#37: Cheng Mi and Si Tingyan are Siblings

It was 12:50 AM.

The late-night show was just beginning, and a bar by the river was booming with electronic music.

In the dance floor, a wild crowd swayed under the laser lights. Her friends called Qi Yunmiao over, but she refused, drinking alone in a booth.

These past few days, Qi Yunmiao hadn’t missed a night at the bar. Her nightlife consisted of nothing but alcohol.

Her temper was no longer as volatile as usual, yet none of her friends dared to provoke her.

Qi Yunmiao in this state made them even more uneasy. Her whole demeanor was gloomy, depressed, but not so negative as to appear disheveled. Instead, she exuded a piercing chill.

Half an hour later, her friends who went to dance in the club hadn’t returned.

When Qi Yunmiao reached for her drink again, the sofa beside her slightly dipped as someone sat down next to her.

She cast a sidelong glance, the black eyeliner at the corner of her eye subtly winged.

Her pupils seemed veiled in shadow, carrying a hint of fragmented, cold aggression.

But the person beside her was unfazed, even chuckling: “What, you don’t welcome me?”

Qi Yunmiao’s face attracted approaches wherever she went, usually from the wild and adventurous type. Most boys couldn’t handle her style and would show timidity when trying to chat her up.

The person sitting next to Qi Yunmiao now was, without exception, the flippant kind.

Qi Yunmiao, not knowing this person, said in a cold, indifferent tone: “Get lost.”

The boy wasn’t annoyed in the slightest. Instead, acting as if he belonged, he finished the last sip of his drink and reached for the bottle in Qi Yunmiao’s hand: “Oh, a girl with such a fierce temper.”

Qi Yunmiao’s gaze was murderous.

The boy poured himself a drink and handed the bottle back to Qi Yunmiao.

Qi Yunmiao didn’t take it: “You’d better get out of here right now.”

The boy, hearing this, showed no intention of moving. He chuckled: “What if I don’t?”

Qi Yunmiao’s patience was at its absolute limit. Almost without a pause, she abruptly raised her hand and knocked the wine bottle out of the boy’s hand.

The sound of shattering glass instantly pierced through the electronic music.

The wine bottle smashed on the ground, glass shards scattered, and liquor flowed.

Qi Yunmiao glared at the boy’s provocation: “If you don’t leave, you can try. Next time, I’ll smash this bottle on your head.”

There was sincerity in her words; she truly would do it.

But the boy showed no fear, his face still bearing that flippant expression.

“As expected of someone who could clash with Cheng Mi.”

Qi Yunmiao couldn’t stand the name “Cheng Mi.”

Every stroke of those two characters felt like needles poking into her flesh.

These past few days, these needles had been constantly churning within her, piercing, deeply embedded to the point of being irremovable.

So when the boy beside her uttered Cheng Mi’s name, she reflexively looked over.

As she glanced, two items were handed to her from the boy’s hand.

Qi Yunmiao’s gaze was drawn, and she followed it.

They were two photos. Under the dazzling lights, the images on the photos were somewhat blurry.

But by silhouette alone, Qi Yunmiao recognized who it was: the person who had recently been tormenting her, her thoughts churning with unwilling desire.

The top photo was clearly taken hurriedly with a phone. There was a police officer pointing at the camera, and the image was a bit shaky, as if the phone might have been snatched away right after the shutter was pressed.

But it wasn’t hard to tell the location and the condition of the person outside the frame.

In the photo, Cheng Mi was in a detention center, with handcuffs on her wrists.

Qi Yunmiao’s gaze paused slightly; she had never seen Cheng Mi like this.

Cheng Mi in the photo was a little different from her current self. Her aura was the same, but in this photo, she was much more prickly than she was now, and her whole demeanor was gloomy and dark.

She wasn’t looking at the camera, her hair tied in a high ponytail, her profile striking and eye-catching. She looked straight ahead, not at anyone else, her long eyelashes upturned.

The bottom photo was half-covered by the top one, only half exposed.

Qi Yunmiao’s gaze shifted an inch further and saw Cheng Mi, heavily made up, drinking and downing alcohol in a nightclub.

Qi Yunmiao glimpsed a tip of the iceberg of Cheng Mi’s reckless and flamboyant past.

The moment she saw her having barely survived in the darkness, a dark wave uncontrollably surged through Qi Yunmiao’s heart.

This undercurrent washed over the thorn that had been piercing her heart these past few days.

The unwillingness and resentment brought by Si Tingyan and Cheng Mi’s growing intimacy were gradually covered and swallowed.

Then, a hint of pleasure flashed in her heart.

Some people are naturally sensitive to and interested in the dark side of human nature, just like the boy in front of Qi Yunmiao now. He introduced himself: “Chen Zhaochi.”

Qi Yunmiao’s eyes finally settled back on the boy’s face.

Chen Zhaochi said: “Aren’t you going to tell me your name?”

Qi Yunmiao directly exposed him: “Don’t you already know?”

He even knew she had a grudge with Cheng Mi, so why pretend not to know? He was clearly here for that reason.

Chen Zhaochi chuckled, not refuting anything, and without beating around the bush, he lazily started talking about Cheng Mi: “Cheng Mi’s mother was a prostitute, she sang and drank with people.”

Qi Yunmiao still looked at him coldly: “Do you think I’d be interested in that?”

“What?” Chen Zhaochi raised an eyebrow, clearly unconvinced, “You’re not interested in that?”

He paused: “Oh, if it were someone else, you might really not be interested.”

“But Cheng Mi,” he said, as if seeing through her, “Do you dare say you’re not interested?”

Qi Yunmiao said nothing more.

Chen Zhaochi smiled, and continued: “She’s pretty much like her mother, just with a bit more of a facade.”

He tapped the top photo with his knuckle: “That’s why she got into all this trouble.”

“So, why are you telling me all this?”

Chen Zhaochi’s face again bore that lazy, indifferent smile, appearing easy to approach, but his words dripped with malicious chill.

“Don’t you want to see her reputation ruined?”

Human evil stirs in the darkness. Once it sees light, and finds companions, it immediately flourishes, covering the sky and obscuring the sun.

The day her father took her to meet director Li Shen at the clear bar, she saw Cheng Mi in Si Tingyan’s arms in the corner. He didn’t push her away.

The day she and her friends went to the girls’ restroom to corner Cheng Mi, she later saw with her own eyes Si Tingyan entering with his clean school uniform jacket. The door locked in front of her.

When they came out later, Cheng Mi had marks behind her ear left by him.

She had clearly liked Si Tingyan first.

But Chen Zhaochi didn’t know these things. Apart from people from Fengxun High School, outsiders only knew that Qi Yunmiao and Cheng Mi were rivals during the GR magazine model scandal, and Chen Zhaochi was also one.

Chen Zhaochi’s voice rang in her ear: “She’s already been ruined once, but she hid away here. You all know nothing about her past, so she’s doing quite well.”

“However, you see, why couldn’t she survive in her old place? Because no one there would accept someone like her.”

The meaning of these words didn’t need much elaboration; they both understood implicitly.

The easiest way to ruin Cheng Mi’s reputation was to make her retrace her old path, to dig up all the things she had buried deep.

Chen Zhaochi didn’t say much. He placed the two photos in Qi Yunmiao’s hand and rose from the sofa.

“I’m leaving now. See you later.”

At first, Qi Yunmiao didn’t understand that last sentence. It wasn’t until she saw Chen Zhaochi walk through the crowd, being carried by the waving arms of the crowd towards the stage, that he put a hand down, and with a leap of his long legs, jumped onto the stage.

He took the headphones handed to him by another DJ, put them around his neck, stood in front of the turntables, pointed a long finger, and the next second, the music vibrated, and screams almost tore through the roof.

________________________________________

The sky broke, and the dirt hidden under the endless darkness became visible, fiercely trampled by justice and forced to kneel into the ground.

Rumors about Cheng Mi started spreading rapidly at noon.

It began with her photo in the detention center, wearing handcuffs.

The content of that post was even more direct and crude.

[This woman committed murder before and went to jail.]

This short sentence and a single photo instantly landed like a massive rock in a calm, ripple-less pond.

The screen filled with exclamation marks and question marks, interspersed with the word “horrifying,” and posts flooded the internet.

Small voices of doubt gradually fell silent under the undeniable evidence of the photo.

Shock, curiosity, schadenfreude, kicking someone when they’re down.

In an instant, human nature revealed its true colors, celebrating like mad. It was a grand feast of malicious revelry.

Someone said, “I told you before she wasn’t a good person, and some people even defended her. She’s from my hometown. My friend went to the same school as her. She’s rotten, truly awful! The girls there wouldn’t even play with her.”

Amidst the rampant malicious comments, another photo further fueled the rumors.

Cheng Mi, heavily made up and drinking in a nightclub – all her past was dug up and exposed.

At that time, the quickest way to learn about another person’s character was through “old classmates” and particularly chaotic and isolated online rumors.

The forum’s discussions ranged from Cheng Mi being a bar DJ to her mother being a prostitute, her also being a hostess who drank with people, eventually defining her as a “public bus.”

It was as if the dirtier she was, the dirtier their words had to be.

From beginning to end, no one came out to say a single dissenting word.

Gradually, many people who had “heard of Cheng Mi before” began to flood the forum.

Whether true or false, whether out of malice or hatred, everything became a fact. Every word they said became Cheng Mi’s past life.

Human nature is always happiest indulging in the destruction of so-called evil, yet often unaware that sometimes they themselves are the greatest evil.

Cheng Mi learned about the rumors about herself around noon. She had always been particularly familiar with the strange glances cast from people’s eyes. Shortly after waking up from her nap and getting up from her desk, Cheng Mi felt something was wrong.

But she wasn’t very surprised. As expected, after logging onto the forum, it was just as she had thought.

The Fenggao forum was filled with posts about her, giving her such a big “welcome.” The discussions were nothing more than those past events.

She and her mother were both prostitutes, sleeping around with people. As soon as she came to this school, she started seducing boys. She had killed someone and been to jail. Her transfer was because she was ostracized at her original school due to these things.

The methods were familiar, typical of Chen Zhaochi’s style.

He always knew best how to destroy a person.

Getting involved with someone like Chen Zhaochi meant that no matter how big or small her initial sin, she would eventually be destroyed by him.

But what Chen Zhaochi didn’t know was that this tactic was useless against Cheng Mi now.

However, Cheng Mi overlooked one point: no matter what the rumor, it eventually boiled down to male-female relationships.

When she first saw those hotly fermenting posts, people were just avidly chewing on her past.

By the time she saw other things later that afternoon, it was already too late.

In this storm of public opinion, neither her ex, Li Zhiyu, nor Si Tingyan, whom she was currently pursuing, was spared.

Originally, these things had nothing to do with them. No matter what, people wouldn’t directly point fingers at them.

But then, a certain comment, amidst the many boring and eye-straining curses, suddenly revealed astonishing information.

[Actually, my family has always lived in the same building as Si Tingyan’s family. You might be very surprised to hear this, but Cheng Mi lives with Si Tingyan.]

This level of shock was completely comparable to Cheng Mi’s past.

The person living in the same building as Cheng Mi and Si Tingyan then added that their mother had once chatted with Si Tingyan’s mother and asked who this new face, Cheng Mi, was. Si Tingyan’s mother said she was her daughter.

She said Si Tingyan’s mother was going to remarry, and Cheng Mi was the child brought by the man.

All the confused people then poured out.

[WTF, so Cheng Mi and Si Tingyan are siblings? No way, Cheng Mi is pursuing her stepmother’s son??]

The forum instantly descended into chaos.

The school’s forum had been largely ignored in terms of academics and had long since ceased to be managed. By the time they discovered the students’ comments were severely uncivilized and decided to shut down the forum, it was too late. The gossip had already flown out of the forum and was rampant throughout the school.

Besides Cheng Mi, Si Tingyan also bore the brunt of much gossip.

Cheng Mi had remained calm until she saw this news.

In that instant, her hand, holding the phone, felt numb for the first time.

She had been on guard, guarding against Chen Zhaochi, guarding against Si Tingyan, not wanting Chen Zhaochi to discover any hint of her relationship with Si Tingyan in this situation.

But she had never imagined that someone would just like this, amidst this storm, pull Si Tingyan into the daylight.

Completely exposing him to Chen Zhaochi’s view.

She had held onto a sliver of hope that as long as Chen Zhaochi didn’t notice Si Tingyan, her private relationship with Si Tingyan might still have a chance to survive.

But now, Cheng Mi’s small hope was brutally shattered.

School had already dismissed. She recalled the face she occasionally encountered in the building on her way to or from school.

She tossed her phone back onto the desk, got up, and left the classroom.