Heiress Unmasked: Shaking the World With Geomancy novel Chapter 1998

Shannon and Benjamin led the two ghosts, and following Morton's directions, the group quickly tracked down Mariam.

Having received yearly offerings from her, Morton naturally knew where she lived.

After Levi's death, his soul returned to his hometown and had been lingering there ever since.

He never imagined that the sister he had spent so many years searching for had actually stayed in the place closest to him all along.

Not far from the site of his fatal accident was an old residential district where Mariam had been living.

After giving up on ending her life, she chose to stay in Jamborough.

At first, she survived through odd jobs, saving up a bit of money until she was able to start a humble food truck. After more than a decade, she slowly built it up into her own little restaurant.

Life had been relatively peaceful since then, except for the fact that lately, her ex-husband and his family had started showing up again, pestering her from time to time.

Back then, when she disappeared for two years, her in-laws couldn't find her and didn't want their son to keep waiting. In order to let him remarry, they filed to have her legally declared a missing person and unilaterally applied for a divorce.

They never expected that a year later, after her ex-husband was injured and could no longer work, the woman he had remarried would run off.

Suddenly, he recalled his ex-wife, Mariam, who had once escaped.

Riding the wave of livestreaming's popularity in recent years, he started a channel under the name "The Search For My Wife: Year 14", hiding the fact that he had remarried and gotten divorced, crafting an image of a devoted husband online.

In his livestreams, he would share stories of his "lost love", claiming that he had been searching for his missing wife for 14 long years and that his leg injury was the result of an accident during that search.

While raking in donations fueled by sympathetic viewers, he also urged the public to help him find his beloved wife.

With how connected everything was online—and with no shortage of self-proclaimed justice warriors on the Internet—it didn't take long for someone to actually help him track down Mariam.

After all, she was running a food truck and later opened a small restaurant; eventually, some well-meaning passerby recognized her and passed the info along.

When the man heard she had a restaurant now, he and his entire family were thrilled. Without hesitation, they packed up and came straight to Jamborough, fully prepared to leech off her again.

Over a decade of hardship had long since forged edges into the once-easily-fooled girl. Mariam didn't have much armor, but she could very well protect herself now.

Seeing that Mariam remained completely unmoved after all these days and having heard rumors about what happened back home years ago, Barnaby Glover and his younger brother, Willie, exchanged a glance and decided to go all-in with shamelessness.

Willie started swearing under his breath, calling her ungrateful, accusing her of being with another man.

Their mother, a woman well into her 70s, plopped herself right down at the shop entrance and started wailing about her "heartless, cold-blooded" daughter-in-law.

Once again, curious onlookers gathered, whispering and pointing fingers.

Mariam stood there, chest rising and falling with anger, and beneath that, a wave of deep, familiar helplessness began to creep in.

She had thought that failing to take her own life all those years ago had marked a fresh start; she thought her life had finally rebooted.

But after just two short years of peace, this family had come clawing their way back in. It was as if fate itself refused to let her go.