“Why are you reporting to school alone? Where are your parents?”
“I don’t remember.”
“… Huh?”
“I said, I don’t remember.”
My name is He Jünle. I’m 19.
It wasn’t my original name. My original name was He Lele… It was too lame. I got it changed after becoming an adult.
Really, I’ve had enough of this farcical name for the last 18 years.
My life between the ages of 0 and 6 were almost fantastically boring. Perhaps I was too young to remember, or perhaps because of something else, I can’t remember much. But who cares?
Anyway, somehow, the morning of my sixth birthday, I suddenly ‘woke up,’ so to speak, my memories being crystal clear after that point.
I had a home. An adopted sister. A childhood friend. An inheritance. That’s everything I had for my new life.
Mo-er was my friend, my childhood friend. The Su family treated me well. Without them, Xüeru and I would’ve had a whole other story… I digress.
I was studious by middle school. I was good at learning, and the teachers told me I was. Whether it was school material or anything else, I learned it in no time.
They called me a ‘genius.’
I came to like being praised.
Even so, when I recall my seventh and eighth-grade days, I still have to say, I was someone as dumb as a piece of rock. I deserve to be bullied.
I was weak, mired in some inferiority complex. I was fragile.
The six years of primary school where I had to basically support an entire family did not teach me to be strong. Instead, the frailty and insignificance seemingly chiselled into my bones made me unable to talk back when I was showered with verbal abuses. When I was bullied, all I could do was keep saying ‘I’m sorry’ in some little corner.
Ho ho. What a dumbass.
On a rainy day of the last semester of eighth-grade, I fought back.
It felt so liberating punching people.
It was even more liberating when I won by punching people.
Watching the cowards flee into the distance, I finally understood. If they got scared from being punched, they will no longer bully me.
I was a genius.
So I was more and more adept at punching people.
The year of my middle school public exams, all the friendships I’d built while fighting culminated in the ‘Injustice Fighters’ gang——Or rather, not a gang. Just some kind of ‘student association,’ really.
After I got to high school, I expanded it into a proper Gang. Those were the days that we began establishing ourselves in the grey areas of the North District.
I thought about the name of the Gang.
Chen Ergou suggested that we just call it the boss’ name.
I agreed.
All in all, I was pretty satisfied with my past. There weren’t unresolved grudges or favours. I was absorbed in my career. I had playfights with my bros, I’d flirt with girls——
Studying?
Ho ho, those dumbed-down stuff of high school were…
One day, everything changed. The Su family fell.
Uncle Su ran away with debt, leaving behind Xiaomo and his younger brother. To pay for his treatment and for living in general, Xiaomo sold herself to the Late Night Tea-party——The Eden of the Aristocrats, toeing the line between light and dark.
My bright, sunshine of a life, since that moment on, has, as if a horse off its leash, a train off its rails, a certain monkey off his stone——
Went absurdly unpredictable, vibrantly ridiculous.
All because I met a weirdo named Murong Jihua.
He would force his way to love, forcibly confiscate good boys and girls (?). He was a domineering, unreasonable man, but he’s exceptionally…
“Smack him with stacks upon stacks of cash; if you can’t smack him dead…”
Hm. Should I thank this CEO for sparing my life?
… Exceptionally, mysterious.
He was handsome for sure. He was more handsome in person than what the press could ever write. He was absolutely generous with money. He looked completely like a standard CEO. An elite of society. A wealthy second-generation living the life.
Yet those eyes. Those eyes, with an inexplicable grey fog about them, made me feel something different.
Our first meeting, was marked by sparks and hostility.
I wasn’t afraid, however.
Unlike me, when he is looking at people, even when he has a wicked smile on, he has no killing intent at all.
He was like a lonely boat adrift out at the sea of stars; he was doing because he had some reason he had to.
——And he, isn’t afraid of me at all.
He looked like he was saying, “help me.”
Fine.
I feel like I might be drunk, but that’s how I let the whole thing go.
My instincts were right.
He treated Mo-er well. So damned well.
I was slightly unhappy. I thought, it must have been because Mo-er, my childhood friend, was being forced against her will——
I lied. I told him, I like Mo-er, and I will not give up on her.
As expected, he challenged me to it. I made a bet with him – whoever wins her heart can have her.
——If I could return Mo-er to her former, carefree self like so, that would be the best.
I gladly accepted.
It must be said, that Murong Jihua is a weirdo.
And it must also be said, that Murong Jihua is rich.
How rich? He could just buy out an entire school or hospital with a wave of his hand. He had authority to arrange for the best medical services available. It was no exaggeration to say he could overturn clouds and trigger rain at his will, to command as he sees fit;
Yet, at the same time, he can also squeeze himself onto a motorbike with me, to eat barbeque off the side of the road, to demolish an entire store at his whim, but then laughably secretly handing over a massive amount of compensation over to the store’s owner. His visiting patients in the hospital was woefully clumsy. He had all sorts of amusing little acts whenever and wherever;
Mm. He once carried I, who fainted, to the hospital.
He watched over me the entire night.
Pfft.
Why is every single word going through his mouth coming out so interesting?
I must test the guy more for Mo-er’s sake; I’ll admit, he doesn’t seem like a bad person at all.
In the hospital, that day, inexplicably, he lunged at me.
It was so sudden, and then, he petrified me with a single sentence,
“He Jünle, you’re a girl, aren’t you!”
He was speaking romantic nonsense all over, but the central meaning, is that he liked me.
Bloody hell, Heavens know how swooned he looked when he was blabbering all these flirtatious phrases, and the more swooned he was, the more angry I was –
Insulting me aside, if you didn’t fucking like Mo-er then what were you doing lying to her?!
After I dragged him to the toilet, and confirmed my gender, that dumbass looked all ‘aw, that’s a shame’?