Chapter 284: Setting Things Right A mysterious force was at work...

The port city in the afternoon always seems to carry the humid heat unique to the southern summer. On the over-urbanized streets of the downtown area, pedestrians hurry to and fro, their eyes all looking for places with air conditioning to hide in and escape the newly arrived heat.

However, the further you go up to the top of the mountain, the more the hilltop mansion is covered with greenery, and it seems to have captured the poetic beauty of tranquility amidst the hustle and bustle of ancient times. Even the occasional breeze and the light filtering through the leaves have a unique gentleness to them.

Unfortunately, Dean Chen, filled with trepidation, had no time to appreciate the beautiful scenery of the hilltop mansion. After forcing himself to remain calm, he was led into the living room by the servants and then respectfully bowed to Madam Li, who was resting on the sofa in the center.

“My son took my sister-in-law to Citibank on business, so there’s no use in you coming to me.” Madam Li casually picked up her teacup, her first words pouring cold water on Dean Chen’s enthusiasm. “I’m too old to make decisions for young people.”

"Madam, I've come here today truly to apologize to you." Knowing that polite formalities were useless, Dean Chen cut to the chase, "Regarding this paternity test report, we were simply doing our job for money; we really didn't know the details..."

"If you knew the 'insider information,' you wouldn't be here talking to me right now." Mentioning this only made Old Madam Li angrier.

At her age, it's rare to see a family reunited in harmony. The truth or falsehood doesn't really matter anymore—but it's precisely this guy's appraisal report that cruelly shattered her self-deceiving dream.

If it weren't for the private investigator's investigation confirming that it was Wu's Filipino maid who leaked the information, leading to the exposure of Li Sishi's "background," not only would her son want to settle accounts with this appraisal firm, but she herself would also have made a note of it and then have this appraisal firm settle accounts with her!

"I didn't know much about the inside story before, but after my thorough investigation of the institute yesterday, I may have learned some other things..." It sounded like a threat, but Director Chen said it with a hint of seeking reward for his achievement, "There's a small error in the appraisal report issued by our institute that you have..."

Seeing the surprised and puzzled look on Madam Li's face, Dean Chen felt much more at ease as he held the file bag in his hand.

Following this, Dean Chen explained to Madam Li, in a simple yet detailed manner, why he had come today: After Li Jinhao requested the relevant departments to inspect his appraisal center, his center was...

Forced to temporarily suspend business.

Having suffered such a huge loss unexpectedly, Dean Chen planned to use the time during the business closure to both pull strings and try to resolve the crisis, while also privately giving his subordinates a stern lecture, telling them that they should either not do anything at all, or if they did do something, they should clean up the mess properly.

While he was angrily reprimanding the people in the office, a young assistant who had only recently joined the company couldn't stand the situation and finally blurted out the truth.

The young assistant said it was his first time taking on "side jobs" with everyone, so he was a little uneasy and accidentally contaminated one of the specimens. However, Wu Weisheng was outside frantically urging him for a report that day, so he had to find a substitute and make a report to cover it up. He planned to call Wu Weisheng after he had dealt with the contaminated specimen, tell him that he had made a mistake in the rush, and then give Wu Weisheng the original report...

Before he could even clean up the mess, news of Li Sishi's "background" suddenly broke in Hong Kong.

Immediately afterwards, the Li family came forward to clarify the situation in a grand manner, and even sent a lot of lawyer's letters to sue the unscrupulous media... Now, how could he dare to take out the appraisal report that he had already redone, but whose test results were completely contrary to the "truth" clarified by the Li family's third branch?

“Completely…the opposite?!” Old Madam Li accurately grasped the most crucial point of this long string of words, her pupils almost contracting for a moment. “You mean…”

"I brought the report, Madam. Please take a look yourself." Dean Chen placed the file bag on the coffee table in front of him and gave Madam Li a meaningful smile, the meaning of which should be obvious to any intelligent person.

"If it was truly a mistake made in haste, and there is a willingness to repent, then it's not impossible to give them a chance..." Understanding the implied meaning, Madam Li suppressed her excitement, picked up the report on the coffee table with one hand, and called out to Sister He with the other.

After receiving the answer he wanted, Dean Chen left on his own initiative. Meanwhile, Sister He had another English report in her hand. Madam Li took a deep breath and opened the seemingly light-weight file bag with trembling hands.

But when she held it, it felt as if it weighed a million pounds.

"It conforms to the laws of genetics, and the probability of parentage is greater than 0.9999..." Mrs. Li read the Chinese report almost word by word, then looked back and forth between the two reports in her hands—one completely different in language but with the same conclusion—her voice trembling. "Definitely a parent-child relationship...definitely a parent-child relationship!"

Two expert reports with completely identical conclusions, and

This Chinese document still has no connection to any of their family members, so there can't be any mistake this time, right?!

She almost burst into laughter at this unexpected turn of events, but when she recalled the "truths" Li Jinhao had confessed to her before leaving, she felt a little confused...

"Quickly, make an overseas call to Ah Hao. I need to find out what exactly happened!" Madam Li, unusually uncouth, snapped, then added, "And this English report, what exactly happened here!"

A transoceanic phone call crossed thousands of miles. Li Jinhao and Zhou Jiaxian, who received the call from Madam Li, were also bewildered and filled with complicated emotions. They put aside their plan to find Li Sishi and then contacted Bob, who had made the original English psychiatric evaluation report.

Over the years, thanks to Li Jinhao's investment, Bob's appraisal business at Citibank has been thriving. Upon hearing that his old friend and financial backer had come to Citibank to see him, Bob immediately put down everything he was doing and eagerly went to the agreed-upon private room.

When Li Jinhao questioned him about the original paternity test report, Bob's eyes widened: "Didn't you say you urgently needed a paternity test report? When I heard it was you who asked for it, I didn't dare to give it to my doctor. I did the test myself..."

"What did you say to him back then? He seemed completely unaware of it?" Zhou Jiaxian asked Li Jinhao quietly.

"At that moment, in a rush, I hinted to him on the phone that I wanted a paternity test report that confirmed the parentage..." At this point, Li Jinhao seemed to have come to his senses.

At the time, he seemed to genuinely mean it, only using the excuse of increasing investment to tell Bob that he urgently needed a paternity test report—he thought that Bob, who was always good at making extra money, had already understood that he wanted to "falsify" the report.

But looking back now, Bob's behavior was actually because he had just received a paternity test report confirming the parentage, and he thought he had found his long-lost daughter, which is why he invested in the testing agency in his joy.

Having worked in legal affairs for many years, he has always been particularly careful with his language, never giving others any leverage against him.

Now, after all this time, it's highly likely that I've dug myself a huge hole...

While Li Jinhao was still brainstorming in the restaurant's private room, Li Sishi and Rong Juezhang, after listening to Uncle Gu's account of the "mistakes and errors of the past" at the Zhengu Wudao Hotel, couldn't help but exchange a complicated glance.

However, Uncle Gu's recollection wasn't over yet: "I put Li..."

After Jinhao escorted me to room 9, he went downstairs to retrieve the key, intending to go with my parents to do some errands. It turns out I overestimated my alcohol tolerance at that time.

He fell asleep in a daze after working for a short while and didn't wake up until the next morning..."

"I rushed off to check on things and just happened to run into Li Jinhuai trying to persuade your mother that he would definitely marry her..."

"At the time, I thought I had done something wrong in those aspects that led to the wrong matchmaking—and later, Li Jinhuai really did settle down, marry your mother, and go to Annam to develop his career, so I dared not investigate the events of that day any further..."

"But perhaps it really is fate. When Li Jinhuai's business failed and he fled to Citibank to make a comeback, he told me, his old friend in Citibank who was still willing to lend him money and let him stay, about his accidental discovery in Annam while we were drinking."

"It was because of this chance encounter that Li Jinhuai discovered you weren't his biological daughter—"

"So after he came here, he spent a lot of effort finding the call girl from back then and roughly uncovered the messy threads of those events..."

"Anyway, we don't know which link in the chain went wrong, but neither your mommy nor your biological father, Li Jinhao, knew that they had ever been together; and the call girl that Li Jinhuai originally planned to use to sow discord between the two thought she was doing business with him and went to room number 6 across the street with him—so if it weren't for that chance encounter, everyone might still be in the dark..."

"How did I find out all this?" Uncle Gu gave a particularly helpless bitter smile. "After Li Jinhuai failed in business twice, he suddenly remembered that he had you, his adopted daughter, so he decided to contact the 'friend' who took you away..."

"As a result, Li Jinhuai, who originally planned to use you to extort a large sum of money from the third branch of the Li family, was so angry after learning that the cruise ship you two were on had actually crashed midway through the journey that he suffered a fatal heart attack..."

Although Uncle Gu, who helped collect some of Li Jinhuai's belongings and learned a lot of secrets about the past, felt that Li Jinhuai was "incurable" in every sense, traditional thinking still held that when a person dies, it's like a lamp going out. And since Hong Kong and the United States are half a world apart, this good-natured man who was once unintentionally deceived into doing bad things silently swallowed all these things, thinking that they would stay with him until the day he also left this world.

Until his parents died in a car accident a few years ago, he struggled to keep the hotel afloat, but it gradually declined. He thought that the long-awaited retribution had finally come to pass. He finally broke through years of repression and revealed to the public the past that he thought he had buried deep in his heart.

She told him everything.

It was as if even Heaven couldn't bear to see this twist and turn, so it secretly set things right, allowing all the mistakes to return to the right path at a certain turning point.

Silently listening to Uncle Gu's words, and recalling the old story of how Li Jinhuai secretly sold her and her daughter to raise funds when he fled from Annam, Li Sishi bit her lower lip hard.

She got up again and followed Uncle Gu to the second floor of the hotel to investigate. The decor of this old hotel was just like it was back then. Li Sishi slowly turned her head to look at the two rooms facing each other, and was speechless for a moment.

Now, even she herself had to believe it to some extent—especially Wu Wenzu, that blond-haired, blue-eyed architecture PhD senior, who had enthusiastically used a lot of seemingly impressive but incomprehensible professional knowledge to analyze and explain to her the various factors that could easily lead her to the wrong room in this kind of decoration when he saw her bewildered muttering to herself earlier…

Now, all that remains for them to fully confirm the truth of what happened back then is a genuine test report, free of any ambiguity or deception.

Just as Li Sishi was lost in her own world, Rong Juezhang's voice, who had said he was going to take a phone call, suddenly came from the stairwell: "Ah May, look who's here..."

Upon hearing his greeting, Li Sishi turned around and looked at the stairs as if sensing something. There, she saw two figures that stirred up all her complex emotions, turning them into a surging wave that crashed over her heart.

"Sishi, your daddy is really yours..." Before Zhou Jiaxian could finish speaking, Li Sishi rushed over and threw herself into their arms.

Like fledgling geese returning to their nests, having weathered the storms of past and present lives, they have finally found the warm harbor they've always longed for.

Unlike his gentle demeanor when comforting Li Sishi, and unlike Zhou Jiaxian's tearful embrace of her daughter, Li Jinhao stared blankly at the little head sobbing softly in his arms. He subconsciously wanted to pat her back to comfort her, but his hand froze in mid-air, unable to continue.

This was not the same summer night when he used to comfort and teach his "stepdaughter" with grand principles.

The child before him was his biological daughter, whom he had missed for many years. She was his continuation in this world, intertwined with the bloodline buried deep within his flesh and blood, born in a chaotic world unknown to anyone.

He once thought that he could accept and love this "stepdaughter" because of his love for his wife—from beginning to end, he never hated this innocent child.

As for the fact that the two of them are more intimate than affectionate in their daily interactions, he simply believes that they haven't had enough time to build up their relationship.

Feelings develop through time spent together. He is confident that he can cherish this "stepdaughter" well in the long run, sincerely cleansing her of all the negative influences from her parents' generation during her youth, so that her smile will no longer hide the almost invisible gloom, and she can truly become a happy child who is loved and has love...

But who would have thought that much of the hardship this child endured in his youth came from his irresponsible biological father?

Yes, he could offer words of comfort like "it's all in the past" to his stepdaughter who needed gentle care...

But now that he has discovered the truth that she was originally his responsibility, how can he, as a negligent father, comfort his child?

"It's not too late..." Just as Li Jinhao was filled with complicated emotions and found it difficult to face the situation, Li Sishi, who was half-nestled in his and Zhou Jiaxian's arms, whispered these four words.

Years later, the warmth of that summer night, felt by the child who once experienced that wonderful feeling, is transmitted back to the depths of the adults' hearts in the same way.