On the Day I Reunited with My Family, I Heard Everyone's Inner Thoughts: They're All Villains

At seventeen, Liu Ruyan was welcomed into the Liu family. A mansion, luxury cars, her biological parents, and a younger sister who seemed more like a true heiress than she did.

On the day they reunited, she heard everyone's thoughts.

Her father: [The girl we raised elsewhere. Let's see if she can be useful.] Her mother: [Those hands are too rough even for serving tea.] Her sister: [If she stays, there'll be no place for me.]

She didn't cry or make a scene. She simply memorized every word, as if entering it in a ledger.

Later, she realized that thoughts weren't meant to be listened to, but calculated. Who was afraid, who was scheming, who spoke cruelly but felt guilty inside: every word was data she could verify.

The Liu family gave her three rules. She set one for herself: she would survive without relying on them.

From a thirty-square-meter workshop to a small production line turning out four designs a season; from paper cards that cost two mao apiece to a coat that could last ten years and be altered ten times. She measured her customers' shoulders, and at last measured herself, too. For the first time, she wrote herself into the ledger.

Liu Yurou, the younger sister the Liu family had raised for eighteen years, had taken her room, her parents, and her name. Later, that woman stood at the entrance to her own shop and signed her name, stroke by stroke.

And there was a man standing beyond the crowd. She couldn't hear his thoughts. He wasn't a bad person; he simply didn't know how to speak.

Someone asked whether she hated them. She said, "Hate takes effort. I need to save mine for making clothes."

This is a story about "hearing," and also a story about "not needing to look back."