Initially, she wanted to frame the team leader because the team leader was responsible for the schedule of the car with the rats. However, Mu Jingzhe caught the vice team leader as quickly as possible.

  “What right do you have to arrest me? I didn’t do anything!” The vice team leader’s eyes were a little flustered, but she remained calm on the surface, looking as if she had been wronged.

  Mu Jingzhe threw out a bottle of fragrance oil. “This is yours, right? Someone saw you bring this bottle of fragrance oil in with their own eyes yesterday.”

  The vice team leader’s eyes went wild when she saw the bottle. “So what? I brought in the fragrance oil for lubrication. What does it have to do with the rats? And no one saw me bring the rats in…”

  “No one saw you bring the rats in, but you were the one who smeared fragrance oil on the sanitary pads. The evidence is conclusive.”

  Mu Jingzhe endured the disgust and fear she felt and personally investigated the car. There were no clues on who had brought the rats, but there was something wrong with the torn sanitary pads and packaging. The reason they had been bitten so badly in such a short time was because they had been smeared with fragrance oil.

  Since they couldn’t find the person who had brought the rats in, they investigated the source of the fragrance oil. They hadn’t expected to really find it. The vice team leader probably hadn’t expected them to find out so quickly either, nor had she expected the fragrance oil to give her away.

  She’d remembered to pay attention to the rats and mice, but she had neglected details like the fragrance oil.

  When Mu Jingzhe finished speaking, her expression drastically changed and the team leader heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Tell me, why did you bring the rats in and cause such a scene?”

  Seeing that she couldn’t escape, the vice team leader no longer defended herself, but she refused to give an explanation.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll go straight to the police and hand you over to them. Thanks to this contract, you’ll have to go to jail for a few years.”

  Mu Jingzhe took the employee contract from Manager Lei. “I didn’t ask you to sign this contract because I was bored or wanted to play around at the time. The contract can guarantee your interests and my rights. You have to pay the price for doing something that caused damage to the paper factory.”

  \r \r \r

  When the vice team leader heard the word ‘police’, she got scared. Upon being presented with such conclusive evidence and hearing Mu Jingzhe mention the contract, she was afraid that she would have to bear a loss or go to jail, so she could only give an explanation.

  She had been bribed, but the person who had bribed her wasn’t the previously mentioned rival, Lanfang, the company that also produced sanitary pads. Instead, it was a manufacturer of toilet paper, Green Bamboo. The reason was that the sanitary pads had affected the sales of their toilet paper.

  In the past, Green Bamboo’s business had been pretty good. However, ever since Mu Jingzhe had started selling sanitary pads, Green Bamboo’s business had plummeted. In the end, they had bribed a staff member and gotten Madam Zhao and the others to put on a show.

  Madam Zhao and the others did indeed have gynecological diseases, but they had minor problems to begin with. Besides, there were hidden dangers if one used the sanitary napkins wrongly. When those women had heard about pruritus and things like that, and the issue had also been exaggerated, they had determined that there was a problem with the sanitary pads and claimed that using these sanitary pads made one ill.

  They had also found Madam Zhao and asked her to cooperate with them. With Madam Zhao and the others as a foundation and the rats arranged by the vice team leader, this would become a major issue. While Mu Jingzhe suffered through this misfortune, they would be able to reap the benefits.

  After the vice team leader finished speaking, everyone looked enraged. “How can you treat the boss like this? The boss has treated us all well. How could you do such a thing?”

  “I must have been possessed. I shouldn’t have done such a thing for some benefits. Boss, I know I was wrong. Don’t kick me out.”

  At the end of the day, it had all happened for the sake of benefits. She had tried to use this method to get a promotion and a raise because her work ability was inferior to the others’.

  “I never thought of causing our factory to shut down, so I didn’t put the rats in the big warehouse. Boss, I do care about the factory. Please forgive me this time…”

  Forgiving her was impossible, for Mu Jingzhe hated betrayal the most.

  “Everyone present must have heard this. When the time comes, you must testify. Go look for the police now.”

  The vice team leader’s expression changed drastically. “Boss, you didn’t keep your word! I told you everything, yet you’re still going to the police…”

  “I only said that I would look for the police if you didn’t say anything, but I didn’t promise you that I wouldn’t go to the police if you came clean!”

  Now that something like this had happened, Mu Jingzhe had to make an example out of her so that no one would dare to do such a thing again.

  The vice team leader was taken away. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief and tensed up, waiting for the results.

  However, before the results of the examination were out, they saw a piece of news in the evening paper the next day. The headline was especially eye-catching: Can sanitary napkins cause pregnancy?

  From the perspective of a bystander, the reporter narrated the story of a 19-year-old girl who had fallen and accidentally suffered a miscarriage in a bathhouse.

  The protagonist of this news report was given the alias Xiaocao, a girl who had followed her mother to the bathhouse to take a bath. In the end, she had accidentally stepped on soap bubbles and fallen, causing her to suffer a miscarriage on the spot. Many people in the bathhouse had seen it with their own eyes. Moreover, because most of them were familiar faces, it had been impossible to hide it from them.

  When Xiaocao had been sent to the hospital, her life had not been in danger anymore, but there was a big problem. She was just a young girl, and she was neither engaged nor in a relationship. However, she had suddenly gotten pregnant, and such a thing had just happened.

  Xiaocao said that she hadn’t done anything wrong. She didn’t know how she had gotten pregnant either, as she hadn’t gone to a place where men and women swam together. The only thing that had changed in the past few months was that she had used the sample sanitary pads that had been distributed on the streets. Later on, she had switched to using said sanitary pads.

  There was no specific description of how the sanitary pads were involved, but after the swimming pool was eliminated, the sanitary pads ultimately bore the blame.

  Perhaps it was because she didn’t want her daughter to be criticized, but Xiaocao’s mother insisted that the sanitary napkins were the culprit. She claimed that the sanitary napkins weren’t clean and had harmed her daughter.

  There was no way to determine if this was true or not. The reporters only reported what they had seen and heard. When Mu Jingzhe heard the news, her first reaction was to feel incredulous. How could they blame that on the pads?

  As it turned out, they could.

  The day after the news was reported, the matter blew up. Everyone was talking about whether sanitary napkins could get a person pregnant. What was even more unbelievable was that there were even people who swore that the baby that Xiaocao had miscarried wasn’t a child at all, but a rat.

  Because she’d had a miscarriage in the bathhouse, everyone had seen it clearly, and it had frightened many people. It was said that many people had seen it with their own eyes.

  Perhaps because the miscarriage had happened in the early stages of the pregnancy, the fetus had probably been very small and not fully developed, which could have caused it not to look like a human. This led to all sorts of rumors. There were even people who swore that Xiaocao had been pregnant with a rat.

  That afternoon, Xiaocao’s mother somehow met Madam Zhao. In the end, she actually came to the door with Madam Zhao, letting the other woman lead the way.

  “My Xiaocao got pregnant because she used your sanitary pads. You have to take responsibility.”

  Anyone who didn’t know better would think that ‘sanitary pad[1]’ was a person’s name and he had gotten a girl pregnant. It sounded like they were there to hold the father, Wei Shengjin, responsible.

  This time, they’d even brought a reporter with them. It wasn’t someone working for a regular media outlet, but an employee of some trashy magazine that they had never heard of. That reporter asked trashy questions from the side.

  “Previously, your sanitary napkins were suspected of making people sick. Now, there are rumors that they can get people pregnant. What exactly is the manufacturing process like? What do you do to the sanitary napkins? Are there many male workers in the factory?”

  He was obviously hinting that the male workers had done something to the sanitary napkins.

  [1] The Chinese term for sanitary pad is ‘wei sheng jin’