Truth

After taking the elevator to the top floor, Lin Yan didn’t take her to Yu Mao’s apartment. Instead, she unlocked her own door and brought Nan Changgeng home.

The living room that opened up before them was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows. The furnishings were neat and spare; a modern white coffee table and a black sofa sat in crisp contrast, while the abundance of green plants added an unexpected warmth and sense of life.

“Sit down for now. We need to talk for a while. I’ll get you a glass of water.”

Nan Changgeng went to the sofa and sat down. “I’m not thirsty.”

“Drinking water helps you stay clear-headed.”

Lin Yan took a glass to the water dispenser, filled it, came back, and set it on the coffee table in front of Nan Changgeng before sitting slightly across from her.

“I hope you’re rational enough to judge clearly how you should treat her later.”

Nan Changgeng: “……”

Lin Yan studied her expression and smiled faintly. “Don’t put that pressure on yourself. If it weren’t for you, she would never have woken up back then. Being able to live more than ten extra years was already borrowed time; even if it doesn’t work out, it won’t be your fault.”

Nan Changgeng’s hand on her knee clenched into a fist. After a deep breath, she asked, “Have you already prepared yourself for her dying?”

“Yes. I’ve been preparing for a long time.”

She lowered her eyes slightly, and only then did a trace of regret and guilt surface in her expression. With a sigh, she said, “If my blog hadn’t been exposed, this day could have been delayed a little longer. It really came out of nowhere...

“She must be regretting it and falling apart right now. Once you know about something like this, it’ll be hard for her to get away from it later. She can’t live, and if she dies, she’ll be afraid of hurting you; it’s basically a dead end. She’ll be trapped by her own emotions and keep consuming herself until there’s nothing left.”

If this had happened a few years earlier, she would have been the one collapsing in anguish and regret, terrified that one mistake would ruin Yu Mao.

But after truly accompanying her through these past few years of struggle, her emotions had grown nearly numb. Especially after learning the truth, after seeing Yu Mao’s predetermined fate... when this day finally arrived, what she felt instead was a kind of relief, as if everything had at last come to rest.

Nan Changgeng lowered her head and looked at the water in the glass. It was murky, with no light reflecting off it. Outside the window, the sky was overcast and heavy. She didn’t know the room’s temperature, but she felt as if her bones were cold.

“Why does she have to die, exactly...? Her body isn’t sick; it’s only a mental problem. Modern medicine can’t save her?”

Lin Yan shook her head, bitter pain lingering between her brows and eyes.

“Before I answer that, I want to ask you something.”

“What?”

“What do you think of her?”

“......”

Her gaze carried an implied meaning. Nan Changgeng froze, momentarily at a loss for words.

Lin Yan seemed to understand. She said with certainty, “You don’t love her.”

Even though ship fans online were in an uproar, spinning the two of them into a love that would never part even in life or death, she was confident in her own eye for people.

This woman’s psychological problems absolutely weren’t minor, and her feelings toward Yu Mao were far from love.

Nan Changgeng had no way to hide it. “Yes. I can’t love her the way I’d love a person. Compared with a human being, she’s too empty. I can’t see her soul.”

Her feelings for Yu Mao were like the feelings one had for a cat she kept: the same kind of cherishing and spoiling, but nothing deeper than that. Even if she could deceive others, she couldn’t deceive her own heart.

Yet Lin Yan showed no dissatisfaction. Instead, she said, “That’s a good thing. You can tell her you don’t love her, that even if she dies, you won’t be sad for long. That’ll make things much easier for her.”

Her heart suddenly tightened, and her thoughts tangled into a mess again. Nan Changgeng felt as though the glass wall between her and Yu Mao had been splashed with a basin of water, washed clear enough to reveal a few strands of icy clarity.

A thought flashed through her mind. She couldn’t help murmuring, “That’s too inhuman...”

“Yu Mao’s existence itself is inhuman.”

Lin Yan’s usually calm voice had turned sharp for the first time.

Under Nan Changgeng’s slightly startled gaze, she stood and walked to the TV cabinet, opened a fingerprint-locked drawer, and took out a stack of documents.

When she returned, she placed them in front of Nan Changgeng.

“Look. It’ll answer your question.”

Nan Changgeng lowered her eyes to the blue folder before her. Her heartbeat grew heavy as she slowly opened it.

The first thing she saw made her pupils contract sharply.

[Informed Consent for Targeted Embryo Gene Editing]

“This is...!”

“This is the answer. Yu Mao—she’s an experimental subject who underwent gene editing.” Lin Yan’s tone was edged with bitterness. Even after knowing the truth for so long, every time she mentioned it, she still couldn’t suppress the resentment in her voice.

To her, using human beings as experimental subjects was simply inhuman, defying heaven and reason, and crossing the absolute bottom line of humanity!

But... this had been done by those above; there was nowhere to file a complaint, no matter how much one wanted to.

What could an individual use to resist a massive state machine?

Nan Changgeng couldn’t speak. She silently read the contents of the file, only feeling her blood run cold, her whole body as though soaked through with snowmelt.

In fact, the document wasn’t very detailed. The only listed drawback was that targeted editing would make the baby highly sensitive to its external environment.

But many benefits were listed: the child would have extraordinary intelligence, photographic memory, extremely strong learning ability, perfect looks, a better physique, no genetic diseases, and a lower risk of cancer; in addition, the participating family would receive a contribution bonus of one million.

The page was filled with bait for greedy parents, and because it came from the official side, it carried a credibility of its own. So even if everyone knew there was no such thing as a free lunch, there were always people unable to resist gambling on it.

It didn’t even clearly state the purpose of such an experimental modification, only giving a pompous, vague line: it was a necessary sacrifice made to save humanity’s future.

This was both an enrollment contract and a confidentiality agreement. Once signed, disclosure of the experiment to the outside world was forbidden. But its secrecy clause wasn’t especially strict; one could privately tell acquaintances, though spreading it widely online was prohibited.

No one dared violate that clause, after all; the internet was always under official surveillance.

In that instant, Nan Changgeng understood why the husband and wife in Lin Yan’s blog entries had been so shattered and desperate.

Clearly, that was the madness of people who had gambled and lost, unable to bear the cost.

Her fingertips were cold as ice as they touched the paper. Very slowly, she turned to the next page.

This was a set of childcare instructions they gave after the child was born.

[Important Notes for Raising a Targeted Gene-Edited Baby

1. The subject’s sensory acuity is amplified to ten to twenty times that of a normal person. Noise, pain, stale air, physical discomfort, and so on are all unbearable; the subject is extremely prone to environmental distress.

2. The subject has extremely strong emotional perception. If you hope that TA will be happy, please ensure your own emotions toward TA remain positive and uplifting. Being beaten, scolded, blamed, angry, or sad will all cause TA intense pain.

3. The subject has an exceptionally high learning capacity, especially during infancy. If you do not want TA’s behavior and mannerisms to gradually diverge from human norms, do not allow TA to live for long periods with other species during infancy and early childhood.

4. The subject requires a large amount of intimate companionship and hugging, or else TA will feel uneasy.

※5. Please remember! The threshold for the subject to bear emotions is limited. Once sensory overload occurs, TA is extremely likely to face mental self-collapse and death! Be sure to implant a mental anchor during the infancy and early childhood periods when TA is most receptive to hypnosis; that is, repeatedly tell TA that TA has nine lives. (Through experimentation, nine has been confirmed as the maximum number of times the subject’s psyche can die and be rebuilt.)

In order for TA to survive longer, please treat your child well and try to reduce the pain and sorrow TA can perceive as much as possible.]

“You see it now. What you wanted to know: the source of Yu Mao’s death threat.”

Lin Yan looked at Nan Changgeng’s increasingly ugly expression, her own smile turning bitter.

“This is the last time. She only has one life left.”

Nan Changgeng’s throat felt blocked. Not a single word came out as she stared at the papers on the table, only to feel as though the black characters were twisting and spinning within her vision.

Lin Yan didn’t care whether she responded. Since there was finally someone who could listen to her talk about these things, she simply went on by herself:

“Even a highly sensitive child is enough to wear people down badly; let alone one whose senses have been amplified to several times that of a normal person, with such a high risk of death on top of it. The moment they got this sheet, they must have started regretting it. But the fact that they handed over this guide only after the child was born meant they never intended to leave them any room for regret in the first place.

“Cry. Such a child would be crying at every moment, because this world is too painful for her. Even the softest fabric covering her body would make her uncomfortable; chaotic noises, dust in the air, even a single word in someone’s voice carrying a trace of negative emotion...

“A baby can only express discomfort by crying. And crying that can never be soothed will either numb people or destroy them. Her father was the former; her mother the latter. After all, a mother loves her child more deeply and cares more, so the more heartbroken she was, the more she would collapse in anger from helplessness, until she was tortured into madness and could no longer control the hatred she felt toward her.

“The child’s endless crying led to regret, which led in turn to mutual resentment between husband and wife, making the environment even more oppressive, which made the child even more miserable and even less able to stop crying, eventually forming a vicious cycle.

“Her mother knew her own mind had gone wrong too. As long as she stayed at home and saw the child, she couldn’t stop feeling anger and despair. Whether actively or passively, she was a continuous source of harm to Yu Mao. So after confirming that Yu Mao’s superhuman learning ability had allowed her to avoid danger on her own and stay home alone, she went out to work during the day. She deliberately left the child with the cat she’d raised for many years, thinking she might as well just let her become a cat, and raise her as one for life. That way she could live more simply, not take in so much outside stimulation, and perhaps face less risk of death.

“Until she was eight, Yu Mao was locked in the house and never went to school, spending her days living with the cat. She learned the cat’s endurance and almost never cried anymore, but every time her mother saw her increasingly inhuman manner, she still fell apart. Maybe out of some kind of self-protection mechanism, she kept unconsciously revealing disgust toward her.

“In fact, after several years, things were gradually getting better. The man usually didn’t come home for half a month at a time, and her mother had started planning a divorce. That day, the two of them were going back to get the household register so they could go through the divorce registration. They never expected to find that their cat had died, and in the explosion of emotion, they started fighting again. And that man had probably been harboring resentment for a long time; once his anger flared, he not only took a knife to her, he also wanted to kill his daughter.

“If she hadn’t forced herself to get up and slit his throat, the ones who died that day would have been the mother and daughter.”

Nan Changgeng listened quietly, and as Lin Yan spoke, her thoughts gradually became clear as well. She steadied herself a little and asked, “Did the dean of the welfare institution tell you all this?”

“Mm, more or less. Her mother had a lot of surveillance cameras installed in the house before, since it’s hard to feel at ease with a small child alone at home. After the two of them died, those recordings were still there. They were treated as Yu Mao’s personal belongings and stored with her inheritance at the dean’s place, to be handed over to her when she came of age.”

Nan Changgeng drew in a long breath; it felt like a stone was pressing down in her stomach. Slowly, she said, “But that still doesn’t explain why she woke up from my music, or why she’s so fixated on me.”

“For those, I really don’t know.”

Lin Yan shook her head. In the look she gave Nan Changgeng, a faint light flickered obscurely.

“But there’s one more thing. After reading the surveillance recordings, I suspected that Yu Mao’s nine lives might already have been used up long ago. Witnessing her mother and father’s death scene back then was probably the final time; by the time she was sent to the welfare institution, she was already in a state of mental death... but you woke her up, so I put my hopes in you. Maybe this time, you can save her too.

“Go and ask her for something; ask her for something she’ll have to work for a long time to give you. Maybe that can make her strive to live a little longer.

“The fact that you don’t love her is a good thing. Since the moment you awakened her, all her sensitivity to the outside world disappeared. All her senses are concentrated on you now; the calmer your emotions are, the better it is for her.”