Chapter 026: I, Wu Chen, Came from an Ordinary Family!

Chapter 026: I, Wu Chen, Came from an Ordinary Family!

Wu Chen found this deeply puzzling. Why would anyone already be watching him, this early on?

His new life had only started today. Plenty had happened in these few hours, true, but judging purely by how fast information traveled, no one should have had time to set their sights on him yet.

Ding Ruilong?

Ding Ruilong wasn’t a deity. There was no way he could know of Wu Chen’s existence yet.

At the very earliest, that would take days.

So who had already put a tail on him?

Li Ruotai, maybe?

Had he sent someone to watch him—even into the restroom?

No, that didn’t add up either. Li Ruotai wasn’t foolish enough to do something so obvious, and his trusted men weren’t sloppy enough to get caught this easily.

Wu Chen turned it over in his mind, but his feet kept moving. Eating came first. His life had been unlocked—he intended to enjoy it properly, not shortchange himself, even if being watched hinted at something brewing, even danger.

But it didn’t matter.

Wu Chen didn’t believe any sudden turn of events could get the better of him. If it could, that thousand-year loop would have been wasted on a dog.

The moment Wu Chen stepped back into the private room and shut the door, a man in a baseball cap leaned out from around the corridor corner. He glanced once at the door, then pulled out his phone and dialed.

“Hello, boss.”

“Where is he?”

“Having lunch with Young Master Li and Miss Li.”

“Keep watching. Be careful. Don’t get spotted.”

“Understood, boss, don’t worry. Oh—boss, should I try listening in on what they’re saying?”

“Are you out of your mind? If Young Master Li catches you at that, you’ll be fish food by tomorrow. Just tail him carefully and see where he ends up.”

…

Inside the private room.

“What were you two talking about?” Wu Chen pulled out his chair and sat, asking with an easy smile.

“You, Brother-in-Law.” Li Ruotai picked up the thread at once, sounding a touch more deferential than before. “Haven’t asked you yet—are you from Donghai originally?”

“Yes. From a county under the city—Ning’an County.” Wu Chen answered lightly, as if it were nothing.

The moment Li Ruotai opened his mouth, Wu Chen already knew what he was after.

Fishing for information. Nothing more.

Li Ruobing knew it too, but she didn’t stop him. Truthfully, she wanted to hear what Wu Chen would say as much as her brother did.

“County boy, huh. So you live in the city now?”

“I do. Old Street, East District, inside Yuehe Community.”

“That area… that’s the old part of town. All old housing. Brother-in-Law, with the kind of skill you’ve got, you never thought about buying somewhere nicer?”

“No need. It’s my family’s old apartment. Living there suits me fine.”

“Family’s old apartment?” Li Ruotai repeated the phrase, sensing an opening. After a pause: “Brother-in-Law, didn’t you just say your family’s from Ning’an County? How’d they end up with an apartment in the city too?”

A logical snag.

“It is the family’s old place.” Wu Chen looked up, smiling. “My dad and mom, back when they were young, right after they got married, came into the city together to build a life. My dad was a cook—could handle lamian, could stir-fry. My mom had a bit more schooling, so she worked as an accountant. That was over twenty years ago now, and housing was cheap back then. The two of them scrimped and saved for years before finally scraping together a down payment and taking out a mortgage on that apartment.”

“After that… my grandfather’s health went downhill for years before he passed. Once my grandmother died, my parents talked it over and decided to look after him. At first they wanted to open a storefront in the city, but they didn’t have the capital, so they went back to the county instead and opened a small restaurant there—easier to look after the old man that way too.”

“The city apartment got rented out for years after that. Prices kept climbing, and they never could bring themselves to sell. Not until I started high school—Donghai No. 1 High School—did I move back in.”

Wu Chen had no reservations about discussing his family. He knew that with Li Ruotai’s resources, digging up the truth about him would take mere minutes.

Worth noting here—

Wu Chen had transmigrated into this world from a parallel universe, but his own identity had remained unchanged in the process. Which meant, in truth, that the parents, relatives, and friends waiting for him in this world were the very same people he’d known before the transmigration.

His feelings for them, naturally, hadn’t changed either.

Their life experiences here diverged slightly from what he remembered, but only in the details—the broad strokes held.

By the time Li Ruotai finished listening to Wu Chen’s simple account, only two words remained in his head.

Ordinary.

Painfully, thoroughly ordinary.

Over twenty years ago, Wu Chen’s parents had once burned with the same youthful hunger as anyone else—hand in hand, striking out for the big city to build something of their own, hoping, like so many of their generation, for a better future.

But fate loved nothing more than toying with people.

After years of hardship scraping together the money for that apartment, circumstance and necessity had eventually driven them back to their hometown, where they’d made peace with a quieter, steadier life instead.

And Wu Chen was the ordinary young man who’d grown out of that ordinary household—

Yeah, right.

Li Ruotai didn’t believe a single word of it.

Tell it to the ghosts.

Could an ordinary man know things like some kind of fortune-teller?

Could an ordinary man out-gamble a top expert flown in from Macau?

Could an ordinary man sever a man’s hand without so much as blinking?

In truth, Wu Chen hadn’t lied at all. Before “yesterday”—before July 7, 2020—he had genuinely been an ordinary person. Had he not lived through July 7 three hundred and sixty-five thousand times over, the Wu Chen of today would still be exactly that.

“Brother-in-Law, when you were in high school, you really lived alone? Uncle and Auntie never came to stay with you, keep you company while you studied?” Li Ruotai pressed on, unwilling to let it go.

“No,” Wu Chen said. “I’ve got a younger sister at home, five years behind me. Someone had to look after her, and the family’s lamian shop couldn’t just shut down—they had to make a living. I was fifteen, sixteen by then. Nothing wrong with living alone at that age. As long as they sent living expenses, I wasn’t going to starve. What’s there for a boy to be scared of?”

He didn’t buy it.

Li Ruotai still didn’t buy a word of it.

Anyone who believed this was a fool.

There was no way a person could be this ordinary, this unremarkable.

And the more mundane Wu Chen made his own background sound, the more suspicious he seemed in Li Ruotai’s eyes. He would absolutely dig into him—and Wu Chen knew it too.

Let him.

Dig all he liked.

Being investigated was the one thing Wu Chen feared least.

If Li Ruotai actually managed to catch him in a lie, or uncover some grand hidden background he’d been concealing—that would be the real ghost story.

Every word of it had been the truth.

“Brother-in-Law’s gambling is something else,” Li Ruotai said, offering the compliment before asking, “Who taught you? Mind if I ask?”

“Figured it out on my own, when I had nothing better to do,” Wu Chen said, offhand.

That much was a lie.

But no one—save perhaps some god—could ever trace where Wu Chen’s gambling skill had actually come from, because the stretch of time in which he’d learned it had long since been erased, reset out of existence.

“Then how does Brother-in-Law know… the things you know?” Li Ruotai pressed again.

Meaning the intelligence.

“That has to stay confidential. Business,” Wu Chen said, putting on a deliberately mysterious smile.

“All right, enough. You interrogating his household registry now?” Li Ruobing cut in, stopping her brother before he pushed further—he’d wandered somewhere he had no business asking about. She knew Wu Chen was an information broker; of course that side of things couldn’t be discussed.

Knock, knock.

Someone rapped at the door, but it opened before anyone answered. A waiter had come to serve the food.

French cuisine: steak, foie gras, pumpkin-corn soup, and a scattering of desserts.

The lunch passed pleasantly enough. They chatted over odds and ends while eating—getting to know one another, more or less.

Afterward, the three of them left the restaurant together, but split into separate cars.

Wu Chen and Li Ruobing headed one way, straight back to Huancai Fashion. Li Ruotai went the other, back to Crown Entertainment.

They went their separate ways.

Sitting in the back of the Maybach, Wu Chen tilted his head to check the rearview mirror, then turned to glance out the rear window. Li Ruobing, unsure what had caught his attention, glanced back herself. Plenty of traffic on the road, the bodyguards’ car trailing behind them—nothing that seemed worth a second look.

“What, can’t bear to be apart from my brother? He’s long gone, you won’t see him now,” Li Ruobing teased.

Given her personality, teasing anyone at all took a certain baseline of familiarity.

In half a day, the two of them had come a remarkably long way.

“It’s nothing,” Wu Chen said, smiling.

In truth, he’d spotted a car tailing them.

And he already knew exactly who’d sent it.

Back in the restaurant corridor, the man in the baseball cap had kept his face hidden—Wu Chen hadn’t gotten a clear look, had no idea who he was.

But people were easy to disguise. Cars weren’t. Wu Chen knew Donghai far too well not to recognize the unassuming black Volkswagen trailing behind them.

The bodyguard in the front passenger seat suddenly pressed a hand to his earpiece, listening intently, then murmured a low reply. He turned back to Li Ruobing.

“Boss, the rear car reports we’re being followed.”