Chapter 138: The Civet Cat Swaps Places with the Crown Prince

The archive room was covered in a thick layer of dust. Afraid of leaving footprints, Xiaocheng had taken the trouble to put on shoe covers. In a county town that was little more than a rural village, the hospital was hardly large, and Xiaocheng had no idea whether records from fifteen years ago would still have survived.

Because the hospital had to issue medical birth certificates for newborns, its records were kept in reasonably good order despite its small size. The faint beam of his flashlight swept across the shelves as he followed the files, arranged chronologically, deeper and deeper into the storeroom.

1990 to 1994. This was the place.

His birthday was July 10, 1991, while the incident had occurred on July 13. The records were arranged according to the dates on which the mothers had been admitted, so, to be safe, Xiaocheng pulled out every file from July 1 through July 13. Fortunately, this had been the period when the family-planning policy was enforced most strictly. Xiangyang had not gone so far as Liaocheng in Shandong, where the infamous “Hundred Days Without Children” campaign had been carried out, but the policy had still caused a marked decline in the birth rate. During the first half of July, only a little over twenty children had been born at the town hospital.

According to hospital regulations, newborns were to be placed in the nursery and cared for there during their first three days. On the fourth day, they were generally returned to their parents, though some were discharged directly after three days. Finding the seven children who had been in the nursery on July 13 was simple enough: he only had to locate all the children whose recorded birthdays fell between July 10 and July 13.

Xiaocheng read almost as quickly as a scanner, but in these circumstances he had to memorize the location of every case file and document with the utmost care, while turning the pages without leaving any trace. He could not afford to move quickly.

Filtering the records by birth date, he found six children. But according to the hospitalization records, there should have been seven.

Seven mothers had been admitted to give birth, yet only six birth records existed. His memory had been right: one of the children had not survived.

The newborns had not yet been given names, but the mothers had. And among those seven mothers, there was indeed no Zhou Qingyan, his own mother. Clearly, someone had switched his birth record.

But who had done it?

Xiaocheng then found the corresponding archived medical birth certificates—the stubs commonly known as birth-certificate counterfoils. These contained the children’s names. His earlier assumptions had all been wrong. The children could be monitored, and his mother’s departure should have had nothing to do with this. If she had truly discovered something and switched the birth records, there would have been no reason for her to leave him.

It was simply a melodramatic story about a young mother who, unable to see any hope, abandoned her child and went in pursuit of her own happiness.

His mother’s image refused to leave his mind, but there were more important things to do. Xiaocheng opened the birth-certificate counterfoils. Under the weak beam of the flashlight, the records of six children appeared before him.

Wu Mengmeng, female, born at 2:37 p.m. on July 11, 1991, weighing 3.1 kilograms. Mother: Jiang Zhili. Father: Wu Yaozhang...

Chen Yuming, female, born at 9:33 p.m. on July 10, 1991...

To his astonishment, Chen Yuming was a student at the same school, though in a different class. Xiaocheng let out a helpless laugh. What a small world. Then again, children from the same town, born in the same month and year, had a fairly high chance of ending up at the same school. Dongfeng Town had only two middle schools, after all.

Wang Ziyi, female, born on July 12, 1991...

Jiang Ya, female, born on July 11, 1991...

The next name made Xiaocheng freeze.

Another familiar face.

Fu Chenyu!

If Xiaocheng had not possessed a photographic memory, he would certainly never have remembered the name. This was Fu Chenyu—the prodigy in mathematical olympiad competitions, the prized student fought over by every educational training institution. The science demon king who had taken first place in every mathematical, physics, and chemistry competition!

Xiaocheng had caught a glimpse of him while waiting in line to enter the examination hall for the preliminary round of the mathematical olympiad. His eyes had passed over the admission ticket in Fu Chenyu’s hand, and he had noticed that the first several digits of their examination numbers were exactly the same. Since examination numbers were based on identity-card numbers, that meant Fu Chenyu had also been born on July 10, 1991.

They had been born on the same day of the same month of the same year.

Xiaocheng’s heart trembled violently.

He had found the child who had been switched with him.

It was Fu Yichen!

He had known little about this person before, but as he pieced together his scattered memories, a complete picture gradually emerged.

Fu Chenyu was a student at Xiangyang Experimental Middle School. There were two ways to get into the school. The first was to graduate directly from Experimental Primary School, which fed into it automatically. The second was to gain admission through an enrollment-preparation class. With Fu Chenyu’s ability, getting in would have been no problem. But Principal Ding had said that Fu Chenyu never attended any training programs, while the preparation classes recruited students through training institutions.

The conclusion was obvious: he had advanced directly through the district enrollment system.

Direct advancement from Experimental Primary School meant that his family lived in the city. Why would city residents travel all the way to this godforsaken place called Dongfeng Town to have a child?

Unless the child was an illegal second birth.

But if he had been an unregistered second child, a small hospital like this one would never have had the quota to issue him a birth certificate. No one would abandon a major city hospital in favor of giving birth in a small-town clinic.

Someone must have switched the records.

Choosing him as the substitute in this modern-day exchange of princes was easy to understand. From childhood, he had shown the qualities of a prodigy.

Clearly, someone had secretly altered and switched the hospital’s birth records. And Xiaocheng could be absolutely certain that the incident was connected to the experiment conducted when he was three days old. Someone had wanted to protect him, and so they had secretly carried out an exchange—but what they had switched was not the child, only the birth record.

If the mysterious organization wanted to investigate the experimental subjects, it would surely consult the archived birth records.

“There is another possibility.” Wen Xiaodao emerged from the depths of his mind, his expression grave.

“We don’t know who did this, but its purpose isn’t difficult to guess. The most immediate purpose of switching the records was obviously to create a false appearance and mislead the experimenters—but it may not have been done to protect us. It may have been meant to give their superiors an explanation.”

The moment Wen Xiaodao said this, Xiaocheng understood.

The mysterious organization was not a single person. The two people who had appeared back then had merely been low-level operatives. Because an unexpected problem had caused the experiment to fail, they had abandoned it halfway through. If their superiors investigated, they would have had no way to escape responsibility. So they had switched Xiaocheng’s identity with that of Fu Chenyu, the prodigy of Experimental Middle School.

After all, Xiaocheng had only recently awakened. Before that, his performance had been utterly ordinary—he had been merely one among the countless common people.

If that was the case, then Fu Chenyu should already have been under surveillance.

But lately, Xiaocheng’s conspicuous performance in the mathematical olympiad had even overshadowed that science demon king. Would he now come to the experimenters’ attention?

It seemed his situation was even more dangerous than he had imagined.

———

Didn’t see that coming, did you? You probably thought the science demon king Fu Chenyu was only there to serve as a stepping stone for showing off and humiliating others. I absolutely couldn’t let you guess it!

As for the “Hundred Days Without Children” campaign in Liaocheng, Shandong, I originally used the phrase “horrifying,” but decided it was not quite fitting enough, so I changed it to “utterly deranged.”