CH 7

He didn’t think the photo would have any repercussions. He met Ye Bing without any trouble, got in the truck, and returned to Houlin with his first batch of goods. He hid the two packages under his bed, but Xia WanWan didn’t find them.

With three days left in the holiday, Jiang Xiao dutifully read his schoolbooks and did worksheets as he’d planned, waiting for school to start.

But after he left Liujiang City, an unsettling event occurred.

The group of teenagers sitting in the coffee shop were looking through the photos in the camera. All the young people in this circle were from rich families. It wasn’t like they’d never seen a camera before, but the new ones from abroad were still expensive. The image quality was obviously different, and the pictures looked good even if you took a snapshot out a window.

The owner of the camera was a girl named Lin RongJia, who wore a somewhat conceited expression. Her father was the general manager of Yongjiang Company. In this circle, her family was the wealthiest.

The camera was passed around to various people and then came back to her. There were a lot of admiring looks and words of praise. At first the seven or eight young people talked about the camera, but then the conversation turned to one person.

Lin RongJia’s older brother1, Lin ChengYu—her cousin, to be precise—had just come back after going abroad for medical treatment. About a month ago he was in a minor car accident. It wasn’t all that serious or life-threatening, but he fell and hit his head. He got a mild concussion and was knocked unconscious for a while. When he woke up, he seemed delusional, like he’d gone completely out of his mind. He kept mumbling about whether he was dreaming, rummaging all around, and bit his own hand so hard he even started bleeding. If you looked closely, you’d see his eyes were totally bloodshot.

The family was terrified. They thought it was brain damage and anxiously sent him to a foreign country for treatment. Although he seemed to return to normal pretty fast, Grandpa Lin still felt uneasy. He forced Lin ChengYu to stay abroad until his physical injuries were all healed.

The reason this was a topic of conversation wasn’t because the story was especially bizarre, it was because of Lin ChengYu. At age fourteen, he was so good-looking he attracted attention everywhere he went. Whenever someone mentioned the Lin family, the teens would focus on Lin ChengYu. He was a first-class shining star on campus and hailed as the school grass2. He was of mixed race and looked like he’d come straight out of a manhua, so the girls were always daydreaming about him.

Lin RongJia’s attitude towards Lin ChengYu was complicated. On the one hand, he really was good-looking and brought her a lot of benefits in terms of school and friends. On the other hand, she was a little afraid of him and disliked him quite a bit.

“Let’s not talk about him.” She turned to her circle of friends and said, “He took a leave of absence. He won’t be coming to school for a while.”

Various teens let out sighs of disappointment.

After the get-together, Lin RongJia went home in a cheerful mood.

She played with her new camera in the study, copying photos one by one to the computer. She was planning to pick out some nice ones to enlarge them. There were some single photos of herself and a few good shots of the street. In the center of the park across from the café there was a large tree, but it so happened that a bus drove by, and the bus was captured instead.

The bus certainly wasn’t very interesting. It was crowded with people, but the shot was crystal clear. Just as Lin RongJia was about to press delete, the door of the study pushed open. Her hand on the mouse froze for a moment.

It was Lin ChengYu.

The Lin family had deep roots, counting eight generations of famous names, and the mansion was enormous. Everyone lived together.

Yongjiang Company was founded by Grandpa Lin and had flourished in the hands of Lin ChengYu’s father. At present its primary business was high-end hotels, and it thrived on this part of the coast. But the smart and capable eldest son, Lin ChengYu’s father, had died unexpectedly. His mother divorced and left the country years before. After that, there was no news of her, and their six-year-old child, Lin ChengYu, was left to be raised by Grandpa Lin.

Grandpa Lin was the chairman of the company, and he held the most shares. He originally had 30%, but he controlled an additional 30% because Lin ChengYu’s father gave his son his stake before he died, so in total it was 60%.

After all, the child was still young, and it was better to leave it to adults to take care of for now. Grandpa Lin really looked favorably on Lin ChengYu. Out of the younger generation he valued him the most. The majority of those shares would go to him in the future.

However, now that Grandpa Lin had gotten older, many things in the company were given to others to take care of. Lin RongJia’s father was the second son of the family, but he didn’t have many shares, only about 20%. Now he was in charge of specific matters in the company, and as the general manager he had real power. The Lin family also had several distant relatives who’d invested money, adding up to another 5% of the shares, but they didn’t interfere in company affairs and just took dividends. The remaining 15% were scattered in the hands of several investors who didn’t have a meaningful say.

Although they were a family, to be clear, it wasn’t unusual for there to be a bit of self-interest in the dark. Lin RongJia’s father was in charge of the company now, but everyone knew he was just paving the way for Lin ChengYu to grow up.

Even at such a young age, Lin RongJia had heard about these things. Her parents often discussed it in private, and although she didn’t know all the details, she vaguely understood what it meant. So she had mixed emotions towards Lin ChengYu, including jealousy, fear, and envy.

Now this person was standing in front of her. Lin RongJia had seen him in the hospital when he first woke up, with his eyes so red they looked about to bleed. Now she was mostly afraid of him. She froze and didn’t dare to move.

She thought Lin ChengYu looked like a fox spirit, a kind of fairy creature, both in terms of looks and personality. Since he came back from his injury it became even more obvious that Lin ChengYu himself was enveloped by a strange, eccentric aura.

But Lin ChengYu didn’t look at her. His face was cold. He rifled through the bookshelves and picked up a book. Without saying a word he turned around to leave.

Lin RongJia’s face relaxed a little. She turned back to delete the photo. The whole time, Lin ChengYu acted like she was invisible, but the moment he happened to glance at the computer screen, he looked like he’d seen a ghost. He darted from the bookshelf to stand behind her.

Lin RongJia was startled. Her hand twitched and she accidentally clicked the delete button. All of a sudden Lin ChengYu snatched the mouse from her hand. He fixed his eyes on her, and with a surge of anger demanded, “Where did you get that photo? Why delete it?”

“… It’s my photo,” Lin RongJia didn’t know why he was suddenly so cross. She reminded him, “There’s… there’s a recycle bin.”

If Lin ChengYu didn’t even know that much, it was hard to say his brain had fully recovered. Lin RongJia saw his hand on the mouse was trembling. After switching to the desktop, the recycle bin was obviously right in front of him, but he searched over and over for it a long time before he found it and recovered the file.

There was nothing strange about that photo aside from the mistake in capturing it. She’d taken a picture of a bus, but because it was so close, the image was startlingly clear. A young man was sitting by the window, like he’d just turned his head, and the photo had captured a frontal view of his face.

He happened to be in the middle of the composition. The moment you glanced at this photo, you’d immediately notice the young man. He wasn’t bad-looking, but everything about him was dishevelled. He wore an old T-shirt, held a schoolbag in his lap, and had his arm around a large bag. Clothes like those were common for impoverished young workers in Liujiang. He looked a little tired. It wasn’t clear what type of hard work he’d been doing.

But after Lin ChengYu carefully examined this picture, he got even weirder.

“I found you,” Lin RongJia heard him mutter, “I finally found you….”

In that voice was a trace of a sob, and Lin RongJia was too timid to turn around. If she’d gathered the courage to look, she would have seen Lin ChengYu’s eyes. Always so indifferent and cold, they were now bloodshot and red.

But there were a lot of people in that photo. There were other passengers on the bus and pedestrians passing by, dozens of faces in total, and Lin RongJia didn’t know which one Lin ChengYu meant.

He made a copy of the picture and asked where it was taken, and finally he didn’t forget to delete the file on Lin RongJia’s computer. He didn’t let her keep a single copy.

“Your family really is the same lineage.” Lin ChengYu left some mysterious words when he left the study. “Very useful, thanks.”

There was another sentence after that, but his voice was too quiet, like he was speaking to himself, and Lin RongJia didn’t hear it.

“I will absolutely find him.”

Lin RongJia, who received a mysterious thank you, didn’t dare to interrupt the weird atmosphere. She had no idea why Lin ChengYu was suddenly crazy again.

—

The author has something to say:

It’s no use meeting now

TL Notes:

shining star – 风云人物 – celebrity, big shot, influential man, man of the hour, man of the year, man in the news

fox spirit – 狐狸精 – hú li jīnɡ – Alternatively: seductive woman, witch, tease, old fox

fairy creature – 精怪 – jīnɡ ɡuài – Alternatively: ghost, demon, spirit monster, elf, genie

“Your family really is the same lineage” – The original line was “你们一家倒是还真是一脉相乘”, but 乘 seems to be a typo for 承 (they are homophones). 一脉相承 means a certain thought, behavior, or doctrine has been passed down through generations like an inheritance.

Transliterated names, titles, and places—new in this chapter: