion.

At this moment, Shi Yi's body was trembling slightly; she felt that she must have developed a high fever, her whole body feeling as if it had fallen into an ice cellar, the chill piercing through her bones...

An hour later, the car stopped in front of the Shi family residence.

"We're here."

Shi Heng unbuckled his seatbelt and was about to get out of the car when he noticed that Shi Yi in the passenger seat had no reaction, just leaning quietly against the chair, her pale face flushed with an abnormal heat.

Shi Heng reached out and touched her forehead, finding it burning hot, almost enough to fry an egg.

"You have a fever?"

Shi Yi opened her eyes in a daze, but her pupils were hazy and blurred, and it took a long time for them to slowly focus.

"Yeah, it's nothing. I'll take some medicine in a bit... cough, cough... and I'll be fine."

Looking at Shi Yi's pale, fragile, yet enduring side profile, a sense of reluctance rose in Shi Heng's heart.

But in the end, he gritted his teeth and pretended to be cold:

"Hmph, leaving the hospital without permission before your body has recovered, you should know what the consequences will be. And talking about having no money for treatment, making up such a ridiculous excuse, are you trying to make our Shi family lose face?"

Shi Yi said nothing; she knew Shi Heng didn't believe that she was so poor she didn't even have money to see a doctor, after all, the Shi family gave her quite a bit of living expenses every month.

But that money had never truly reached her hands; it had long been deducted layer by layer, and she didn't know whose pocket it had ended up in.

"I know."

Shi Yi didn't want to waste any more breath on Shi Heng; she was already in enough pain and tired enough.

After ten years of living alone in the orphanage and five years of torture in prison, she had deeply understood one truth: obedience—was her only choice.

She had resisted, argued, and struggled.

But the result... was only being pushed into the endless abyss time and time again.

Now, she didn't want anything anymore, and she didn't want to fight.

She just wanted to live with a little less pain.

The next half month was a relatively calm period.

It wasn't because the Shi family's attitude toward Shi Yi had improved, but because Shi Yi chose to be submissive—whatever the Shi family told her to do, she did.

She dragged her feverish body several times to the yard to shovel poop and pick up balls for Shi Xi's dog.

She was woken up by Shi Heng at 5 o'clock every morning to prepare breakfast for the whole family, and she was busy until 12 o'clock at night before finishing cleaning the entire house.

Shi Father was consistently neglectful and cold toward her, while Shi Mother was even more harsh in her accusations, picking bones out of an egg.

Everyone in the Shi family seemed to have discovered that Shi Yi was different this time she came back—she had become exceptionally obedient, compliant, and silent.

But no one asked her for the reason; they just squeezed Shi Yi even more unscrupulously and recklessly. She didn't know if they were intentionally testing her bottom line or deliberately retaliating for her previous disobedience and refusal to admit her mistakes.

However, Shi Yi silently endured all of this.

After her body felt a bit better, she locked herself in the dim basement and secretly wrote her resume—she knew she had to go out and earn money; only by leaving this house would she have a way to survive.