Xi Zhengqing adjusted his glasses and said irritably, "It seems Old Mr. Pei still hasn't taught you any manners. The next time I see him, I'll suggest he discipline you properly."
Pei Ying glared at him. "How dare you show your face here again? What the hell did you do?!"
Xin Hexue couldn't tell people apart at all!
Xi Zhengqing put on a respectable smile. "Little brother, haven't you already guessed? Why ask when you know the answer? Or are you eager to hear about the experience from me?"
Pei Ying had a bad temper to begin with, and during his first eighteen years in exile, no one had taught him how to deal with a shameless old fox like this. He almost instinctively wanted to start throwing punches again.
Xi Zhengqing said impatiently, "Enough. In any case, for the time being, just think of it as having gained another older brother. The Pei family has plenty of younger-generation members anyway."
He even had the leisure to take another jab at the Pei family for having "such a thriving brood."
Pei Ying sneered. "Why should I do as you say?"
He immediately started to turn around and tell Xin Hexue the truth.
Xi Zhengqing said leisurely, "You don't want Pei Guangji to wake up either, do you?"
Pei Ying was almost instantly rooted to the spot.
Xi Zhengqing continued to persuade him. "After all, the moment he wakes up, the position of Pei Corporation heir will go right back into his pocket."
Xi Zhengqing said, "Never mind your eldest brother for now. Your other brothers aren't easy to deal with either, are they? And don't you have a few uncles as well?"
Pei Ying turned back. "What are you trying to say?"
Xi Zhengqing knew the man wasn't bright, so he got straight to the point. "You'll inherit the Pei Corporation because I'll help you, provided you stay out of my way."
It was already quite obvious who his so-called business concerned.
Pei Ying clenched his teeth hard, the taste of blood spreading through his mouth.
Under the present circumstances, it was absolutely impossible for him to be with Xin Hexue openly and rightfully.
First of all, his brother stood between them.
Second, he had yet to build up enough resources. He couldn't even stand up to the old man yet.
One day, when he rightfully inherited the Pei Corporation...
Pei Ying shot Xi Zhengqing a look of loathing and, with all his strength, forced a reluctant answer from his throat. "Yeah."
Xi Zhengqing gave a mocking smile.
The gathering Zuo Yongyan had arranged was at a newly opened themed restaurant in the Core District.
The restaurant made skillful use of 360-degree holographic projection technology. The entire private room presented a 5D scene, and the undersea theme filled the surroundings with shimmering waves and swaying fish, both real and illusory.
The man seated at the head of the table wore sunglasses. He had thick golden curls, a broad forehead, and sword-shaped brows, while his thin lips curved up in a slightly audacious smile.
He had the typical looks of a mixed-race Alpha, with strong features like a portrait sketched in pen. Apart from his eyes, which others couldn't see, his face was handsome.
Zuo Yongyan said to the blond Alpha, "Brother Qiu, to celebrate your return from the Thirteenth District, let me toast you first!"
Qiu Yuan smiled. "Thanks. Making it back alive really is worth celebrating."
He picked up his glass, and the three clinked their glasses together.
The cold liquor ran down Xi Zhengqing's throat and into his stomach as he suppressed a subtle feeling of discomfort.
To be honest, he had never much liked dealing with these two.
Zuo Yongyan's family background was inferior, and he wasn't bright, either. Qiu Yuan bore the title of genius director, but his taste was too vulgar; all he did was make trashy films about lower-class people fighting and killing each other.
Xi Zhengqing had nothing in common to talk about with them.
Pei Guangji, who barely qualified as a rival, was still in intensive care.
Qiu Yuan suddenly asked him, "Did you have a hand in what happened to Pei Guangji?"
Xi Zhengqing frowned. "How could I? He had bad luck, that's all."
He just happened to encounter a drunken cargo-skiff pilot on a rainy night, and the brakes failed.
Xi Zhengqing wouldn't do anything so risky.
If he really wanted to get rid of someone, he would do it perfectly and leave no trace. Pei Guangji wouldn't have had a chance to end up in the ICU.
His communicator vibrated with an alert.
The frown on Xi Zhengqing's face eased.
[Xin Hexue: Guangji, the old smart housekeeper was sent back to the factory for recycling. Can you order a new one? Life is rather inconvenient without a housekeeper.]
Xi Zhengqing typed a reply.
[I'll have someone deliver a new one to the villa.]
Qiu Yuan looked at his expression and asked, "Did you come from South City in District One?"
Qiu Yuan said, "What's in that villa of Pei Guangji's?"
Xi Zhengqing drained his glass. The shimmering waves the restaurant had created refracted across his lenses, and in his slightly tipsy vision, the scene from last night seemed to appear again.
He answered, "A cat."
Chapter 17: Face Blindness (17)
After they mentioned what had happened to Pei Guangji, Zuo Yongyan began pretending not to hear. After all, his comparatively less illustrious family background had always placed him on a lower rung in their childhood friendship, so he wasn't in a position to get involved in the infighting among the heirs of the other three major financial groups.
Nor would he give the appearance of being closer to any one of the Pei, Xi, or Qiu families. If that were taken as the Zuo family choosing a side, it was hard to say the other two families wouldn't join forces against them and start putting obstacles in the Zuo Group's path.
He realized that Xi Zhengqing and Qiu Yuan's conversation had reached a pause, and neither of them intended to continue discussing the earlier aircraft accident.
Zuo Yongyan livened up the atmosphere. "What cat? Brother Pei keeps a cat? What breed?"
Xi Zhengqing said carelessly, "White. Don't know. That cat likes keeping dogs."
The collar was still on his hovercraft.
Zuo Yongyan: ???
The cat liked keeping dogs?
Was that even Chinese?
Zuo Yongyan laughed it off. "That kitty has a rather unusual hobby."
Remembering something, he asked Xi Zhengqing, "Didn't you say Brother Pei was keeping someone before? Brother Xi, did you see them? Were they at that villa address?"
Xi Zhengqing shook his head. Pale golden liquor slowly ran down the side of his glass, gradually filling it.
Without a change of expression, he said, "I didn't see them."
Zuo Yongyan said, "That's really strange... He sent a message to our group chat just to entrust us with a cat?"
Somehow, it didn't sound like Pei Guangji's style.
Of course, secretly keeping a canary sounded even less like something Pei Guangji would do.
Zuo Yongyan couldn't say which of the two was more absurd.
Qiu Yuan said, "What? What are you talking about?"
Qiu Yuan said, "While I was in the Thirteenth District, was Pei Guangji's life really that full and exciting?"
Xi Zhengqing said coolly, "You were struggling to get by in the Thirteenth District. That must have been pretty exciting too."
Zuo Yongyan was terrified the two would start arguing.
Because Xi Zhengqing and Qiu Yuan had very different personalities and incompatible views, their relationship could be called the most fragile link in their childhood friendship.
Besides, Qiu Yuan and the other three couldn't, at least in the strictest sense, be said to have grown up together.
The three of them had been brought along by their elders to socialize while they were still learning to speak, whereas Qiu Yuan...
He had come along later, replacing the Qiu Group's original heir. Their paths hadn't crossed until middle school.
The Qiu Group's original heir had been Qiu Yuan's older brother, Qiu Jing. Although he was of the same generation, Qiu Jing had been a few years older than them, and they had been neither close nor particularly distant.
Back then, chaos had broken out at the Prometheus Laboratory under the Qiu Group. The experimental subjects had defected, and Qiu Jing had died in the sea of flames.
Only then had Qiu Yuan had the chance to become next in line to inherit.
But Qiu Yuan clearly had no ambition to inherit the Qiu Group. He had an artistic madness about him, unlike the young master of a financial group. Otherwise, he wouldn't have left the Core District to travel everywhere, going in and out of the chaotic Thirteenth District and driving Madam Qiu into the hospital with anger.
Zuo Yongyan asked curiously, "Brother Qiu, didn't you say you went out looking for inspiration? Did you make any special discoveries during those months in the Thirteenth District?"
Qiu Yuan looked over Zuo Yongyan and Xi Zhengqing through his sunglasses.
Behind the pitch-black lenses, his eyes took on a boundless blue-black hue, like the deep sea.
"I didn't make any special discoveries in the Thirteenth District. That place is no different from hell. You can imagine it: crime is as commonplace as eating and drinking, people die in the streets every minute, and both the public security and transportation systems are paralyzed. Even in the urban areas, traffic lights are covered in ivy, the asphalt roads underfoot are broken apart by cracks, and overhead, the atmosphere is dark with enormous amounts of dust and ash."
Despite the cruelty of the facts he had described, Qiu Yuan shrugged indifferently.
"The suburbs have become fields of radioactive glass and have been completely overrun by aberrants. I'd guess it won't be long before the Thirteenth District's urban areas become a paradise for aberrants too."
Compared with the brutal sights of the Thirteenth District, something else interested him more.
Qiu Yuan asked, "When I came back, I heard Cook was assassinated by an aberrant and was already dead when he was found?"
Cook's father held an important position in the Federal Security Bureau and had previously proposed mobilizing military forces to carry out a plan to annihilate the aberrants completely.
Zuo Yongyan said, "Yeah. The report on the incident made the front page of our Federation Times at the time."
The Zuo family was a media giant and had acquired the Federation Times years ago.
Zuo Yongyan recalled, "Cook had previously visited the Sixth District, and his body was found in District One. He might have been targeted by aberrants a long time ago."
Qiu Yuan raised an eyebrow. "What about that aberrant? Did they catch it?"
Zuo Yongyan said, "They caught one, but the medical examiner said it didn't match the fatal wound. To keep the public calm, they still announced that they'd caught the real killer."
Qiu Yuan leaned back in his chair and said leisurely, "In any case, aberrants can't get into the Core District, so we don't need to worry, right?"
Human physiological characteristics were vastly different from those of aberrants, and aberrants couldn't pass the Core District's many layers of verification systems.
Zuo Yongyan thought of how the military factories now under the Qiu family were developing and mass-producing highly lethal weapons against aberrants, so he nodded in agreement. "True. We can rest easy."