Please, save him.
A shiny black Bentley is parked downstairs in a residential building that has been stained old by time, its appearance incongruous with the surroundings.
The afternoon sun cast slanting rays on the car's surface, creating a gradient of gray shadows. Through the window, a pale hand rose from the gear lever, and slender fingers touched the answer button on the central control screen.
Before he could speak, Qi Ya's voice rushed into the car and spread out: "Where are you now? If you don't have anything to do, hurry home. It's urgent."
Chen Sizhe was hung up on before he could even ask what the urgent matter was, but he didn't think much of it. His hand returned to the gear shift, his fingertips pressed against the crystal gear shift knob, the cold touch and the car's air conditioning both urging him to wake up. Beneath his involuntarily furrowed brows were thoughtful eyes, making it difficult for him to wake up.
Before he began practicing Taoism, he thought that fate was in his own hands. Only after he began practicing Taoism did he realize that there are too many things in life that are beyond his control.
Now, he can't even control his body.
The image of Shi Wendai smoking flashed before his eyes again. He didn't like the smell of smoke, nor did he like people who smoked, but he didn't dislike her.
My first reaction wasn't to complain about the smoke, but rather to involuntarily wonder about her past.
What past experiences sculpted her eyes like that, and shaped her soul like that?
The engine started, its sound assaulting his mind; the world didn't give him much time to immerse himself. Residents and children passing by the apartment buildings secretly cast their gazes at the luxury car, a sight usually only seen on city center streets. A woman carrying a sack of groceries pulled her child's hand back to the wall, watching the car drive away, its exhaust fumes a farewell.
The wind followed the car as it sped along. Feng'an District was a faded world, and Chen Sizhe, the "pampered young master" Wen Dai described, should return to his vibrant homeland.
There was no lawyer here who needed his visit, only a lady who needed him to escort her home.
The Bentley was parked in a space befitting its status, the underground garage filled with all sorts of luxury cars. The car door was knocked shut, and Chen Sizhe strolled leisurely to the elevator and took it upstairs. He clearly didn't consider Qi Ya's urgent matter to be urgent; after all, in Qi Ya's words, asking him to rush back to help her decide on the placement of the Buddha statue was also considered urgent.
The elevator doors opened with a "ding," followed by the sound of laughter and conversation coming from the living room—both were female voices.
The leg that had spontaneously stepped forward had the thought of retreating, but it was too late.
Just as Chen Sizhe was about to press the elevator button again to escape, Qi Ya's quiet voice drifted from the living room: "Stop."
A graceful and elegant lady, with a dignified smile on her face, shuffled on the tiles in her slippers. She walked over and grabbed Chen Sizhe's arm without giving him a chance to refuse. This woman, who would rather not carry a vase, dragged and pulled the 1.95-meter-tall, fitness-savvy Chen Sizhe to the living room. The words were squeezed out from between her smiling lips: "The doctor said I have an irregular heartbeat and I need to be careful about my emotions. If you dare to run, I dare to faint."
"...I understand." Chen Sizhe's expression was a mixture of helplessness and resignation. The Cupid lips that others could only achieve through plastic surgery looked like an unhappy upside-down boat on his face. The elegant woman sitting on the sofa was casting a tender glance at him.
Unfortunately, the bright moon shone on the ditch, and he didn't even glance at her out of the corner of his eye.
Qi Ya forcefully pressed Chen Sizhe down to sit beside the woman, giving the impression of forcing a respectable man into submission. Her hand remained on Chen Sizhe's shoulder, her strength partly used to subdue him and partly to maintain her smile. "This girl is called Xu Jing, Jing as in quiet. She's the daughter of one of my senior classmates, and she's incredibly talented—she's only 24 and has already held her own solo art exhibition. She's an artist. You can chat with Jingjing here; she's very interesting and knowledgeable. If you haven't eaten, take Jingjing out to eat with you; she didn't eat much at the dinner table earlier. I'm going to play a few rounds of mahjong with my sisters; you young people can chat amongst yourselves."
The sound of knocking on the floor reached Ning Mi, and the door clicked shut again with a thud. Chen Sizhe followed the lingering sound and moved to the single sofa on the other side.
The obvious act of distancing seemed to have no effect on Xu Jing. She calmly leaned over, picked up the teacup on the table, took a sip of tea, and glanced at him with slightly raised eyelids. "Aunt Qi told me you're a lawyer. Actually, I've heard of you before. There aren't many senior partners as young as you in the industry."
"You're not bad either." With a perfunctory, business-like compliment, Chen Sizhe pulled out his phone, his fingertips rapidly tapping the screen, his mind clearly annoyed.
Xu Jing held a teacup in her palm, her gaze drifting over the man reclining on the other sofa. Tracing his features, she smiled faintly and said softly, "It seems you're not interested in me. However, I am interested in you."
Chen Sizhe's brow twitched, sensing that another big problem was brewing. He immediately stood up, smoothed out the wrinkles in his clothes, and adopted the speed of a courtroom conversation: "It's getting late. Miss Xu must have been here quite a while. Please forgive me if I haven't been a good host today. If you have nothing else to do, please stay a while longer. I have other matters to attend to, so I'll take my leave now."
However, Big Trouble also got up. The woman put the teacup back on the table, a smile on her gentle face. "No, since you're leaving, I'll go with you."
"Not on the way."
"I didn't even say where I was going and you're already so sure it's not on my way?"
"Yes. It won't work, and I don't have time to waste. If Miss Xu doesn't have a driver, she can tell the butler, and he will arrange one for her. I'm not good at hospitality, please forgive me."
Chen Sizhe strode forward with a brisk pace, as if some ferocious beast was behind him, and hurriedly walked to the elevator leading to the parking garage.
Her dangling fingers slowly clenched, and Xu Jing watched his departing figure. A soft scoff escaped her lips as she whispered, "It's not that you can't, it's that you don't want to."
-
The screen, now lit up, displayed the online banking interface, and a pink and white fingertip slowly dragged across the numbers.
There are still ten million in the card.
Wen Dai tossed her phone onto the bedsheet, lay flat on the bed, and stared blankly at the screen.
A heart and mind as thick as paste, inside a body as thick as paste, wish they were paste themselves.
"If an ordinary family had this much money, they would be overjoyed... It's not enough at all!" The frustration in her heart was like air being filled into a balloon, and Wen Dai was letting it out; she shouted at the ceiling, but actually she wanted to shout at God.
Building relationships with the powerful and influential requires far more than tens of millions of dollars, not to mention that her demands would likely incur their joint liability. She didn't even want to touch that portion of the money.
Her eyes stung again, and tears streamed down her face. Wen Dai's gaze turned vacant, and her lips parted as she murmured, "These are what they left me, what they gave their lives for... my parents, these are their keepsakes."
It's a string of vague numbers, untouched banknotes that can be easily exchanged. None of them bear their presence, yet they come together to form them, to form two lives.
Life, or rather fate, wouldn't even give her time to remember her parents.
The phone she had tossed aside suddenly rang. She turned over and picked it up; the screen displayed Qian Yan's name. She couldn't help but furrow her brow, her heart inexplicably pounding.
The moment the call connected, Qian Yan's hoarse voice, choked with sobs, burst from the receiver: "Little sister, come quick, I beg you—Xiao Tong, I don't know what's wrong with him, he suddenly developed a high fever last night. I thought it was just a common illness, so I gave him cold medicine, but this morning he suddenly started convulsing and kept banging his head against the wall. I had no choice but to tie him up with a rope, and now he's kicking the bed."
Even without headphones, Wen Dai could faintly hear the "bang bang" sound from the other end of the phone. She immediately jumped out of bed, rushing to the wardrobe to grab clothes while holding the phone to reassure Qian Yan, "Sister, you need to keep Xiao Tong under control first, don't let him hurt himself, I'll be right there!"
She tossed her phone back onto the bed, hurriedly changed her clothes, and then grabbed her phone again. Her slippers seemed to be trying to slip away, becoming more and more chaotic the more she rushed.
Wen Dai ran to pick up the bag she usually used to store talismans and small magical artifacts, quickly checked the items inside, and then rushed out the door.
Her vision seemed to be able to hold nothing more, automatically opening up a patch of gray lying quietly in a corner of the city. There was a person there, a life, waiting for her to save it.
So, what Chen Sizhe saw when he arrived downstairs just as he was about to call her was this: the unit door was smashed open like a cannonball, turned 180 degrees and slammed against the wall with a thud. Her waist-length hair was not tied up and fluttered in the wind like a black banner. Her thin arms were holding a bulging canvas bag. Chen Sizhe recognized her by her profile in the glimpse.
"Wen Dai!"
Like an arrow shot from a fully drawn bow, Wen Dai instinctively stopped, turning her head to meet Chen Sizhe's eyes.
The man walked up to her in a few strides, his gaze sweeping over her for a moment before he decisively swallowed back what he was about to say, simply stating, "Where are you going? I'll take you."
Without standing on ceremony with him, Wen Dai abandoned the option of taking the subway to the shantytown without hesitation. She went straight to Chen Sizhe's car parked in front of the building, her voice brimming with gusts of wind: "Do you know where the shantytown is? I'll tell you the location in a bit, and you can drive in the direction I tell you."
Influenced by her attitude as if she were handling an emergency, Chen Sizhe nimbly got into the car and became her driver; the arrogance that had only appeared before he was twenty years old reappeared, and he almost sped along the road at the speed limit.
Out of the corner of his eye, he glanced at the person in the passenger seat. The woman was still looking straight ahead, and her peach blossom eyes were filled with anxiety. Noticing that her hand resting on her thigh was trembling, Chen Sizhe tightened his grip on the steering wheel.
The speeding car passed through the bustling city center, the changing scenery along the way like a painting, the end of the painting returning to simplicity, a simplicity so stark it was bleak.
The road leading to the shantytown was too narrow for Chen Sizhe's Bentley, so he parked it in a parking space at the alley entrance and followed the hurried Wen Dai into the damp alley.
Damp dust permeated the sweltering air, and the stench of garbage cans occasionally wafted into the nostrils. Wen Dai's brows were perfectly smooth, but Chen Sizhe, who had never set foot in this part of the world, couldn't help but furrow his brow.
The six-story building is all cement gray, with the only bright spots being the stained glass windows. At first glance, it seems as if you have stepped into the last century, as if the place has been abandoned by the times.
After several turns, the end is a cut-off plane with a narrow, steep staircase built close to the right wall; there is no handrail, every step is flawed, shoe prints are imprinted in the steps, and the steps are so flat that you can't even fit a foot all the way down.
Wen Dai seemed fearless of falling, skipping two or three steps at a time as if afraid she wouldn't make it to the bottom. She even wanted to run on such steep steps.
Chen Sizhe finally frowned, the deep lines on his forehead likely stemming from the disdain in his eyes; it was an unconscious expression, not his fault. For a pampered son of a noble family to even take a step into that alleyway was considered a sign of affability.
Under the low trees, people were still playing chess, and those smoking casually exhaled their smoke, which billowed upwards but they couldn't climb very high. Wen Dai rushed towards the small house made of blue iron sheds, its white iron door half-open, the thin walls and door unable to conceal the sounds of banging and groans of pain from within. She pushed the door open.
What came into view was Qian Tong, who was bound hand and foot but still kicking and thrashing on the bed, and Qian Yan, who was crawling on top of him to pin him down. The little boy's face was red, as if blood had pooled in his head, like a balloon about to burst. Qian Yan's eyes were almost as red as his face, and she mechanically repeated, "Little Tong, be good, baby, don't be afraid, don't be afraid, Mommy's here."
Chen Sizhe, who had rushed up behind Wen Dai, heard these words clearly. It was as if a broken string was still being plucked, playing a song of life. A lament.
Wen Dai hurriedly ran to the side. She subconsciously reached for the hand that should have been wearing the Five Emperor Coins on Qian Tong's wrist, but the empty wrist made her turn her gaze to Qian Yan.
“It’s broken, it just broke suddenly. I wanted to tell you, but I was afraid of causing you trouble. We’ve already caused you enough trouble… Little sister, I’m so sorry…” Qian Yan remained lying on top of Qian Tong, covering her face with her hands and sobbing.
With a sigh mixed with helplessness, Wen Dai truly had no time to comfort Qian Yan. She used her supernatural vision, and when she looked down again, what appeared in her field of vision was no longer Qian Tong's flushed face, but a paper-white face superimposed on it, like two layers that had not yet merged. Extremely black pupils were round and staring straight at her, with almost no whites in them, as if ink had been poured into someone's eyes.
"Holy crap." Even though she couldn't get used to ghosts no matter how many times she watched them, Wen Dai swallowed her heart, which had jumped into her throat. In order to be efficient, she chose to exorcise the evil spirits directly through the language of the upper realm.
However, this ghost was clearly just a small fry to be used, and tried to escape after separating from Qian Tong; but Chen Sizhe, on the other side, was no fool. He quickly made hand seals and drew talismans in mid-air, "Five Thunder Messengers, Thunderclap Heaven and Earth. Bind demons and capture monsters, gather and collect yin souls. Swift as thunder and fire!"
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