At first, Jing Shu listened to their chatter as if it were idle small talk, a background noise to the stifling heat. The elderly man introduced his family's generation name scheme with paternal pride. His own name was Su Guosheng, and Su Lanzhi's father, his cousin, had been named Su Guoqiang.
But since even Su Lanzhi had never met this elder before, there was no real familial bond to speak of, just a name on a distant branch of the family tree. The gifts they brought were purely out of respect for the two elders, Jing Shu's grandparents, who had passed away, a gesture to the past.
Then the conversation veered pointedly toward Su Meimei's grievances, and the old man began lecturing Uncle and Su Lanzhi with the assumed authority of a patriarch. Jing Shu frowned, her earlier suspicion crystallizing. "So the appearance of her so called Second Grand uncle was really orchestrated by and for Su Meimei?"
They were all separated by several degrees of kinship, cousins once or twice removed. Why was Su Guosheng so personally invested in Su Meimei's domestic affairs? In the dimness of the room, Jing Shu's eyes, adjusted to the low light, studied Su Meimei's profile and then Su Guosheng's. Both had broad, square faces with strong jawlines. Su Lanzhi and Su Yiyang, however, had inherited their mother's softer, oval faces.
An unbelievable, yet suddenly fitting, thought rose in Jing Shu's mind.
As Su Lanzhi listened to the litany of accusations and the pressure to hand over a pig, her expression darkened from polite patience to simmering anger. By the end of the old man's speech, the fire in her chest finally flared up, breaking her restraint. "Second Uncle, whether my siblings and I are united or not is our immediate family's business. You just need to take care of yourself in your old age. We're grateful for the visit, but that is all.
I don't care about the ten odd thousand yuan from the car sale anymore. What I care about is that Su Meimei and her lover, Sun Yinrui, would rather cheat me out of money than lend me any when I was desperate. As for the black pigs, that was simple repayment. They lent me money back then, so I paid them back with pigs. If Su Meimei had lent me money, I would've set one aside for her too. But she didn't." Her voice was tight.
Su Meimei put on a deeply wounded look, her hands clasped. "My dear sister, I never even got to drive that car, and now it's not worth a bowl of white rice. If I hadn't scraped together more than a hundred thousand for you back then, you couldn't have bought that much stock. I gave ten thousand more than anyone else.
So give me a pig now. Isn't that reasonable? If Zhang Zhongyong hadn't told me, I wouldn't even know you divided up several pigs behind your own sister's back. And now you bring the tiniest sliver to 'treat' the only elder left in the family, along with those so called pickles and marinated eggs. Brother in law works at a Livestock Breeding Center. Getting eggs is easy for him, yet he only brought a few. It shows your heart."
She turned to Su Guosheng, tears welling. "Uncle, with my parents gone, you're all I have. You must stand up for me. I've poured my heart out for this family." Tears began to run down Su Meimei's face, a performance of victimhood.
Overheated and perhaps frustrated, Su Guosheng undid the top buttons of his crisp Zhongshan suit. He seemed done with subtlety. "We're all family. There's nothing that can't be resolved if everyone takes a step back. Lanzhi, I hear you still have pigs at home. Why not give your sister one? It'd mend fences. And I, as an elder with some connections left, can do you a favor in return. I'll speak to your leaders and help you get promoted to deputy director. A trade, for family harmony." The offer was a blatant transaction.
Su Lanzhi trembled with anger, her face pale, at a loss for words against such entitled manipulation. Beside her, Jing An clenched his fists, the muscles in his jaw standing out.
Jing Shu clicked her tongue, a sharp, dismissive sound in the tense room. "Su Meimei, you must be mistaken about one thing. Someone with neither the kindness of raising us nor the duty of being a true parent has no right to point fingers at how we manage our resources or our family bonds. On what basis? Blood that was never shared? Care that was never given?
And drop the act. You say you pour your heart out for us? Then tell me, what did you just serve us to eat?" She pointed at the blackened plate. "Those aren't dried radishes. They're the free, moldy mushrooms from the government distributions a while back, left uneaten until they dried out and fossilized, right?"
Before anyone could stop her, Jing Shu pulled out her phone and turned on the flashlight, shining the bright beam directly onto the blackened pile on the plate, revealing the speckled white and green mold clearly. "And all those garlic shoots and mushrooms on your balcony," she swung the light toward the balcony door, "they require water every day to stay alive, don't they? You also have hundreds of bottles of water stacked in the bedroom. Everyone, have a look."
Jing Shu strode to the side room she had scouted earlier and pushed the door fully open. The phone beam lit up neat stacks of branded mineral water bottles, a small hoard. "You claim you haven't a drop for guests, you don't even turn on a light to save power, and you serve us moldy, inedible mushrooms. This is your version of pouring your heart out? We can't afford such 'affection.'"
With a sharp crack that echoed in the quiet room, Su Lanzhi, pushed past her limit, slapped Su Meimei hard across the face. "Su Meimei, I treated you with all my heart my whole life. Where's your conscience? How could you do this to your brother and me?" Her voice broke.
"Pfft!"
A tooth flew from Su Meimei's mouth, glinting in the dim light before hitting the floor. Blood immediately streamed from her nose, and her cheek swelled high in moments, turning an angry red. Su Meimei stared at Su Lanzhi in shocked disbelief, then with a shriek of rage, lunged wildly at her, hands clawing. She was shoved back with a heavy thud onto the floor by Jing An, who stepped protectively in front of his wife.
After drinking No. 4 Spirit Spring for half a year, Su Lanzhi and Jing An probably hadn't realized just how much their strength and reflexes had improved. The slap had been devastating, the shove was effortless.
Su Guosheng shot to his feet, his composed facade crumbling into agitation. "What are you doing? Do you want to turn the sky upside down? Violence in my presence!"
"Dad, you see it, don't you? This is how I live under their roof, how they treat me," Su Meimei sobbed from the floor, blood and tears mixing. "I'm done pretending. Ever since I was little, I overheard those two old people whispering that they shouldn't have kept me, that one more child meant one more mouth to feed. They never treated me like a real daughter. They died and left me nothing. I married and was despised by my in laws because I had no family to rely on. Boohoo." Her words were a torrent of long held poison.
Her words turned everyone in the room to stone. Uncle, Su Lanzhi, Jing An, they all looked stunned, unable to process the venom and the revelation. Jing Shu, however, narrowed her eyes, memories and pieces clicking into place with cold clarity.
Su Meimei stayed on the floor, howling as if pouring out a lifetime of manufactured grievance. "It was Jing Shu who reported me and Sun Yinrui to the authorities. If I hadn't managed to contact you, Dad, they would've killed me. Look, this is her family. You keep telling me to act like I'm one of them. What's the point? Whether I'm their real child or not, they still bully me like this.
Those two old people must've told them about me long ago, bad mouthing me behind my back. How else would they treat me this way?" She pointed a trembling, accusing finger at Su Lanzhi and Uncle.
Su Lanzhi was still frozen, reeling from the dual blows of the violence and the information. Her hand, the one that had struck, shook as she pointed it back at Su Meimei. "So you knew. You knew you weren't their biological child. That is why you never truly saw us as family. That is why you treated me like that all along. So everything makes sense now." The heartbreak in her voice was profound.
Su Yiyang stepped forward, his face stricken, looking decades older in the bad light. "Su Meimei, people have a saying, the kindness of raising is greater than the act of giving birth. Our parents raised you for over twenty years. How can you call them 'those old things'?
They never spoke of your situation to anyone. When you were brought home, you were only a few months old. I was five. I remember. Lanzhi was two and knew nothing. I don't know where you were brought from, and Lanzhi knows even less. We've always, always treated you as our real sister. How can you say something so ungrateful, so cruel?" His voice was thick with pain.
Jing Shu cleared her throat, the sound dry in the heated, tense air. "If I'm not mistaken," she began, her voice cool and analytical, cutting through the emotional chaos, "when Su Guosheng was sent down to the countryside as an educated youth, he had a child with a local rural woman. Then he got the chance to be transferred back to the city. For the sake of his future and reputation, he abandoned the child, Su Meimei, and left her with his cousin's family, our grandfather, to raise in secret. Is that about right?" She looked directly at Su Guosheng, whose face had gone ashen. "No matter how you slice it, Su Meimei, you're a child abandoned by your biological father for his own convenience. And now he shows up, not out of love, but because you called him when you were in trouble, and he sees a use for our family's resources."
That would've explained the butterfly effect. In Jing Shu's previous life, Su Meimei had lived comfortably on her husband's money and never faced a true life and death crisis that would've driven her to seek out her shameful birth father. She probably resented him for abandoning her to enjoy a better life alone, and so she had never contacted him. In this life, pushed to the brink by her in laws' abuse and the collapse, she had reached out, and he had seen an opportunity.
In the third year of the apocalypse in Jing Shu's previous life, Uncle's whole family had been buried under their building in a massive earthquake. The truth would've died with them, leaving Su Lanzhi to carry a lifetime of guilt and confusion over her sister's behavior.
"If she's not a blood relative, then we owe her nothing. No familial obligation, no debt of sisterhood. Then we can strike back without restraint," Jing Shu thought, and a cold, clear sense of relief washed through her. Her mood improved considerably.