Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Once you’ve made fast money, the seed is planted.

You never forget the taste of it for the rest of your life.

Elder Brother started gambling. And he won. He didn’t lose; most of the time, he was winning.

He won many, many, many times.

We were all dazed, truly believing that the heavens had finally opened their eyes and our luck had turned.

Making money, it turned out, could be so “easy.”

But we forgot one thing: people like us can’t afford to lose.

Just once-it only took falling once-and everything he’d won, along with our original capital, was gone. But back then, who believed in such things?

Elder Brother didn’t believe it, and neither did I.

We had to win it back. We had to turn the tables.

His eyes were bloodshot with greed; those were the only two words left in his head.

And then… came that hellish ending.

He was detained and strung up to be beaten. I… I don’t want to talk about it anymore.

After that, it felt like we had died once already. We crawled back into the muck of our lives, defeated.

I have to say, Elder Brother truly was remarkable.

Most gamblers in this world rot in that quagmire for the rest of their lives.

But Elder Brother? He fell once, and he never touched that stuff again for as long as he lived.

He had self-control.

He started trying again.

Elder Brother scrambled to start a small business. There were ups and downs, profits and losses; he was so busy his feet hardly touched the ground.

In the end, he actually managed to build it up, bit by bit.

Once he had money, he tore off my old necklace and replaced it with a thick gold one.

I… I suppose I was happy.

In truth, I hadn’t needed to work for a long time.

My skin grew pale and fair; my hair became smooth and lustrous.

Away from the harsh elements, my natural features began to glow with life.

Elder Brother got a nice car and a spacious house. He even bought me my favorite puppy.

Life was looking up.

It was just that he gradually stopped being as attentive to me as he used to be.

Maybe he was just busy.

Life seemed to have returned to a certain kind of peace, but beneath that calm, something had already soured and rotted.

Men use money to compensate for a lack of love, while women trade their endurance for a sense of security.