Chapter 2: Decisive Ho the Third

She was back.

She really was back!

The heavens had not deceived her!

With wide eyes full of disbelief, Qin Ruan trembled, her palm-sized exquisite face expressing a mixture of joy and surprise, akin to both weeping and rejoicing.

A pair of beautiful eyes shone with teary light, crystal-clear tears sliding down her cheeks, falling onto the silk quilt that covered her body.

Since childhood, Qin Ruan had lived in the slums of West City in Capital City, sans parents and growing up in an orphanage.

Children who grow up in the slums' orphanage tend to be wild from a young age.

They survive long years among gangsters, murderers, and thieves, and inevitably pick up some bad habits themselves.

In order to survive, Qin Ruan had no choice but to integrate into the slums, a place she loathed deeply, yet also where she felt a sense of belonging.

It was her home, a place where she had lived for eighteen years.

Even though West City was filled with filth everywhere, including various shady deals and the daily silent disappearance of lives, she still referred to West City as her home.

Eighteen years...

All her memories of living freely and enjoyably for that brief span of eighteen years were rooted in West City.

On the year Qin Ruan turned eighteen, she was sought out by the noble Qin Family of Capital City.

She turned out to be the lost daughter of the Qin Family, the third miss of the Qin Family.

Years ago, when Madam Qin gave birth to a pair of twins in the hospital, someone attempted to kidnap her son. In their haste, they ended up confusing him with his sister, Qin Ruan.

The kidnapper, upon discovering that the child was a girl, dumped Qin Ruan in the snowy winter.

Girls were not valued in those days, as people's mentality was still deeply rooted in the bias of boys over girls.

Luckily for Qin Ruan, she was found by a kindhearted individual who sent her to the orphanage.

If she had remained an orphan of the slums' orphanage her entire life, she would have perhaps led a mundane life till the day she died of old age.

Everything tragic only began when she was recognized and taken into the Qin Family.

Despite being a legitimate daughter of the Qin Family, she was labeled an illegitimate child. She suffered slander, humiliation, insults, traps, and wrongful accusations.

She was even deliberately estranged from her father and brothers.

All of this was the doing of her stepmother and her stepsister, a cold-blooded and malicious pair that made one's skin crawl.

While recalling the hardships she would face ahead, Qin Ruan's eyes gradually filled with a cold, vengeful, and angry light, and the sorrow that lay deep within them.

She suddenly sat up in bed, the sudden movement causing her body to erupt in pain.

Ignoring the pain, Qin Ruan knew she needed to leave here as soon as possible.

This was the hotel where she had been framed by her stepsister and had spent a night of folly with a stranger.

However, this was not the same room where she had been through the storm, she had been switched.

In order to ruin her, her stepsister had specifically sought out a rich second-generation man with some power who liked beauty in order to tarnish her chastity.

Little did they know that she had a fleeting encounter with the well-known, decisive, and influential Mr. Huo of the Capital City, all due to some unexpected factors.

When her stepsister found out, she ground her teeth in anger and audaciously swapped places with her.

That woman had moved her to this current room and taken her place beside Mr. Huo.

The disorderly state of the room was also deliberately arranged by her.

During her past life, she had been left oblivious to these truths until after her death.

This was one of the countless times Qin Ruan had been calculated against by her stepsister within a year of returning to the Qin family, and it was the most successful time of them all.

Because of this incident, she had lost everything she had held dear, including the unborn child in her womb.

Qin Ruan lowered her gaze, touching her flat stomach.

The child she had lost in a night full of passion and chaos was now growing inside her belly again.

This time, she would not let anyone hurt her child.