Chapter 9: Devil's Sunflower
——Those who crawl back from hell are never humans, but evil spirits.
As the black car drove into the Mo family estate in Bangkok, heavy rain poured down.
When the iron gate slammed shut behind him, Mo Xiaohan knew that this was not "home" but an arena.
Mo Xiaohan was pushed out of the car, his knees slamming heavily onto the bluestone slabs. The rain washed away his thin clothes, sticking to his back, outlining his bony figure.
"Look who this is?" A sharp female voice came from the corridor. "Our noble bastard is back."
Madam Mo walked slowly towards him, holding an umbrella. Her high heels crushed his fingers. "Master said, since you have the blood of the Mo family, you should learn the rules of the Mo family."
She bent down, pinching his chin with her scarlet nails: "From today on, you only have two choices-"
"Or become the sharp 'knife' of the Mohist school."
"Or die like your mother."
The "rules" of the Mohist school are simple - only those who survive are qualified to have the surname Mo.
Mo Xiaohan was locked in an iron cage in the backyard, along with several fighting dogs that had been starving for three days. The housekeeper tossed him a rusty dagger through the fence and said, "If you're still breathing before dawn, I'll give you a meal."
When the first Dogo Argentino pounced on him, he remembered the first word Ruan Xingchen taught him to write - "ink".
When the dagger pierced the dog's neck, warm blood sprayed all over his face.
The moment the second dog bit his calf, he heard the clear voice of the little girl in his memory: "Brother Xiaohan, the sunflowers should be painted facing the sun..."
When dawn fell, only a bloody man and a pile of broken limbs remained in the cage. Mo Xiaohan dragged his bony legs out of the cage and, under the horrified gaze of the housekeeper, placed the three dog heads neatly on the steps.
"Food." He held out his hand covered in brains.
After that day, everyone in the Mohist family knew that the bastard born by this prostitute was a wolf cub that survived by stepping on the corpse of a vicious dog.
At the age of eleven, the stone door of the dungeon slammed shut, completely blocking out the light from outside.
Mo Xiaohan blinked in the dark and soon heard rustling sounds around him - it was the movement of those illegitimate children, their breath filled with fear and ruthlessness.
"Either fight your way out or rot here."
Three days later, he was leaning against the door, covered in wounds. The blood at his feet had already half-coagulated, but he could still feel the faint warmth from the bodies that had not yet completely cooled down.
The butler finally smiled and opened the stone door: "Congratulations, young master, for passing the first lesson."
The light outside was so bright that he squinted his eyes. He stood in the open space at the door of the dungeon. Behind him was the thick darkness and the smell of blood. In front of him, the gray sky pressed down on the gloomy Mo family manor.
On his twelfth birthday, Mo Xiaohan received a gift——
A gun, and a fighting coach kneeling in front of him.
"Kill him." The butler pressed the gun into his hand. "This is your coming-of-age ceremony."
The coach was the only one who had taught him Jiu-Jitsu.
When the gun went off, the ring on Mo Xiaohan's left hand was splattered with blood.
When he was fifteen, Mo Xiaohan poisoned the eldest son of the Mo family's favorite thoroughbred horse at his birthday party.
No one could prove that he did it, just like no one could explain why the racehorse worth tens of millions suddenly went crazy and threw the second young master on his back into a fence full of spurs.
"It's you!" The second young master, his face covered in blood, was supported by someone and pointed at him hysterically: "I'm going to peel off your skin!"
Mo Xiaohan stood in the shadows, stroking the silver ring on his ring finger with his left hand - it was the same men's ring he and Xingchen wore, engraved with "Starlight" in Thai.
"Second brother, you're joking. This horse is my eldest brother's darling, how could I dare to touch it?" Mo Xiaohan smiled harmlessly. "I can't even get into the stable, how can I poison it?"
His fingertips paused on the silver ring. "Besides, before the horse went crazy, weren't you riding it and competing with your brother? Maybe it got spooked?"
That night, gasoline was poured into the eldest brother's bedroom. When the fire started, Mo Xiaohan stood in the garden, watching the struggling figure in the second-floor window, and hummed a tuneless nursery rhyme softly:
"Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..."
When he was seventeen years old, Mo Xiaohan single-handedly wiped out the lair of an armed drug lord on the Myanmar border.
When he returned to the Mo family carrying the drug lord's head, his father, the man he had only seen in the photos of his mother's belongings, finally looked at him straight in the eye.
"Not bad." His father patted his shoulder with his cigar-smelling hand. "Next week, let's go to the Golden Triangle and take over Ah Kun's business."
At the celebration banquet that night, Madam Mo handed over a glass of red wine and said, "Xiaohan has grown up. It's time for some entertainment."
Behind the wine glass, the girl in the white dress was shivering, just like the sunflower-like figure in her memory.
Mo Xiaohan crushed the wine glass.
"I think it's dirty."
At the age of eighteen, Mo Xiaohan broke the second young master's neck at a family meeting.
"Sorry, my hand slipped." He wiped the blood off the ring and looked at the pale-faced Mr. Mo: "Now, I am your only son."
After that night, the account books of all the casinos in Southeast Asia were delivered to his desk.
At the age of twenty, the arms trade line surrendered to him.
At the age of 22, Mo Xiaohan massacred the entire Mo family, even the guard dogs were not spared.
On the night of his father's murder, Mo Xiaohan's gun was pressed against his father's temple. The dying old man stared with wide eyes: "What on earth do you want?"
Mo Xiaohan turned the ring on his left hand, and heavy rain was pouring outside the window.
"I want all of Southeast Asia." He leaned over and whispered in the old man's ear, "so that when I find the star, no one can take her away from me."
When he sat on the throne of the patriarch with his father's head under his feet, the entire Southeast Asian underworld was trembling.
In his first year as the ruler, Mo Xiaohan did two things—
1. Turn Madam Mo into a human pig and keep her in an aquarium
2. Send people to find a silver ring engraved with the Thai word "eternal day"
When his confidant asked about the ring's owner, he stroked the "starlight" on the ring and chuckled: "I'm waiting for my sunflower to bloom."
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