chapter 4

I brewed a pot of Mingqian tea and poured two cups. I placed one in front of him and held the other in my hands.

“Just telling you that sentence directly would seem too dismissive. It wouldn’t be worth the five hundred thousand you paid.

“How about this: I’ll start from the beginning. It’ll help you understand the meaning behind those words.”

He nodded, crossing his arms over his chest in a defensive posture.

I smiled. “Relax. I’m not some psychopathic killer who murders just anyone.”

He forced a smile and uncrossed his arms, though the outline of a folding knife was visible in his pocket.

I sighed softly and began telling him the story of Cheng Hui and me.

Everyone who knew Cheng Hui said I was a jinx-that everything he cared about was destroyed by my hand.

When he jumped from the building, he landed headfirst. That face of his, which he spent millions every year to maintain, was smashed to pieces.

After his death, the company he had spent over a decade building was seized and auctioned off. The Cheng Family Enterprise was ruined in an instant.

His old friends and associates were dismissed from their positions one by one and sent to prison.

Little did they know, every effect has a cause.

When I was very young, my father worked as a security guard at Cheng Hui’s company.

The job was stable, but the pay was low-just enough to cover the expenses for our family of three.

A family like ours was never meant to withstand any real hardship.

When I was nine, my mother fell ill. My father took her to a hospital funded by Cheng Hui’s company.

The doctors said she had stomach cancer. Two-thirds of her stomach was removed.

She had to undergo chemotherapy and radiation therapy at regular intervals.

My father exhausted our meager savings and eventually sold our house. It took a year just to get her condition under control.

However, fate did not smile upon us.

Three years later, her cancer relapsed, and the cells spread throughout her abdominal cavity.

Many people urged my father to give up, but he said that as long as he had a breath left in him, he would never watch her die.

Because as long as she was there, our family was whole.

To avoid dragging the family down, my mother tried to end her life several times, but my father always stopped her. We would just hold each other and weep.

We watched as my mother withered away from a plump woman into a living skeleton.

Sometimes I selfishly wondered: if my mother had succeeded in her suicide or if my father had just let go and let her pass sooner, would the ending have been different?

To afford her continued treatment, my father became a test subject for new drugs at Cheng Hui’s company. After three or four years of that, his liver and kidneys failed.

After enduring endless agony, my mother finally passed away.

Poverty is a person’s greatest original sin. It strips the poor of their basic human dignity and any possibility of happiness.

At that time, I was only fifteen. I went to Cheng Hui’s door to beg, and I became his blood bag.