Giving You Dawn And Dusk - Chapter 14

Even after hanging up the phone, Liang Shi still could not quite come back to herself.

She did not even remember how she had managed to brush off Mrs. Liang before ending the call.

However, after hanging up, she still changed the ringtone.

It was too noisy.

If someone called while she was asleep, she was afraid it might scare her straight into sudden death.

After changing the ringtone, Liang Shi flipped through the original owner’s phone again. She searched through the memo app, cloud drive, shopping apps, WeChat contacts, and Weibo, turning everything upside down.

There were only three entries in the original owner’s memo app.

[Run. Run far away.]

[Sacrifice. Heh.]

[Who would be a good child? Die.]

Three very baffling sentences. They did not connect before or after.

The date of each entry was the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month, but the years were different.

The first was from 2019.

The second was from 2020.

The third was from 2021.

And now, it was already 2023.

This phone had also been with the original owner for quite a few years.

The fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month was a very strange point. Everyone knew it was the Ghost Festival, the day when, according to legend, the gates of hell opened wide.

Liang Shi had not believed in these things before, but now that she had transmigrated into a book and even encountered a system, her life was already this bizarre. Adding a few more even more bizarre things did not seem impossible.

Most importantly, it mentioned a sacrifice.

Sacrifice to whom? What were the sacrificial offerings?

She did not understand.

The original owner had a particularly bad habit. She almost never saved people’s names. Other than family members, there was no one else in her contacts. But there were many text messages from unfamiliar numbers in her SMS list, such as the earlier message about wife-swapping.

She was completely confused and had no idea who anyone was.

And the original owner’s contact names for her family were also very simple. Basically, each was only one character.

Only Xu Qingzhu’s was somewhat special. Her contact note was—Zhuzi.

There was even a phone-system tree emoji attached at the end.

Judging from these tiny details, the original owner seemed to genuinely like Xu Qingzhu?

This kind of behavior seemed like something only young girls in the passionate stage of love would do.

But if she liked Xu Qingzhu, and had already married Xu Qingzhu, why could she not be open and proper about it?

It was truly puzzling.

Maybe because Xu Qingzhu would not let her touch her?

But Liang Shi remembered that this part had been explained in the book. Because Xu Qingzhu had developed post-traumatic stress disorder after being kidnapped, she was very afraid of intimate contact with others. On their wedding night, the drunk Alpha had tried to violate her, causing Xu Qingzhu to be hospitalized that very night.

And that same night, the Alpha, still flushed with drunken excitement, had slept with a Beta.

They were both cannon fodder, so the book had not even written their names.

But after waking up, Xu Qingzhu learned about that incident and had refused to let Liang Shi touch her ever since.

Their relationship had also become very stiff.

In order to trick Xu Qingzhu into bed, the original owner had tried many methods, but all of them had ended without results. In the end, at the suggestion of her disreputable friends, she chose the method of pheromone suppression.

At the time, that friend had said, “Omegas, you know. Once they’re marked, they’ll become obedient.”

“After the first time, she’ll be begging you to touch her.”

The original owner was dissolute and had many disreputable friends. She had nearly a hundred WeChat groups, and all kinds of flirting and dirty talk happened in each one.

Some groups had only Alphas, so everything they talked about was related to Omegas—who had gone to which club today, what kind of girl they had picked up, how she felt in their hands, what new tricks they had played in bed. Some people even posted erotic pictures.

Liang Shi clicked in and scrolled through quite a bit, then chose to clear the chat history and leave the group.

She left more than ten groups in a row.

There were also groups with Omegas and Betas mixed in. The people inside chatted aimlessly, and most of it was also skirting the edge.

Some Omegas’ profile pictures were swimsuit photos or maid outfits.

Liang Shi was puzzled. Had the country’s anti-pornography and anti-illegal publications campaign not reached this place?

Even if this was an ABO world, it still had a complete social system.

The novel author had basically built the background based on the real world, so many aspects were similar to the world Liang Shi had originally lived in, apart from the genders and privileges unique to the ABO world.

As well as the newly added setting where civilization in this world had developed rapidly, the birth rate had declined, and pregnancy could not be terminated.

Liang Shi frowned as she repeated the same operation as before.

After leaving more than eighty groups in a row, her WeChat list exploded again.

A bunch of people came running over to ask what had happened and why she had suddenly left the groups. She stared at those people with no contact notes and fell into deep thought.

Should she… delete them too?

After thinking about it, Liang Shi still decided to forget it.

However, she deleted all those Omegas and Betas who obviously existed just for flirting and dirty talk.

This was her account now. She did not want to see all that filth and smoke.

Even when she opened Moments, it was full of photos that were basically no different from nude pictures.

It was rather… painful to the eyes.

Liang Shi then browsed through Weibo and discovered that the original owner had never posted anything. Her browsing history was also quite clean. It seemed she did not use this app often.

The situation with the cloud drive, however, was not too good.

She had a membership for the cloud drive, with a storage capacity of one terabyte, and it was basically filled with short videos.

Out of curiosity, Liang Shi had naturally seen such videos before too, but they had all been very normal and aesthetically pleasing clips.

But when she opened one of the videos the original owner had saved, she nearly vomited after watching only the beginning. It was extremely heavy, filled with blood and violence.

Liang Shi immediately closed it and, while she was at it, deleted everything in the cloud drive at once.

For one instant, she felt as if she were cleaning an account.

Erasing all the traces of that person’s life, then replacing everything with herself.

But from now on, she was the one who had to continue living here.

By the time she finished all this, it was already one in the morning. Liang Shi, mentally exhausted to the extreme, lay there, yet she could not fall asleep.

There was too much uncertainty in her life. This completely unfamiliar environment had her nerves stretched tight, and she was somewhat unable to sleep.

She lay there lost in random thoughts for a very long time, and in the end, she did not even know how she fell asleep.

When she woke up early the next morning, the ward was empty.

She went downstairs to check on Xu Qingzhu. The other woman had not woken up yet, so Liang Shi went outside the hospital to eat breakfast.

After finishing, she returned to her ward to sleep.

Nurses came and went in the ward, but Liang Shi did not notice.

She was too tired. She desperately needed rest.

//

Liang Shi slept for a day and a half before finally recovering her energy.

She went to handle her own discharge procedures, then drove the car to a 4S dealership and exchanged it for a white Porsche.

By the time she returned to the hospital again, it was already afternoon.

She went up to the tenth floor and headed to Xu Qingzhu’s ward. When she stood at the door, she heard cheerful laughter inside.

She hesitated over whether she should go in, but then she heard Zhao Xuning behind her say, “Go in if you’re going in. If you’re not, don’t block the way.”

Liang Shi: “……”

She pushed the door open and entered. The laughter inside the ward came to an abrupt stop.

The moment Bai Weiwei saw her, she rolled her eyes and said in a strange, sarcastic tone, “Oh my, Second Miss Liang has arrived. Aren’t you afraid this dirty floor will soil your shoes?”

Liang Shi did not respond. She only looked at Xu Qingzhu and asked gently, “Are you feeling better?”

Xu Qingzhu nodded and replied coldly, “Mm.”

“There’s no time like the present,” Bai Weiwei said. “How about right now? The Civil Affairs Bureau hasn’t closed yet. Why don’t the two of you go get your divorce certificates?”

Liang Shi immediately said, “Who said we were getting divorced?”

“Second Miss Liang, if you don’t divorce, then we’ll see you in court.” Bai Weiwei stood up and confronted her. “Our Zhuzi isn’t someone easy to bully either. I’ve already asked a lawyer. Even within marriage, forcing an Omega into bed and forcibly marking an Omega are both illegal.”

Liang Shi: “……”

That had not been her doing.

But who asked the original owner to have committed such sins?

“I didn’t have that intention,” Liang Shi explained.

Bai Weiwei gave a cold snort.

Liang Shi’s phone vibrated slightly. She took it out and looked. It was a voice message from Qiu Zimin.

She tapped it, intending to convert it to text, but accidentally hit play instead.

Qiu Zimin’s voice rang out inside the ward. “Tonight at seven-thirty, Cangyue Restaurant. You’re not allowed to be late. Even if you’ve changed your mind, you have to go explain it clearly to Zhou Yi’an yourself. I won’t—”

Liang Shi fumbled in panic and kept tapping the wrong spot. At this moment, she finally managed to press pause.

But everything that should have been heard had already been heard.

The expressions of everyone inside the ward turned rather unpleasant.

Liang Shi immediately said, “Xu Qingzhu, I can explain.”

Unexpectedly, Xu Qingzhu lay down and pulled the blanket over herself. Her voice was very faint. “Go out. I’m tired.”

Liang Shi: “……”

At this rate, she would not get eighty luck points even in her next life!