Corruption

On the eve of my wedding, my biological father, stepmother, and fiancé conspired to commit me to a mental asylum.

My crime? Being so “insane” that I attacked someone with a knife.

Three years later, I was discharged with a ten-billion-dollar inheritance that requires only my signature to claim.

Everyone expects me to still be a lunatic, but this time, I’m going to make them pay.

While I am at my most lucid, I will reclaim the lives, the money, and the truth they owe me, one debt at a time.

When I was thirteen, I traded myself for a bowl of chicken soup. From that moment on, I knew I was born for this life. I used it to trade for one head after another.

On the day the Xiao Family ran into disaster, the servants all scrambled to grab whatever valuables they could find. Unable to outfight them, I could only take away the nine-year-old Second Young Master, who still couldn’t speak.

Later, after the storm had passed, he asked me if I would be his concubine.

Fu Yanxiu’s younger sister was still growing, his mother lay half-paralyzed on the kang, and he still had to study for the imperial examinations.

For all seven years of our engagement, I worked his family’s fields.

The day he passed the provincial examination, Fu Yanxiu came to break off our engagement, his face grim.

“Sui Zhu, the capital isn’t a place for someone like you,” he said.

In 1993, twenty-two-year-old Huang Xincheng goes to prison after defending his pregnant girlfriend, Li Fang, from a drunken harasser.

Four years later, he comes home determined to rebuild his life and earn her family’s trust.

For a brief season, hard work gives him everything he has ever wanted: a wife, loving parents, and a child on the way.

Then one senseless act takes Li Fang from him, leaving him with a newborn son, two grieving elders, and a promise he will spend the rest of his life trying to keep.

When Meng Wei—the man whose kidney he destroyed in that first fight—returns to ruin his livelihood, Huang discovers that prison settled nothing.

Backed by a powerful clan, Meng Wei attacks every honest path Huang tries to take until the only door left open leads into the underworld.

Huang rises from mahjong-parlor manager to crime boss and real-estate tycoon, telling himself every compromise is for his family.

But as loyalty becomes murder and ambition becomes corruption, the good man Li Fang loved grows harder to recognize.

Over seventeen years of revenge, two men drag each other toward destruction.

One father’s dream of giving his son a spotless future is built upon crimes that refuse to stay buried.