Heading for the Plains - Chapter 4

To Xia Chao’s surprise, her refusal didn’t seem to shock Ping Yuan at all.

The older woman simply leaned back against the sofa with a detached air. “Why?”

Xia Chao lowered her head. “No reason.”

Ping Yuan’s brows finally knit together. “Then show me your college entrance exam transcript. Do you have any of your mock exams? If you do, bring those too.”

“I didn’t bring them.”

“Don’t you have digital copies?”

Xia Chao’s voice began to tremble. “Why? Why do you have to see them?”

“Because your mother asked me to convince you to go back to school,” Ping Yuan said. She looked up, her gaze sweeping over Xia Chao’s shaking shoulders, yet her tone remained disturbingly calm. “Did she not tell you?”

Xia Chao bit her lip. “I’ve already said it. I don’t plan on repeating the year. I want to find a job.”

“So she did tell you,” Ping Yuan noted, calmly bypassing the protest. “Bring me the transcript.”

“.Did you not hear a word I said?”

“Bring it.”

Her tone was strictly business. Xia Chao finally began to understand; she had guessed correctly. Ping Yuan was only doing this to fulfill Xia Ling’s dying wish. This “fulfillment” carried no affection; she simply wanted to settle the debt so she could cut ties and return to her normal life.

Ping Yuan didn’t care about her feelings at all.

Xia Chao lowered her lashes and took a deep breath. “…Fine.”

Ping Yuan watched her with a blank expression as the girl, lips pressed tight, pulled out her phone, opened a specific screen, and thrust it directly in front of Ping Yuan’s face.

It was an old phone with a cracked corner and a yellowing plastic case, practically electronic waste—yet Xia Chao gripped it with white-knuckled intensity. She was clearly fuming. In her thin, bony wrist, blue veins pulsed with the rhythm of her suppressed anger.

Quite the temper.

But Ping Yuan didn’t care. With the screen shoved against the bridge of her nose, she was forced to look. What she saw first wasn’t the numbers, but Xia Chao’s eyes staring back at her, burning with a restrained fury.

A brat who doesn’t know how good she has it.

Without even realizing it, Ping Yuan’s lips curled into a mocking, provocative smirk. She drawled the words out slowly. “No… wonder.”

“Your scores are pathetic.”

Her voice had that dangerous quality where the angrier she got, the more emotionless she sounded. “No wonder your mother’s only wish before she died was for you to actually study.”

“Can you stop using the words ‘your mother’?” Xia Chao suddenly interrupted, her voice hoarse with the effort of holding back. “She was your mother, too.”

Ping Yuan was taken aback. The girl didn’t care about her grades being insulted; she cared about the perceived slight to Xia Ling. Ping Yuan’s smile widened as she realized she had found a nerve.

“She’s your mother,” she said, her voice laced with a cruel amusement. “Xia Ling worked herself to the bone to raise you. You two were thick as thieves, a picture-perfect portrait of mother-daughter devotion. Is she not your mother?”

“Stop twisting things. Xia Ling was your biological mother,” Xia Chao shouted, stung by the callousness. “She didn’t want to use this to blackmail you into anything. She just wanted to see you! And you… you didn’t even go to see her once before she died!”

“Does simply giving birth to me make her a mother?”

“Do you think you’re so noble? Traveling a thousand miles just to condemn your ‘ungrateful’ sister?”

“Don’t be naive, little girl,” Ping Yuan said coldly. “The world doesn’t revolve around your tiny little dramas.”

“I know that in your eyes, Xia Ling was the best mom in the world. You two shared such a deep bond that you can’t fathom why I wouldn’t want to see her.”

“So, let me tell you. I don’t acknowledge her because twenty-odd years ago, she was the one who decided to abandon me.”

“Do you know why?” she asked slowly, her grip tightening on Xia Chao’s hand with a force that allowed no retreat.

The distance between them vanished. Xia Chao’s eyes widened as Ping Yuan’s face loomed large in her vision. At a distance where their breaths almost mingled, Ping Yuan stared her down and let out a mocking huff of laughter.

“This is why.”

She pointed to her chest. On the skin exposed by the black vest, a dark red scar lay prominently. It wasn’t deep. It clearly had years of history behind it. When Xia Chao had come out of the bathroom, she hadn’t looked at Ping Yuan out of a sense of politeness.

She was only seeing it now.

But Ping Yuan didn’t care about politeness. She was smiling thinly. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s a scar from open-heart surgery.”

Her voice was like a jagged blade, slicing the air into bloody ribbons. “Xia Ling didn’t tell you, did she? It’s fine. It’s a pretty shameful story; if I were her, I wouldn’t tell anyone either.”

Her grip on Xia Chao’s wrist tightened further. This time, it was Xia Chao who looked up to see her “sister” looking back with eyes that seemed to bleed a profound, ancient sorrow.

“But unfortunately for me, I remember.”

“I remember that I had congenital heart disease. When I was four, I had a severe episode. Xia Ling took me to the hospital in the provincial capital. I don’t remember exactly what the doctor said.”

“Based on what I know now, I assume the doctor said the surgery needed to happen as soon as possible.”

“But surgery cost a lot—a lot of money. And back then, the family was dirt poor,” she whispered. “I remember that day… coming out of the hospital, Xia Ling seemed to be holding me and crying?”

“And then, she was gone. I cried and searched for her everywhere. I searched and searched, screaming for my mommy, but I never found her again.”

“Later, I was picked up by human traffickers,” Ping Yuan said, spreading her hands in a mock gesture of helplessness. “So, don’t tell me Xia Ling is my mother. She gave me a broken body, threw me away, and now she has the nerve to come back and ask me to raise her daughter for her?”

“The funniest part? I only found out after I grew up that because my condition was caught and treated early, it wasn’t even the most severe kind.”

“But Xia Ling threw me away at the hospital gates because of it,” she said, her smile deepening with a cruel sense of satisfaction. “Sometimes I wish those traffickers had just sold me off. I wish the police hadn’t busted them mid-transit, and I wish I hadn’t left my DNA in the missing persons database only to be matched twenty years later and harassed by people like you.”

“Now, do you understand? Xia Ling gave birth to you and raised you. You love her. I get that,” she said indifferently. “But I don’t have those feelings. So, stop calling me ‘Sister’.”

“You don’t deserve it.”

******

The DNA match had been a routine part of a police sweep for missing persons. For Ping Yuan, the moment she was notified that her biological mother had been found, she felt only rage, not joy.

The only reason she had agreed to the “reunion” was because the intermediary told her that Xia Ling was terminally ill. And she didn’t want to become a second heartless Xia Ling.

So she acknowledged her. She told Xia Ling, with a heart full of bitterness, that those few years of early childhood upbringing were only worth one condition. Either she would quit her job and go to Nan County to care for her until the end, or… Xia Ling could ask for one favor.

She remembered Xia Ling going silent on the other end. The simple, quiet middle-aged woman had thought about it for a long time before hesitantly saying, “Let me think.”

“No rush,” Ping Yuan had said before hanging up.

Half a day later, Xia Ling sent her a message. Since she wasn’t good at typing, she sent a voice note. Her voice carried a thick Nan County accent, both foreign and hauntingly familiar: “Take care of Xia Chao for me. She’s your sister. She looked after me so much that I’m afraid she blew her entrance exams this year…”

And Ping Yuan had replied with a single word: Fine.

She really did do poorly, Ping Yuan thought now, recalling those abysmal scores. She wanted to laugh. Xia Ling certainly knew her own daughter.

How much must Xia Ling love her? To go through all that trouble to find the eldest daughter she’d abandoned, just so she could provide her favorite with a second mother.

On what grounds? Because she was born later? Or because she wasn’t sick because she wasn’t a burden that would drain the family dry? If she hadn’t been sick, would she be the one in Xia Chao’s position now?

It was so unfair. From the moment she saw Xia Chao; saw her bright eyes and her healthy body, Ping Yuan couldn’t suppress her anger. Not to mention, she remembered she had been abandoned at the hospital in the middle of summer. She hated summer.

But it was fine now. All the cards were on the table. Ping Yuan felt a sudden sense of clarity, as if she had finally smashed that window glass.

Xia Chao remained silent, her fingertips slowly tapping the back of her phone with a soft, rhythmic thud. She was thinking.

Ping Yuan watched her, like a cat that had intentionally shattered a vase, waiting with bated breath to see the owner’s reaction.

Finally, Xia Chao spoke, her words carefully measured. “You’ve misunderstood.”

“I am not Xia Ling’s biological daughter. I had no idea she hadn’t told you.”

“Xia Ling only had one child—you,” she said softly. “I was adopted five years after you went missing. And before that, Xia Ling never stopped searching for you.”

The rhythm of their breathing broke. At that moment, Xia Chao’s breath brushed against Ping Yuan’s face, stirring a stray lock of hair by her ear.

It was Ping Yuan’s turn for her eyes to widen in disbelief.

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