Shen Yelan was being followed.
She'd first noticed it three days ago when a maid she had never seen before started to appear around her a lot. When it wasn't the maid, it was a male servant who would be doing his chores nearby. Even when she left the Shen Estate, she realized that random cars would follow her.
Since discovering she was being watched, Shen Yelan had been forced to stay confined to her room at the estate. She'd even minimized her interactions with Sun Lili to avoid drawing additional suspicion.
But all of this was getting on her nerves.
She looked into it, and before long, she had found out it was Mo Jingrui who was the culprit behind all this.
The moment Shen Yelan learned this, that ridiculous thought from days ago resurfaced in her mind. Immediately afterwards, she gagged. She could not help it. Just the mere thought of Mo Jingrui having any romantic interest made her feel disgusted.
It didn't make logical sense. Objectively speaking, Mo Jingrui was handsome. Extremely so. He was wealthy, powerful, and basically the dream man for half the women in the country.
Shen Yelan had been staring at his recent picture from a business magazine cover on her phone. The man was wearing a tailored, fitted charcoal suit and was casually fixing his cufflinks. His dark hair fell messily over his forehead, casting a shadow over his dark eyes.
Shen Yelan zoomed in on his face, trying to see what other women saw. She stared at those fox-like eyes and his high-bridged nose. For some reason, they looked familiar, though she could not remember from where.
She stared at his face for long minutes when suddenly, a thought hit her so suddenly that had her entire body go rigid. She would always see familiar eyes in the mirror.
"No way..." Shen Yelan murmured to herself.
The next second, she went to her emails and scrolled back for one that was buried deep inside. It was an email she had received three years ago. When she found it, she tapped on the file that was attached to it. It was a DNA report, the same one she had been reading on the flight on the day she was returning to South City.
She went straight to the conclusion at the bottom of the page.
Based on the test result, the probability of paternity is 0%. The alleged father is excluded as the father of the child.
She wasn't surprised by the DNA results themselves. A couple of years ago, she had discreetly done a DNA test with Shen Chengwei and had found out that this body was not biologically related to the Shen family. The only reason she came to the Shen family was for the original Shen Yelan and the promise she had made to her.
But she'd always assumed the biological father was some random man her "mother" had an affair with. She'd never been particularly interested in finding out who he was. But now... if this body was somehow connected to the Mo family...
No. She needed to be sure before jumping to conclusions.
Shen Yelan grabbed her laptop. Her fingers flew across the keys, and soon, a family portrait of the Mo family appeared on her screen.
In the center, an Old couple sat. They were the old patriarch and matriarch of the Mo family. The old couple had two sons, standing on either side of them.
The eldest son was Mo Junming, who was the father of Mo Jingrui. He was standing to the right of the old couple and was dressed in a tailor-fitted suit and had a stern expression on his face as if he had long forgotten how to laugh.
Around Mo Junming stood three younger men who were his sons. The first was Mo Jingrui himself, positioned slightly behind his father's right shoulder. He had a blank expression, and with facial features similar to Mo Juniming, he looked like a younger version of the older man.
The second man was also a familiar face, though Shen Yelan had never met him in person. She'd seen him on television, though. Mo Ruiyang was a famous celebrity whose face covered almost every billboard. He also happened to be the actor who'd played the male lead in that drama she'd been watching with Sun Lili just days ago. In this family photo, he had a playful, almost mischievous smile on his face. He looked nothing like Mo Jingrui, and if it weren't for this picture, she would never have guessed the two were related, let alone brothers.
Mo Haotian was the youngest of Mo Junming's sons and appeared to be the same age as Shen Yelan herself. He shared similar features with both his older brothers. He held a lazy, almost rebellious aura around him.
On the other side of the old couple was a man dressed in a military uniform. This was Mo Yize, who had gone to the military instead of joining their family business like everyone had expected him to do. However, he had gained a strong foothold in the military and was said to be one of the youngest people to reach the rank of general.
Next to him stood his wife, Nie Wantong. She was holding a little girl in her arms who looked to be only a few years old. There were boys standing with them with almost identical faces.
One was Mo Shiyu, who was wearing a casual hoodie and was grinning at the camera. The other was his younger brother, Mo Haoran who was of a similar age to her. He was wearing a leather jacket and was sporting a scowl, like he'd been forced to be there against his will.
Shen Yelan stared at the photo for a long moment and then laughed at herself for having such a ridiculous thought of being related to the Mo family. She looked nothing like any of these people.
But then she realized that there was no female figure on Mo Junming's side.
"Don't tell me..." she murmured.
Again, her fingers started to move on the keyboard. This time, it took her longer than before, but finally, she found a picture. It was a picture of a young couple at some kind of event.
The man was unmistakably Mo Junming, though much younger, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties. He wore a tuxedo and was smiling at the woman with him, unlike the stiff expression he had in the family portrait.
But Shen Yelan's attention wasn't on him. She was staring at the woman standing beside him. For a long moment, she couldn't move.
Because that face was almost identical to hers. If she did not know any better, she would have mistaken she would have thought she was looking at her sister. But this was clearly more than a twenty-year-old picture.
Suddenly, everything was starting to make sense.
So this was the biological mother of this body.
But if her biological mother was this woman in the photo, then who was the woman she'd always thought was her mother?
Until this moment, Shen Yelan had assumed that the woman had gotten pregnant with someone else's child and tricked Shen Chengwei into believing it was his. It had never crossed her mind that the original Shen Yelan wasn't related to either of them.
She would have done a DNA test with that woman as well, just as she had done with Shen Chengwei, but she did not know where that woman was. She was planning to deal with the Shen family first before turning her attention to that woman.
Now, though, this revelation changed everything.
She had to find out how the original Shen Yelan ended up in the Shen family if she wasn't even related to any of these people. And most importantly, was everything that little girl had suffered for nothing? Had she spent her entire life being treated as worthless by people who had no claim to her in the first place?
The more Shen Yelan thought about it, the colder her expression became. In the end, she gave an amused chuckle.
Those who knew her would have realized that she was furious and someone was about to suffer. Unfortunately for the Shen family, they were the ones currently within reach for her to vent her anger. If Shen Chengwei's second wife were here, they might have suffered a little less. But it doesn't matter. That woman would have her turn eventually.