chapter 140
(Gu Yu Chu and Gu Zhen have different fathers and different mothers, with no blood relation at all. He only calls him “brother.”)
Before entering the Necromancer Game, Gu Yu Chu’s life could be divided into two parts, with his sixteenth birthday as the dividing line.
Before sixteen, he had never seen his parents. The grandfather he relied on for survival died of illness when he was ten.
The rented basement would leak and lose power whenever it rained, yet the rent-come wind or storm-still had to be paid.
Before Grandpa passed away, he gave him a bank card and said that every month, his parents-people who didn’t want to be bothered with raising a kid at all-would transfer 1,000 into it, just enough to cancel out the rent.
He couldn’t afford school, and he couldn’t find a proper job. He could only rely on Grandpa’s friends, getting introduced and reintroduced until he finally got into a tiny private factory with few workers to do odd jobs: tightening screws, assembling circuit boards, sewing, hand-assembling Lighters…
Or he’d slip onto construction sites that didn’t require computer registration, pretending to be an adult so he could haul bricks and lay walls.
On his sixteenth birthday, he happened to receive a paycheck, and decided he’d treat himself to a meal-with meat.
Wearing clothes so worn they’d rubbed through into holes, he sat in a cramped, grimy little fly-ridden diner, waiting for his food. Instead of the dish arriving, a few uninvited guests did.
Several men filed in, all in suits and leather shoes, money practically clinging to them from head to toe.
The man in front stood out the most. His aura was exceptional, and his features were the best Gu Yu Chu had seen in his sixteen years.
He was even more handsome than the celebrities on the advertisement posters.
When he drew near, there was a cool, distant scent about him.
This man didn’t belong in a place this poor. And he brought news that would overturn Gu Yu Chu’s entire sixteen years.
“I’m Gu Zhen. From now on, your surname is Gu too.”
“Come back to the Gu Family with me.”
He was the young master of the Gu Family who had been switched out sixteen years ago.
In the upper circles of A City, there were four families powerful enough to cover the sky with one hand. The Gu Family was one of them.
Gu Yu Chu didn’t even get to see his food before he was ushered into a Bentley. Everything felt like a dream-casual, absurd, unreal.
The Gu Family was that powerful, yet their child could be switched so easily.
And after the switch, it had taken them so long to find him.
He had countless questions. In the end, he lowered his head, staring at the dirty print his muddy shoe sole had left on the carpet, and asked, “Who are you?”
Gu Zhen said, “I’m your brother.”
–
After entering the Gu Family, he realized that the meat he’d ordered for his birthday, placed on the dining table here, wouldn’t even count as a few shreds.
And Gu Zhen wasn’t actually his brother by blood.
Madam Gu’s health was poor. Back then, after giving birth to Gu Yu Chu, she suffered a massive hemorrhage. Though they managed to save her, the doctor told her she would never be able to conceive again.
The baby boy who had been mistakenly taken home in his place wasn’t fated for wealth. He died before he was old enough to speak. Heartbroken, Madam Gu adopted Gu Zhen and raised him as the successor of the Gu Family.
Gu Zhen was five years older than him. The month he brought him back to the Gu Family was also when he had just begun taking over the family business.
When Madam Gu saw him in his tattered clothes, she cried until her eyes were red, then handed him a Black Card. “Yu Chu, we’ve wronged you these past sixteen years. From now on, you’re a child of the Gu Family. Take this card first as pocket money. If you’re ever short on money, or if you want to buy something, tell Mom. I’ll do my best to satisfy you.”
Gu Yu Chu looked at the balance on the card.
For a moment, he thought something was wrong.
Otherwise, why would there be such a long string of zeros after the number?
Madam Gu had given him five million as pocket money.
He didn’t even know how to spend that much.
Just the day before, he’d still been a penniless nobody who had to think long and hard about whether to spend one extra yuan to add an egg to his meal.
The Gu Family’s money and power lifted him through far too many social tiers at once.
In an instant, he went from someone who had to kneel and look up at others to someone others had to kneel and look up to.
It also brought him into bigger, broader circles.
The Gu Family’s young master, who had been left outside and made to suffer, had been found.
He was taken to and from all sorts of elite gatherings, and the Gu Family even held a high-profile welcome reception.
For a time, everyone in A City’s upper class knew his name.
Gu Yu Chu.
He lived two years of comfort in the Gu Family, under the same roof as Gu Zhen, yet they rarely ran into each other.
Gu Zhen had just taken over the company and was extremely busy. When they did meet, he would only exchange a brief greeting, rub his hair, and tell him to drink more milk and eat more so he could grow.
Even though everyone in the Gu Family revolved around him,
his gaze always drifted to Gu Zhen, the one farthest from him.
And he always wanted that emotionally distant brother to look at him a few more times.
Madam Gu was afraid he wouldn’t have any friends, so she donated a whole building so that once he became an adult he could easily enroll in a School and have more chances to interact with his peers.
But even recognizing characters was hard for him. Every day in class, the moment the teacher started talking, he’d grow drowsy.
There were a lot of rich kids in this School.
Everyone called him Young Master Gu. They fought over the seat beside him; everyone wanted to be his friend.
“Young Master Gu is so serious, he even takes notes in class. I wasn’t this serious even back in high school!”
“Class is so boring. I just bought a new car, flew it in from overseas. Let’s go out for a spin sometime! Young Master Gu, you coming?”
“Today’s class was really dull! With our status, we can skip and still pass. Instead of wasting time here, why don’t we go do something fun?”
He didn’t know what “fun” was.
They dragged him out to go clubbing, to bars for drinks, racing through the night, speeding around the city. In that extreme rush of excitement, he felt a thrill he’d never experienced before.
So this was what having friends was like.
It really was much happier than staying home alone.
In the bar, beneath the deafening music, more and more friends gathered around him.
Everyone clinked their glasses. Someone handed a drink to Gu Yu Chu.
“Young Master Gu, my family still has a deal with the Gu Family this year. This one’s to you, you’ve gotta have your brother look after us more.”
He’d only just started drinking and thought alcohol didn’t taste very good. But because of that one line mentioning Gu Zhen, because of their mistaken assumption about how close he and Gu Zhen were, he inexplicably downed the drink and answered vaguely, “I’ll ask my brother when I get back.”
“Even if you’re the kid the Gu Family just acknowledged, Mr. Gu definitely dotes on you! The few times we stayed too late at the bar, wasn’t it always Mr. Gu who came to pick you up?”
With the alcohol in his system, Gu Yu Chu remembered too. Back then, Gu Zhen hadn’t felt at ease, so he’d called several times asking where he was and why he wasn’t home yet, and finally came in person to pick him up.
Loud laughter cut off his train of thought as his friends spun a bottle to choose tonight’s “lucky one.”
“Whose turn is it to pick up the tab?”
The man the bottle pointed to pointed at himself and faked a sob. “Have mercy, I just bought a sick new motorcycle and my dad found out and froze my card. I couldn’t scrape together a thousand bucks right now.”
“We’re all friends here.” Gu Yu Chu thought of that card of his he couldn’t seem to use up no matter what and spoke up. “I’ll pay today.”
He started going to bars more and more, and he often picked up the bill.
Because of his generous, free-spending ways and how “good he was to his friends,” he became famous a second time.
Every time he spent money, everyone treated him even more warmly.
Friends introduced more friends. Under the flashing lights of the bar and dance floor, no one’s face was clear anymore. Every night different people handed him drinks-liquor that, once swallowed, made him feel like he was floating, able to forget all his worries, sometimes even hallucinate.
No one knew that the only reason he played so wild was to make his brother come pick him up and take him home.
Before he’d started going to bars, seeing Gu Zhen three times in a month was already a lot.
After he started, every night that went past midnight, Gu Zhen would drive over.
He wore a very cool, aloof men’s cologne.
Every time Gu Yu Chu smelled that scent,
he knew Gu Zhen had come to get him.
If he wasn’t too drunk, they could even chat a bit in the car.
Until one day, the Gu Family grounded him and pulled him out of School, forbidding him from seeing those friends again. He was shut in his room without understanding why, and after a while it felt like his whole body was being eaten alive by ants.
He felt cold and in pain, pounding on the door wanting to get out, but he had no strength anywhere in his body. He could only collapse to the floor, scratching at his skin nonstop, weakly calling out to the person who always appeared in his hallucinations. “Bro…”
Someone came in through the door, picked him up and laid him on the bed, and held a glass of water to his lips.
His body trembled with pain. He knocked over the glass; the covers were soaked.
When he looked up, it was the first time he’d ever seen Gu Zhen angry.
“Someone hands you water and you just drink it, no questions asked, you don’t even know they’ve put something in it! And now it’s this hard just to take Medicine?”
“Things at the company have mostly stabilized. Mom only knows how to spoil you. Dad’s in poor health and you still pissed him into the hospital this time. Gu Yu Chu, from now on I’ll be the one to discipline you.”
“First, you’re going to kick that habit you picked up outside.”