“You only have two months left.”
...
Walking out of the hospital clutching her test report, Lu Yinghan stood in the small courtyard with a pale face, mocking herself with self-deprecating irony.
Just yesterday, she had happily returned home from her shift at the milk tea shop, having bought herself a small cake to celebrate her birthday.
Yet the moment the cake touched her tongue, an agonizing pain tore through her internal organs as if carved by blades. Unable to endure it, she had collapsed in her dilapidated rental room, which cost a mere one hundred and fifty yuan a month.
She had grown familiar with this pain over the past two months. At first, she had been a little worried, but seeing that she could still function, she skipped the hospital to save money. This time, however, the examination had cost her a fortune.
On her twentieth birthday, of all days, she was diagnosed with a terminal illness...
The news left Lu Yinghan—who had always been strong and optimistic—at a complete loss for how to feel.
She rode the bus back to her rented room in a daze.
Looking at the decrepit, rundown space, she finally managed to pull herself together.
Setting down the report, Lu Yinghan silently began cleaning the room...
Knock, knock, knock!
“Yinghan! Are you home?”
“Yes, Aunt Shen, I’m here!”
Rubbing her sore eyes, Lu Yinghan went over and opened the wooden door. Her landlady, Aunt Shen, stood outside with a friend, smiling warmly at her.
“Yinghan, I’m here to collect this month’s rent.”
“Oh, sure, Aunt Shen, I’ll transfer it to you right away.”
Lu Yinghan hurried to pick up her phone, found Aunt Shen’s profile, and sent the rent over.
Seeing the transfer notification, Aunt Shen’s smile broadened.
“Got it! Yinghan, if you ever need anything, just let me know, alright?”
“Mm! Don’t worry, Aunt Shen, I have everything I need right now. Thank you!”
Aunt Shen exchanged a few polite words before closing the wooden door firmly behind her.
The friend who had been standing behind Aunt Shen immediately grabbed her arm, leaning in close to whisper, “What’s going on? Why is a young girl living in a place like this? Isn’t this just that makeshift storage shed you threw together back then? How did it turn into a rental?”
“Aiya, I didn’t want to either! But the girl begged me over and over, so I finally gave in. That hundred and fifty yuan barely covers the utilities!”
After saying this, Aunt Shen glanced back at the wooden door and pulled her friend even closer.
“I’m only telling you this, so don’t go blabbing it around. Word has it this girl is the eldest daughter who was kicked out of the Lu family!”
“What?! The Lu family? You mean the wealthy Lu family?”
Aunt Shen hastily slapped a hand over her friend’s mouth.
She knew this woman wouldn’t be able to keep her voice down!
“Keep your voice down! Didn’t the Lu family lose a daughter back then? They said Mrs. Lu was driven out of her mind with grief. Apparently, the Lu family blamed her for failing to look after her younger sister—said she did it on purpose! So they kicked her out!”
With that, Aunt Shen gestured toward the wooden door with her chin, indicating that the girl inside was Lu Yinghan.
Everyone knew what followed.
A top-tier prominent family in the capital losing their youngest daughter and casting out their supposedly ‘vicious’ eldest daughter had become notorious news.
Aunt Shen’s friend knitted her brows. “She looks so well-behaved, though. She doesn’t seem like the type to do something like that.”
“Who knows? How could ordinary folks like us understand how the rich think? For them to despise their own biological daughter like that, maybe she was raised on the outside or something!”
Although the two had leaned in close, they had forgotten that the paper-thin walls had virtually no soundproofing against their booming voices.
Lu Yinghan had heard every single word from start to finish.
She picked up the hospital report again, childhood memories drifting hazily through her mind.
She was only in her early teens back then. Her younger sister had insisted on going out to play and demanded that Yinghan accompany her. Unable to refuse, Lu Yinghan had no choice but to sneak out with her.
It had been her sister’s demand.
Yet on that very day, her sister vanished without a trace. No matter how desperately Yinghan searched, she couldn’t find her. She combed the entire street, blood blisters bursting on the soles of her feet, but she never stopped looking.
She had been terrified.
Terrified not only that her sister was in grave danger, but also that the Lu family, who already disliked her, would loathe her even more.
In the end, the truth couldn’t be concealed. When the Lu family learned that their youngest daughter had gone missing, fury erupted.
“Where is Lu Yinghan?! Tell her to drag herself to my study!”
That night, Lu Yinghan had sat on her bed in her tiny attic room. The blood blisters on the soles of her feet had ruptured, oozing bloody fluid, yet the stinging pain couldn’t compare to the icy chill freezing her from within.
Gnawing on her fingernails with trembling hands, Lu Yinghan pushed open the door to Lu Xiong’s study in terror.
Four men of the Lu family sat sternly inside.
As the door of the study slowly clicked shut, Lu Yinghan’s heart sank along with it...
The overwhelming barrage of curses and accusations left the teenage Lu Yinghan no chance to explain or defend herself. She felt completely suffocated.
Her hand clenched tightly around the report. Her heart throbbed with sharp pangs of pain, triggering the lingering ache in her internal organs. Lu Yinghan gasped for air, her chest throbbing as though pierced by a blade.
She remembered. She would never forget.
The disgust in Lu Xiong’s eyes and the callous sneer on his face as he spat those words.
That was her biological father.
The chill he gave her was so deep that it had numbed even the agonizing pain in her feet.
By the next day, the wounds on the soles of her feet and the abrasions on her body had swollen and inflamed, yet they still drove her away without mercy.
Without a shred of hesitation.
After leaving the Lu family, she ended up in an orphanage. There was no comfort—only ridicule and bullying. That torment had persisted all the way until now...
All because she was the daughter cast out by the Lu family.
If only she hadn’t agreed to go out with her sister back then, would she have been like other normal children—happily attending school, finding a steady job, and leading a quiet life getting married and having children?...
The more she dwelled on it, the more her head pounded with a throbbing ache.
She quickly forced herself to halt the downward spiral of negative thoughts, steadying her breath to ease the pain.
After a long while, tears finally welled in the corners of her eyes.
Hurriedly covering her eyes with her hands, Lu Yinghan bit her lip and choked back her sobs.
Stray whimpers escaped through her nose, but she swallowed them back forcefully, stifling every sound.
She couldn’t bring herself to wail out loud.
She could find no justification to indulge in such a release.
Would crying allow her to start her life over? Would it change her present reality? Would it allow her to survive?
It wouldn’t. It would only make her all the more aware of how pathetic she truly was.
After weeping for several minutes, Lu Yinghan sat blankly on the battered wooden chair, letting tears and mucus streak across her face.
After sitting in a daze for a long while, she roughly wiped away the tears, reached into her faded canvas bag, and pulled out a half-torn sheet of paper and an almost-empty gel pen.
Pausing, she discarded both and reached back into her bag to draw out a fresh sheet of clean paper and a new pen that she had previously been reluctant to use. Under the glow of the bare bulb, she began to write with utmost care...
A month later, upon receiving her paycheck from the milk tea shop, Lu Yinghan quit her job and gave up the rental room.
With her modest savings in hand and shouldering a simple backpack, she set out to do what she had always longed to do.
She traveled across the country without care or restraint.
In her final month, she wanted to live for herself—to truly live...
Two years later, in a picturesque mountain village, a farmer gathering firewood stumbled upon a human skeleton. Terrified, he rushed to report it to the police.
The incident alerted the local government, and reporters flocked to the scene to cover the story.
With permission from the local police, they were shown case photos of the remains.
In the photographs, the body lay peacefully on the ground, hands resting devoutly over the chest.
Inside her clothing, three sheets of paper had been found.
Aside from the two-year-old diagnosis report of her terminal illness and a page densely filled with travel plans, what made the reporter’s eyes sting with tears was the final one—a half-torn sheet of paper, upon which delicate, neat handwriting carefully read:
“May there be no next life.”
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