Chapter 1 The Deaths of Parents Were Not Accidents
21st century, military hospital.
A frail old woman was surrounded by a crowd of people, each with a sorrowful expression on their face.
"I lived to be eighty-nine years old. Dying peacefully in my sleep is a happy occasion. Don't cry," Zheng Jiayu gently comforted her descendants.
Through the crowd, she seemed to see a young man wearing a white shirt and black pants on the side.
"Gu Yunting, I've come to find you."
As soon as he finished speaking, the electrocardiogram turned into a flat line and emitted a piercing alarm.
...
March 7, 1974.
"Knock knock"
Inside the research institute's residential compound, a middle-aged man, accompanied by his wife and children, knocked on the door of one of the rooms.
The yellow funeral couplets still pasted on the door had not been cleaned.
The knocking woke the girl who was lying on the sofa.
The girl stared blankly at the rooftop.
When she woke up, she seemed to have forgotten something.
"Jiayu, are you home?"
The sound at the door made Zheng Jiayu sit up from the sofa without thinking, and she went to open the door despite her weak body.
As soon as I opened the door, I saw my parents' colleague and his family standing at the door.
The man who came was named Li Zonglin. He was my father's colleague, and we usually didn't exchange more than a few words. Why was he here today?
"Uncle Li, is there something you need?"
Before Li Zonglin could speak, the woman next to him quickly walked up to Zheng Jiayu and bumped into her, causing Zheng Jiayu to instinctively take a few steps back.
"Jiayu, now you're all alone in your family. Before they passed away, they arranged a marriage between you and my son. Why don't you two go ahead and get married?" As he spoke, he glanced greedily at Zheng Jiayu's house.
Zheng Jiayu, who was still recovering from her parents' funeral, suddenly snapped back to reality.
Looking at the greedy woman in front of her, Zheng Jiayu's thoughts drifted back to the past two days.
Three days ago, my parents were involved in an accident on their way back to the research institute, resulting in a fatal car crash.
The institute staff helped her with her parents' funeral arrangements these past two days.
This woman came once, and the first thing she asked was what her parents had left for her.
How much compensation did the research institute offer?
My parents were buried yesterday, and today the Li family came knocking on our door, taking advantage of my parents' absence to bring up the marriage agreement.
There's definitely something fishy going on here.
“Aunt Li, my parents just passed away, so I’m not thinking about these things for now.”
Ignoring Zheng Jiayu's refusal, Aunt Li held her hand tightly: "Jiayu, I'm only doing this for your own good."
"Jiayu, I promised your parents I would take good care of you. From now on, we are your family."
Just as Zheng Jiayu was about to speak, a sharp pain shot through her head as she listened to Li Zonglin and his wife's self-talk.
Gently rubbing his throbbing head, he looked at Li Zonglin and his family of three and saw something strange about them.
In those scenes, Li Zonglin's son, after being rejected by her, broke into her house at night, threatened her, and finally forced her to compromise and marry someone else.
On the very first day after she married into the family, Aunt Li stole the house and savings that her parents had left her, and relentlessly tormented her, almost killing her.
As for Li Zonglin, he rose through the ranks by stepping on the corpses and reputation of the three members of their family.
Zheng Jiayu rubbed her eyes, and the scene that had appeared on the three of them disappeared.
It all seemed like a hallucination to her.
What was that just now?
Seeing that Zheng Jiayu remained silent, Li Zonglin assumed she had tacitly agreed and glanced at Aunt Li beside him.
Aunt Li held Zheng Jiayu's hand and said, "Jiayu, I'll go back and choose a date so you can marry into our family as soon as possible."
After the image disappeared, Zheng Jiayu's headache stopped.
Once she had recovered, she pulled her hand away from Aunt Li's and looked at Aunt Li expressionlessly: "Aunt Li, I never said I wanted to marry your son."
After saying that, he looked at Li Zonglin and asked, "Uncle Li, I have two questions. First, when did you promise my parents that you would take care of me?"
"Secondly, you said our two families have made a marriage agreement. Where is the marriage certificate or the tokens exchanged between the two families?"
Zheng Jiayu's two questions left Li Zonglin speechless.
Just as Li Zonglin was trying to gloss over the situation, two middle-aged men came up from downstairs.
These two men worked at the research institute and were also my parents' best friends.
Upon seeing the two, Li Zonglin's eyes showed a hint of panic.
"Captain, what brings you here?"
Captain Xiang glanced at Li Zonglin: "What are you doing here?"
Just as Li Zonglin was about to speak, Zheng Jiayu seized the opportunity to step forward and said, "Uncle Xiang, Uncle Li brought his family here to ask me to fulfill my marriage agreement with his son, and he also said that he promised my parents that he would take care of me."
"But there's one thing I don't understand: my parents died in an accident, so how could he have agreed to that?"
At this point, Zheng Jiayu paused deliberately before pressing further, "Or does Uncle Li have the ability to foresee the future and know in advance that my parents will die?"
Zheng Jiayu's questioning made Captain Xiang look at Li Zonglin with a serious expression, and he rebuked him unhappily: "Jiayu is indeed engaged, but her fiancé's surname is Gu. What does that have to do with your Li family?"
Reminded by Captain Xiang, Zheng Jiayu remembered that her grandfather had indeed arranged a marriage for her when she was a child.
That person was a very handsome young man, and he was also the grandson of my grandfather's friend.
"Li Zonglin, you're taking advantage of Jiayu's parents' recent passing to do this kind of thing. What are you trying to do?" Captain Xiang looked Li Zonglin up and down.
His gaze seemed to see right through Li Zonglin.
"I'm just feeling sorry for Jiayu and want to take care of her," Li Zonglin explained with a forced laugh.
He glanced at Zheng Jiayu as he spoke, hoping she would say a word in his defense.
Zheng Jiayu sneered inwardly at the Li family's eagerness and the greed in Aunt Li's eyes.
They just want to exploit the Zheng family's extinct lineage, yet they put on such nice words.
“Uncle Li, I’m eighteen now and I don’t need your care. I hope your family won’t say things like that again.” Zheng Jiayu refused Li Zonglin’s kindness in front of Captain Xiang and the others.
Although Li Zonglin was dissatisfied, he could only nod with a forced smile and say, "Then...then we'll be going now."
Aunt Li wanted to say something, but Li Zonglin pulled her away.
Their son, Li Jian, who hadn't said a word the whole time, stared at her with a gloomy look in his eyes, a look that made Zheng Jiayu think of everything she had just seen on him.
Xiang stepped to the side, blocking Li Jian's view, and looked directly into Li Jian's gloomy eyes.
"Is there anything else?"
Li Jian followed Li Zonglin and his wife downstairs with his head down.
As he reached the corner of the stairs, he glanced at Zheng Jiayu while turning to look at the team leader and the others.
He said silently, "You...are mine."
Li Jian's actions gave Zheng Jiayu a chill down her spine.
All she could think about was Li Jian breaking into her house and forcing her to marry him.
Her hands clenched unconsciously; she absolutely couldn't let this happen.
"Uncle Xiang, please come in."
Captain Xiang and the others followed Zheng Jiayu into the house, sat down, and took out an envelope.
"Jiayu, we are very sorry about what happened to your parents." Captain Xiang looked at Zheng Jiayu with remorse.
Zheng Jiayu shook her head bitterly: "You didn't want it to be like this either."
However, Captain Xiang shook his head, his expression unusually serious: "The deaths of your parents were not accidents."
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