Chapter 1

The street next to Suicheng No. 1 Middle School has the highest traffic flow every Friday afternoon.

Especially the illegal internet cafe called 'Blue Spider' on the corner of the street, which always attracts third-rate students from several nearby middle schools who are not doing their studies properly to gather here, either to play games or to have secret romantic relationships with their partners.

Only today, the atmosphere is a little different.

Everyone in the Internet cafe was paying attention to that corner intentionally or unintentionally.

Seven or eight bad boys were sitting or standing, occupying that space, and the one who was surrounded by them at the innermost part seemed to have been leaning against the wall for quite some time.

"Brother Rui, is anything really going to happen?" the skinny boy asked, his feet against the wall.

The boy named Rui Ge was playing a game on his phone and glanced at him unhappily: "What can happen if you just hit him like that? I didn't put any bricks in my schoolbag. This kid is skinny and maybe he has a disease."

Someone else said, "Why don't we just forget about it today? He is the Yang family's biological son after all."

"What's wrong with being a biological son? Does the Yang family need a son?" The other party seemed to have heard a joke, put away the phone and said, "This guy relies on being a biological son of the Yang family and has to compete with Yang Shule in everything. He even wears the same clothes as Yang Shule. He speaks Mandarin like a rag and doesn't even realize it. He is arrogant and independent. I heard that he was the top student in his high school. People who grow up in the countryside are different. It's inspiring. You should learn from him when you have nothing to do! Do you understand?"

Someone else echoed: "What should we learn? Learn from him that he is not sociable? Learn from him that he is smart, or learn from him that he regards ignorance as his personality?"

“Hahahahahahahahaha…”

A group of boys once again started joking without restraint.

When Chen Mo woke up, he felt a dull pain in his head.

The various noisy sounds in my ears seemed to be separated by a layer of fog and could not be heard clearly.

He only vaguely caught some words, such as Yang Shule, wrongly picked up, and school.

He thought he was dead and most likely going to hell, otherwise why would he recreate his high school memories?

Many years ago, Yang Shule’s biological mother, Li Yunru, gave birth urgently while working in the city. Due to her poor health and her husband’s gambling and long-term domestic violence, she thought about sending her child to someone else for foster care.

But in the end she didn't choose to give it away, but chose to exchange it.

She secretly took Chen Mo back to a poor mountain valley called Yuhuai Village, 300 kilometers east of Suicheng. Since Chen Mo had no trace of her husband Chen Jianli since birth, Chen Jianli suspected that she was cheating on him.

The beatings and kicks became more intense, and the insults and curses were repeated in a harsh manner.

Most of Chen Mo’s childhood memories are of the dark woodshed.

It was like livestock that could never be fed and a stomach that could never be filled. He could remember the excruciating pain of Chen Jicheng's cigarette butt burning his instep, the weight of his fists and feet landing on various parts of his body, and the little bit of pitiful warmth that Li Yunru would occasionally give him when she held him against her chest.

Later, he began to rebel.

From being completely passive to occasionally being able to make the opponent suffer, until the year when he could really fight Chen Jianli, Chen Mo had not yet finished his first year of high school. Chen Jianli called him a psychopath and began to be afraid of him. Li Yunru frequently took a long-distance bus to the city, stayed there for three or five days and then came back. Whenever Chen Mo asked, he would always dodge.

The truth never comes too late.

It had been less than two months since Chen Mo turned seventeen.

It rained heavily that day.

Li Yunru knelt on the dirt road, tugged at Chen Mo's sleeve, and begged him, "It's me. Everything is because of me. It has nothing to do with the child. Chen Mo, please act like a mother and don't blame him."

Chen Mo was shrouded in a huge confusion. He heard himself asking: "What about me? What am I?"

The Yang family sued Li Yunru.

Chen Mo's destination, in the words of other people in the village, was a step towards success.

This "step to heaven" refers to the fact that the Yang family is a famous wealthy family in Suicheng. In fact, it is not wrong. Chen Mo began to wear clothes and shoes of various brands that he did not recognize. He was picked up and dropped off by car when he went out, and his daily life was carefully taken care of by servants.

However, no one taught him how to be consistent in the face of such a huge class difference.

No one told him that what was more tragic than the physical pain was the difficulty in adapting to college. The servants at home deliberately copied and pasted his clothing, food, housing and transportation standards to those of Yang Shule, calling it equal treatment, but in fact it was mocking and embarrassing. Moreover, the blood relatives he had once expected were biased again and again.

His barren world was overgrown with weeds.

Sometimes I ask, why?

Why was it that he was the one who was left out for seventeen years, but everyone cared about the other person? So he really tried his best to fight for it.

During this process, every word that really happened and rang in my ears was like oil boiling over a raging fire.

——Chen Mo, can you get along well with Shu Le?

——Shu Le will inevitably be talked about in school in the future. Don’t tell others that you were wrong. You were taken away by mistake, not switched.

——Yang Shule has always been an excellent student with a lot of trophies in various competitions. He didn’t accuse you of cheating and even smoothed things over for you! What about you?

——It’s been several years, it’s been several years, Chen Mo, you still can’t tolerate him?

——Work at the grassroots level for three years before joining the company.

——You are so competitive and unscrupulous, do you think the Yang family will really let you be in power?

——In my, Yang Zhi’s understanding, I have only had one younger brother from beginning to end, and that person can never be you.

——How could my Yang family have a son like you? Get out!

——Chen Mo, Chen Mo…

Those years when I studied hard day and night and tried my best to make it seem effortless have become a complete joke.

Many years later, Yang Shule has firmly established himself in the Yang family. He is the second son of the Yang family, who is not a biological son but is more like a biological son to him.

Chen Mo is different.

After failing the college entrance examination, he worked in a company for many years, from the bottom to the top, fighting with his eldest brother to the death. In the end, he was defeated. He turned against his parents, was deserted by his friends, and was retaliated by the enemies of the Yang family, and died tragically at the bottom of an abandoned building in the suburbs.

In the end, all he saw was a gray concrete ceiling with no end in sight, just like the entire background of his life.

Do you regret it?

No.

His only regret was that he realized before his death that he had lived his whole life to the fullest.

Parents’ approval, other people’s opinions, and worldly significance.

For these.

The only person he feels sorry for is probably himself.

*

"Hey, the person is awake!"

When someone kicked his shoulder again, his five senses gradually came back to him. Chen Mo heard someone say above his head: "Get up, stop pretending to be dead, who are you trying to scare to death?"

There were various rustling sounds all around.

Someone in the distance seemed to be curious and asked, "What happened?"

Some people even replied disdainfully, "They are just bullying. Chen Mo is going to be badly beaten by Li Rui and his gang."

"Isn't his family quite wealthy? He must be treated like a treasure after he was found."

"So what if they're rich? The richer the family, the more complicated it is. The more complicated it is, the more they have to learn to please others."

"I heard that Li Rui and his friends called him several times but he was indifferent. He has a weird personality and is very different from the one who was taken away by mistake. No wonder he was targeted by this group of people."

"Please, since when has the person who causes trouble first been considered right?"

Chen Mo started coughing.

The cough went from slow to rapid, as if the lungs were being coughed out of the chest.

He supported his upper body with his hands, leaned his head against the wall to see the surrounding environment clearly, then looked at his school uniform and the back of his hands that were supporting the ground with obvious bones and meridians.

It was all too real.

It was so real that it took him several minutes to accept the fact that he was not dreaming.

"Are you fucking infected with some infectious disease?" The leading boy with a shaved head and a fierce look frowned at him as if he was looking at a virus.

Chen Mo recognized him at a glance, Li Rui.

The reason why he remembered it so quickly was not because he was familiar with it, but because after he transferred to Suicheng No. 1 Middle School, most of the incidents that targeted him were led by Li Rui.

The school bully of Suicheng No. 1 Middle School and the only son of the Li family of Huiyuan Real Estate.

At that time, people pouring sand into water cups and finding dead cockroaches in clothes were all minor matters. Chen Mo was once locked up in the equipment room overnight by this group of people. He was beaten up and sent to the hospital because he resisted a one-on-ten fight. His family thought that he was causing trouble at school.

Chen Mo is a vengeful person.

Later, he took revenge at all costs.

The year Huiyuan Real Estate went bankrupt, the arrogant boy in front of him also came to him humbly in the name of old classmates.

At that time, he had already climbed to the position of vice president of Yang Group.

Over the company's equity issue, he and his elder brother Yang Zhi were in a fierce battle.

He wore the most expensive suits, discussed hundreds of millions of dollars of business with clients in the most fluent English, and shuttled between various negotiation tables and social venues, but when he woke up in the middle of the night, he knew that he had already been rotten to the core.

Power and money are the only two things he holds tightly in his hands.

At that time, everyone knew that the biological son that the Yang family had found that year was a mad dog.

Now I’m suddenly back to being seventeen years old.

The group of people that seemed difficult to deal with at first turned out to be nothing more than fleas and ants.

"I'm asking you a question!" Li Rui stepped forward and prepared to kick him again.

Halfway through, he was blocked by Chen Mo.

The person who had been coughing heart-wrenchingly a second ago, supported himself on the ground with his hands and slowly stood up.

Chen Mo's hair covered his eyebrows, and his face, which had been red from the violent coughing, slowly recovered, revealing an abnormally pale color. He dusted off the hem of his school uniform, looked up at him, and said slowly, "No. I ate low-quality milk powder when I was a child, which caused my immune system to become damaged. I also have problems with my respiratory tract, spleen, and stomach. Have I explained it clearly enough?"

The Internet cafe, which should have been very noisy, was surprisingly quiet at this moment.

Only the young man's slightly hoarse voice, word by word, was clear enough for everyone present to hear.

In this environment, Li Rui's face looked obviously ugly.

He took two steps forward, grabbed Chen Mo's collar, and pushed him against a nearby computer desk, gritting his teeth and saying, "How dare you act so arrogantly at a time like this? Do you know why I'm causing trouble for you today?"

"I know." Chen Mo looked directly into the other person's eyes: "You like Yang Shule, right?"

Chen Mo spoke softly, and it seemed as if he could see the dejection in the other person's eyes. Chen Mo pulled back his collar and continued, "You like him but don't dare to pursue him, so you have to start with me, hoping to gain some attention and favor from him. Li Rui...classmate, people like you also have secret crushes, which is quite pitiful."

"You're looking for death!"

Everyone watched the two of them, not knowing what they said, when they suddenly started fighting.

Li Rui was a tall and strong man, and was about to punch Chen Mo, but the man who looked quite thin picked up a mechanical keyboard on the table next to him and smashed it on the man's head.

The sound is loud and the movements are smooth.

Before the group of people with Li Rui had time to surround him, Chen Mo grabbed Li Rui's neck with his backhand, ignoring the dark red blood flowing from his hair, and whispered in his ear: "You also know that the word homosexuality will make you lose face in school, right? Then do you want me to tell you guys again that your biological father is actually a Phoenix man who cheated on marriage, and he has at least three or five male mistresses outside? You hate homosexuals, but you are also a coward who dares not admit that you like men, right?"

Li Rui's face turned red from being strangled.

The bully from No. 1 Middle School was like a turkey with its throat strangled. Even his voice was trembling imperceptibly. He asked back, "How did you know?"

"The Yang family is a big family with a lot of wealth. Is this little gossip about your family anything new?"

"So what do you want?"

The status was reversed so quickly that Chen Mo was too lazy to bother to argue. He let go of him, looked around and said calmly: "Take your bunch of... lackeys and get out."

Because I took advantage of the foresight, I didn't feel any sense of accomplishment even though I was in the upper hand.

Chen Mo bent down to pick up the schoolbag on the ground, ignored Li Rui and others who were still standing there in a daze, and walked to the front desk.

He didn't leave, but knocked on the front desk with one hand, "Turn on the machine, three hours."

"Okay, okay."

There was a young girl at the front desk, who quietly looked at the visitor.

There was only one thought in my mind: the rumor was really not credible.

The boy was thin, but not short. On his shoulders hung the blue and white school uniform jacket that had just been stained a little by tearing, but he didn't look dull at all. He had beautiful eyebrows and eyes, and the carefreeness and calmness that he inadvertently revealed in his gestures was enough to suppress all the embarrassment, and only a trace of paleness on his face made people feel a little distressed.

While the front desk was busy, he casually pulled out a pack of ordinary Yuxi cigarettes and a lighter from the shelf next to him.

Put it on the glass case and ask, "How much is it in total?"

"The total is... forty-eight dollars and fifty cents."

The man in front of me searched all over his body, and finally took out a black wallet from his trouser pocket. When he opened it and saw a thick stack of red cash inside, he raised his eyebrows meaninglessly, then took out a bill and handed it over, "No need for change."

The girl blushed for some reason when she saw his overly natural movements. She took the money and hesitated: "It's not so good."

Chen Mo raised his eyes and asked again: "What is there to eat here?"

"Oh, we have instant noodles." The receptionist immediately said, "Pickled pepper, spicy, or pickled cabbage and mushroom?"

"Nothing else?"

"Uh... no more."

At this time, Li Rui and his gang just came out from inside.

When passing by the front desk, Li Rui deliberately bumped Chen Mo's shoulder, pointed at him, and gritted his teeth: "Chen Mo. I'll remember you. Wait for me."

The glass door opened and closed, and the group of people quickly disappeared. The girl at the front desk looked at him worriedly: "Do you want to tell the teachers at school? They are so arrogant, I'm afraid they will cause trouble for you again."

Chen Mo picked up the cigarette and lighter and smiled, "It's okay."

The girl didn't know what to say, so she asked, "Do you want more instant noodles?"

"No thanks." He turned and walked to the back of the Internet cafe, leaving a message: "I'm keeping healthy lately and I don't eat fast food."

The girl looked at the man's back as he walked and tore open the cigarette package, and saw him casually stuff the outer packaging garbage into his trouser pocket and skillfully knock out a cigarette. She couldn't help but be suspicious.

Is this really for health preservation?