Before going to sleep, Shi Su repeatedly looked at Jing Jihan’s profile picture, unable to believe that he hadn’t noticed his own reflection in it.
She swore at herself for being so careless not to have noticed it at the time.
At the same time, she couldn’t stop enlarging the picture over and over to look at it.
She fell asleep with the phone in her hands.
In her dream, Shi Mianmian hugged Jing Jihan’s leg and sweetly asked, "Uncle Ji Han, can I call you Dad from now on?"
The scene in the dream seemed layered with fog. Through the fog, she seemingly saw once more the man at the bottom of the cliff drenched in blood. This time, she didn’t turn and run away in fright. Instead, she squatted beside him with Shi Mianmian, who looked curiously at the man’s face and said, "Mommy, if we take this man home, he’ll be my dad, right? Why is he covered in blood? Is he injured?"
In the dream, Shi Su confidently patted her chest and said, "Leave it to me, he won’t die!"
A light seemed to flash before her eyes, transforming the scene into a wedding ceremony at a church. Shi Su, clad in a white wedding dress, happily walked inside.
As the church doors slowly opened for her arrival, she suddenly saw that the church was empty.
There wasn’t a single guest.
Not even Shi Mianmian.
Nor Jing Jihan.
In the pitch-black church, a voice emerged from nowhere, chilling and deep—
"Shi Su, are you really walking into the church alone? Where is the father who should be giving you away at your wedding?"
"I have no father," Shi Su answered decisively and firmly.
"Then, who is your daughter’s real father?"
The voice, cold and arrogant like a judge, pierced the heart like a dagger despite its iciness.
Shi Su abruptly clenched the bouquet in her hands, as if pricked by the thorns beneath the roses. She didn’t feel the pain, yet blood cascaded from her fingers, drop by drop, staining the hem of her white wedding dress.
"You, a living corpse who crawled out of a fire five years ago, don’t even know which wild man you were with."
"A discarded daughter of the Shi Family, no background, a single mother with a child of unclear parentage, nearly defiled by her mentor, notorious with grudges unavenged, unsuccessful, in twenty-four years never having any real brilliance—what right do you have to enter?"
"You have nothing."
"You have only endless troubles and past nightmares."
"Before you is an abyss."
"You want to drag him down with you?"
"Do you deserve it?"
Sentence after sentence like judgment crashed down upon her.
Shi Su looked up at the pitch-black sky, where it seemed that a corner of light awaited her, even as she was completely engulfed by darkness.
She silently gazed at that light, lowered her head, and looking into the darkness of the church, coldly retorted, "Why am I not worthy? Those are external labels, completely unrelated to me. My life, I can fight for it myself!"
The air was filled with cold laughter like thunder: "But you’re not clean!"
A flash of lightning broke the pitch dark, and after the flash and thunder, the spot of light in the sky vanished instantly.
Standing amid the howling wind, Shi Su looked into the surrounding darkness, only seeing the drunken Mr. Chu staggering towards her, recalling herself in a disheveled state burning with fever climbing out of that dark room, falling under a tree, heedlessly rushing into a car by the roadside.
Everything was a blur, she couldn’t remember how she left that car.
She only remembered barely stumbling down the road, almost hit by a car, only remembered Shi Lingkang found her under the "guidance" of Xv Yaru and Shi Yunyin, and she collapsed in the middle of the road unable to stand.
Shi Lingkang took her to the hospital.
The doctor wrote eight characters in the diagnosis.
——Private parts torn, swollen and bleeding.
At that time, Shi Lingkang, her father, had nowhere to place his old face, didn’t ask her why, but in front of Xv Yaru, Shi Yunyin, and the doctor, gave her a harsh slap.
He cursed her: "How could our Shi Family produce something dirty like you! Who’s that man?!"
She looked blankly at Shi Lingkang’s face and hoarsely answered, "I don’t know."
What met her was another slap.
The surrounding gossiping intern nurses whispered and pointed at her: "That girl seems to have messed around outside, got caught by her dad, don’t know how many men messed her up like this, doesn’t even remember who, tsk tsk tsk...so disgusting..."