My husband and I had been married for years without a child.

To keep the family harmonious, I gave in to my mother-in-law. I paid a staggering 100,000 yuan to a distant cousin to bear a child for my husband.

After the baby was born, I raised him as my own flesh and blood.

Never in my wildest dreams did I expect my heartless husband to have an affair with that cousin. What’s worse, he brought her into our home, brazenly seizing my house and all my assets.

When I found out the truth, they threw me out onto the street. The three of them lived happily ever after, cozy and content as a family.

Homeless and destitute, I was eventually assaulted and killed by a vagrant.

Now I’m given a second chance. I’ve returned to the very day I agreed to hand over the money.

……

I died on the coldest day of the bitter winter month.

The vagrant straddling me, raining blows and kicks down on my body, was the last thing I saw in this world.

I gasped for air, my vision blurring—until the familiar sight of my home came into focus. The stench of the vagrant still lingered in my nose, the slimy feel of his foul tongue slithering across my neck refusing to fade away.

I shuddered violently and pinched my thigh hard. The sharp, piercing pain grounded me, making my racing heart finally settle.

I… I’ve been reborn?

My mother-in-law Liu Guifen’s voice cut through my daze.

“Xiaohui! What’s wrong with you? Are you even listening to me?”

I followed the sound of her voice, my eyes locking onto her dry, chapped lips. I snapped back to my senses, dazed and confused. “Huh?”

Liu Guifen gritted her teeth, forcing patience as she repeated herself. “Zhaoxing is already in his mid-thirties, and I’m getting on in years. Sigh… Watching my old sisters dote on their grandchildren, my heart aches with longing to hold my own grandson in my arms…”

She reached out and took my hand. “Xiaohui, it’s not your fault you can’t have children. Mom doesn’t blame you.” But her tone and expression couldn’t have been more contradictory. She wore a self-pitying look as she sighed. “I wonder if this old woman will ever live to see a grandson born into this family.”

Liu Guifen pressed on. “Sigh, finding a surrogate isn’t such a big deal. They said it’ll cost just this amount—”

She crossed two index fingers to form the number ten. “You’ll skip the pain of childbirth, and our family will gain a child. It’s a win-win situation, isn’t it?”

Hearing those all-too-familiar words, I realized with a jolt—I’d gone back to the day my mother-in-law first hinted at asking me to pay for a surrogate to bear a child for my husband.

In my past life, I’d felt deep guilt for failing to conceive a child with Qi Zhaoxing after ten years of marriage. My mother-in-law had never hidden her dissatisfaction, constantly throwing veiled insults at me. My husband, too, had been desperate to have a baby.

No matter how hard we tried, I never got pregnant. The constant pressure from my mother-in-law and husband wore me down, weighing heavily on my mind.

Then Liu Guifen had gotten wind of something—she’d heard that wealthy couples, where the wife didn’t want to endure childbirth, would pay young women to bear a child for the husband and then raise the baby as their own. She’d brought it up to me, even bluntly saying that even if I *wanted* to suffer through pregnancy, I didn’t have the luck to do so. But at the end of the day, the reason didn’t matter—only the result did. If I couldn’t have a child, I could always pay someone else to do it for me.

Stressed beyond belief, my mind had been in a fog. I’d also been desperate to have a child, hoping it would save me from the endless gossip and cold stares, and rescue our crumbling marriage. So when my mother-in-law dropped her hints, I’d agreed without hesitation. I’d even pulled 100,000 yuan out of my own pocket and handed it to her.

My mother-in-law’s relative had introduced a girl—said to be the daughter of a friend of a distant relative of hers. By some convoluted, tenuous family connection, this woman was supposed to call my husband “cousin.” Plagued by family poverty, she’d been willing to act as a surrogate for the money.