Chapter 52 Mother
When Professor Shi rushed over, Qi An was returning to his top-floor ward to pack up his few clothes and move them to the new house.
The new house has been cleaned.
Qi An had just pushed open the door and was smiling as he told Tan Fu that he had bought steamed buns when he heard Professor Shi's excited shout. His smile froze on his lips, and his heart skipped a beat.
“Even the data from the quarantine facility isn’t considered top secret anymore; it’s easy to request access to it.”
Professor Shi explained for a moment, then eagerly opened a close-up photo and held the tablet up to Qi An's face.
His gaze lingered on Qi An's face and photo, and just as he was about to offer his comments, Qi An snatched the tablet away.
When she saw the close-up photo, her heart started pounding.
Actually, her resemblance to Ye Xiao is not even 10 out of 10, only 6 or 7.
Their similarities are mainly concentrated in the contours of their facial features.
The person in the photo has a longer face and longer eyes, with eyebrows that reach into the temples. Compared to Qi An, the person has a more dignified and radiant appearance.
Such similarity naturally leads people to think of blood ties.
"You previously said that your father's name is 'Qi Wanquan' and that he comes from Southeast Base No. 4."
They searched for survivors of Southeast Base 4 across bases throughout the continent and indeed found someone who knew you and your father.
If Ms. Ye is your mother, then Mr. Qi must be your adoptive father.
Based on the relevant data from the quarantine facility, the young researcher, Xiao Zhao, was 99% certain that Ye Xiao and Qi An were mother and daughter, but adhering to rigorous academic principles, he still asked a few more questions:
Ye Xiao's husband's surname is not Qi.
They only found people who knew you and Mr. Qi, but they couldn't find a photo of Mr. Qi.
Xiao Zhao didn't know if Qi An and Qi Wanquan looked alike, but Qi An and Ye Xiao's husband on their marriage certificate did have some similarities.
The survivor they found from Southeast Base 4 had been in the same nursery as Qi An when they were children, and was two years older than Qi An.
He said that Qi An had been in the nursery since he could remember, and her father was Qi Wanquan.
That means Qi An was with Qi Wanquan from infancy.
If Qi Wanquan is the adoptive father, how did Qi An know about his origins?
Did Qi Wanquan tell her that?
What is the relationship between Qi Wanquan and Ye Xiao? What happened after Ye Xiao gave birth to the child?
The last question was the most important, and Xiao Zhao, Professor Shi, and four other pairs of eyes were all fixed on Qi An.
Qi An was in a daze and only came to his senses after being called twice. He whispered, "That Ash Priest in South China should be a mutation of Ye Xiao."
The two people opposite were stunned.
After a two-second pause, Professor Shi slapped his thigh and exclaimed, "That makes sense! Ye Xiao's ability to transform into the Ash Priest is perfectly reasonable!"
He wanted to take back the tablet and pull out Ye Xiao's collection of information from the quarantine facility to explain the rationale behind it.
But Qi An held the tablet firmly in his hand and couldn't budge it at all.
Qi An continued to flip through the documents in the "Ye Xiaosheng Biography" folder.
There are more than ten photos, including one of Ye Xiao when she was 4 or 5 years old. In the photo, the little girl with short hair and an apple-shaped face is leaning against a small shop, happily sucking on a rainbow lollipop.
The information says this is Ye Xiao's family's small shop, located next to a junior high school in a small county town.
This is an ordinary family of four, and Ye Xiao has a younger sister.
However, when my younger sister was 5 years old, she was diagnosed with leukemia, and the family's financial situation deteriorated rapidly, forcing them to sell their house.
Ye Xiao didn't go to university; she had a naturally beautiful voice, an amazing sense of rhythm, and a pretty face.
She started live-streaming her singing in junior high school, and learned to write and perform her own songs.
By the time she entered high school, she already had a stable following, and the tips she received were enough to cover her living expenses.
Qi An flipped through those photos and live stream clips, carefully watched those interviews after Ye Xiao became famous, and also watched videos compiled by an unknown person that summarized Ye Xiao's rise to fame, sketching out the image of that person who had lived in his mind.
Ye Xiao seems to have had a different kind of student life, being absent-minded in class and extremely busy after class.
She was a poor student, came and went in a hurry and didn't fit in, but she was also too beautiful and eye-catching.
Her live-streaming account was exposed by her classmates, and rumors spread like wildfire.
However, the more turbulent her school life was, the more repressive and turbulent her youth was, the more inexhaustible her creative inspiration became.
She wrote six songs during her two years of high school.
The secondhand guitar she bought with her savings wore down her fingers, but she received an invitation to collaborate with an independent musician.
The year she was about to enter her senior year of high school, a chaotic scene unfolded on campus, leading to her being called in for a talk with her homeroom teacher and her parents being summoned several times.
However, her co-written song fully expresses the gaze and jealousy, and sings of the innocent malice of youth.
This song made it onto the original singles charts of mainstream music platforms, giving Ye Xiao some fame in the industry.
Her homeroom teacher said that if she continued like this, going to university would be just a dream.
When the homeroom teacher said this, he looked her up and down, his words filled with a mocking and disgusted sense of "improper conduct".
Her parents were already exhausted from the pressures of life, and after hearing the teacher's words, they felt even more lost and panicked.
The house was in complete chaos.
But Ye Xiao sat on the balcony for two nights and then threatened to drop out of school by going on a hunger strike.
"At that time, it almost came to the point where we were about to sever our parent-child relationship!"
I understand my parents, but at that time I felt I'd rather jump off a building than go back to school.
In a self-media interview, Ye Xiao smiled as she recounted this experience to the content creator.
Although she was smiling, there seemed to be lingering fear in her eyes, as well as the stubbornness of her youth.
After dropping out of school, Ye Xiao, with a demo of her own song and her resume, used the money she had saved from live streaming to go to a big city alone to interview with talent agencies.
"Things didn't go smoothly after that. The contracts were complicated, and the industry was complicated too. I didn't understand anything about it, so I could only rely on my intuition to avoid pitfalls."
Even after signing the contract, I was still doing live streams for a long time. I even pooled my own money to shoot the music video, and all the clothes were second-hand, haha.
No matter how difficult things get, I don't dare go home. I feel like I'm too afraid to go home. I'm holding on with a sense of injustice and a desire to prove something.
"Of course, in the end, it was still..." Ye Xiao paused, her eyes lowered slightly, and there was a hint of moisture between her eyelashes:
"It was almost Chinese New Year, so I didn't go back home. I relied on live streaming to report my safety."
But my mom came to see me. In the dead of winter, to save money on tickets, she took a slow, old-fashioned train and spent the whole day on it.
Her hands were ice cold when she came in, and she burst into tears when she saw me.
I also shed tears, but I was also wary that she was trying to take me back.
But my mom didn't try to persuade me to go back. She packed me thermal underwear, homemade rice cakes and meatballs, and meat stewed by my dad.
The meat was placed in a stainless steel insulated container, which my mother kept warm in her arms the whole way. It was still warm when she opened it.
She spent the New Year with me in our small rented apartment.
I was working on an album at the time, almost finished, but I added a song at the last minute, and that song became a huge hit.
The uploader immediately realized that this was the famous song about struggle and love, and laughed:
"It's not just one song that became a hit, the whole album is a hit! Several songs from the album are currently on my repeat playlist!"
Ye Xiao also laughed and said, "That album did sell well. Besides the title track, several other songs also became hits at music festivals."
When my mother came to spend the Chinese New Year with me, my sister's condition actually worsened again.
But once the album was released, we had enough money for my sister's bone marrow transplant.
The shadow that had hung over the family for years has dissipated, and reconciliation has long since arrived.
The following year, Ye Xiao went home for the Chinese New Year.
A few years later, the school posted her photo on the wall showcasing outstanding alumni.
Her homeroom teacher did indeed lead a class with a very good college entrance examination pass rate.
Some of the classmates who carved the word "cheap" on her desk, or even jokingly asked her "How much?" behind her back, went on to attend top universities and find decent internships.
But by the time they entered the workforce, she had already bought a large apartment in the city center.
The gloomy rumors of the past have vanished, and only the legend of her rise to fame circulates in her hometown.
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