Chapter 1

Chapter 1

My rent is half the market rate.

That’s because my neighbors are a pair of lunatics.

“I’m telling you upfront, the people across the hall are noisy. They’re a public nuisance,” the landlord said, looking completely fed up.

Who wouldn’t be frustrated after being forced to slash the rent by fifty percent?

I told him I didn’t care and signed the contract without a second thought.

I’m the type of person who loves a good spectacle. Back home, I got so bored that I accidentally burned the house down. My dad was so livid he gave me a huge lump sum of cash and kicked me out.

He said I didn’t understand the hardships of the real world, so I figured I’d go out and experience them for myself.

On my first day, I heard high-pitched moans coming from across the hall.

A man and a woman, perfectly in sync.

I thought to myself, *Is that it?*

After an hour of that, the couple started fighting. The shouting escalated into throwing things, followed by sobbing and screaming.

Once they finished smashing things, they went right back to the moaning.

This cycle repeated all night long.

I get it now. They really are crazy.

The next morning, just as I was heading out, the door across the hall opened.

I was curious to see what kind of people the “Soprano Couple” were…

But a child walked out instead.

He was wearing a local elementary school backpack. He was very thin and small, though his head seemed a bit large for his body.

I was a little surprised there was a child living there…

But the feeling only lasted a moment.

It’s a big world; you see all kinds. Some people don’t give a damn about their kids; their own desires always come first.

If they want to go crazy, they go crazy. If they want to get laid, they get laid. They don’t have an ounce of self-restraint.

Having seen my fair share of lunatics, I remained unfazed.

The kid followed me into the elevator, staring at the bag of steamed buns in my hand and swallowing hard.

I could have ignored that, but his stomach was growling like a thunderstorm.

I figured that after all that commotion last night, the couple probably hadn’t bothered to get up and make the kid breakfast.

So, I asked casually, “Hey kid, are you hungry?”

To my surprise, he backed into the corner of the elevator as if I’d said something terrifying.

“No, no! I’m not hungry!”

Yet his stomach wouldn’t stop growling.

I shoved the buns into his hands and walked away with long strides.

I didn’t think much of it.

After settling into my new home, I went out and bought a cooking robot. I thought it would free up my hands, but it turned out to be a total scam.

One minute it was barking orders at me to chop this, the next it was telling me to slice that.

And it didn’t even clean the pot properly.

It felt like I’d bought an ancestor to come home and boss me around.

After messing with it for a while, I got bored.

I remembered there was a small Western restaurant downstairs and thought about going to buy some cake.

Just as I stepped out, the door across the hall opened again.

This time, a woman walked out.

She looked to be about twenty-seven or twenty-eight. She was decent-looking, but she had dark circles under her eyes, looking like she’d overindulged in certain activities.

She glared at me fiercely.

I figured she hadn’t been getting along with the neighbors for a while now. She probably knew I’d been shocked by their antics last night, so was she trying to give me a warning to establish dominance?

I gave her a slight smile. “What are you looking at? Looking for your mother?”

Seeing her expression instantly shift to pure shock was absolutely hilarious.