Dedicated to studying, yet forced into a chaotic situation.

Chapter 12 Dim Light Falls Like Stars

Shi Sui returned to her room, closed the door, and the heartbroken expression on her face vanished instantly.

She wiped away the tears from the corners of her eyes, her face utterly indifferent.

When Jiang's mother heard that she had been humiliated and that Gu Chenyi had accused her of seducing him, Jiang's mother was unmoved and even thought that she should apologize.

But as soon as they heard Gu Chenyi curse them to die, their expressions changed instantly. They immediately felt that it was Gu Chenyi's fault, and that it was okay to slap him.

Shi Sui didn't feel wronged; she only felt lucky.

Fortunately, she has now seen through the true colors of the Jiang family and needs to prepare to leave them as soon as possible.

Once a person sheds tears, they are prone to overthinking, and Shi Sui thought about her past life.

She was drugged by human traffickers in a shopping mall when she was four years old and sold to a remote town in the southwest. She was bought by a family surnamed Shi and raised as a child bride.

Her adoptive father was a lame cement worker who worked when there was work, and when there was no work, he became an alcoholic and abusive.

Her adoptive mother was a controlled breeding machine, suffering from congenital intellectual disability. There were more men than women in the small town. Although she didn't know the details, Shi Sui suspected that her adoptive mother was also bought by her adoptive father, since her adoptive father was twenty or thirty years older than her adoptive mother.

Congenital intellectual disability has a certain probability of being inherited, but the more likely it is to be inherited, the more the adoptive father wants to have another child.

The poorer people are, the more children they have, and the more likely they are to get genetic diseases, yet they still want to have more children.

The adoptive father favored sons over daughters. I heard that he had previously given birth to healthy baby girls, but they were all thrown into the river alive.

In the end, only his two mentally challenged sons survived.

She lived in a small room with her mentally challenged brother and sister. Her adoptive parents lived next door, and whenever her adoptive father came home at night, there would be sounds of beatings and her adoptive mother's heart-wrenching cries.

After her adoptive mother was knocked unconscious, it was her turn to be beaten.

Shi Sui's entire childhood was a nightmare of domestic violence.

But soon, she learned to fight back. She did a lot of rough and heavy work, so she was much stronger than the average person. In addition, she had fought with other children in the town since she was a child, so she had accumulated a lot of practical experience.

Shi Sui is not one to suffer in silence. When her adoptive father throws a beer bottle at her, she picks up a broom and hits him back.

Her adoptive father was lame and old, so he was soon no match for Shi Sui.

She won the first time with her fearless spirit, and from then on, she could only win.

After winning the fight, she ran away and hid in the fields outside all night, looking at the stars in the sky, thinking that she would beat her adoptive father to death one day, but it didn't matter, it would just mean going to jail, and maybe she would be better off working on a sewing machine in prison than here.

However, her dream of going to jail did not come true.

When Shi Sui was twelve years old, her adoptive father bought counterfeit liquor to save money. He got drunk and vomited and had diarrhea in front of the convenience store. Before anyone could take him to the town's clinic, he died suddenly on the roadside.

Only Shi Sui, her mentally challenged adoptive mother, and her brothers remained at home.

Although the three men posed no threat to her life, Shi Sui still desperately wanted to escape this home. She had some memories of her life before she was four years old, and she knew she didn't belong here; she had been trafficked.

So when the town's staff who were promoting compulsory education came to her, she chose to go to school without hesitation.

She studied hard because her teacher said that as long as she studied well, she could go to a wider place and leave this small town.

However, before she could achieve any academic success, she began to dream of being the eldest daughter of the Jiang family.

Not long after, a well-dressed man from out of town arrived in town, claiming to be sent by the Jiang family to take their young lady home.

Shi Sui is the Jiang family's daughter who was abducted many years ago, just like the plot in her dream.

After the outsider gave the adoptive mother a large sum of money, he took Shi Sui back to the Jiang family.

She also met her biological parents and brother, as well as the female lead, Jiang Tianyao.

It turns out that after she was abducted, Jiang's mother was heartbroken and blamed Jiang's father for only playing on his phone and failing to keep an eye on the child. So Jiang's father adopted a cute and adorable girl from an orphanage and named her Jiang Tianyao.

The city lights outside the window are dim, bustling yet unfamiliar.

Shi Sui thought that the old days were gone forever, and she didn't want to live in the Jiang family anymore.

[Host, don't be so sad.] the system comforted her. [You still have studies to do.]

Shi Sui: ...There's no need to constantly remind me to study hard.

"[You can earn money by learning,]" the system said again.

That was a good consolation.

Shi Sui immediately took out her newly bought study guide, which she and Xu Chaomu had bought together at the bookstore that evening. It turned out that the reason Xu Chaomu had encountered that group of thugs was for the same reason as her—

Everyone's going to the bookstore for the 30% off discount.

This made Shi Sui realize that they shared similar interests, so she patted her chest and promised that he would ask her to go with him whenever he wanted to buy books, and that she would definitely protect him.

The night was deep, but the room was brightly lit, and the only sound was the swishing of the pen tip across the paper.

After an unknown amount of time, Shi Sui finally made the last payment, and the system's notification sound rang in her mind.

[Congratulations, host, for completing Task 2x3: finish the exercises in the Chinese, Math, and English tutoring books. Reward: 300 yuan.]

On the other side, the dim lights resembled stars teetering on the brink of collapse.

As night deepened, the occasional meows of stray cats echoed through the streets, along with the sounds of a couple arguing from some unknown apartment building.

In the dilapidated residential building, the air was filled with the smell of decay. The paint on the walls had almost completely peeled off, and the small advertisements pasted on them were all mottled and torn.

The door wasn't locked; it wasn't that there was no lock, but rather that it didn't need one at all.

Previously, a thief broke the door lock and came in empty-handed but left empty-handed as well. This seemed to have dealt a huge blow to the thief's career, and he ended up sticking a big "poor" character on the door.

The crooked word "poor" was still pasted on the door, but Xu Chaomu was too lazy to tear it off.

He pushed open the door and went home.

A dark, empty house.

He didn't need to turn on the lights; he could walk to his room with his eyes closed. There was only a folding bed and a small desk.

Xu Chaomu pressed the light switch in the room. The light bulb flickered on and off for two seconds before suddenly turning on, but it wasn't bright; it was just a dim yellow light.

As usual, he took out his test paper and exercise book and quietly started working on the questions.

By the time Xu Chaomu finished the last question, it was already late at night. Only a few lights remained on in the apartment building. After checking the answers, Xu Chaomu capped his pen.

The whistling wind blew through the hole in the window, curling up the pages of the books on the desk.

The wind also brushed aside the stray hairs on the boy's forehead, revealing his fair forehead and beautiful, delicate eyebrows and eyes. He sat at his desk, quiet as a painting.

Xu Chaomu realized that she was spacing out.

He rarely daydreams, considering it a meaningless and time-wasting activity.

But he still couldn't help thinking about the girl who saved him that afternoon—beautiful, bright, and warm, a light he thought he would never touch in his dark life.

She saved him and knocked out those thugs for him.

He thanked her, thinking there would be no more contact; the young lady and his life were like parallel lines that would never intersect.

But she insisted that he treat her to a meal, not at an expensive restaurant, but at a small, run-down shop on the street.

She's so cute when she eats; her cheeks puff out like a little hamster, and she only has eyes for the food, eating with such relish.

Later, she said they were friends, and she even took him to buy scratch-off lottery tickets. He won 140 yuan and said with a smile that he was so lucky because he was there.

She was so beautiful when she smiled; her eyes curved like bright little moons, and they instantly shone into his heart.

Later, when they went to the bookstore to buy study guides, they talked for a long time about the pros and cons of the books and their prices. It was the first time he realized that he could talk to someone so much.

She is from another world.

She just barged into his world without any warning.

"Shi Sui".

The dim light fell like stars, and the boy savored those two words repeatedly.