"Mom, I'm home."

The girl pushed open the door and called out. From inside the house came the sound of her parents arguing.

Whether she was home or not, or whether she had eaten dinner, was unimportant to her parents.

Her father was paralyzed in bed. Although he could move a little, he couldn't do anything other than barely manage to use the chamber pot himself.

Her mother had to go out every day to set up her breakfast stall, getting up early and working late.

Logically, their family's atmosphere should be like many of the television reports and newspaper articles,

poor but resilient,

and not lacking in family warmth and harmony.

She herself should have been doing well in school, making her parents proud.

But perhaps fairytale stories were, after all, in the minority.

Her own family was very different from the similar reports she had seen before.

Her father, paralyzed at home, had not managed to cultivate his temperament. He had a very bad temper, especially towards her mother, who worked outside every day. He often scolded her, saying that she had a man on the side, a lover.

He said her mother was shameless, a slut.

Her mother would argue with her father every time, and then her father would smash things and roar.

This man's strength for the rest of his life was probably all used up lying in bed and cursing.

And she couldn't bring herself to completely sympathize with her mother, because the small pieces of jewelry and some of the clothes that her mother occasionally wore home were clearly not the kind that her mother would buy for herself.

And once, she and her boyfriend were at a hotel when they ran into her mother, who was supposed to be getting ingredients, and another man entering the same hotel.

At the time, the two groups almost got into the same elevator. If she hadn't reacted quickly and told her boyfriend that she was going to the restroom first, a terrible embarrassment might have occurred.

This was a broken home,

appearing to be battered by wind and rain; in fact, it was indeed drafty everywhere.

She didn't know why her mother didn't divorce her father. She also didn't know why a father who was lying in bed, unable to go to work and earn money, and who couldn't even do housework, didn't have a shred of self-awareness.

In short,

she habitually used her key to open the door,

habitually heard her parents arguing,

habitually walked into her small room in the attic,

habitually poured herself a glass of cold water,

habitually opened her latest model Apple laptop,

habitually took out her newly bought gentle makeup remover,

habitually opened the videos of the beauty bloggers she often watched,

habitually logged into Zhihu.

This was her life, and it was also her current rhythm.

The college entrance exam, for her, had long been an unattainable dream, because her grades were too bad, so bad that she had already despaired.

She regretted it a little.

She regretted that she shouldn't have said that her homeroom teacher had violated her back in middle school just for a few tens of thousands of yuan.

At the time, her mother was very excited, and her father was very excited. After she said this, her mother didn't go out to set up her stall for a few days, and she called some relatives to carry her paralyzed father to the school gate on a stretcher.

The couple cried in each other's arms,

miserable and wretched,

and reporters came swarming in like sharks smelling blood.

Moral ethics and the lack of humanity

were often the hot topics that journalists liked most right now, because they didn't cross the line, the risks were extremely low, but the hot topic effect they could reap was incomparably huge.

In short,

the direction of that matter caught her a little off guard.

At first, she just wanted a little more pocket money to buy clothes.

Her homeroom teacher and language teacher, knowing about her family's situation, had also helped her out with some things. He would even pay some of her school fees in advance.

Occasionally, Teacher Ren's mother would also invite her to her house for dinner.

Teacher Ren hadn't married yet,

and coupled with the fact that she often went to his office and home,

it did indeed give many people the opportunity to make baseless speculations.

Rumors had already existed before she exposed him, but at that time, she didn't care.

Although, she had also heard about them.

Once, after she secretly went to a bar and was seen by her teacher on the way out, the teacher became cold towards her. He seemed very disappointed, disappointed in her.

His mother no longer called her to eat,

he even stopped paying some of her school fees in advance,

and he no longer helped her out,

which made her feel very angry.

Then she used her being violated as a threat to ask the teacher for money. She needed money. The lipstick she had her eye on, the clothes she had her eye on, and the goods she wanted to buy through daigou (purchasing agent) all required money to buy.

But the teacher refused her, even if she threatened to expose the matter.

Even now, she felt that her homeroom teacher from middle school was indeed a scholar.

At the time, he even knocked on the table and scolded her, "Justice resides in the hearts of the people."

However,

was that really the case?

After the matter blew up,

he was immediately suspended from his job by the school.

The immense pressure from public opinion eventually caused him to collapse.

He had angrily fought back,

writing long and detailed rebuttals online,

full of classical Chinese expressions.

Even though she was just a middle school student at the time, she was just a mediocre student, she could still see at that time that the teacher's rebuttals were very pale and powerless.

Although they seemed sonorous and forceful, filled with righteousness, and unafraid of rumors,

in the eyes of outsiders, this was just a stubborn denial, self-righteousness, and an attempt to get away with it by relying on his identity as a teacher.

The teacher had taught language arts his entire life, teaching batches of students how to write good compositions, but his own "composition" was not well written.

What the outside world and public opinion wanted to see was not his style of writing, and his sonorous and forceful rebuttals and irony with a "Lu Xun" style even stimulated the nerves of external public opinion.

What?

We're all wrong?

Only you are wise?

Impossible.

Then, there was an even stronger backlash.

Nowadays, when celebrities are caught in scandals, they must immediately hire public relations companies to smooth things over with various operations.

If it were really that simple to just reason and present the facts,

then most of the public relations companies would starve to death now.

And at that time, another piece of news was dug up: one of the teacher's uncles was the section chief in the local education bureau.

A very small section chief, over fifty years old, who usually adhered to morality and was also an old scholar, liked to study xinxue (Neo-Confucianism), and therefore, his interpersonal relationships were very poor. At fifty years old, he had no chance to rise any higher.

But the outside world only needed a short title for this news: The Beastly Teacher's Background Revealed!

Everything completely exploded.

People indulged in venting their "anger," feeling that they were fighting against dark forces and the powerful in the world,

and the media enjoyed gaining traffic and exposure.

This was a gluttonous feast that she had started.

In the end, it ended with the teacher jumping off the teaching building.

And the tens of thousands of yuan that the school initially paid her family to appease the situation and restore normal teaching also served as a "final conclusion" to the incident.

If they weren't guilty,

why would they pay money?

Right.

After learning of the teacher's death,

she was in pain for one night, and then regretted it for a month.

She was in pain for one night because she still had a conscience.

She regretted it for a month because she realized that if she waited until she went to college and then did it this way again, she could profit even more, such as getting a recommendation for graduate school, or getting more compensation.

She took out her wallet from her pocket. It belonged to the girl named Lin Yi, who was her classmate.

There was a lot of cash in the wallet, as well as many VIP cards.

A mocking smile appeared on her lips: Heh, rich people.

Rich bitch.

She then took out the five thousand yuan from her pocket and put it into her locked small drawer. She felt that today's harvest was good. In fact, she had received many donations afterwards, which she and her parents split in half.

She removed her makeup and washed her hair.

She reopened the webpage,

logged into Zhihu,

and today, she was going to write about her day.

For example, she had a brother-in-law who owned a bookstore, a sister who was a doctor, and a father who owned a pharmaceutical company and had also been the president of a hospital.

She wrote that today, a classmate who had been violated by a teacher, but was actually a green tea bitch, had lost her wallet. She despised her in her heart, but still took five thousand yuan from her brother-in-law to give to her.

Because five thousand yuan was just a fraction of her monthly allowance.

Just treat it as pitying this green tea bitch.

She had a large number of fans who followed her updates. As soon as she sent a message, many people would come to reply and like it. She liked this feeling. Here, she found her new life.

Sometimes, she couldn't even distinguish between the virtuality of the internet and the reality of real life.

She felt like she was Lin Yi.

Of course, there were also people who satirized her for looking down on poor people just because she was rich and had a good family background, saying she was snobbish.

She replied very calmly: whocare?

She closed her computer, ready to rest. Staying up late was a woman's enemy. She needed to take good care of herself. Her appearance seemed to be the only truly valuable thing that her parents had left her.

She went to the bathroom to wash up.

Her parents' argument was still going on. Her father was smashing cups and cursing her mother. Her mother cursed him back, calling him a good-for-nothing, asking why he didn't hurry up and die,

and go find a car on the road and lie down under it, and then pay the family a sum of money, which would also be considered fulfilling a man's responsibility.

She smiled when she heard this.

After washing up, she returned to her bedroom.

She opened the door,

but found a person sitting on her bed,

a man.

The man was smoking,

and the ashes were falling into the lid of a skincare product she had just bought.

For a moment, she didn't know what attitude to take when facing this man.

The laptop that she had closed was reopened by the man.

The man was reading her replies on Zhihu.

Silence

lasted for about three minutes.

She finally asked tremblingly, "What are you doing here?"

She knew him. She had just seen him. He was Lin Yi's brother-in-law, the one who owned the bookstore.

Zhou Ze stuck the cigarette butt into her skincare product.

Her mouth twitched. That one was very expensive. She had only bought it after sleeping with an old man once.

Zhou Ze looked at her with a smile that was not a smile,

and then said very seriously:

"Pay back the money."