"Chuyi, guess who this is?" Qian Qianqian saw her return and pointed excitedly at a short-haired girl with a slightly dark complexion and thick, dark eyebrows.
Xia Chuyi: ...I don’t recognize her.
Luckily, Qian Qianqian didn’t beat around the bush and said, "Chuyi, she is the real Meng Zhaodi!"
Now it was Xia Chuyi’s turn to be shocked.
"Are you Meng Zhaodi?" she asked the girl in front of her.
She had just learned that the real Meng Zhaodi had vanished without a trace.
Without the actual person involved, she had been pondering how to deal with the "Meng Zhaodi" situation, and now here the real Meng Zhaodi was, appearing right in front of her.
"You... Meng Zhaodi, how did you come to the Capital City?" Xia Chuyi took a look at Meng Zhaodi and inquired, "Did you come to the Capital City for Kyoto University? Do you know you’ve been replaced by someone else?"
For a high school senior who had endured years of diligent study to finally be admitted to university, only to be replaced, it was a deeply sorrowful matter indeed.
Thus, upon learning this, Meng Zhaodi had traveled many miles to the Capital City.
That was her speculation.
"If you are here to re-enroll, I can help you," Xia Chuyi said. "I almost got replaced myself once."
So, in some respects, she and Meng Zhaodi had something in common.
However, after hearing her offer, Meng Zhaodi looked at her and shook her head seriously, saying, "No need, I didn’t come to Kyoto University to study."
This remark caught Xia Chuyi by surprise.
"Why?" She couldn’t quite understand.
Meng Zhaodi declared, "The person who took my place... my family knew about it."
"My admissions letter was sold to her by my family."
"What did you say?" Xia Chuyi was utterly astonished and repeated Meng Zhaodi’s words, asking, "Your admissions letter, it was sold by your family?"
"But that’s a Kyoto University admissions letter!"
Kyoto University, where admission promised a boundless future, how could any parent sell their child’s admission to such an institution?
As if seeing through her confusion, Meng Zhaodi shook her head and said, "No matter how accomplished a girl becomes, in the end, she’s expected to marry."
Xia Chuyi: ...These words sound so familiar.
Back when she was with the Xia Family, it was a phrase she often heard.
In this era’s preference for sons over daughters, it was unimaginable how many families would keep having children, over and over, until a son was born.
Sometimes, when they couldn’t support all their children, selling a daughter was common, with daughters often meeting misfortunes unlike sons. Either sent to sordid places like brothels or disabling the child in some way to beg in the streets.
Meng Zhaodi then said, "In short, my admissions letter, along with my school records, were sold by my family without my knowledge."
"Because the son that my stepmother bore was frail and needed formula milk."
In just a few sentences, the message was incredibly dense.
Stolen admissions letters, records... stepmothers, sons, formula milk.
In these times, it was rare for a girl to even attend high school.
In a family, if there was a boy whose academics were decent, any girl would inevitably be expected to make way for him.
Even if the girl’s grades were better than the boy’s.