The Amnesiac Omega Who Reels Me In Every Day – Chapter 112
by Little PandaEven Lingering Regrets Must Be Settled
Jiang Ningshu × Song Lian
Financial Patron and Lover
After giving birth to Jiang Jinyi, Jiang Ningshu developed severe postpartum depression.
That she would develop postpartum depression was, in truth, not surprising at all — throughout her entire pregnancy and delivery, every moment of vulnerability and hardship, she had been almost entirely alone. No Alpha. No Alpha’s comfort.
For an omega, going through pregnancy and childbirth without an Alpha’s soothing was agony akin to a thousand cuts1.
Psychologically, she was acutely sensitive, profoundly restless, and consumed by anxiety.
Most of the time, her body felt as though she were a drug addict in withdrawal — a thousand ants crawling beneath her skin, the torment frequent enough to drive her into tremors, into delirium.
The suffering drove her to thoughts of ending it all more than once.
But the moment she heard Jiang Jinyi’s cries, she told herself: hold on. Live for the child.
The child was the sole reason she kept breathing.
She endured — no matter how agonizing, she faced her baby with a smile and boundless patience.
“Xiao Jin, smile for Mom, won’t you?”
“Give me a smile, and Mom will smile too. We’ll be happy together. Mom will stay by your side and watch you grow up properly…”
Jiang Ningshu would always say these things to a baby Jiang Jinyi, who was still so small and couldn’t understand the words’ meaning — but whenever she saw her mother, she loved to smile. Her smile was impossibly endearing: those little dimples, those charming under-eye curves, lashes fluttering like tiny fans. It truly had the power to heal.
Jiang Ningshu believed it would get better. If she could just endure this period, it would get better.
Her career sailed smoothly onward, but her condition spiraled relentlessly, worsening into bipolar disorder and omega separation anxiety syndrome.
Jiang Ningshu couldn’t count how many times she had broken down, how many tears she had shed, how many bruises and blade marks scarred her arms.
Before Jiang Jinyi turned two, Jiang Ningshu genuinely felt she couldn’t hold on anymore.
Truly — she was barely sustaining herself.
She had even drafted her will.
Fortunately, not long after, she met the person who saved her life.
The truth was that Jiang Ningshu’s encounter with Song Lian was anything but ordinary. At a business function, she had been drugged — she realized it and tried to save herself, and in the final second before losing consciousness, she dragged Song Lian, who happened to be passing by, into her room and locked the door.
Driven by the drug, the unconscious omega used every trick at her disposal to keep the only Alpha who could help her.
They had sex.
When Jiang Ningshu had been with Zhao Yan, she had always been reserved — the shy, inexperienced type.
But this time was different. It was as though she channeled everything through the drug’s influence — thoroughly proactive, thoroughly seductive, clinging more desperately than a vixen, and toward a complete stranger at that.
When she woke, Song Lian was already gone.
At first, Jiang Ningshu was consumed by guilt — she felt she should belong only to Yanyan.
How could she have been with someone else…
Even as the guilt gnawed at her, she found herself craving that stranger Alpha’s pheromones — a hunger far more intense than her longing for Yanyan’s pheromones. Her overall condition, too, had shifted: that suffocating agony seemed to have eased considerably.
She went to see her therapist.
The therapist told her that her condition might be alleviated through a sexual relationship.
In fact, right after she had given birth, Jiang Ningshu had already consulted this therapist, who had advised her to find a new Alpha.
The night they broke up, Zhao Yan hadn’t completely marked her — but it had been a deep marking2, and she was carrying Zhao Yan’s child. Combined with love, longing, guilt, and other such factors, the desire for Zhao Yan’s pheromones had swollen to pathological extremes.
To crave without receiving — gradually, body and mind alike deteriorated.
But she could still be marked by another Alpha. When a new mark overlaid the old, she would no longer be governed by Zhao Yan’s scent, thereby alleviating her condition.
At the time, Jiang Ningshu had refused the suggestion.
She couldn’t accept being with anyone else.
With this accident, the therapist became even more certain — sexual stimulation could significantly alleviate her condition.
She wasn’t the only one in such circumstances. Many omegas who developed bipolar disorder after a breakup experienced the same, some even developing sex addiction.
Her situation had grown severe enough that she no longer had the confidence to watch Jiang Jinyi grow up.
Severe enough that she feared she might lose the will to endure at any moment and leave.
She compromised.
She accepted the therapist’s advice, picked up the business card Song Lian had accidentally dropped in her room, and with hollow eyes, murmured to no one in particular: “Yanyan, I’m sorry…”
“If it were only me, I would choose to be set free. But I still have Xiao Jin. She’s still so little — I can’t imagine what would become of her without me. Who else would love her with all their heart? I won’t let her become an orphan…”
Her eyes lowered, a single tear sliding from the corner of her eye, tracing down her cheek, her voice already choked: “Yanyan, if you knew… you wouldn’t bear it either, would you?”
Yanyan was surely abroad, living a new life by now. She, too, should start a new life for Xiao Jin’s sake. She had to live, truly live.
She had to be there as Xiao Jin grew up.
She found Song Lian using the business card.
At that time, Song Lian had been truly desolate — lowly, unremarkable, like an ant scrabbling to survive, someone anyone could step on.
Jiang Ningshu could control her effortlessly.
Jiang Ningshu proposed keeping her as a kept lover. In the end, Song Lian yielded.
Jiang Ningshu styled herself as a fickle, heartless financial patron3. She told Song Lian she was keeping her because she was satisfied with her pheromones, that Song Lian was to serve her well and absolutely must not catch feelings.
She placed Song Lian at her side as her secretary — secretary, lover, virtually inseparable. Song Lian satisfied her every demand, including her physical needs.
Accompanying her through every night that should have been unbearably agonizing.
Her condition stabilized significantly. She watched her Xiao Jin grow up — age two, age ten, age sixteen, age eighteen.
She was present for every milestone in Jiang Jinyi’s life, spoiling her into the happiest, most willful little princess in all of Luo City.
For over a decade, she maintained this patron-and-lover relationship with Song Lian. Originally, the two had signed only a two-year contract. After two years, Song Lian was no longer destitute — she could have left, could have shaken off the arrangement’s constraints — yet she chose to remain caged, because of one sentence from Jiang Ningshu: “I don’t think I can live without you anymore.”
She renewed the contract. Continued as patron and lover.
Jiang Ningshu truly couldn’t do without Song Lian anymore. She told herself it was perhaps because she had developed a dependence on her pheromones.
It absolutely was not love.
She loved only Yanyan.
When she had surrendered body and heart to Yanyan, she had promised her — for the rest of her life, she would only ever have one girlfriend.
So she kept Song Lian hidden thoroughly. Apart from her therapist, no one knew of her relationship with Song Lian.
Song Lian had always been her secret lover who couldn’t be seen in the light of day.
If not for that accident…
“So what, Jiang Ningshu? Are you going to keep me as your hidden golden canary4 for the rest of my life?”
Time returns to the present. Song Lian touches her while pressing the question.
She admits it — she’s acting shameless5. She had long ago fallen for the financial patron she was never supposed to fall for. She could have stayed rational — but now, she couldn’t seem to hold back anymore.
Five years apart — and in those five years, her desire had swelled without limit. She wanted to stand beside Jiang Ningshu in the light of day. She loathed, with every fiber, the way Jiang Ningshu looked so desperately resistant to being discovered whenever someone caught them intimately together.
Song Lian, someone so sharp and alert, had actually detected Jiang Jinyi the moment she entered the study — and had wickedly refused to stop. After Jiang Jinyi left, she made a point of reminding Jiang Ningshu: “But Xiao Jin already saw us just now. How do you plan to explain that to her? Hmm?”
Footnotes
- 千刀万剐 | qiān dāo wàn guǎ | Literally 'a thousand cuts and ten thousand slices' — a reference to lingchi, China's historical method of execution by slow dismemberment over hours, reserved for the gravest offenses; used metaphorically for unbearable, excruciating torment.
- 深度标记 | shēn dù biāo jì | An ABO-verse term for an extensive temporary mark that falls short of a complete permanent marking but nonetheless creates strong biological and pheromonal dependence, intensifying the omega's craving for the marking Alpha's scent.
- 金主 | jīn zhǔ | Literally 'gold master' — in Chinese entertainment and relationship culture, a wealthy financial patron who supports a lover or artist in exchange for services or companionship; the term connotes transactional power and financial control.
- 金丝雀 | jīn sī què | Literally 'golden canary' — a caged ornamental songbird prized for its beauty and song; in modern Chinese slang, a kept mistress or lover confined and financially supported in secret, evoking the image of a beautiful bird trapped in a gilded cage.
- 犯贱 | fàn jiàn | Colloquial slang for debasing one's dignity, courting heartache, or acting pathetically; carries the connotation of knowingly subjecting oneself to degradation or emotional torment.
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