“Yes, I admit that I owe them, and I did benefit as well. But Anzhi Xia, can you really say that you didn't benefit at all?” Shen Hongmei said this not because she actually knew whether Anzhi Xia had benefited, but because it was just her own guess at what was in Anzhi Xia's heart. “Since you were able to help me get rid of that thing called the System, you must know just how incredible its existence was. Can you say for sure that you really eliminated it? Who knows if you didn't just take it from me and use it for yourself?”
When she was little, her wish was simply to be able to eat candy and have her fill of meals. After being bound to the System, her wish was fulfilled, but her family suffered deeply because of it. That was why she felt such panic.
But over the course of it all, her desires grew from merely being well-fed to becoming much grander.
She wanted to leave that village, to have a good job and a stable life, to have talent and accomplishment and the envious gazes of others...
She had gotten all that, but looking back she realized that her road to success had been built by trampling on the shoulders of her loved ones. Because of her alone, many people had sacrificed their health, even their lives.
As someone who still had some moral principles, she felt guilty.
But all people have their weaknesses, and it is easy to go from simple to extravagant but hard to go from extravagant to simple.
Shen Hongmei, who had lost the System, was clearly going through the difficult transition from extravagance to austerity.
She could no longer smoothly sail through life with the System's help, and she could no longer exchange affection points for the resources the System had brought her. This greatly inconvenienced her life, and without the halo around her, she also faced obstacles at every turn in her work.
Anzhi Xia knew full well what benefits she had gotten, but she wasn't foolish enough to tell Shen Hongmei about them.
“I don't know if it defied the heavens or not, but I won't keep something so harmful like you did, and then restrict my own life with it, deeply harming my own loved ones and friends. Perhaps you won't believe me, but can you deny that in all this time you haven't seen a single person around me suffer any effects?”
Shen Hongmei fled in defeat under Anzhi Xia's scornful gaze, even feeling that coming here had been nothing but humiliating herself.
She could not deny one fact: she did not have Anzhi Xia's abilities, nor could she control the System.
All of her success had been bought with the pain and lives of others.
Watching Shen Hongmei's retreating figure, Anzhi Xia let out a helpless sigh.
Perhaps she couldn't be called a good person either, because she knew that if she revealed what she possessed it could bring tremendous good to the world, yet she still refused to expose herself.
But she was willing to offer what little help she could to others, like the deeply harmed Yang Dawei. Although he was still muddleheaded, he had clearly improved a lot with her help over this period of time, and his health had returned to normal. It was just that his mind was still not very clever.
As for the other people harmed by the System and Shen Hongmei, she currently didn't have the ability to contact them, so she also couldn't do anything for them.
If she were to meet them one day, she would also be willing to help those victims to the best of her ability.
After all, Shen Hongmei was right that she had benefited from it.
Anzhi Xia also had her own headaches to deal with, like Fourth Brother's reply letter.
Second Elder Brother and Third Elder Brother's letters said that Fourth Brother had an impatient temper. The family still hadn't dared to tell him about her getting married, and told her to break the news gently when the time came, and to console Fourth Brother as much as possible to prevent him from doing anything rash in the heat of the moment that they couldn't control.
So after careful consideration, she decided to first keep her marriage a secret and send the letter back to An Family, and have them forward it on to Fourth Brother.
That way, when Fourth Brother's letter came, it would also have to pass through An Family's hands, so maybe that could keep it hidden for a bit longer. She also felt quite apologetic to Fourth Brother about this approach.
Anzhi Xia thought that even when she did tell him, she would at least wait until he finished new recruit training and came back before telling him in person, to avoid some uncontrollable factors.
...
The beauty of springtime flowers is soon gone, but the peach blossoms in the mountain temple have just come into bloom.
Although there was no mountain temple here, there were still plenty of peach blossoms.
Several wild peach trees grew along the riverbank, and Anzhi Xia had thought about being able to pick peaches to eat when the time came. But Pei Jing told her those were wild peach trees, so the peaches were small and fuzzy. They would be picked clean by children before they were even ripe.
She calculated her expected due date—she had gotten pregnant at last year's Mid-Autumn Festival, so her due date should be sometime in early May.
But her belly was very big, and there was no hospital to get checked at in the small town.
Sister-in-law Fengxia urged her not to eat too much, so as not to make the birth difficult. Anzhi Xia knew her own appetite really wasn't that big, and in her later trimester she was eating the pregnancy nutrition meals tailored for her by Divine Doctor Sister.
As for Pei Jing's side, she just gave some vague response about having eaten already or that she'd eat later when the time came. Anyway he was often not there, and coupled with her visibly large belly, he wouldn't insist that she eat more.
Thinking back to the pregnancy dream she'd had, plus Grandma's and Zhou Nuan's experiences having twins, she also had a premonition.
At night in April, the weather had already become hot.
The husband and wife lay in bed, Anzhi Xia on her back with her bulging belly exposed while Pei Jing looked at it with a smile, intently watching as small bulges would push up here and there.
Whenever that happened, Anzhi Xia felt an itchiness in her belly that she desperately wanted to scratch but couldn't reach. Both itchy and helpless.
After lying on her back for a while she became uncomfortable. She used one hand to prop up her belly, wanting to roll onto her side. Pei Jing hurriedly helped her.
The two of them hadn't been intimate as husband and wife for a long time now. For Pei Jing who had tasted but not yet had his fill, this clearly required a great deal of self-control.
But Anzhi Xia's pregnancy was arduous, especially recently with her inability to fall asleep at night and increasingly frequent trips to the bathroom. Seeing her like this pained him greatly, and he wished he could take on her suffering himself, yet he was helpless to do so. He could only be more attentive, and make her as comfortable as possible in other regards.
Perhaps it was the abrupt shift onto her side, but the child(ren) in her belly also seemed uncomfortable with the change. It felt like something scraped around inside her belly, an itchiness that made her want to smack her stomach to relieve it.
“Do you have time recently?” Anzhi Xia asked him. “I want to go to the hospital in the city to get checked out. I keep feeling like there's more than one in here.”
Not having done any prenatal exams since becoming pregnant was the norm for most people. Generally there were no issues, so no one would go to the trouble of running to a hospital.
And if it really was twins like she guessed, her due date would probably need to be moved up earlier, so they had to prepare well in advance.
