The first memory Tang Ze and Yu Jin truly made together came the day after they purchased love.
Tang developed a fever. Yu sat beside him through the night, changing the water in a basin beneath an ordinary lamp. There was no seaside station, no storm, no fated meeting.
They rarely mentioned it. The purchased history had cinematic shape: running through rain, missing the last train, choosing each other against their families. Whenever the marriage became difficult, they returned to those dramatic scenes as proof that they had once loved deeply.
The real eight years moved to the edge—the mortgage paid during unemployment, hospital visits for aging parents, school pickups, meals left warm after arguments. Because those days had never been packaged as love, they seemed less qualified to support a marriage.
Only when Tang Yi began dreaming did anyone ask whose past had been doing the supporting.
Tang Ze and Yu Jin had been married for eight years.
They remembered rain on the day they met, missing the last train at a seaside station, who returned first after their worst argument, and the night they decided to marry.
None of those events had happened to them.
Their son Tang Yi noticed first.
For a school assignment, he drew a seaside station. Two young people stood beneath the rain. The man wore a blue coat Tang Ze had never owned. The woman had long hair Yu Jin had never worn.
“Was it raining when you first kissed?” Tang Yi asked.
“Yes,” both parents answered.
Then Tang Ze remembered that on the date in question, they had been registering their marriage in A-City. Before the wedding, they had met six times. They were compatible, practical, and stable, but they had no shared past strong enough to hold a life together.
So they purchased a Complete Love Package.
The purchase took place seven days after their civil registration. They did not dislike each other. They simply lacked a beginning that sounded like a reason. Yu Jin’s mother feared a marriage without passion. Tang Ze’s father said practical couples always divorced once conditions changed.
The company offered twelve templates: campus love, travel, rescue, shared enterprise, reunion. They chose lovers who resisted family opposition because it made the marriage feel chosen rather than arranged.
“Will the original people remember?” Yu Jin asked.
“They retain the facts,” the consultant said.
Facts and meaning were separated again. Tang Yuan and Yu Xi remembered the seaside, the station, and the rain. They no longer knew why those facts left an empty place in every later life.
Meeting.Adventure.Choosing each other.Reconciliation after betrayal.The certainty of building a life together.
The sources were Tang Yuan and Yu Xi, across the border.
They had loved each other at the seaside station and had been separated by their families and employers. To secure safety for people they cared about, they agreed to sell parts of their memories. No one told them the sale would remove the fact that they had ever loved.
Reverse Risk Management implanted their history in Tang Ze and Yu Jin.
The contract contained an additional clause:
FUTURE CHILDREN WILL PRESERVE NARRATIVE CONTINUITY.
“You did not buy a feeling,” Lin Zhao said. “You bought another couple’s history.”
Tang Ze looked at eight years of family photographs.
“But we truly lived those years.”
This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
That was also true.
The purchased love had helped create a real home. Tang Yi had truly been born, truly been sick, truly been held by his parents. Once stolen property generated a life, it could no longer be returned like an unopened product.
Yet Tang Yi dreamed for the lost lovers every night.
He dreamed of the station, the argument, and the farewell that never ended. He repeated Yu Xi’s old phrase: “Never promise forever after the last train.”
Outside, Tang Yuan and Yu Xi lived separate, stable lives. In every photograph, each left the same empty space beside them. Neither knew who it was for.
The family hearing system projected a full-return outcome:
TANG ZE AND YU JIN LOSE ALL EMOTIONAL GROUNDS FOR MARRIAGE.TANG YI’S FAMILY RECOGNITION RESETS.TANG YUAN AND YU XI RECOVER THEIR LOVE MEMORY.
“How can a child decide our marriage?” Yu Jin stood in front of her son.
Tang Yi was not deciding whether his parents should love each other. He was demanding the return of his body’s storage rights.
The examiner warned that deleting the archive might remove some memories of his actual parents.
“Which ones are mine?” he asked.
No one could answer quickly. Purchased love and real childhood had been stitched together. When Tang Yi first walked, Yu Jin remembered Yu Xi falling near the sea. When Tang Ze carried his feverish son to a clinic, his muscles replayed Tang Yuan running across a platform with a lover on his back.
The child was not a neutral container. He was the seam. Pulling every thread would tear both histories.
“Then stop adding new things,” Tang Yi said. “When I am older, I decide what stays.”
A child proposed the smallest available fairness: stop continuing the occupation.
Lin Zhao said, “Because you wrote the marriage into his body.”
Tang Yi stepped out from behind his mother.
“I don’t want to remember for you.”
He did not demand a divorce. He did not decide for the two people Outside. He asked only that no new marital memories be stored inside him.
Tang Yi drew another family picture.
Four adults stood between two cities.
My family has four adults.Two know me.Two know my dreams.
The drawing passed through a mirror scan to the seaside station Outside. Tang Yuan and Yu Xi saw it at different times. Their full love did not return, but both remembered one gesture: after the last train, someone had once brushed wet hair away from another person’s face.
“I think I waited for someone here,” Tang Yuan said.
Tang Ze and Yu Jin chose to keep the memories they had purchased.
It was not justice. It was an admission that their existing family could not be dismantled without harm. They signed a new agreement: Tang Yi would carry no new memories; when he became an adult, he could request removal of the rest; Tang Yuan and Yu Xi would receive fragments of their past over time.
The first weekend after the contract was rewritten, the family went to an ordinary bus terminal. The bus was forty minutes late. Tang Yi spilled a drink on his father. Yu Jin became angry after taking the wrong exit.
At home they taped the wrinkled ticket to the refrigerator.
“Is this our memory?” Tang Yi asked.
“It is ugly,” Tang Ze said.
“Then it is probably real,” Yu Jin answered.
They did not discover a new epic love. They began deliberately building a shared past that did not depend on stolen history. Outside, Tang Yuan and Yu Xi each received one returned fragment—the gesture of moving wet hair from the other person’s face. They were not forced to reunite. What returned first was the right to know that they had once chosen someone.
Lin Shao’s signature on every child-storage contract was no longer only a clue. It was a specific responsibility.
After Tang Yi stopped storing new memories, his parents discovered that many arguments had no shared version. Purchased love had always arranged conflict into a story of deeper reconciliation. Real life offered no such protection.
Yu Jin remembered Tang Ze’s absence during her mother’s illness. Tang remembered raising money for the treatment. Both were true. They had to respond to the present without using a romantic past as proof.
Tang Yuan and Yu Xi chose not to meet after receiving fragments. Returning a stolen choice did not justify arranging a reunion. Tang Yi left two empty spaces beside the bus ticket on the refrigerator—not invitations, but a reminder that the family’s history had not begun with his parents.
The rewritten contract required one non-source family memory each month. At first the parents staged trips and photographs. Tang Yi said the new memories still looked like products.
They began recording ordinary events without deciding whether they were beautiful: a blackout and cold dinner, an unresolved argument, a missed school meeting. Real history mattered not because it was romantic but because it had not been taken.
Tang Yi learned to label his dreams: what I dreamed and what I lived.
On the last page of the original contract, Lin Zhao found the settlement officer’s name:
LIN SHAO.
The mirror lit.
For the first time, Lin Shao faced her directly.
“You have seen what I did,” she said.
“You used a child as a container.”
Lin Shao was quiet for a long time. “I used myself as a container too.”