Chapter 107 - 105: I Am Not Ma Nan, I Am Yao Ying

Chapter 107: Chapter 105: I Am Not Ma Nan, I Am Yao Ying

"When I was sixteen, my dad was working in the fields. Around noon, my mom told me to take him his lunch."

Yao Ying recalled the past. "I was carrying the lunchbox, walking toward the fields. A van drove up from the opposite direction. When it got to me, the door slid open and they just pulled me inside."

"Once I was in the van, before I could even scream, I only got a look at the man who’d grabbed me before a hand was clamped over my mouth, and I passed out."

"When I woke up, I had no idea where I was. If I cried, they beat me. If I spoke, they beat me. If I didn’t behave, they’d drug me unconscious again. When I came to, they’d give me some food and water."

"We traveled like that, stopping and starting. The next time I woke up, I was in someone’s house. I didn’t know where it was. They chained me to a bed and told me to have a baby for their son."

As Yao Ying spoke of her past, her tone was level, her expression unchanging.

After being scarred so deeply, nothing could stir a ripple in her heart anymore.

"For four years, I was locked in that room. Four years. To stay alive, to make things a little easier for myself, I went from resisting and screaming at first to gradually trying to please them. Because that was the only way I could survive."

"I had to live so I could wait for my parents to find me. I was also terrified of the beatings, so I had to submit. Four years passed just like that. When they saw I couldn’t get pregnant, they started dressing me up, giving me more food and pretty clothes."

"Then one day, another strange man came. I saw him bring another girl with him. The man looked me over and started negotiating a price with them."

"For three thousand yuan, they sold me all over again."

Yao Ying gave a bitter laugh. "I still had no idea where I’d been sold to. At first, I did chores and hard labor. Later, when they saw I wasn’t bad-looking, they started dressing me up again to... serve those bastard men."

As she spoke, she looked at Zhuang Yanzheng. "I spent another five years in a place like that! I saw all kinds of men. Old, young, married, unmarried, men with respectable jobs, men who couldn’t show their faces in the light of day... Countless men. The sight of you men makes me sick!"

She suddenly let out a couple of curses through gritted teeth.

Chu Xingrou and Zhuang Yanzheng were both in the interrogation room.

Zhuang Yanzheng said nothing.

Chu Xingrou dug her nails into her own hand, forcing herself to remain composed.

"If you want to live, you have to read people’s expressions, say things that make them happy. You have to be obedient, and you have to learn how to handle all sorts of people."

"But even if you’re careful, you still end up offending someone. For people like us, being ’phased out’ pretty much means waiting to die. Or being sold again, to have any useful organs harvested and sold off."

"And that was when fate decided to play another joke on me. Qian Fan, the man who abducted me all those years ago, wanted to buy me to be his wife. He didn’t recognize me anymore. He’d done this kind of thing so many times, he couldn’t remember all the people he’d trafficked long ago. Even though my name hadn’t changed by then, he still didn’t remember me."

"He was very good to me at first. People like us... after being tortured so much, if someone shows us the slightest bit of kindness, we let go of all our resentment. I just thought, maybe I could live a quiet life like this. Having someone who cared for me, who gave me even a shred of dignity, would have been enough."

"But Heaven wouldn’t even grant me a life like that. Qian Fan was an alcoholic and a gambler. When he lost money, he’d come home and beat me. He’d beat me half to death."

"I couldn’t take it anymore. I wanted to kill myself. But then Qian Fan took me back to Jinghai, to his hometown. It was only after I went back with him that I realized... the place where I grew up was in the next village over. My parents were in the next village."

"He was afraid I’d run away, so during the day when he was out, he’d lock me in the room with an iron chain. I couldn’t get out at all. At night, if he was in a good mood, things were better. If he was in a bad mood, I’d get beaten."

"The next time he beat me, I took a fruit knife from the kitchen and stabbed him in the chest. Then I took the key from his body and ran home."

"Why did you kill the three members of the Ma Yan family?" Zhuang Yanzheng asked, deliberately not using the word "parents."

Yao Ying laughed. "I ran home from Qian Fan’s house. I could finally go home, finally see my parents. I thought they would hold me and cry, that they would feel the same way I did, as happy as I was. Zhu He asked me who I was. She didn’t recognize me at all."

"We hadn’t seen each other in over a decade, so I’d changed a lot. I could understand that. I told them I was Ma Nan. But besides surprise and shock, all that was left was fear. Not a trace of happiness."

"They asked me how I came back. I told them that, by a twisted turn of fate, a trafficker had brought me back."

"Then they asked what he brought me back for. I said the trafficker who abducted me wanted me to be his wife."

"Guess what they said," Yao Ying said, looking at Zhuang Yanzheng and the others.

None of them spoke.

Yao Ying looked at Chu Xingrou. "If they were your parents, what do you think they would have said?"

Chu Xingrou’s lips moved, but no words came out.

’If she had really been through all this, her parents would have hunted down the trafficker, dismembered him, and chopped him to pieces.’

Yao Ying had been calm throughout her story, but when she spoke of her parents, tears fell onto the interrogation chair. "They said that since I was someone else’s wife now, I shouldn’t have come back. That my parents’ house was no longer my home."

"I told them I missed them, that I wanted to come home."

"But they said that in everyone else’s eyes, I was already dead! They’d held a funeral for me, collected the condolence money. They asked what it would mean for me to come back. How would they explain it to the village, to everyone?"

Zhuang Yanzheng listened to her words.

After Su Miaoyi saw the footage, he had sought confirmation from Huayue Village.

The death certificate and cremation certificate were both authentic. A funeral had indeed been held.

But they hadn’t been able to find out how they had pulled it off back then.

"That’s when I realized I hadn’t been abducted. I had been sold. They sold me."

Yao Ying suddenly started to laugh. "And here I was, naively thinking my parents would be looking for me. I even thought they’d be worried. It was all just something I made up in my own head."

Chu Xingrou clenched her hands tightly.

Yao Ying was laughing, but tears streamed endlessly down her face. "What did I do wrong? All I did was be born. Was it just because I wasn’t a son? Each family could only have one child, so they secretly had a son and didn’t want to be fined or be unable to register his household. So they sold me, said I was dead, and held a funeral for me. That way, their son could get his registration. They didn’t have to spend any money, and they even got paid twice."

"So what about me? Did I deserve to die? I could accept them playing favorites—people’s hearts are biased, after all. But... how could there be such heartless parents in this world! Do they even deserve to be parents?! They deserve to die! They wanted a son so badly, right? Fine. I’ll make sure they aren’t even buried together. I’ll make it so their souls are scattered after death, never to find peace, never to be reborn!"

When she finished, Yao Ying laughed again. "Five years was long enough. I’ve lived comfortably these past five years. They were the happiest five years of my thirty-two years of life. What they did to me... killing them was their retribution. I murdered someone, so facing justice is what I deserve. But I am not Ma Nan. I am only Yao Ying."

...