Chapter 403: Your Brother Is Bursting with Talent

Chapter 403: Your Brother Is Bursting with Talent

In the office.

“Darling, I have to go down to sales, and then…” Li Ruobing glanced at her watch and looked up. “Then straight into a meeting. Senior management. I won’t be coming back up. It should wrap up around five-thirty…”

“Sure.” Wu Chen nodded and gestured. “Perfect. I’ll take Jiaojiao shopping… Oh, right. I just talked to A-Tai. He’s leaving tomorrow. We’ll all eat at home tonight.”

“Okay. I have to go…”

Something urgent seemed to have come up in sales. Li Ruobing agreed, gave the corner of his mouth a quick kiss, and hurried off with her assistant.

She had barely gone.

“Bro!” Wu Jiao’s indignant voice rang out.

She and Chen Xue had come out of the lounge while Wu Chen and Li Ruobing were still talking. But with Li Ruobing there, Wu Jiao had kept quiet.

She knew how to behave. She knew better than to have a shouting match with her brother in front of her sis-in-law.

Besides, she felt there were some things she shouldn’t say in front of her.

“Done with your hair?” Wu Chen said without so much as turning his head, walking straight to Li Ruobing’s desk.

Wu Jiao hurried after him.

He went around the desk and sat. She planted herself beside him.

“Bro! You lied to me!” She pouted, the picture of outrage.

“What did I lie about?” he asked with a smile.

At the same time, he opened the top right-hand drawer of the desk. It held all sorts of things: seals, fountain pens, and a pile of car keys.

“Your watch costs over two million! You told me it was two hundred thousand!”

“You said two hundred thousand. I never did.”

“I said a hundred thousand, and you said half right. Isn’t a hundred thousand half of two hundred thousand?”

“What I actually meant was… take ‘a hundred thousand,’ ten ten-thousands, and split it. The ‘ten-thousands’ part was right… so, half right…”

“You… you’re cheating…”

Throughout, Wu Chen never once looked at her. He sifted through the keys in the drawer with his fingertips and picked out the one for the Bentley.

The Lamborghini couldn’t seat three, so he needed a different car.

He took the Lamborghini key from his pocket and tossed it onto the desk.

Then he shut the drawer.

He stood.

Seeing his sister still beside him, glaring daggers, he smiled and gave the back of her head a light pat.

“All right! Come on. I’ll take you two shopping.” He smiled, then called to Chen Xue, “Let’s go, Xiaoxue. Don’t leave anything behind.”

“Oh, okay, Brother Xiaochen…” Chen Xue said.

Wu Jiao still looked furious, but she went to get her bag anyway.

They went down.

Soon they reached the underground garage.

They got in.

The Bentley Continental was a coupe, a two-door four-seater. The back seat was cramped, but for a slim young girl it was more than roomy enough.

Once inside, Wu Jiao looked all around.

“A Bentley,” Chen Xue marveled from the back.

“Bro, is this Sis-in-law’s car?” Wu Jiao asked.

“Yeah.” Wu Chen was pulling on his seat belt. “Seat belts,” he reminded them both.

Everyone buckled up.

The engine started.

They pulled out.

Wu Jiao started in on the watch again. There wasn’t much to say about it. Li Ruobing had given it to him.

She asked what his suit cost too, and he told her the truth.

Next to the watch, the suit seemed cheap, so it wasn’t nearly as frightening.

A little over ten minutes later.

Mixiang Shopping Center, South District.

It was a big shopping complex that had opened the year before, not far from the South District CBD, part of a nationwide chain of shopping plazas.

It wasn’t low-end, but it wasn’t especially high-end either. It had budget brands and luxury brands alike.

Time to shop.

Once they started going through the stores, Wu Jiao finally stopped asking questions. All her attention went to the shopping.

She had no objection to her brother putting things on his card.

She had hesitated to accept things from Li Ruobing because, in the end, Li Ruobing wasn’t family. They had only just met. They were practically strangers. Taking too much from her was genuinely embarrassing.

But her own brother?

He was her real brother. Her closest family.

She even had half a mind to spend some of his money just to get back at him.

Wu Chen didn’t buy her anything too expensive either.

He had several hundred million yuan in cash sitting in his accounts and hardly anywhere to spend it. Money was “earned” to be spent, and he would never begrudge any amount spent on his family.

But!

He knew his sister. If he bought anything too expensive, she wouldn’t dare accept it.

The time wasn’t right yet.

For now, ordinary things would do.

Shoes at a few thousand yuan. Jeans at a few thousand. Dresses and jackets at over ten thousand. Several extra sets of nice shirts and short-sleeved tops…

He didn’t buy them only for Wu Jiao.

He bought Chen Xue the same things.

He knew how close his sister and her best friend were, and how they always kept in step. Chen Xue’s family was fairly well off, a rich kid by any measure, but she had always matched Wu Jiao’s spending level.

So this time, Wu Chen meant to keep them in step too.

At first Chen Xue flatly refused to accept anything he bought her. She simply wouldn’t take it.

It was Wu Jiao who talked her round, even asking, “Are we best friends or not?”

Only then did Chen Xue give in.

They shopped until after five.

All three were loaded down with bags large and small, and they were more or less done.

Only then did it finally dawn on Wu Jiao that something seemed off.

It felt like… they’d spent an awful lot of money!

The first thing Wu Chen had bought her was a two-thousand-yuan belt. Not all that expensive on its own…

But after a full circuit of the mall, she did the math in her head.

He had bought her nearly fifty thousand yuan worth of things!

And Chen Xue the same!

Together, that was a hundred thousand!

Where had her brother gotten a hundred thousand yuan?!

His clothes and accessories were frighteningly expensive, but those had all been gifts from his girlfriend. He hadn’t paid for them himself.

Shopping, though, meant swiping a card and actually spending money!

And from start to finish, he hadn’t shown the slightest sign of strain.

Which meant he might have far, far more than a hundred thousand yuan.

Wu Jiao’s expression started looking odd again.

The shopping trip was over.

The three of them took the elevator down to the mall’s underground garage.

At the back of the Bentley, they opened the trunk and started fitting everything in.

“Bro, answer me honestly,” Wu Jiao said suddenly.

“Hm? What?” Wu Chen paused mid-packing and turned to her.

“Are you spending Sis-in-law’s money?” she asked, very seriously.

“You think your brother has what it takes to be a kept pretty boy?” Wu Chen laughed.

“No!” She shook her head at once.

She genuinely didn’t think he had it in him to be a kept man.

It wasn’t his looks. It was his personality.

Nor did she believe he would ever become one for money. She had at least that much faith in her brother.

“There you go, then. Why ask?” Wu Chen said.

“Then… how come you seem so rich? You haven’t even been working a month.” She pouted.

Even as she said it, she was starting to regret things. She had spent so much of his money without knowing whether he was really rich or had simply spoiled his little sister so much that he’d blown everything he had.

Had he maxed out a credit card?

“I made money,” Wu Chen said.

“How?” she asked immediately.

“Your brother is bursting with talent. How hard could making money be?” He said it half in jest.

He was, in fact, telling the truth.

“Bro, you didn’t…” Wu Jiao had already begun to wonder whether he’d done something bad.

She never finished.

Suddenly—

“Mr. Wu?”

A middle-aged man’s voice, from not far off.

All three turned.

Two lanes over, a middle-aged man in a white shirt was hurrying toward them.

More than a dozen men trailed behind him, all in their twenties. It was the height of summer, and some wore short sleeves, tattoos showing on their arms.

“Mr. Wu, it really is you.”

Seeing Wu Chen look his way, the man quickened his pace.

As he drew near, he even took on a somewhat deferential posture, bobbing his head in little bows.

Wu Chen recognized him at a glance.

One of Wang Zhuangyuan’s lieutenants. A man named Feng Yuan.

Back when Wu Chen had wanted an introduction to Lei Cheng and needed people to play a game, Wang Zhuangyuan had rounded up more than a hundred men. Feng Yuan had been among them, so he had met Wu Chen.

In fact, even if he never had, someone at Feng Yuan’s level was by now required to know who Wu Chen was.

“Something you need?” Wu Chen asked.

“N-no, nothing. Brother Zhuangyuan sent us to take care of something here. We’d just gotten out of the cars when we saw you, so I came over to say hello…” Feng Yuan said, his face one big ingratiating smile.

He turned at once, gestured at the men behind him, and snapped, “Say hello! What are you all standing there for?”

“HELLO, MR. WU!”

It wasn’t a holiday, so the enormous garage was mostly empty, cavernous and hollow.

More than a dozen men who looked like nobody’s idea of good people bowed to Wu Chen in unison, a full ninety degrees, and bellowed their greeting.

It was nearly deafening, echoing off the concrete.

Wu Jiao jumped and ducked partway behind her brother on instinct.

Then she stared at the back of his head with a very, very strange look in her eyes.