After He Hong left, her mother—who walked with a slight limp—shut the courtyard gate and carried out a small wooden stool. She sat in the yard, counting aloud as she helped the girl keep track of her jump-rope practice.

“Auntie, helping Xiaoxi with her jump rope?” Xiao Liang crossed the road and greeted her through the iron gate as if they were old acquaintances. He leaned forward and glanced into the yard. “Sister He Hong isn’t home?”

He Hong’s mother was an honest, quiet woman, not good with words. She studied Xiao Liang carefully several times but still couldn’t place him.

Even so, his familiar tone threw her off. Embarrassed to admit she didn’t recognize him, she simply replied vaguely, “He Hong just went back to Yun Society. Had something to take care of.”

“It’s already this late and she’s still heading back?” Xiao Liang said, pulling open the pack of Hongmei cigarettes he had just bought and lighting one by the gate. “I heard the Nanting Lake Juice Factory’s been doing pretty well these past couple of years. Sounds like the rumors are true.”

As he spoke, he noticed the look in Lin Xi’s eyes. For a girl her age, it carried an unusual mixture of vigilance and distrust toward strangers.

Xiao Liang smiled at her. “Your mom told me you’ve been practicing jump rope for almost a year now, but you still can’t manage forty jumps a minute. At this rate, you’re probably going to fail your PE exam again at the end of the semester.”

Lin Xi pursed her lips and fell silent, clearly discouraged.

He Hong herself jumped rope beautifully—light and graceful—but when she tried to teach her daughter, all she ever did was urge her to go faster.

Xiao Liang had heard her mention the problem before. Watching from outside the gate for a moment, he immediately spotted the issue.

Simply put, He Hong didn’t know how to teach.

Lin Xi had developed earlier than most girls her age. When she jumped rope, she habitually hunched her shoulders and bent forward. The faster she tried to go, the clumsier her feet became. Often the rope snagged after only a few swings—or even right at the start—breaking her rhythm over and over. Under those conditions, there was no way she could improve.

While chatting casually with He Hong’s mother about small-town gossip, Xiao Liang began giving Lin Xi some pointers. He told her to slow down first, focus on keeping the rope passing smoothly under her feet without interruption, and demonstrated several times by taking the rope himself.

Once she understood the method, Lin Xi’s improvement was immediate. Within less than half an hour, her jump-rope count had risen dramatically. The progress was almost astonishing.

Xiao Liang took out another cigarette and placed it between his lips. Seemingly absent-mindedly, he shook out the matchbox, letting He Hong’s mother see that only two matches remained. He struck them several times in a row, but neither caught fire.

Lin Xi had always been clumsy with jump rope, but after Xiao Liang’s guidance she improved visibly in just twenty minutes. Her grandmother’s impression of the young man had turned very favorable.

“Might want to smoke less,” she muttered, but still went inside to fetch another box of matches.

Xiao Liang held the cigarette in his hand and looked at the girl’s bright, star-clear eyes.

“The town government is secretly investigating the director of the juice factory where your mother works—Xiao Yujun. I’m the one in charge,” he said quietly. “Xiaoxi, you know he’s not a good man, right? Has he ever bullied you?”

The girl’s gaze flickered with sudden alarm. A moment later she hesitated, then shook her head.

Of course, Xiao Liang hadn’t expected to get any real answers from such a brief moment alone.

When He Hong’s mother returned with the matches, Xiao Liang made a quick gesture to Lin Xi to keep quiet. He accepted the matchbox, lit his cigarette, and silently pondered what might be hidden behind the girl’s unnatural reaction.

—

Back at the inn, Xiao Liang slept poorly that night.

Again and again in his dreams, Lin Xi’s pure, unblemished face from seven or eight years later appeared before him—only to transform into the flushed, beautiful face of He Hong from the moment he had awakened drunk, when she had been straddling him.

The dreams left him wide awake.

He lay there staring at the dark violet sky beyond the window.

He had been framed.

Xiao Yujun was the mastermind behind it, while He Hong had been the most direct instigator.

By 1994, Xiao Yujun had already bribed quite a few officials in Yun Society Town and even across Shishan County. They helped him siphon off collective assets, establish new factories, and secure construction contracts. But among those directly involved in framing Xiao Liang, he could only confirm two people for now: Chen Shen, the town police station chief, and Du Xuebing, the head of the economic management office who had forced him to stay and drink that night.

But the world had never been a place where villains inevitably received punishment.

In his early years, Xiao Yujun had made his reputation through violence and swagger in Yun Society. Chen Shen and others had once called him brother. Later, with the backing of several key town leaders, he became the Party secretary of Nanting Village. Even before 1994, he had already hollowed out the once-prosperous Nanting Lake Juice Factory.

When Xiao Liang returned to Yun Society after being acquitted in his previous life, Xiao Yujun had already manipulated the factory’s restructuring and turned it into his private property.

But having grown accustomed to crooked paths, Xiao Yujun never intended to develop the factory properly. Instead, he squeezed every last drop of value from it, leaving Nanting Village and Yun Society Town buried in debt.

None of that stopped his personal fortune from skyrocketing.

He continued bribing and cultivating higher-level officials in the county and the city. During the coming wave of state-owned enterprise reforms, he would swallow up enormous amounts of public assets. Eventually he monopolized Shishan’s building materials market through both legal and illegal means, raking in huge profits from municipal construction projects. He expanded recklessly into mining and real estate development, amassing enormous illicit wealth.

Throughout the process, Xiao Yujun inflicted serious damage on the economic development of Shishan County and Dongzhou City.

His mining operations ravaged the environment. His construction companies produced countless shoddy buildings that collapsed like tofu dregs. The resulting financial losses and wasted funds were incalculable, leaving thousands of residents with no place to seek justice.

And yet his personal wealth only grew faster.

Before the year 2000 he already claimed assets exceeding one hundred million yuan. By 2012 or 2013, he even appeared on the famous Hurun Rich List.

The officials who had colluded with him advanced smoothly through their political careers.

Chen Shen, currently just the chief of the town police station, would retire in 2017 as a deputy director of the Dongzhou Public Security Bureau.

Du Xuebing, the head of the town’s economic management office, would climb all the way to vice county magistrate of Shishan. In 2007 he would be jailed for bribery and corruption—but after serving only three years, he obtained medical parole and reemerged as a highly paid senior vice president of the Xiao Group.

As for Xiao Yujun, although He Hong’s husband Lin Xuetong attacked him with a knife in late 1995 and injured him, his twisted habits never changed. Over a decade later he was even accused of abusing minors.

But by then Xiao Yujun had become too powerful.

The Xiao Group’s assets exceeded tens of billions. His protection network in Dongzhou was so dense that no one could touch him.

In his previous life, Xiao Liang had never accepted the injustice of being framed. He tried tirelessly to gather evidence against them, hoping to clear his name. But alone and powerless, he had never managed to bring Xiao Yujun or his accomplices to justice.

After Lin Xuetong’s attack in 1995, He Hong finally broke away from Xiao Yujun. Before leaving Dongzhou with her daughter Lin Xi, she came to see Xiao Liang and begged his forgiveness for the role she had played in framing him.

But how could he forgive her then?

He remembered the night clearly. Rain poured down in sheets. In a fit of rage, he smashed an ashtray across He Hong’s face. For a moment he completely lost control, tearing open her clothes, wanting to unleash years of suppressed desire and hatred upon her flawless body—to avenge the injustice he had endured.

In the end, reason prevailed.

Instead, he pushed her away. She clung to him trembling, but he forced her out the door and shoved her into the pouring rain.

After that, He Hong left only a letter behind before disappearing from Yun Society.

Xiao Liang didn’t learn what had become of her until 2001, when he accidentally ran into Lin Xi on the campus of the Provincial University of Finance and Economics. Only then did he discover that after leaving Dongzhou, He Hong had moved to the provincial capital with her mother and daughter and opened a small restaurant. Lin Xuetong, meanwhile, had died in prison in 1996.

In his previous life, Xiao Liang had deliberately approached Lin Xi—but ultimately he couldn’t cross the moral line in his heart and chose to leave her.

Even so, he continued to keep track of He Hong from afar.

The scar on her forehead never ruined her beauty. Her skin remained fair, her features delicate. Even in her forties and fifties she retained the light, youthful figure of a young girl. Numerous successful men in their fifties pursued her, yet she remained single.

If Xiao Liang’s feelings toward He Hong had become complicated because of Lin Xi, then his hatred for Xiao Yujun was something closer to bone-deep.

Now that he had been reborn before 1994, besides clearing his name, the one thing he most desperately wanted was to send Xiao Yujun—the man who had orchestrated his downfall—straight to prison.

That was the only way he could truly reclaim his innocence.

But Xiao Liang understood clearly that to achieve this, he first had to obtain evidence of Xiao Yujun and his associates embezzling collective assets from the Nanting Lake Juice Factory.

Such evidence would not only weaken the accusations against him, it would drag Xiao Yujun directly into a corruption investigation—and perhaps even secure his conviction.

Of course, Xiao Liang also knew that simply obtaining evidence wasn’t enough.

In the 1990s, the phrase *“Who dares accuse this official in my court?”* wasn’t just a joke.

If he naively handed the evidence to departments in Shishan County or Dongzhou City, the most likely outcome was that the materials would be forwarded layer by layer—until eventually they landed right back in Yun Society Town, where the local authorities would be tasked with investigating themselves.

That would be the official process.

Unofficially, the documents might “accidentally” disappear somewhere along the chain. Or someone bribed along the way might simply toss them into a mountain of scrap paper, where they would be forgotten forever.

The only real solution was to place the evidence directly into the hands of someone powerful enough to act on it.

His father, implicated by the Chen Fushan case involving the former city party secretary, had become someone people avoided in Dongzhou. He no longer had the influence to help much.

Should Xiao Liang contact the Provincial No. 14 Retired Cadre Residence directly?

At the moment he didn’t even know whether the old man he had rescued—now presumably in the hospital—had taken the initiative to learn about the suspect who fled the crash scene.

Or perhaps he could expose Xiao Yujun’s harassment of Lin Xi and other minors right now?

But after last night’s brief interaction with Lin Xi—and after carefully reviewing everything that had happened to He Hong, Lin Xuetong, and Lin Xi in his previous life—Xiao Liang suspected that although Xiao Yujun had already set his sights on Lin Xi and might have crossed certain lines, the situation probably hadn’t escalated to outright abuse yet.

Otherwise, He Hong would have already left Xiao Yujun entirely.

Instead of merely staying cautious and sending her daughter to spend every night at her mother’s house after school.