At those words, Qin Shang suddenly jerked upright from the passenger seat, his gaze turning cold and sharp.
He did not respond. Instead, he turned his head and stared fixedly at Xu Mingyang, his eyes making even his best friend's scalp prickle. His expression was slightly ferocious.
The headache that had not flared up for several days had returned at that very moment!
Four years ago, Qin Shang had just dropped out of vocational secondary school when his mother, Li Youwei, who had always depended on him and supported him, suddenly jumped to her death.
She left behind an apology letter.
More accurately, it was a suicide note...
In it, she described how she had been unable to afford Qin Shang's tuition, then had helplessly been deceived into joining a fraudulent organization and pyramid scheme, step by step falling into a trap, racking up enormous debts, and finally being unable to repay them, leaving death as her only way out.
How she had failed her son, how she had failed society...
The contents were tragic and helpless. A single mother, having trusted the tricks of a pig-butchering scam, had gradually fallen into the abyss and been swindled out of everything she owned.
Qin Shang had still been at school then. That day was the day he was supposed to have his graduation photos taken.
His homeroom counselor had been puzzled. Qin Shang's mother had clearly received the notice, so how could she have inexplicably failed to show up? Then the news arrived...
Thus, that day, the students and their parents all looked at Qin Shang with pity.
The first person to discover the scene of his mother's jump was a reporter.
The reporter violated professional ethics and exposed the contents of the letter, causing the entire internet to erupt.
Qin Shang fell from heaven into hell in an instant, while countless classmates looked at him with amusement and ridicule.
He had always been an independent, antisocial person.
Around the time of the high school entrance examination, his father's whereabouts had become unknown. Qin Shang had no heart for studying, performed poorly on the exam, and could only enter a third-rate vocational secondary school.
But he was unwilling to give up his studies. Looking at the increasing white in his mother's hair, Qin Shang swore that he would become a successful member of society.
So he studied behind closed doors every night at school.
He had been counting on being able to share his mother's burden after graduating...
Who could have known that the good times would not last? On the day of his graduation, just after he received his admission notice for a top-up undergraduate program, his mother jumped to her death.
And the reason was that, after being deceived into joining a pyramid scheme, she had incurred enormous loans.
"Your family was already in such poor shape. You should have given up studying and gone out to work sooner!"
"Exactly, exactly. Seeing how he stood head and shoulders above everyone else every day, we thought he looked down on us vocational students and refused to sink to our level. Turns out he's just a piece of trash who forced his mother to take out loans to pay his tuition."
"What's the use of getting good grades? He's still useless, isn't he? His mother took out loans to put him through school. He might as well have stopped studying!"
"His mother was an idiot too. How could she believe a pyramid scheme?"
"It's 2021 already. Don't tell me there are still people who haven't downloaded the anti-fraud app?"
His mother's suicide note had probably only been intended for him to see, but the reality was that, because of that reporter, everyone in the world who knew Qin Shang had seen it...
Unable to defend himself, condemned by thousands!
Netizens only believed what they saw.
And in order to magnify the story's impact, that reporter fabricated a story out of thin air through the marketing accounts: a poor student had forced his mother to support his lavish lifestyle, driving her step by step into the abyss...
I never made Mom take out a loan to send me to school...
I had no idea that continuing my education was such a burden for her...
If I had known, if I had known...
I definitely would have dropped out!
I didn't know that Mom had joined a pyramid scheme...
I, it was my fault. It was all my fault...
If I admit I was wrong, can you give me my mom back...
Tears surged in Qin Shang's eyes.
He broke down.
He had clearly been a sensible child, yet in the eyes of outsiders, he had become someone who was inconsiderate, showy, and arrogant.
He became an unfilial son who had forced his mother to take out loans to put him through school, ultimately driving her to death under the weight of the pressure.
The four words "defiant and utterly unfilial" were stamped directly onto Qin Shang.
The joy of being accepted into university was instantly diluted.
That day, Qin Shang paid no attention to the condemnation of others. There was only one thought in his mind.
Only mothers are good in this world; children with mothers are like precious treasures.
Starting today, I have no mother anymore...
When he went to claim the body, Qin Shang had rushed there in such a hurry that he had not even brought his wallet. Xu Mingyang had covered the expenses for him.
Xu Mingyang was his only friend at vocational secondary school.
That was because they had exactly the same goal: to turn their lives around through the top-up undergraduate program and rewrite their fates.
That was why they had grown close.
Qin Shang was not cold, nor was he arrogant or contemptuous of his vocational-school classmates. He simply had too few topics in common with them.
Every day, he thought about where to find work and how to make enough money to pay his tuition.
The other students thought about where to drink that night and which class had the prettiest girls.
They were not the same kind of people.
Others had the means to have fun. He did not.
Others could muddle through. He could not...
He still had his mother!
But after his mother died, his final support and the direction of his efforts were gone as well.
Revenge. Once he had accepted the fact that his mother had jumped to her death,
the flames of revenge began burning in his chest...
"Skull..."
"What!?"
That year, when he had stood in the morgue to collect his mother's belongings,
Qin Shang's face was deathly pale. Biting his lip, he murmured;
"My mother's suicide note said that she had been deceived into joining an organization called 'Skull.' They were the ones who killed my mother. I'm going to destroy it. I'll destroy it with my own hands..."
That day, Qin Shang said nothing more to Xu Mingyang.
Because he knew that, starting that day, the two of them would be walking two different paths.
Using the money he had saved from working odd jobs, he cremated his mother's body and burned his own admission notice for her.
Then he resolutely began searching throughout the civilian world for the pyramid scheme called 'Skull.'
It was worth mentioning that Qin Shang's part-time work at school was not shelving books or helping classmates carry things...
"Games—every game has mechanics. As long as you understand the underlying logic, you can easily break through a game's mechanics!"
He played games for his classmates and did account boosting, earning quite a lot of money.
He had actually already become self-sufficient.
He did not know where his mother's enormous financial pressure had come from.
Communication between a single parent and child was not always that close.
Qin Shang himself had seemed desperate to make something of himself and give his mother an easier life, but he had never calmed down and properly talked things over with her.
After that, Qin Shang got his wish and entered that pyramid scheme.
Xu Mingyang did not know what had happened in between.
But when they met again just a few short months later, Qin Shang had already risen to become the boss's trusted confidant.
When Skull traded with an overseas drug-trafficking organization, Qin Shang, having gained the boss's trust, became the person responsible for taking the money.
On the crucial day of the transaction, he fled with the money and vanished without a trace.
That day, the overseas drug-trafficking organization slaughtered all the Skull fraudsters at the scene.
The casualties were devastating!
This was a major criminal case.
Once the matter grew serious, it finally attracted the authorities' attention.
The drug organization was investigated. Those present were arrested or killed.
Perhaps to protect themselves, after being taken in, their members reported the upper echelons of the fraud organization and voluntarily disclosed the names of its senior members.
The senior members of the 'Skull' organization were arrested and imprisoned as a result!
And among the list of members they disclosed was the traitor who had fled with the money... Qin Shang.
Before you continue