Chapter 3
Late at night, after showering and changing into fresh clothes, Gu Xin lay in bed scrolling through Weibo.
Thanks to the trending search, the moment Gu Xin tapped in, she saw the retirement statement posted by Yan Shuangshuang’s main account. Right after that came the exposés from the marketing accounts.
Differentiation test report, secret marriage, abortion, entering and leaving unsavory places, affairs with multiple Betas…
They claimed there were pictures and truth, but most of it was basically replacing one thing with another. Aside from the differentiation test report being somewhat true, the rest was more or less like puffed snacks—inflated beyond all reason.
Gu Xin opened the retirement statement. Condensed down, it roughly said that she was sorry to the audience, sorry to her fans, and had decided to leave the industry. It was a very official statement, yet the comment section was already a bloody storm.
【No way, no way. There are still people stanning an artist who deceived the audience like this? Snowflakes, please have some standards! Hiding her gender, abortion, sleeping with fans, maybe even doing drugs—there’s nothing she can’t do, only things you haven’t thought of. yss, you really make me cry. It’s been so long since I’ve seen an artist with all five poisons and ironclad evidence like this. Snowflakes, don’t come here trying to wash her clean. I’ll delete every single one of you.】
【Never in a million years did I expect the first big melon of the year to be yss collapsing… What did Omegas ever do to you? Why pretend to be an A! I hate people who profit off gender benefits the most. Good riddance, wonderful riddance. If an O insists on pretending to be an A, then she deserves to retire!】
【Dying of laughter. A bunch of fans are still trying to wash this clean. A differentiation test report absolutely can’t be faked. Your peerless perfect A has turned into a delicate O!】
【[Image] [Image] [Image] This is you, right? Don’t just post a retirement statement and play dead. I’ve been your fan since your debut and thought you were dedicated and didn’t sleep with fans, but it turns out you were playing this wildly behind everyone’s backs? Refund, refund, refund!!!】
【Tsk, tsk, tsk. Yao-Si-Si really knows how to stab her own fans in the back. The money Bloodflowers spent on Yao-Si-Si before, all the fights they tore into for her, all turned into water that leaked into their brains. You treated Sister as your wife, while your wife took your money to go fishing~ Bloodflowers must be crying all night tonight~】
Ninety percent of the comments were malicious. Of the remaining ten percent, half were the few fans left who refused to believe it and hoped Yan Shuangshuang would come back, while the other half were ordinary viewers who simply regretted the loss of Yan Shuangshuang’s acting skills.
In short, a rising star had fallen tonight.
Before she became famous, Yan Shuangshuang had played countless minor roles. She had walked step by step to where she was today through her own sweat. She was not some empty vase with nothing to offer.
But now everything was ruined.
Gu Xin scrolled through those negative comments one by one. The exaggerated, terrifying malice rushed toward her face, as if everyone had been waiting for Yan Shuangshuang to overturn all along, and a grand carnival for bystanders was now being performed in full splendor.
For some reason, an image flashed through Gu Xin’s mind. She cut down experimental material, placed it under a microscope, and kept magnifying it, magnifying it again, using all her strength to find its imperfect parts.
Then she focused.
And cut it apart.
An unbearable wave of nausea surged up. Gu Xin rushed into the bathroom and clung to the toilet, vomiting wildly until even bile came up.
In the end, with trembling hands, she tore off a wet wipe and cleaned the filth from her face. After making sure she no longer had the urge to keep vomiting, Gu Xin returned to the bed on weak hands and feet.
Her stomach burned. She curled up, as if doing so could make her feel a little better.
The physical discomfort did not affect the workings of Gu Xin’s mind. Calmly, she opened her notes app and recorded each item one by one.
The divorce agreement, the nouveau riche-style decor, Yan Shuangshuang’s strange attitude, her own abnormalities in the hospital—everything pointed toward her past.
Gu Xin remembered everything that had happened after she woke up. She was like a director sitting in front of a camera called “Gu Xin.” As long as she wanted to, she could pick out any frame of memory and replay it at any time.
But heaven had decided to play a joke on her.
She could not remember where she came from, nor could she remember how she had obtained all that “common sense.”
It was as if some malicious god had deleted, with a single click, the very foundation that made her who she was, leaving behind only an empty surface.
Gu Xin pillowed her head on one hand and stretched the other out. Moonlight from outside the window licked up against it intimately, and her gaze fell on her fingertips.
Smooth, fair, without even a single callus. They were like the hands of a young lady who never touched spring water, born only to enjoy life.
Something deep in her mind was pried loose, and a faint sense of wrongness leaked out.
Gu Xin felt that everything was fake.
Her “home” was fake, her memories were fake, even her own body was fake. She did not belong here at all.
“Gu Xin” should have been a salted fish, but not quite this salty. “Gu Xin” should have had a job, not been some young heiress. “Gu Xin” should have had someone she was proud of and loved, not… not been alone like this now.
Someone should have always been by her side.
No matter where she was or what she wanted to do, that person would always be beside her.
…Yan Shuangshuang.
A name floated up naturally, as naturally as the fact that she never added milk or sugar to her coffee.
The bubble holding this name froze before Gu Xin’s eyes. Gu Xin looked at it for a long while, then reached out to grab it, but the instant she touched it, it scattered.
It was an illusion.
Gu Xin rubbed her face and forced herself to pull herself together a little. She opened her social apps and began learning who “Gu Xin” was.
Pinned at the top of WeChat were several luxury goods purchasing agents. When she tapped into them, without exception, they were all urging her to pay. Gu Xin thought of the rows of luxury watches and designer bags in her closet. None of them suited her taste, and yet she had not even paid for them.
She continued scrolling down. There were quite a few unread messages.
Gu Xin had obsessive-compulsive tendencies. She could not stand seeing red notification dots, but she could not find where the “mark all as read” button was either, so she had no choice but to tap into them one by one and clear them.
The contents of every chat were empty of anything meaningful. Aside from letting “Gu Xin” know that she was a frequent visitor at bars, they offered no extra information.
Until she tapped into the chat with someone in the middle named “Magic Baby.”
The latest record was from eleven o’clock last night. The previous chats were all about drinking and introducing drinking buddies, but last night, the other person said they knew a traditional Chinese medicine doctor who was very effective and asked if Gu Xin was interested. “Gu Xin” had not replied from then until today.
After thinking for a long time, Gu Xin typed: That effective? You’re not tricking me, are you?
It was as if the other person had been waiting for her reply all along. A long string of messages came clattering over.
【Several of my friends were treated there. Absolutely no problem. Guaranteed treatment, guaranteed cure. Boss Gu, don’t worry, I didn’t tell anyone it was you going. But you absolutely shouldn’t avoid doctors out of fear. Pheromone deficiency is a serious matter. The sooner you cure it, the sooner you can feel at ease.】
…Pheromone deficiency?
Gu Xin stared blankly as she touched the back of her neck, then tentatively released a little of her pheromones.
A rich floral fragrance immediately spread through the room.
For safety’s sake, Gu Xin tested it a few more times. Very soon, the whole room was filled with the scent of flowers, and Gu Xin had no choice but to turn on the air purifier.
Whether releasing or withdrawing them, her pheromones functioned perfectly fine.
Why would she have a problem like “pheromone deficiency”?
Gu Xin tapped her fingertips and searched Yan Shuangshuang’s name in WeChat. When she tapped in, their chat screen was actually blank. There was not a single message record, giving Gu Xin no chance to flip through any memories of the past.
After hesitating for a very long time, Gu Xin ultimately did not ask Yan Shuangshuang about her pheromones.
Their current relationship was tangled and chaotic, impossible to sever cleanly or sort out. Yan Shuangshuang probably did not want to see her soon-to-be ex-wife asking about pheromones in the middle of a turbulent night, and Gu Xin also did not want to leave behind the undignified impression that she was a pervert sexually harassing her soon-to-be ex-wife.
Suppressing an unnamed sourness in her heart, she returned to the “Magic Baby” chat, replied a few random words, and then simply blocked all those fair-weather friends above before deleting the chat boxes.
Step by step, once she was done, only eleven people were left in her WeChat. One was Yan Shuangshuang. Six pinned contacts were purchasing agents she had not paid yet. The remaining four were “Teacher,” “Senior Brother,” “Unimportant 01,” and “Junior Sister.” When she tapped into these people’s chat records, without exception, they were all blank.
Gu Xin did not rashly disturb them.
She turned to her contacts list. Her contacts were also mostly bad company, and shockingly enough, she could delete them all.
On QQ, aside from Yan Shuangshuang, no one remained.
After that, Gu Xin searched through every app that existed on her phone and barely pieced together her past life.
She liked luxury goods, especially luxury clothing and designer bags; there was an entire cabinet full of them in the cloakroom. She liked hooking up with good-looking Betas; everyone she followed on Weibo was exactly that. She liked health preservation and believed in traditional Chinese medicine folk remedies; she had been drinking medicine all along. Most importantly, she liked going to bars and dance clubs, and loved taking photos with different handsome men and beautiful women.
Gu Xin looked at the colorful variety of pretty young things in the photo album. Beside each of them was a person with brows and eyes exactly like her own.
Who was this?
Was this Gu Xin?
Finally, Gu Xin opened Alipay and searched for social security and housing fund records.
Her ID showed her date of birth. After calculating it, she was twenty-five this year. If she had followed the trajectory of an ordinary person and graduated from university at twenty-two, then she should have worked for at least two years.
The results that popped up showed that she had indeed paid into social security, only from the ages of sixteen to twenty, and the location was the Capital Communications Research Institute.
After twenty, Gu Xin had never paid into social security again. In other words, it was very likely that she had never worked again.
For an entire five years, there seemed to be a gap in her life.
Qingming was coming soon. On the road back to the Dongwu Villa District, Yan Shuangshuang saw that a funeral goods shop was still open, so she got out of the car and bought some paper money and ingots, as well as three bouquets of chrysanthemums.
As soon as the car door closed, there was a ding-dong. It was a deduction notice from the bank, reminding her that this month’s mortgage payment would be deducted tomorrow.
Yan Shuangshuang was quiet for a while. She opened her bank card balance and discovered that after paying the penalty fee for breach of contract, she could practically be described as penniless. Her fingertips tapped against the steering wheel. While driving, Yan Shuangshuang called the real estate agent.
“Hello? Is this Miss Li? Sorry to bother you so late.”
“Mm, I’d like to sell a property. The one in Liuquan Villa. It’s a little urgent.”
“Okay. Thank you for the trouble. The lowest I can accept is seventy percent of the market price. Please help me negotiate as you see fit.”
“Thank you.”
After hanging up, Yan Shuangshuang quietly thought that once Gu Xin signed the divorce agreement and she sold the marital home in Liuquan Villa, the two of them should be even, right?
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