My boyfriend is a bit of a criminal, what should I do? Urgent!

When Yu Ning heard this, her heart felt as if it had been pinched.

“You spent time with me in life B, why did I commit suicide that time?”

Jin Miao took several gulps of her coffee, seemingly trying to suppress her emotions. “It should have been related to Ling Wangjin.”

Yu Ning followed her description of Ling Wangjin and thought of a possibility. “Did he induce me to commit suicide?”

Unexpectedly, the moment the words left her mouth, Jin Miao looked quite startled.

“Does he… show signs of that with you now? No wonder there were posts about this online.”

Yu Ning waved her hands repeatedly. “I wanted to ask if there were any official authoritative reports from the police regarding those two rebirths of yours.”

Especially in life A; according to Jin Miao, he had killed twenty-six people. In today’s society, to be able to kill so many people, it must have been an extremely heinous criminal case. The police would certainly have followed up with detailed investigations.

Jin Miao shrank her head back, her voice growing weaker. “Life A? That case made quite a stir at the time, and everyone was very curious… The police took a long time to investigate, so I just wanted to go to the crime scene myself to take a look… and then I fell into a ventilation shaft.”

Yu Ning felt her temples throbbing. She couldn’t help but ask, “Why would you go to a place like that?”

“To make money,” Jin Miao said without thinking. “When the news about Ling Wangjin broke, many people ran over to livestream it. I was just one of them… I was just unlucky. I shouldn’t have been looking at my phone while walking instead of watching the road.”

Yu Ning: ”…What about life B?”

Jin Miao: “I didn’t get the chance…”

Yu Ning: “You even called the police to stop me from being with him, how could you not have had the chance?”

“Because I was in pain.” Jin Miao picked up her coffee cup as if she were guzzling a bottle of liquor and drained it in one go. “At the time, I was reborn just thinking that saving one person was better than none. I tried every possible way to pull you out of that fire pit, but I didn’t expect… that after you returned to your parents, your mental state was actually less stable than when you were by his side.”

On this point, Yu Ning agreed with her assessment.

Regardless of what intentions Ling Wangjin truly held, he had indeed provided her with a stable and gentle mental space.

Although she still felt restless occasionally, she no longer felt that sense of suffocation she had experienced while living with her parents.

Jin Miao: “Sometimes I wonder if I was wrong.”

Yu Ning: “Perhaps. At this stage, I feel quite good staying by his side.”

Jin Miao buried her hands in her hair, her whole body hunching over. “It seems Dr. Wang Meiru was right. You didn’t head toward a dead end because of him; rather, he was the one who kept you from heading toward a dead end.”

Dr. Wang Meiru?

Yu Ning had heard the name vaguely. She recalled hearing it from her parents during their arguments and mutual recriminations, where they mentioned that this doctor was very famous and that her appointments were hard to book.

She hadn’t expected such a rarely seen, well-known figure to appear before her in this manner.

Yu Ning: “How did Dr. Wang Meiru analyze him?”

“She didn’t analyze Ling Wangjin.” Jin Miao looked up from her hands. “She analyzed you.”

Yu Ning was surprised. “Me? Tell me the cause and effect in detail.”

“I only saw her Weibo analysis after it hit the trending topics.” Jin Miao recalled as she spoke. “She was scolded quite severely.”

“Scolded?” In Yu Ning’s impression, Dr. Wang Meiru was a highly respected figure. “Why?”

“What she wrote was quite different from what many people online were discussing at the time.” Jin Miao paused for a few seconds every few words, as if thinking, speaking hesitantly.

Yu Ning urged her: “What did she say?”

Jin Miao cleared her throat. “I am recounting Dr. Wang Meiru’s Weibo based on my memory now. Try to control your emotions.”

“Although many media outlets describe Yu Ning’s experience, saying she fell into such a situation because she was helping Ling Wangjin, and describing her as full of justice and a spirit of sacrifice, I have further analyzed this through the descriptions of her relatives… Personally, I believe her psychology is very fragile, and in some aspects, even a bit self-centered.”

My psychology is fragile? Self-centered? Yu Ning was a bit surprised, but seeing that Jin Miao was still talking, she didn’t interrupt.

“During this time, I visited Yu Ning’s parents and discovered that there are problems in this family. The values they imparted to their daughter were too ‘correct’—for example, that she could never lie. They asked me why Yu Ning’s mental state became so terrible after she started working.”

That was true. Yu Ning remembered how she felt at the time; it was as if she were drowning in water. They were all the same people, saying the same things, so why was it so different?

“They shaped a world without lies, only right and wrong. Thus, when Yu Ning suddenly entered the gray society, she couldn’t lie, didn’t know how to use social pleasantries, and didn’t understand what her colleagues were truly trying to express.”

At the time, she had struggled desperately as if drowning, learning to do those things and say those words, but she didn’t know why her heart felt like it was holding back a breath.

“I don’t understand why they were so afraid of Yu Ning coming into contact with the bad side of society, but it must have been this control and repression that led Yu Ning to end up with someone like Ling Wangjin… However, I personally do not agree with the popular opinions circulating online.”

“I summarized some materials and visited people who were close to Yu Ning and Ling Wangjin at the time. They unanimously said that Ling Wangjin accommodated Yu Ning a lot, almost to an bottomless degree… Perhaps in this relationship, the person who truly held the dominant position was Yu Ning?”

“I don’t agree with this part of Dr. Wang Meiru’s view, which is also why many netizens scolded her.” Jin Miao interrupted her narrative. “Based on our chats online and what I saw in life B, I don’t feel that you were the one in control.”

Yu Ning didn’t discuss the issue of dominance with her. “Is there more?”

Jin Miao: “There shouldn’t be. Dr. Wang Meiru spoke quite professionally, and I didn’t remember some of the technical terms.”

“What about life C?” Yu Ning noticed she had only mentioned A and B.

“Life C is the life we are in right now.” Jin Miao pointed downward.

Yu Ning: “What conditions do you need to be reborn?”

“It should be jumping into that ventilation shaft, right?”

“Jumping?” Yu Ning noticed the word she used.

“Yeah, the second rebirth was me jumping into the ventilation shaft.”

“Why?” Yu Ning was completely bewildered. “What prompted you to jump into the ventilation shaft for the second rebirth?”

“Because I had to be reborn.” Jin Miao answered without thinking. “In life B, I was really miserable…”

She sniffled.

“After you died, there was no news about the murders, and the building hadn’t burned down, so I felt very guilty and also a bit curious… I followed him and ended up in a warehouse full of flour…”

She spoke faster and faster, her hands messing up her hair. She covered her face with both hands, bending over and then straightening up, letting out a trembling sob.

As if opening the floodgates of her emotions, she became increasingly agitated, her whole body shaking.

“I was terrified at the time. I thought he was going to kill me, but… but… he threw away the lighter himself, and then slit his throat in front of me…”

“Later, the police told me he had already killed three people, all related to you… At that time, he actually wanted to kill me.” Jin Miao paused for a few seconds, then murmured repeatedly, “But why didn’t he kill me? Why didn’t he kill me?”

Yu Ning was shocked by her reaction. “Are you okay…”

Jin Miao looked up at the sound, tears streaming down her face. When she spoke of this, her voice was still nasal, and she spoke aggrievedly.

“How could I be okay? During that time, I couldn’t sleep at all at night. Every night, I would loop the scene of him before he died, listening to him say it over and over… keep saying it… keep saying it…”

As she spoke, she gestured, raising her hand and slowly sliding it across her own throat. Her palms were clenched tight, the veins on the back of her hands bulging, as if she were slitting her own throat.

“Take me to see Ningning.”

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