"Qin Jiao, how could you do something so disgraceful? If this gets out, how can I continue being a teacher! Do you have any idea what a terrible impact this will have on the school's reputation! I knew I shouldn't have brought you to the math competition!"
"And what am I supposed to tell Shen Yi's parents!"
"A grown girl like you, with no sense of propriety, trying to seduce someone. You're shameless!"
Li Mei's throat was dry from her tirade. She grabbed a nearby mug and chugged some cold water, then glared furiously at the two students standing against the wall.
To be precise, she was glaring only at Qin Jiao.
Shen Yi's family was wealthy, so Li Mei didn't dare glare at him, let alone scold him.
After the incident, she had pushed all the blame onto Qin Jiao.
The lightbulb in the guesthouse room cast a dim glow. It swayed when the wind blew, casting mottled shadows on everyone's faces, like something out of an old film.
Watching Li Mei's impassioned speech, her mouth opening and closing as she recited the exact same lines from her previous life, Qin Jiao felt as if her past life had been nothing but a dream.
She had been on her way to divorce Shen Yi when she got into a sudden car accident. When she opened her eyes again, she was back at the age of eighteen.
'The turning point of my life!'
Qin Jiao had come to the provincial capital with her teacher and classmates for a math competition. After the exam, she had inexplicably fallen asleep. When she woke up, Shen Yi was lying beside her, and then her teacher, Li Mei, burst in with a group of students.
Because of this incident, Qin Jiao was forced to drop out of school and became the laughingstock of her entire village. Her parents, so ashamed they couldn't hold their heads high, left to find work in other cities. They were deeply depressed, and it wasn't long before they both fell ill.
Her younger sister, Qin Shi, was too afraid to go to school because of the scandal and stayed home. Later, she went to work in another city with some others from their village and was trafficked.
But that wasn't all. Shen Yi had a violent temper and was paranoid, and this whole fiasco only worsened his condition. Later, the Shen Family came and forced Qin Jiao to marry Shen Yi.
At the time, Qin Jiao had no choice. With her back against the wall, she had to marry him.
But she never expected that it would be the beginning of another miserable chapter of her life.
Shen Yi already had a bad temper, and he believed Qin Jiao had plotted against him back then. So, the two of them began to torture each other...
Only after dying once did Qin Jiao realize the truth: all her misfortunes had happened because she was merely a character in a period novel, her life ruined by the schemes of a transmigrator named Lin Nian.
Pulling herself back from her thoughts, Qin Jiao glanced at the tall, silent young man beside her. This was the eighteen-year-old Shen Yi.
The young man was already almost six feet tall, but rail-thin, with an almost sickly pale complexion. His bangs were a little long, obscuring eyes as deep as dark pools and making him appear all the more sullen.
As a teenager, Shen Yi's temper was even worse, his personality erratic. If anything didn't go his way, he'd want to destroy everything.
Qin Jiao was puzzled. 'Li Mei has been yelling for ages, so why hasn't Shen Yi said a word?'
'This is so unlike his explosive personality.'
'Thinking back on the dozen-plus bleak years of my marriage in my last life,' Qin Jiao sighed internally. 'If only I'd been reborn one day sooner. Then I wouldn't have been caught up in this massive scandal with Shen Yi! But still... that doesn't give Li Mei the right to humiliate me like she did last time!'
"Qin Jiao! Are you even listening to me?! How dare you zone out at a time like this?!" Li Mei was furious. The more she looked at Qin Jiao, the more she disliked her.
Qin Jiao lifted her dark eyes and said calmly, "Do you have any proof that I did this? And you call yourself a teacher, throwing around words like 'seduce' and 'shameless.' For that alone, I could report you to the Public Security Bureau for slander!"
Li Mei was stunned.
Then she remembered she was the teacher. 'Why should I be afraid of a student?'
Li Mei sneered, "Report me for what? You did something disgraceful, and now you won't let people talk about it? I know your type. You saw that Shen Yi's family is rich and thought if you slept with him, you wouldn't have to take the college entrance exams or find a job. I've seen plenty of shameless little girls like you!"
"Nothing happened between Shen Yi and me. Someone framed us. When you all came in, our clothes were still on."
"More like you didn't have time to take them off yet."
Qin Jiao's eyes darkened.
'Is that something a teacher should say?!'
Just then, Shen Yi, who had been silent the entire time, suddenly spoke, his voice cold.
"Done talking? Then get out."
Li Mei, who had just taken a sip of water, nearly choked.