"You wretched little brat!"
A heavy slap landed squarely on her face. Shi Qingqing, slight of frame, staggered back and hit the wall with a dull thud.
She went limp, motionless.
"Don't you dare play dead! Shi Qingqing, you ungrateful wretch! If anything happens to Lanlan, I—I will make you pay with your life!"
Shi Qingqing felt a sharp, pulsating pain in her head. The resentment and suffocating frustration that had been festering in her heart had not yet dissipated. As she opened her eyes and saw the three members of the Shi family standing before her, a surge of hatred and fury erupted within her.
In that instant, even if it were only a phantom of the past, she wanted to lunge forward and tear them apart!
But as she tried to move, her body felt weak, and her face burned with a stinging, raw pain. Only then did she notice that the Shi family members before her were dressed in clothing from decades ago. Even that scoundrel Shi Wang looked to be only about ten years old, not the age he had been when he joined in the brutal beating that left her dying.
She glanced at the walls, where slogans and quotations from the Great Leader from the 1960s were hung.
"Shi Qingqing! What kind of attitude is that? Your mother is talking to you!"
A furious, low bark snapped her back to reality. She remembered now.
It was the end of March, 1966. She had just recently passed the exam for a factory job. As it turned out, Qiao Lanlan, who had taken the exam with her, was discovered to be the biological daughter of her parents! And she, herself, was the child of the Qiao family.
Shi Jingye and Wang Meifang had brought Qiao Lanlan back into their fold. Because she had been unwilling to leave the Shi family, she had refused to change her surname or return home with the Qiao couple. Seeing this, the Shi family was delighted and kept her around.
From that point on, she had groveled even more desperately to please the Shi family. When Qiao Lanlan failed the job exam, the moment Wang Meifang opened her mouth, she had handed her own job over to her. Then, while at the factory, Qiao Lanlan had suffered a sudden heart attack and fainted. She had helped take Qiao Lanlan to the hospital with the other factory workers.
When the Shi family received the news and arrived, Wang Meifang didn't say a word before cursing her and slapping her across the face.
In her past life, that slap had left half her face numb; if it had landed just a little differently, it could have left her deaf! But, having been raised under the abuse of the Shi family, she had thought it was normal at the time. Burdened by the belief that she had failed the Shi family and Qiao Lanlan, she was filled with nothing but guilt. Despite being the one who gave up the job, the one who was scolded and beaten for no reason, and the one in pain… she had humbled herself, apologizing and begging for the Shi family’s favor.
But now...
Shi Qingqing’s eyes grew deep and cold. The insults from the Shi parents filled her ears, but inside, she was brimming with a fierce excitement—the excitement of having been reborn, the excitement of taking revenge with her own two hands!
Wang Meifang, not satisfied with her verbal abuse, lunged forward to pummel her.
"Have you turned into a mute, just like your vicious mother!?"
"You ungrateful ingrate! We provided your food, your clothes, and your schooling. You took everything that belonged to Lanlan. This job was meant for Lanlan anyway, so what’s the harm in letting her have it?"
Shi Qingqing listened to the curses and felt the blows on her body, but there was no longer a ripple of emotion in her eyes. Shielded by Wang Meifang’s body, she turned toward the wall and quietly took a few sips of the Spiritual Spring Water from her spatial dimension.
Soon, energy flowed through her limbs. As soon as she felt her strength returning, her gaze turned sharp. She spun around and raked her nails hard across Wang Meifang’s face!
She had been curled up to protect herself, so the strike was purely instinctual, and Wang Meifang was caught completely off guard.
"Ouch!"
Wang Meifang’s eye was scratched. She instinctively pulled back to cover her face, emitting a sound of utter disbelief. "Shi Qingqing! You dare lay a hand on me?"
Before Shi Jingye and his son could react, Shi Qingqing grabbed Wang Meifang’s arms and used her own body weight to pull her downward with a sharp yank.
"Bang!"
Wang Meifang hit the wall head-first, just as Qingqing had earlier. But Wang Meifang’s skull was clearly harder; the impact didn't stop her.
"Ow! You wretched girl—Old Shi, Old Shi!"
Tears streaming from her eyes, Wang Meifang didn't dare open them and could only shout for her husband. Seeing his wife had been bested, Shi Jingye furrowed his brows and marched over.
Shi Qingqing immediately slid out from under Wang Meifang, using the time to familiarize herself with her young, frail body. After making her fortune in her past life, she had secretly taken self-defense classes to avoid the beatings from Zhou Hongjun and his mother. If the Shi family scum hadn't told Zhou Hongjun where she lived, he wouldn't have been able to disguise himself as a delivery man and stab her the moment she opened the door, leaving her too injured to survive the subsequent brutal beatings by him and the Shi family.
Shi Jingye glanced at Wang Meifang, saw she was fine, and then glared at Shi Qingqing.
"Are you trying to turn the world upside down? Kneel!"
In a crowded hospital corridor, Shi Jingye demanded a young woman kneel—he truly thought of himself as some kind of master. It had been the same in her past life; whenever Shi Qingqing did something to displease him, he would force her to kneel, threatening that if she didn't, she would face a brutal beating and be pulled out of school.
Shi Qingqing loved school. At school, no one called her a "wretched brat," and no one told her that her only value was to be a beast of burden for the Shi family, to pamper her younger brother, and to give everything she had for him. Her classmates and teachers praised her for being smart, kind, and...
So, for the sake of her education, even after the awakening of her rebellious consciousness, she had still compromised with the Shi family. She had thought that once she entered the factory and became a worker, her life would gradually improve.
Little did she know, the Shi family had never intended for her to "escape their control." The matter of the swapped children had not been an accident. It was only on her deathbed in her previous life, when she heard Wang Meifang say it herself, that she learned the truth.
Back then, the Shi family's daughter had been born with a congenital heart defect. Wang Meifang knew her husband wanted a son, and not only had she given birth to a daughter, but a sickly one at that. In a moment of madness, she decided to swap her child with someone else's. Seeing how the Qiao couple doted on their newborn daughter, Wang Meifang targeted them. She figured that if the Qiao family loved the child so much, they might be willing to spend everything they had to treat her illness.
Taking her back had been a necessity—they couldn't risk raising suspicion. But Wang Meifang hadn't wanted to raise her; she had tried to sell or abandon her several times, failing only due to kind-hearted strangers and unexpected events. By the time she was four, she could cook, wash, and do chores, and Wang Meifang decided that having a little servant wasn't so bad after all. That was the only reason she had abandoned the idea of getting rid of her.
When the factory hiring event came, Wang Meifang saw Qiao Lanlan. A daughter so healthy—where was the sickly shadow of the girl from before? And so, Wang Meifang wanted to reclaim her own daughter. Once Qingqing landed the job, Wang Meifang had intentionally orchestrated the exposure of the swap, forcing her to give up the position through a mix of coercion and manipulation.