After a long silence, Shao Yuanjia let out a short, incredulous chuckle.
“Qi Siran was secretly digging into Wen Yin?”
With Qi Siran gone, there was no reason to keep up any pretense. He let the corner of his mouth lift with interest. He hadn’t expected his little sister’s investigations to hide so many surprises from him.
“Send me a copy of everything Qi Siran has found,” he said, rubbing his chin. The game had suddenly grown far more interesting. How would Wen Yin respond, he wondered.
The assistant wasted no time. Within minutes the dossier—every scrap of research the two of them had compiled over the past few days—was sent to him. Shao Yuanjia studied Shao Yinan’s life history with meticulous attention. Then, his eyes snagged on a single line in the file and froze.
It plainly stated that after Wen Yin’s birth she had spent some time living in an orphanage.
The name of that orphanage made his whole body tremble: Harmony Orphanage.
At the sound of that name, memories slammed into him, sudden and relentless. He remembered everything from his years there—the only bright thread in an otherwise dim childhood. When everyone else despised and abandoned him, there was one person who had accepted him. The memory of that elder sister’s smile—warm as the sun—came back clearer than anything.
He could still recall the beatings, the insults, how his mother had deliberately abandoned him and pushed him into the orphanage. Shao Yuanjia closed his eyes and his hands curled into tight fists on the arms of the chair.
His mother, ravenous for advantage, had poured her hatred into him after he was born. Not a day of peace had come. Beatings and scoldings were all he knew. When he finally ended up at the orphanage, life improved slightly. He’d met that warm, sunlike girl there. But happiness didn’t last long. When his mother realized he could be useful, she had brought him back, and for a time she actually treated him well—almost like she cared. He had thought he’d been granted a second life, a second chance at light. Then, within two years, he was sent to the Shao household. Childhood, to him, had been a stretch of shadows, broken only by that smile and that girl.
For years he had tried to find her. The results had been sparse. The records said that after he left, she had been adopted herself within a couple of years—but the family moved repeatedly, and he could never pin down a location. Over time he had given up the search. The memory remained sealed inside him, but in a place waiting, like fertile soil quietly sprouting new shoots.
He forced himself to steady his feelings. He breathed in, forced calm, though his hands trembled despite it all. Only he understood the weight that orphanage carried in his life.
He scrolled on. The record said Wen Yin left the orphanage the same year that girl left. Could it really be mere coincidence? He didn’t want to believe that the woman he had been planning to use could be the same person.
Shao Yuanjia arranged his thoughts. He controlled the irritation rising in his chest and summoned his assistant back. “What exactly are Wen Zhi and Qi Siran after?” he asked, voice cool.
The assistant hesitated a beat, then answered, “From what we can tell, Miss Qi and the others want to investigate Wen Yin’s origins—her family background. They’re particularly fixated on the hospital where she was born. They’ve been trying to get in there, slipping people money, trying to dig up other details.”
Shao Yuanjia’s brow knitted tighter. “What are they suspecting?” he asked, but he had no clear idea himself. Frustration flared; he waved the assistant away and sat alone in the boss’s chair, head bowed.
Could Wen Yin really be that girl from Harmony Orphanage? The idea hit him like a bruise. He hugged his head and tried to turn it away. That sunlit memory rose again—then, unexpectedly, pain followed. This was the first time the thought stung rather than warmed him.
If she was the one, what would that do to his plans?
He picked up the phone. “Keep a constant watch on Wen Zhi and Qi Siran’s movements. Also, dig deeper into Wen Yin’s childhood, focusing on her time at the orphanage.”
The assistant seemed to understand immediately and promised to follow up. Not long after he hung up, the phone buzzed again.
“Shao General Manager, there are childhood photos of Wen Yin in the folder I just sent. You should look at them now.”
The assistant’s intuition was sharp. He’d worked with Shao Yuanjia long enough to know what would trigger his interest: anything from Wen Yin’s early years. He remembered the gossip that Yuanjia was a bastard who’d been taken back into the family, that his mother had been cruel at first, then inexplicably doted on him before he was taken in by Shao Qi.
Shao Yuanjia nodded at his screen and scrolled to the end of the file. There, he found a stack of photographs: Wen Yin at different ages—awkward, childish, then gradually maturing. One old sepia photo stood out among them, its edges browned with time.
His gaze locked on it.
He couldn’t deny the resemblance. Wen Yin looked astonishingly like the sister from his memory. When his fingers hovered over the photo, he felt a subtle tremor at the tips, as if the past itself had found a way to answer.
“Calm down, Shao Yuanjia,” he told himself out loud, rare words of self-reassurance. He forced his expression back into something controlled. He willed it not to be what he feared.
—
At the Shao residence, Shao Yinan ended the call with a grim face. Things were getting restless. The air around him was cold enough to make people step back.
“Some things need to be cleaned up,” he murmured.