Chapter 1: Death, Unending Hatred 

On December 10, 2023, it was overcast, with a forecast of light snow!

Beijing’s Major Hospital!

A luxurious single patient room!

“What bad luck, after months of waiting, she still hasn’t kicked the bucket. If it weren’t for that stubborn lawyer insisting we have to wait until she’s completely dead to inherit her assets, I wouldn’t bother coming here every day,” Li Limei complained loudly with her mother, Li Cuihua.

“Mom, when is she going to die? Should we just pull her plug?” Li Limei glanced at the hospital bed and continued.

“Be patient. I asked Dr. Zhang; it’s just a matter of days. No need to get your hands dirty. The closer we get to the end, the calmer we need to be,” Li Cuihua replied in a low voice.

“Hmph, when she was strong and healthy, I could have sold her off to the mountains. Now that she’s on her last breath, why would I be afraid of her?” Li Limei said disdainfully.

Listening to her stepmother and half-sister, Shen Zihan clenched her fists tightly under the blanket. The torment she suffered in the mountains was all thanks to these two. She realized she had been blind to the truth, living closely with her enemies as if they were family—how ridiculous!

Heaven finally opened its eyes and allowed her to wake up after half a month in a coma; otherwise, she would have died without knowing the truth. Shen Zihan suppressed her anger and continued to pretend to be unconscious, eager to hear what else she didn’t know.

“Right? They’ve got pretty faces but no brains. It’s one thing for Mom to be an idiot, but the daughter just lets us manipulate her. Their very existence is to be our family’s servants,” Li Cuihua said, laughing with glee.

“Exactly, it’s like being sold and still counting the money for the buyer,” Li Limei chimed in, equally pleased.

“It’s a pity, though. She was so savvy in business but died too early,” Li Cuihua said, glancing at the unmoving figure on the bed, her voice tinged with a hint of regret.

“What’s there to regret? Once she’s dead, all her assets will be ours,” Li Limei said with a triumphant smile, her tone sharpening.

“Mom, what I admire most about you is your decisiveness. If it weren’t for your planning back then, my dad and grandma wouldn’t have been able to bully Yu Meijuan into hanging herself. If she hadn’t hanged herself, how could we have returned home smoothly, smoothly…”

Her voice abruptly cut off as Shen Zihan, who had been in a deep sleep, suddenly sat up.

The mother and daughter jumped up in terror.

“How did you wake up?” Li Cuihua exclaimed, wide-eyed.

“I didn’t know your schemes until I woke up. If I hadn’t woken up, my assets would have been given to you for nothing. You are not only malicious but also shameless,” Shen Zihan said, her eyes blazing with anger.

The mother and daughter exchanged glances, and Li Cuihua said viciously, “So what if you’re awake? You’d better go meet the King of Hell peacefully. Now that you know everything, you should die even sooner.”

As she spoke, the two of them lunged toward the bed in unison.

Shen Zihan had been enduring it, but hearing her mother say that they caused her death filled her with rage, causing her to tremble. She hated herself for being blind and mistaking her enemies for family; she had been supporting them with her hard-earned money, and she wished she could skin them alive.

Knowing her time was short, she thought she might as well take them with her to the afterlife. As they lunged at her, she grabbed a fruit knife from the small table and stabbed it into Li Limei’s chest.

Although she was weak from a long illness, the desperation within her unleashed a tremendous force. The knife plunged deep into Li Limei’s chest. Li Limei clutched her bleeding chest and screamed.

Li Cuihua stood frozen in shock, staring at the knife in her daughter’s chest.

Seizing the moment, Shen Zihan didn’t hesitate; she pulled the knife out and stabbed it again into Li Limei.

As Li Cuihua snapped back to reality, she rushed forward to pull the knife out of her daughter’s chest.

Watching this unfold, Shen Zihan mocked herself internally. The person before her was so foolish; she realized she had let them deceive her for her entire life. She was the real fool.

Li Limei’s knife was pulled out by Li Cuihua, and blood gushed from the wound. Shen Zihan felt an immense satisfaction. But she didn’t stop there; she picked up the thermos from the table and swung it at Li Cuihua’s head, causing her to roll her eyes and collapse on the floor.

Now blinded by rage, Shen Zihan grabbed the knife again and recklessly attacked both of them.

One stab after another, until she collapsed from exhaustion on the ground.

At that moment, she seemed to see her mother smiling down at her from the beam above.

“Mom, your unfilial daughter has come to be with you.”

******

“Water.” Shen Zihan was startled awake by her own rough, hoarse voice, and she quickly sat up, only to feel darkness closing in and collapsed back onto the bed.

She weakly lifted her head to look around the environment: the tattered quilt, the dark ceiling and walls, and the uneven yellow mud floor.

What shocked her was the hand-torn calendar, which clearly displayed the date as November 20, 1985.

“November 20, 1985… Am I reborn, reborn on the day I had a fever and my mother was humiliated?” she murmured to herself.

Suddenly, a sharp pain struck her heart as the unbearable memories of her past life flooded back.

Her tragic life began on this very day.

On this day, her mother hanged herself with a hemp rope.

Less than a month after her mother’s death, her scumbag father married her stepmother, Li Cuihua, who brought her own children into the house.

Understanding her situation, Shen Zihan began her life as a doormat.

The highest state of a doormat is to trust the other party unconditionally.

Of course, the fate of a doormat is not good; Li Cuihua and her family sold Shen Zihan into the mountains.

There, Shen Zihan endured tortures that no ordinary person could withstand. It was in that place that she found a tremendous opportunity that allowed her to escape from the mountains.

It was also because of the severe torment she endured that she lost the right to be a mother and the ability to believe in love.

To survive, she had begged, wandered, washed dishes in restaurants, worked as a waitress, and served as a nanny. These hardships gave Shen Zihan the ability to survive and gradually led her to the peak of her life.

Shen Zihan established one company after another.

Even after achieving success, the doormat Shen Zihan failed to see the true nature of her stepmother and her family. They gained endless wealth from her. In her final moments, she still thought about leaving all her assets to them.

“Hahaha…” Shen Zihan looked at the calendar and felt a surge of joy inside her.

She felt that heaven had treated her too well, allowing her to be reborn. It was time for these people to experience the methods of someone who had crawled out of hell.

“Mom, this time, I absolutely won’t let you suffer such humiliation again, nor will I let you walk the same path as in your past life.”

Ignoring the pain in her body, Shen Zihan gritted her teeth and got up; she was going to save her mother.

In the yard, she picked up an iron hammer. This time, she not only wanted to rescue her mother but also to take the life of that scumbag. Since he had caused her mother’s death, his life was not worth mourning.

She sensed that her space had come along as well, so she decided to kill this bastard and throw him into her space as fertilizer.

Shen Zihan pushed open her mother’s door with the iron hammer.

The moment she opened the door, she saw the scumbag about to tear her mother’s clothes, while her mother lay there unresponsive.

Filled with rage, Shen Zihan swung the iron hammer down hard onto the man’s back.

“Ah…” Accompanied by a piercing scream, the hefty body fell heavily onto her mother.

Shen Zihan summoned all her strength to flip that mass of flesh off her mother. Ignoring the man’s fate, she hurried to check on her mother.

From Li Limei’s account, she knew her mother had been drugged. She struggled to control herself and scooped a ladle of cold water from the tub. She gulped it down and splashed it onto her mother’s face.

The cold water jolted her mother, Yu Meijuan, awake. Seeing her daughter’s anxious eyes, she said, “Zihan, why are you here? Aren’t you burning up?”

In a flash, she saw the scumbag menacingly raising the iron hammer to strike her daughter. In a moment of desperation, she pushed her daughter away, and the iron hammer struck her head instead, blood streaming down her pale face. She closed her eyes and collapsed onto the bed.

All of this happened in an instant. Seeing her mother faint again ignited Shen Zihan’s anger and strength. She turned around to see the stunned hefty figure.

Shen Zihan snatched the iron hammer from the man’s hands and relentlessly smashed it down on his head.

“I’ll kill you, you filthy scoundrel, for bullying my mother! I’ll kill you, kill you…” She kept repeating this phrase, the image of her mother hanging from the beam in her past life driving her to continue her assault without stopping.