The work was exhausting as she had to come in early and return home late every day. Once, she overworked herself until she bled below, almost suffering from a miscarriage.

  Mu Qingcheng gritted her teeth and took a few miscarriage prevention jabs at one go before she managed to keep her two children.

  From then on, she did not dare to work so hard anymore.

  The hair salon’s boss pitied her and reduced her workload as well, though this was out of some ulterior motive he had toward her!

  After all, she was a single, young, and beautiful woman. Although she was pregnant, she still could not escape from men’s lecherous desires.

  A few months later, Mu Qingcheng gave birth to a pair of twins.

  In the hospital ward, the hair salon’s boss attentively and diligently took care of her, then he held her hand and confessed solemnly that he wanted to make her his second wife.

  Mu Qingcheng naturally refused.

  Therefore, blood rushed into the hair salon’s boss’s head, and he divorced his wife.

  Finally, during the month following her childbirth, the hair salon’s boss actually caused a scene at her rented apartment, even destroying everything inside it.

  She steeled her heart and left the town with her babies who were less than two months old.

  It was hard to imagine how tough life was for a single mother with two children.

  As she did not do it properly following the month after her childbirth, Mu Qingcheng’s body took a drastic turn for the worse.

  She was in financial straits after giving birth. Therefore, she could only fill their stomachs by working at nightclubs with her sweet, singing voice.

  Unfortunately, with the debauched and corrupted environment she was working, it was inevitable for her to be disturbed by all types of men.

  There were company bosses and ordinary salarymen, but most of them were parvenu.

  This was nothing, though.

  Mu Sheng did not give up looking for her all those years.

  To avoid the Mu family’s eyes, she and her children drifted from city to city. If she were to count how many times they had moved houses in those seven years, she would be unable to count them using both hands.

  From as long as he could remember, Gong Jie’s childhood was more profound than his homeless and miserable life.

  Not long after stopping in a city, they had to move to another again like refugees.

  His impression of their house was blurry.

  He remembered once when his sister and he were woken up in the middle of the night. Mu Qingcheng disregarded everything and carried them, leaving everything they had behind except for their identifications and some cash in her rush.

  At that time, they had just been to that city for three months. Since they had only just moved, they only had one bed in the rented apartment and other scattered appliances as well as small devices. All of their daily necessities were bought at the last moment.

  Naturally, these were all not new.

  They were bought from second-hand market places Mu Qingcheng brought them to.

  The table lamp they had had an unstable electric current, causing the light to flicker occasionally.

  Their CRT black and white TV needed a pat to the back, or it would not receive any signal at all.

  At that time, Mu Qingcheng scrimped and saved. She would buy fresh vegetables from the wet market in the morning for her children, while for herself, she would pick up those unfresh vegetables thrown out by the stall owners before the wet market closed for the night. She brought them back and fried them, eating them deliciously with what she bought for her children in the morning.

  In three years’ time, Mu Qingcheng had become skinny beyond recognition.

  However, that night, they did not know what had happened.

  Mu Qingcheng carried them as if they were being chased, abandoning everything in their rented apartment and hastily boarding a long-distance bus overnight.

  Little Gong Jie was terrified, crying about wanting to go back home. He had left his beloved teddy bear at their rented dwelling, as well as a meager amount of money he had sneakily accumulated.