Chapter 034: I Don’t Want to Die the Same Year, Month, and Day as You

Chapter 034: I Don’t Want to Die the Same Year, Month, and Day as You

This was the real reason Wu Chen had pulled Lu Guangnian aside for a private word.

Otherwise there was nothing left to say. He’d already told him what needed telling; the rest, Lu Guangnian could dig up on his own. One more paternity test with the boy would lay the truth bare—Wu Chen didn’t need to say another word about it.

He’d come out here for one reason alone: to tell Lu Guangnian that his line hadn’t ended after all.

The injury that had left him unable to father children had happened when he was twenty-six. Before that, he’d been a strong, healthy man. Of course he could have had a child.

Across a thousand years of looping, Wu Chen had investigated more people than he could count, uncovered more secrets than any one man should know, learned the full weight of more private histories than he could number. It left him, often, with the same quiet thought: fate really does love to play tricks on people.

Lovers who turned out to be siblings separated at birth.

A hit-and-run driver who killed someone in the middle of the night, only to discover the victim was his own father.

Babies switched at the hospital, so that the child meant for poverty grew up rich, and the child meant for wealth lived worse than a dog.

Too many cases like that to count.

One thing was worth noting, though.

He hadn’t found Ma Huifang through Lu Guangnian at all.

Wu Chen had spent so long mapping people’s relationship networks that, over time, those separate webs had begun to overlap—strangers linked to strangers through some shared connection, until it all became one enormous net.

He’d found Ma Huifang because of her son, Ma Jiawei.

Ma Jiawei was thirty-two, held a master’s degree, and worked at Donghai Shanguang Technology Group as head of the technical department.

Shanguang’s owner, Zou Hai, was fifty—one of the country’s earliest programmers, a former hacker, a genuine heavyweight in the field.

Wu Chen had come across him during a stretch of time he’d spent studying programming, back when he considered his own skills sharp enough to go looking for someone to test himself against.

He’d sought out Zou Hai first.

And that was how he’d discovered the real prodigy working under him: Ma Jiawei. His skills had already surpassed his mentor’s—which was exactly how he’d become an executive at a listed company by thirty-two.

Wanting to meet him within a single day, Wu Chen had gone digging.

What he found surprised him: Ma Jiawei carried his mother’s surname. No father listed anywhere.

While tracing Ma Huifang, Wu Chen worked backward from the boy’s birth date, subtracting the ten months of pregnancy to pin down when she’d conceived.

Eventually, from an old neighbor, he got the name of her first boyfriend—Lu Guangnian.

The name of Lu Guangnian, chairman of Juli Group, wasn’t the kind of thing an ordinary person would recognize easily.

To most people, the wealthy they could actually name were either the country’s top handful of tycoons or whoever ranked first in their own city. Even second place rarely registered.

People knew company names, not the men behind them. There were simply too many rich men in the world, and the ordinary person could name only the ones who kept turning up in the news—a small handful.

Stop someone on the street and ask them to name the ten richest people in their own city, and most couldn’t manage even one.

But Wu Chen had already finished investigating Lu Guangnian long before this. At first, hearing the name again, he’d assumed it was simple coincidence.

Digging deeper, though, he found it wasn’t a coincidence at all.

Ma Jiawei’s biological father was Lu Guangnian himself—the real estate magnate of Donghai.

…

“I… she… a son… you…” Lu Guangnian stared at him, stunned past speech, unable to string together a single full sentence.

“Your granddaughter turns five this year,” Wu Chen said, smiling.

“She—is this true? You’re not lying to me…