Xu Zijin found herself lying on a bed in the hospital when she awoke. She pulled out the needle of the perfusion tube from the back of her hand without hesitation and rushed out of the ward.
When she arrived at the funeral home, she saw a group of people standing in the mourning hall. Xu Zijin suddenly stopped and dared not walked in.
On the way here, she had kept telling herself that it was just a practical joke. They tried to make a fool of her because she rubbed them the wrong way. "Dad is still alive. The Xu Consortium is booming... What happened these days is a bad dream. It"s unreal," she thought to herself.
Soon someone noticed Xu Zijin and mourners stepped aside to let her pa.s.s.
Xu Zijin slowly walked up to her stepmother, Liu Xin. Everything in front of her became unreal to her. She felt weightless, mechanically stepping forward like a lost soul.
The mourning hall was silent. No one sneered at her; no one railed at her; no one even made a noise.
Xu Zijin walked for a long time before she reached the coffin.
Liu Xin in a white mourning dress knelt beside the coffin alone, her face pale and drawn as if Xu Yuanshan"s death had taken a dozen years off her life.
Liu Xin was crying sadly and her tears needled Xu Zijin"s heart. She immediately came back to her senses and recalled all Fu Sinian had done to her and her family. It was not a dream. She could no longer deceive herself.
She burst into tears.
Xu Zijin suddenly threw herself on her knees and wailed with sorrow.
"Dad--"
Liu Xin struggled to her feet, rushed up to hold Xu Zijin, beating at her shoulders while crying loudly, "You wicked girl! Why did you come here so late? You father...You father is dead..."
The two women embraced each other tightly and cried bitterly. An intangible air of sadness filled the mourning hall.
Suddenly, there came a commotion from the crowd. Fu Sinian walked into the hall, followed by many people.
Liu Xin became agitated at the sight of him.
"How dare you come here! Fu Sinian, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Yuanshan adopted you from the welfare inst.i.tution and brought you up. He regarded you as his own child, and he even married his only daughter to you. He did everything called for by humanity and duty. But you bit the hand that fed you. You are really an ungrateful wretch!" Liu Xin shouted, her eyes burning with hatred. At that moment, she wanted nothing more than to kill this wicked man in front of her.
"No! Aunt Liu, calm down..." Xu Zijin clung to Liu Xin and stopped her from approaching Fu Sinian.
"Xu Zijin, how can you take his side? Your father was out of danger after emergency treatment. But yesterday afternoon this man broke into the ward and said something to your father. As a result, this morning your father pulled off the oxygen mask when no one was watching him. Now he is dead. Fu Sinian is the murderer! He killed your father!"
Xu Zijin"s face paled in an instant. She looked at the handsome man standing in front of her with disbelief.
She knew Fu Sinian didn"t love her, but she never expected that he would have been so cruel to her father.
Fu Sinian wore an indifferent look and didn"t intend to respond to the accusation from Liu Xin. "Since you have time to hurl abuse at me, you"d better recall what you did in the past."
Liu Xin had a look of incomprehension on her face.
Fu Sinian twisted his lips into a sarcastic smile and said, "Can you tell me what you did to the Fu family in An City twenty years ago?"
Liu Xin was stunned. Then, she turned pale as a ghost.
"You…" She looked at Fu Sinian in horror and pointed at him with trembling fingers, as if she had seen an evil spirit who had climbed out of the bottom pit of h.e.l.l to take his revenge.
"You... You are... Ha ha... No wonder you... That explains a lot... It has been your revenge plan from the beginning..."
Xu Zijin"s heart skipped a beat, a strong sense of uneasiness surging into her mind.
"Aunt Liu, what are you talking about? What happened to the Fu family? Why does he want to take revenge on us? What the h.e.l.l happened twenty years ago?" she asked confusedly.
Liu Xin looked at Xu Zijin with pity, her eyes filled with tears. Before she could tell Xu Zijin the truth, two policemen came into the mourning hall and asked, "Which one of you is Ms. Liu Xin?"
Liu Xin took a deep breath to calm herself down, held her stepdaughter in her arms and said in a gentle voice, "Zijin, I hope you will live a happy life." With that she pushed Xu Zijin aside, walked up to the policemen and said, "I am."