Chapter 051: The Car Accident Ten Years Ago

Chapter 051: The Car Accident Ten Years Ago

Wu Chen played along with Lei Cheng’s little display, and when he caught the name on the screen, he let a flicker of genuine surprise show.

“Hello, Godfather…” The call connected, and Wu Chen caught the faint, sugary voice on the other end before Lei Cheng lifted the phone to his own ear.

“Hey there, baby, miss me?… Mm… hahahaha… mm… all right, all right, quit complaining. You’ve barely been famous five minutes—if the director wants you to play it a certain way, just play it that way. He’s a friend of mine, he’s got your interests at heart too…”

Wu Chen raised his teacup and drank, listening quietly to Lei Cheng’s half of the call. He couldn’t hear what Tao Manying was actually saying, but the tone made it obvious enough—she was pouting at him, working the charm.

If anyone else had been in the room—one of her fans, say—

If that person had known who this greasy, unkempt, middle-aged man was talking to, and heard the words coming out of his mouth, they might have collapsed on the spot and clawed their own eyes out.

The more excitable ones might have jumped off a building. Devoted fans were capable of anything.

Because the mismatch was that absurd.

Tao Manying was a genuine beauty—by Wu Chen’s own exacting standards, a solid nine. Fair skin, striking face, endless legs, presence and polish to match. She could play a noblewoman one moment and a wide-eyed girl the next.

She was, by any measure, exactly what ninety-nine point nine percent of men pictured when they imagined the perfect woman.

And the patron who’d kept her for ten straight years—the very Lei Cheng sitting across from Wu Chen right now—was every bit as ordinary, greasy, and sleazy as he looked.

It wasn’t even really about looks. Lei Cheng’s features weren’t bad, and the weight wasn’t the real issue either. It was everything else—the bearing, the presence, all of it.

The two of them stood at opposite ends of the earth.

Put them side by side, and “beauty and the beast” wouldn’t come close to covering it. It would look more like a beauty standing next to a steaming pile of garbage.

Not an exaggeration. Not even slightly.

At first glance, Lei Cheng gave off less presence than an average man on the street.

But—

A first impression was just that. An impression.

And impressions could be built on purpose.

Wu Chen knew Lei Cheng was doing this deliberately.

Setting money aside entirely, Wu Chen actually believed the imbalance ran the other way. It wasn’t Lei Cheng who fell short of Tao Manying. It was Tao Manying who fell short of Lei Cheng.

Without him, she might have vanished into the crowd years ago—or worse, become some wealthy man’s private plaything, forbidden from ever stepping into public life, let alone rising this high.

Wu Chen had seen photographs of Lei Cheng from a decade back. Across the thousand-year loop, he’d come across them more than once. Back then, Lei Cheng had been tall, lean, thirty-two and in his prime—handsome, composed, carrying himself with real presence.

It was the car accident, ten years ago, the one that had nearly killed him, that had remade him into this.

Or rather—he’d chosen the disguise himself. He’d started eating and drinking without restraint, keeping women, throwing money around, funding actresses’ careers, letting his manners go crude and rough.

Every bit of it had been armor. A way to keep himself from being killed.

Ten years, and the whole stretch could be boiled down to a single word.

Endurance.

He’d been enduring the entire time, waiting for one chance to land a killing blow and flip the board entirely.

Even knowing, somewhere underneath it all, that the chance might never come.

Because the man who wanted him dead wasn’t a stranger. It was his own elder brother—Lei Zhenghui’s eldest son, Lei You.

Lei Cheng was the losing side of a brutal family war.

That accident ten years ago had been Lei You’s doing. Three people in the car had died; one had been left critically injured; Lei Cheng was the only survivor. Among the dead was his own wife, married to him just two years.

Lei Cheng had never once beaten his brother—not for lack of ability. As far as Wu Chen could tell, the two of them were closely matched, both genuinely capable men.

The reason he’d always lost came down to something simpler: Lei You had eight years on him.

Back in the seventies, people married young. Lei Zhenghui had married at eighteen, had his first son at nineteen—Lei You.

By the time his second son, Lei Cheng, came along, Lei Zhenghui was already twenty-seven.

Lei Cheng’s birth had been, at the time, something of an accident itself.

While Lei Cheng was still in sixth grade, Lei You had already graduated university and joined Hongfa Industrial.

By the time Lei Cheng finished his own degree, Lei You was already Lei Zhenghui’s right hand, one of the core pillars of the company.

That gap in age left the brothers with no real closeness between them.

If anything, Lei You had resented his own full brother from the start.

The resentment traced back to the day Lei Cheng was born—the day their mother, after delivering him, bled out on the operating table of the county hospital.

They hadn’t been able to save her.

Of course, old grief wasn’t the real reason the brothers turned on each other thirty years later. The accident, in the end, happened because Lei Cheng had steadily built his own standing inside the family business, and Lei Zhenghui had come to value him more and more.

Lei Zhenghui had even said, once, openly at a shareholders’ meeting, that when he retired the company would pass to both sons together.

Lei Cheng’s rise inside Hongfa was a direct threat to Lei You’s position.

Strip away everything else, and the falling-out came down to one thing: who would inherit.

After the accident, Hongfa went through a wave of upheaval—reshuffled staff, sudden departures. A few people simply vanished.

Once out of the hospital, Lei Cheng had once shown up at Lei You’s villa with a gun, close enough to pulling the trigger that he’d had to be physically stopped.

Four months after the crash, Hongfa had already settled back into calm, and Lei You had come through without so much as a scratch.

There was never enough evidence to prove Lei You had ordered the accident. It was only ever what people said.

But some things didn’t need evidence. Everyone simply knew.

In the end, Lei Zhenghui had sided with his eldest son.

Not out of pure favoritism, though—he’d been thinking about the company. At the time, Lei You was forty, already deputy general manager. Lei Cheng was thirty-two, ten years into his career at Hongfa.

Lei Zhenghui himself, still general manager, was fifty-nine.

He didn’t know how many more years he had left to run things personally, and the position would have to pass to one of his sons eventually.

The elder? Or the younger?

He could only choose one. The two of them could never have worked side by side after that.

In the end he chose the one who was older, steadier, better connected, more forceful.

That single choice was the entire reason Lei Cheng had become what he was now.

Lying low.

Enduring.

Waiting.

In truth, across the thousand-year loop, Wu Chen hadn’t paid Lei Cheng much attention at first. In Donghai, the man was an outsider, always low-key, careful with his privacy to a fault.

But the deeper Wu Chen dug into Donghai’s billionaires, the more he noticed something odd—a surprising number of them seemed to have some private connection to Lei Cheng.

Private, specifically.

No public contact whatsoever. Never seen together at any social event. But behind closed doors, they met often enough.

And never over business.

It was strange enough to be worth chasing down. So Wu Chen investigated Lei Cheng properly, and that was how he’d learned the whole history. In the course of it, he’d even traveled to Huaixi City, tailing Lei You across several consecutive July sevenths before finally grabbing the man and getting the details out of him directly.

Huaixi wasn’t far from Donghai—just over four hundred kilometers, a bit past two hours by high-speed rail.

Wu Chen had learned everything there was to know.

“Hahahaha…” Whatever Tao Manying said next set Lei Cheng laughing again. “All right, all right, baby. Listen—I need you to take some leave, get back to Donghai as fast as you can. I’ll square things with the director myself…”

“Yeah, it’s urgent. I’ve lined up an endorsement for you. Cosmetics.”

“Don’t worry about the breach. I’ll cover whatever penalty comes with it.”

“Mm. Good girl. Give me a kiss… that’s my girl. All right, hanging up now.”

Lei Cheng ended the call and looked up at Wu Chen, grinning. “She’s booking the earliest flight out. Bangkok back to China, a bit over four hours in the air… no direct flight to Donghai, though, she’ll have to change planes in the capital. Should land here around eleven, midnight. So—your brother wasn’t just talking big, was he? Hahahahaha…”

He laughed again, pleased with himself.

Done.

“Impressive,” Wu Chen said, smiling. His gaze lingered on Lei Cheng a moment, something flickering behind it.

Since Lei Cheng had shown this much sincerity…

It seemed only right that Wu Chen offer something in return.

There were things about Lei You he could finally share.