Don’t Be a Kept Man

Chapter 110: This Idiot is Too Easily Deceived

Wen Chuo lived in 504, and rent wasn’t expensive in this kind of rundown building.
Unfortunately for him however, as a man with no proper job and with no aim in mind, living everyday without anything to do, his rent basically came from swindling off of Bai Yang.
How hard must it have been, and still is, for an idiot like Bai Yang who has to work so hard for his own life and also has to raise this kind of waste of a human being who wouldn’t even know how to live by himself.

Wen Chuo was nineteen this year, and thinking back to his previous life, it should be about two more years before the Wen family would come and take him back into the family.
Which meant there wasn’t that much of a rush.
He could just follow the same old road as his last life to take back control of the company, and before that, he’ll just continue to live however he had been living.

Only this time however, when he leaves, he’ll make sure to settle the idiot in a safe place first, so as to not let him run off to nowhere and get lost.

Wen Chuo didn’t like Bai Yang in his previous life, and this life, well, it wasn’t that he would like him either.
He’ll just try his best to treat him like his brother, sharing wealth and fame together.

The only thing he could give was this……

In the height of summer, it was hot to the point where it was unbearable.
It was only when the sun started to set that it would start to cool down slightly, blowing along a slight breeze that soundlessly and unknowingly calmed people’s hearts.
Wen Chuo let go of Bai Yang, and seeing the scattered amounts of money in his hand, he asked with a fake smile on his face, 

“This money’s for me?”

Bai Yang quickly retracted his hand back in alarm and stuffed the money back into his pocket.
He ignored Wen Chuo after that and turned around to head back up to their building.

Wen Chuo followed along, laughing as he said, 

“Hey, this bad habit of yours of being stingy really can’t be changed huh.
How much money could that be for you to be treasuring it like immeasurable family heirlooms.”

He rested his arm around Bai Yang’s shoulders but it was quickly shrugged off.
Wen Chuo didn’t mind it however, and he looked to the side, looking through the broken alleyway that was filled with advertisements and clothes drying on the drying racks outside the windows.
When there was a breeze, the flowery bed sheets would dance in the wind, spreading the faint scent of laundry detergent, and every household here was about the same.

The sky was beautiful in all its colors, as orange, red, blue, and purple blended together.
Layering and layering outwards, it was an unspeakable beauty to be taken in with the eyes.
Standing in the stairway, leaning over the railing, the view became all the more clearer.
All this, this kind of scenery, Wen Chuo hadn’t seen for such a very long time.

How long has it been… it seemed to have been like three years, a thousand and more of days and nights.

Wen Chuo was a bit out of breath after climbing five flights of stairs.
He leaned against the railing, not all too willing to move.
Bai Yang was standing in front of his apartment and preparing to open his door when he spotted Wen Chuo and he went over to pull him away.
In Wen Chuo’s perspective, he only felt his shirt tightening before he was forced to retreat back a couple of steps. 

“Ah ah ah,” he said as he was dragged backwards and he said after, “what are you doing, what are you doing.
Are you going crazy again.”

Bai Yang’s words were heavier than gold, 

“Dangerous.”

Wen Chuo confusedly said, 

“What’s dangerous?”

Bai Yang: “Trip to death.”

Wen Chuo smiled and pulled Bai Yang’s hand off of him.
He smoothed out his shirt as he said, 

“Trip to death? I don’t dare to die.”

After enduring only two more years, the Wen Family would be his.
He wouldn’t have to live in such a run-down place, and he wouldn’t have to be living a poor man’s life.
Why would he choose to die.

The color of Bai Yang’s eyes were really black, and his skin was very white.
With his features proper and clear, if he wasn’t an idiot, he’d be a handsome fellow.
Too bad his aura was a bit depressed and gloomy.
Bai Yang grabbed onto Wen Chuo again, pulling him towards his apartment, and said with a stubborn expression set on his face, 

“Dinner.”

Wen Chuo couldn’t cook nor did he have the money for food.
Three meals a day, they all came from leeching off of Bai Yang.
Sincerely a waste of a human being so rarely seen in this world, that he was.

Wen Chuo held onto the door frame, not budging from his spot, 

“Ah, it’s just going to be stir-fried cabbage with rice again.
I’ve eaten it so many times I could throw up.
Even if you make some watery congee, it would be better than this.”

Wen Chuo felt like he had eaten so much of this kind of food for so many years that just smelling it would be enough for him to throw up.
He was truly scared of these days of poverty, really truly terrified.
Nightmares, those times when he couldn’t sleep, they would all be recalling the “good old days” of the past.
Repeatedly thinking and repeatedly thinking, so much so that he turned a bit sickly.

Living in heaven and then falling right down to the dirt ground. 

It would have been better if he had kept living in hell, as flavors, of sour, sweet, bitter, spicy, these things were all based on comparisons.

Bai Yang silently looked at him, with his pair of eyes that looked so black, and did not let go of Wen Chuo, creating goosebumps on the latter from his intense gaze.
Wen Chuo couldn’t shrug him off and finally only loosened up in the end to perfunctorily say, 

“Fine fine fine, you go make dinner first.
When it’s ready, I’ll come over.
I’m just going to take a shower.
Spent almost the entire day at the internet café, my body’s covered in sweat.”

Bai Yang let go of him and then entered his apartment.
With a “pang”, the door closed.

Wen Chuo wasn’t angry.
Instead, he leaned against the wall, miraculously laughing out of nowhere, as if he felt that this was all too interesting.
He opened the door to his apartment, preparing to head into his room when San-shen bumped into him as she came down from the rooftop after collecting her clothes.

“Ah ah ah, Xiao Chuo, don’t go inside first,” 

San-shen said with her hands full of her bed sheets.
She sashayed over to him, and there were still remnants of her youthful charm in her aged face, 

“When are you going to hand in your rent from last month, hmm? You keep dragging and dragging, how can you be like this when you are so young.”

Wen Chuo’s smile dropped off his face and he muttered as he used his key to open his door, 

“Two days, two more days.”

Wen Chuo’s mother was a nice woman and her relationship with the neighbors hadn’t been bad.
Combining that with how San-shen saw a kid living on his own like Wen Chuo didn’t have it too easy, she didn’t rush too much.
She only said, 

“Then you must remember.
Don’t forget it.”

Wen Chuo’s attitude was very good, 

“Of course, of course, can’t be forgotten.”

A handsome lad was always pleasing to the eye, so San-shen only smiled and then patted his head before leaving.

Wen Chuo’s home was quite messy but as there weren’t any unnecessary items, it didn’t look as bad as it would have otherwise.
He threw all the clothes crumpled up on his bed into a basket to leave for all eternity and then took a careful look around this small, tiny house.
His final conclusion was that it was definitely, naturally better and more comfortable to be living in an actual house, a mansion, than this.

By the bedside table, sitting quietly was a picture of a woman.
She was a beauty, and behind her were vast open fields upon fields of crops which only complimented her even more as a whole.
Taken at a private winery, there was “Liu Ruo Qing”, these three words and a date written on the back of the photo.
Wen Chuo gave it a few glances before flipping the photo frame over and slipping it into a drawer.

This woman’s brain wasn’t that great, and she wasn’t that shrewd.
Her stubbornness however was more than that of the average human and, after divorcing her husband for cheating, she left with her ten year old son without a glance behind.
The alimony for a child was not a cheque with a small amount, but in front of the homewrecker, she had torn it into pieces, clean and fast without hesitation.

Oh Liu Ruo Qing, what a woman who still had the attitude of a missus with wealth.
How she had been raised up by her family to not understand the world, to not know the pain and bitterness of struggling to live.
She had no brain and no smarts, only a prideful air about her.
Unfortunately, after her family had gone bankrupt, she already had no ability or backing to be prideful.
A few years of being poor had already wrecked her and stomped her to death.

In her remaining ten or so years, there was only Wen Chuo, one person left beside her.

So it could be said, Wen Chuo hated idiots the most.
This one was dumb, the one next door was also dumb.

Downtrodden, he went to take a shower and change his clothes before heading over to Bai Yang’s.
When he walked in, he could smell the scent of food being cooked and Wen Chuo looked over.
Peeking a glance at Bai Yang chopping up vegetables in the kitchen, he lazily walked further inside.

There were a lot of things in Bai Yang’s house.
A pile of plastic bottles picked up from the streets all flattened and squeezed into large plastic checkered bags, each stacked and organized in the corner.
There was a big shoe box on top of an ancient old desk containing cleaned bottle caps, all of which were prize winners, and Wen Chuo counted, about three or four of them.

In the kitchen, Bai Yang was stir-frying vegetables.
The moment after he put it in, there would be crackles and pops of sound.
During this time, with the ease of familiarity, Wen Chuo pushed up the bed and without a doubt, there was a stack of yuan right underneath the mattress.

The idiot earned his money in many different forms of currency.
Out of habit, he would collect up to a certain point, exchange it into a hundred yuan bill, and then another and then another to a rounded amount.
With this, he’d then take them to the bank after saving up a thousand or two thousand yuan.
But usually before his money reached the bank, it’d all be swiped away into Wen Chuo’s hands.

Wen Chuo yelled out towards the kitchen, 

“Ack, Bai Yang, lend me some money.
I have to pay the rent.
I’ll give it back to you later.”

The sounds of stir frying immediately stopped and Bai Yang turned off the gas.
Like an arrow, he shot towards the bedroom and grabbed those bills from underneath the mattress.
He tucked them in his pocket like they were a baby in danger and shook his head, 

“No.”

Wen Chuo fakely smiled as he sat on the edge of the bed, his pair of peach blossom eyes curving into half-moons, 

“I’m not not going to return it.
It’s just to cover this emergency and I’ll return it ten times, a hundred times the amount borrowed later.”

Bai Yang backed up a few steps, still shaking his head, 

“No.”

Wen Chuo thought that Bai Yang was not only as dumb as his own mother, but also as stubborn as her.
It made him grit his teeth and he subconsciously stood up from the bed.

Bai Yang looked at him with alert eyes.
His eyelashes were thick, and that pair of black eyes were so beautiful — they were like a painting of ink.
Black was black, white was white, without a single impurity.

So extremely pure and clean.

When Wen Chuo walked forward a step, Bai Yang would back up a step.
Wen Chuo stepped forward again and Bai Yang directly turned around towards the kitchen.

“Hey, don’t go,” 

Wen Chuo pulled him back and then with actions so familiar, he pressed him against the wall.
His tone was low, tinged with a bit of laughter and also that purposefully sprinkled in pitifulness, 

“Lend me some money, I’ll return it to you in the future.
You won’t really want me to be kicked out by San-shen would you?”

“You are a bad person, no.”

Panic started to surface on Bai Yang’s usually emotionless face, and he reached out his hands as if to push him away.
Yet he was instead held still by Wen Chuo and pressed back onto the wall, 

“How am I bad? Hmm?”

Wen Chuo wrapped his arms around Bai Yang’s waist, feeling how it was truly so skinny, so skinny he could feel the bones.
Bai Yang’s brain reacted about a half beat later and he started to struggle, yet he was hugged tightly by Wen Chuo.

Wen Chuo’s voice was soft and gentle, as the corners of his mouth slowly slightly tilted up, bringing up a mesmerizing smile to his face, 

“Little dummy, I know you are the best to me.
Just lend me a little.
I’ll for sure return it to you.
Or how about this, I won’t go back to the internet cafe.
You want me to go right, I won’t go left.
Wherever you want me to go, I’ll go there.
I’ll always listen to you, ok?”

These kinds of words, he has said more than ten, fifteen times, so much so that he knew it by heart, but there was not a single time when he has really done so.

Bai Yang didn’t utter a sound but his struggling movements stopped.
His overly long bangs covered his eyes, and he looked quite like a depressed young beauty.
Wen Chuo’s long fingers brushed aside Bai Yang’s hair and he leaned down to kiss him on the cheeks.
When he lied, his face didn’t get red, nor did his heartbeat beat faster, 

“I’ll go find a job tomorrow.
All that I earned, all the interest and everything else, I’ll give it back to you.”

And then testingly touched his pockets.
Bai Yang lowered his eyes to look, but he didn’t do anything to block him.
Wen Chuo knew then that he was willing.
He smiled even more brazenly and pinched up Bai Yang’s thin chin and kissed him on the lips, 

“Good Bai Yang, I knew you were the best.”

One hand was wrapped around his waist and the other slipped into his pocket, successfully deceiving Bai Yang out of his long, hard earned money.

[ ZZZT —- ]

Right at this time, Wen Chuo’s hand suddenly felt numb, and that stack of bills scattered onto the floor.
Immediately right after, a weird electronic voice sounded in his head.

[ My host, hello.
This series of actions has disobeyed the system’s rules.
This is the first warning.
The second warning will be more serious and the third will immediately take away your life points.
Please treasure this life that did not come by so easily.
]

[ The galaxy’s strongest system has begun and our mission and purpose is to be self-sufficient, self-reliant and to reject being a kept man.
My dear host, the fruits and efforts of using your own hands and hard work is the most sweetest of them all.
Let us become strong!!! ]

Wen Chuo’s face slightly changed and he glanced around him, but he found nothing out of the ordinary.
He only thought that he was being delusional and, seeing Bai Yang looking at him with confusion, he smiled as he caressed his face, 

“Good boy.”

And then reached down to pick up the money.

[ ZZZT —-! ]

And then another electronic shock came by, this time stronger than the previous.
Wen Chuo’s legs trembled and his entire self crashed onto the floor.
He felt excruciating pain emanating throughout his entire body and his expression was shocked to the brim.

[ Ding! This action has disobeyed the system’s self-sufficient rules.
Please my dear host, take care of yourself, and take this system’s rules seriously.
If this goes on, the third time will directly take away your life points.
Your life that came by after much difficulty, please make sure you treasure it~ ]

Wen Chuo: ……