Lin Qiao burst into the bedroom, pepper spray in hand, to find Li Yunzheng flipping through a photo album on her bookshelf.
"Breaking and entering carries a three-year sentence," she activated her phone's voice recorder.
"DNA testing isn't a crime." Without turning, he held up a photo—a young Li Chenzhou with his arm around a woman in a white dress beneath a crabapple tree, the familiar oily sheen of a jade bracelet glinting on her wrist.
Lin Qiao's blood turned to ice. It was the same photo her dying mother had clutched, muttering about "stolen dowry."
"Autumn 1989," Li Yunzheng's finger traced the serial number on the photo's edge. "Your mother was the Li family's private physician."
The refrigerator hummed to life, its cold light illuminating his unbuttoned collar. Below his clavicle, a barcode brand stood out starkly: **MN-07-02**.
"Control group experiment." His smile was bitter. "You were a naturally conceived embryo. I was the cloned counterpart from the same batch."
The pepper spray clattered to the floor. Suddenly she remembered her college genetics textbook—fewer than 50 documented cases of Rh-null blood type worldwide. And yet, both she and this devil before her shared it.