After Shen Yi fell into a deep sleep from exhaustion, the moment she opened her eyes, she found herself transported—again.
The location was all too familiar.
An orphanage.
She curled up in a corner, her chin resting on her knees, watching the snow fall outside the window, flake by flake.
There was no heating here; a thin layer of frost clung to the glass.
Her hunger had long since passed the point of aching; her stomach felt hollow and empty.
Shen Yi touched the small black box hanging around her neck. The cool metal pressed against her collarbone. It was something Shen Sixing had given her. Everything she had brought with her was still there.
"System," she asked, "for this time-travel trip of mine, am I punished with a physical body transfer or just a soul transfer?"
She looked down at her hands.
They were small, her knuckles still carrying a bit of baby fat. Her nails were trimmed unevenly, and on the base of her thumb was a faint old scar.
Her current body was clearly that of a child, around seven or eight years old.
And what about the other version of herself?
Had she just vanished in front of Shen Wenta?
The system's voice echoed in her mind: 【You can think of it as me slicing you apart.】
【The fifteen-year-old you is still asleep over there. It’s the eight-year-old you who’s been tossed over here.】
Oh.
So she had been split up.
Shen Yi thought for a moment. "Then what’s the other me doing over there? Just sleeping?"
【The system will handle it. Time flows differently there compared to here. By the time you return, maybe only a few hours will have passed. Don’t worry—Shen Wenta won’t notice.】
Shen Yi didn’t ask anymore.
She stood up, brushed the dust off her gray cotton jacket, walked to the window, breathed a warm puff of air onto the glass, and drew a crooked circle with her finger.
Outside, the snow was still falling. The orphanage yard wasn’t large; the withered lawn was buried under snow. A few children were running around, their noisy, boisterous voices filtering through the glass.
She had been in this world for three days now.
When she first arrived, she had landed in a shabby room, the air thick with the smell of old cotton wadding.
The orphanage director was a plump, middle-aged woman.
When she saw Shen Yi, a flicker of confusion crossed her face at first, but then it vanished, replaced by an air of natural familiarity.
"Oh, Shen Yi, you’re up early today," she said, as if Shen Yi had been living there for a long time.
Shen Yi stood by the bed at that moment, watching the director’s expression shift, and felt a chill run down her spine.
Did she know this director?
The system said: 【I can help by tweaking their memories, making the director accept your existence. Otherwise, you’re only eight, you know. It’d be really hard to survive alone in this world.】
There was so little a young child could do.
Shen Yi understood that.
So, was this the past or the future?
She pondered the question and finally decided to ask one of the kids nearby.
Soon, from their casual chatter, she found the answer.
This was the past.
"And if I made some changes," Shen Yi thought to the system, "like making sure someone never encountered a certain event—what would happen?"
The system replied: 【Causality mends itself. The world’s consciousness won’t allow major deviations.】
【You can tweak things at the edges, but at key turning points, you’ll find that you inevitably miss the mark, fail, or are swept away by coincidences.】
【It’s like water meeting a rock—it flows around it, but in the end, it still joins the original river.】
Shen Yi understood.
She was now a little fish swimming in a river whose course was already set. She could stir up a few ripples, but she couldn’t change the direction of the flow.
Life at the orphanage was dull.
It was far calmer than Shen Yi had imagined.
There were none of the bullying or abuse she had seen on TV. At most, children argued over a cookie or whined to the caretakers for a toy.
There were too many displaced children. Some had been abandoned because their families couldn’t afford to keep them; others had lost their parents to accidents. A few had no clear origin at all—just dumped at the doorstep, wrapped in a tattered blanket.
The world was a chaotic place.
The rich hid safely behind walls, while those outside them were left to die.
The orphanage’s heating relied on coal, and it was unreliable at best. During the coldest days of winter, the children huddled together in bed, shivering under their thin blankets.
Even if Shen Yi was physically tough despite her small size, and even if the cold didn’t prevent her from staying lively, the other children weren’t the same. Some fell ill, their coughs echoing through the night.
This place was pure agony.
When Shen Yi had been in an orphanage as a child, the conditions had never been this terrible.
In winter, every child longed to be taken away, to live even slightly better lives.
The children waited an entire month before the first batch of adoptive parents arrived.
That day, the sunlight was bright. The director gathered the children in the activity room, lined them up, and made them wear their cleanest clothes.
Shen Yi stood slightly behind the middle of the line, a red string tied in her hair by the director.
She was the most striking among the children.
The couple who came were well-off, so the director wanted to place Shen Yi with them first. With deliberate intent, she nudged Shen Yi forward.
The couple—a tall, thin man and a short, plump woman—scanned the children one by one, occasionally leaning in to whisper to each other.
Shen Yi watched them and instinctively took two steps back.
A primal resistance stirred within her.
She stared at them expressionlessly. Compared to the children who were eager to show off or those who were shy, she came across as oddly unlikable.
No normal person would pick a child with such a strange demeanor.
Yet the couple’s gaze lingered on her.
The woman approached, crouched down, and touched Shen Yi’s hair. “How old is this child?”
The director quickly gave her age and added a few compliments, saying Shen Yi was “very well-behaved” and “rarely cries.”
Throughout it all, Shen Yi stood silently, her eyes hollow, neither smiling nor shrinking away.
She could sense something off about this couple.
The man’s knuckles were thick, and his thumb had calluses. The woman’s perfume was strong, but when she bent down, Shen Yi caught a faint trace of an iron-like smell at the collar of her shirt.
There were many dangerous people in this world, but to have such bad luck land on her was still rare.
“It’s good for a child to be quiet,” the woman said, satisfied with Shen Yi’s gloominess. “We’ll take her.”
Shen Yi, of course, didn’t want this.
Her problem now wasn’t about finding her father or mother. In their younger days, Shen Sixing and Wen Ya were far from good people, and falling into their hands probably wouldn’t end well.
Her best plan was to lay low, wait for the punishment period to end, and then go home.
Going with this couple was clearly not going to lead to anything good.
But she had no choice.
Having an orphanage child adopted was a joyful event, and the director was only too happy to free up an extra bed.
An eight-year-old had no right to choose.
Whose hands she fell into was simply her fate.
By evening, Shen Yi was taken away.
Before she left, she looked back at the orphanage’s courtyard. The withered tree was still there, the snow already melted, revealing the damp, muddy ground beneath.
A few children pressed against the window, watching her, their eyes filled with an unnameable, unreadable envy.
Shen Yi let out a silent sigh.
I’m screwed.
She followed the couple limply to the car.
What were her foster parents’ surnames, anyway?
Shen Yi thought for a moment. She couldn’t remember.
She didn’t care, either.
They moved into a shabby rental apartment. It was supposed to be rented, but Shen Yi pieced together from their occasional conversations that the place was arranged by some superior of theirs—they couldn’t stay long and would have to relocate at any moment.
The apartment had only two rooms.
Shen Yi was young, so she slept on a folding bed in the living room, the blanket as thin as paper, the cold at night seeping into the marrow of her bones.
Her foster parents never bothered to talk in private around her.
Maybe they thought a child wouldn’t understand, or maybe they simply didn’t care whether she knew.
Sometimes Shen Yi sat in the corner, listening to them arguing in hushed voices.
“This job is a bust.”
“Then what do we do? Their people are looking for us.”
“We need to move again.”
The woman couldn’t control her agitation. “They’ll kill us! We destroyed their arsenal.”
From those fragments, Shen Yi pieced together a rough outline: these two were low-level operatives in some organization. They took on jobs they shouldn’t have, and now the other group was hunting them down.
The woman had a vicious temper. Whenever something displeased her, she would smash things.
Once, when the man came home late, she shattered a pile of bowls, shards of glass scattering to Shen Yi’s feet. Shen Yi didn’t move, didn’t cry out—she just sat there, quiet and still.
The woman glanced at her and suddenly said, “This kid might as well be mute.”
Shen Yi met her gaze calmly.
“Doesn’t look smart,” the man sneered. “After we settle this mess, we’ll sell her off.”
