Stepping out of the police station, Gu Ting found a nearby bank and deposited 100,000 yuan in cash, keeping 10,000 yuan on hand for emergencies. Once that was sorted, she rushed to her next destination—the hospital.
After all, she had been in a car accident the previous year, and the fake Gu Ting had been involved with that guy named Li Xingzhou. Since the exact circumstances remained unclear, she felt it would be much safer to get a full physical examination.
Exiting the subway, Gu Ting’s phone rang. The caller ID read: Cheng Gong Entertainment Agent, Brother Luo.
“Tingting, have you left the hotel yet?”
Gu Ting maintained a normal composure. “Is something wrong?”
“President Wan is holding a key meeting today at eleven o’clock. Everyone must attend. Hurry up and get to the company.”
Gu Ting’s eyes flickered, her voice laced with a lazy indifference. “I’m almost at the hospital. I can’t make it back. Take a leave of absence for me.”
“What’s wrong? Are you sick? But it’s hard to explain things to President Wan. You know President Wan has always been dissatisfied with your performance. You don’t want to get chewed out by him again, do you?”
Gu Ting let out a soft sigh, sounding as if she were carrying a thousand heavy emotions and boundless sorrow. “Brother Luo, lately I’ve been feeling like something is very wrong with my body. Someone told me my condition doesn’t look good. It might be… sigh… I don’t really care about getting yelled at anymore, I really don’t.”
On the other end of the line, Luo Yuan fell silent. He felt as though all his recent confusion had suddenly been cleared up. No wonder Gu Ting had inexplicably gone back on her word yesterday and kicked Wang Mingxiao out, acting as if she didn’t care about the five-million-yuan debt at all. No wonder she had behaved so abnormally last night, being so aggressive and hot-tempered… It turned out she was sick, and it was highly likely a terminal illness. If he were in her shoes, he probably would have just thrown caution to the wind too.
“…Sigh! Tingting, just go get your checkup. I’ll handle President Wan for you.”
Gu Ting put her phone down and sneered silently. Suggesting that she might be gravely ill and needed a hospital examination—no matter how cold-blooded and ruthless that man named Wan was, what could he possibly say? Yet Luo Yuan still insisted on taking credit for helping her. He truly was shameless enough.
In the past, Gu Ting never dared to get sick, nor did she have the money to do so, so she had barely ever stepped foot inside a major hospital. This time, she finally got to experience the whole process. It took her most of the day to finish the various physical examinations, and when she received the results, everything was normal. Only then did she completely set her mind at ease.
She had visited the police station and the hospital; now it was time to head back to her residence. The fake Gu Ting’s living address wasn’t hard to find; she managed to track it down by looking through the delivery addresses on her phone.
With a mindset to save whenever possible and a desire to experience the long-lost hustle and bustle of ordinary life, she transferred between buses and subways several times along the way. Finally, she unlocked a shared bicycle and rode it for over half an hour, only reaching her destination just as darkness began to fall.
Before arriving, Gu Ting had already braced herself mentally. She figured the fake Gu Ting’s residence wouldn’t be anywhere pleasant, and the reality proved her right. The place where the fake Gu Ting lived was close to the suburbs. The surrounding area was completely desolate, the residential compound was utterly dilapidated, the main gate was missing, and parts of the perimeter walls were broken here and there. It looked exactly like a ruined building in an abandoned village.
The further Gu Ting walked inside, the tighter her brow furrowed. It was bad enough that the compound was run-down, but there weren’t even a few working streetlights. The occupancy rate was terrifyingly low; she hadn’t seen a single soul for a while. Moreover, the surrounding vegetation was wildly overgrown, to the point where the paths were barely visible.
Nevertheless, the fake Gu Ting’s residence was right here, and many things that originally belonged to her were stored inside. Coupled with her lack of money, she had no choice but to go back.
Gu Ting was unfamiliar with the compound, and without any streetlights, she struggled to find her way. She had to pull out her phone to continue checking the route. At a certain moment, she suddenly felt that the atmosphere around her was a bit off. Looking up under the faint beam of her phone’s flashlight, two figures silently closed in on her.
Gu Ting: “!!!” I freaking knew this compound wasn’t safe!
“Hehehe… Hey gorgeous, you really kept us brothers waiting.” Even after being spotted, the two figures showed no panic whatsoever. They stepped closer at a measured pace, letting out sinister, eerie laughs. “Don’t you dare scream, or my knife won’t show any mercy to a pretty face.”
This spot happened to be on the outer edge of the compound, where the trees grew thick and wild. From a distance, one couldn’t see what was happening inside, let alone hear anything, which explained why the two thugs were acting so arrogantly.
Gu Ting remained exceptionally calm. She wasn’t surprised—not in the slightest. However, within this unbearable silence, the resentment and rage in her heart were slowly ignited. Upon reaching a certain point, the flames flared up with a violent whoosh, burning frantically and relentlessly!
She was resentful. She was resentful because her life had already been difficult enough. Things that others were born with required a thousand or ten thousand times more effort for her to obtain. Yet even so, fate still insisted on playing tricks on her and tormenting her, putting her through a car accident, making her travel to a godforsaken alternative world, forcing her through a hellish death loop, and making her live like neither a human nor a ghost. After finally managing to cross back, she was forced to shoulder a massive debt.
Five million yuan! An ordinary person might not even earn that much money in several decades! Yet they expected her, a twenty-four-year-old orphan with no father and no mother, to bear it?
She was enraged. She was already in such a miserable state, yet there were still people trying to bully her, steal her money, and take advantage of her. Could it be that whether she faced fate or thugs, her only option was to raise her hands and surrender?
She refused!
Under the extreme fury and resentment, Gu Ting’s tense body slowly relaxed into a fluid stance. Just when the two thugs thought she was too paralyzed with fear to move, Gu Ting suddenly gathered all her strength in the next split second. With a hundred percent of her power, she delivered a fierce kick straight to the crotch of the closest thug. “Screw your father!”
While the other thug stared in a daze, Gu Ting completely ignored the sharp blade in his hand. Driving her elbow forward, she struck the second thug squarely in the face. The moment the man bent over in agonizing pain, her knee was already driving upward, violently smashing into his vital area. This brother’s soul took flight into the heavens on the spot, his mouth agape wide enough to stuff a goose egg inside.
At one point during the scuffle, Gu Ting’s eyes had almost brushed against the frost-white blade of the knife, but she remained eerily calm, confronting it head-on as if she weren’t afraid of death at all.
Gu Ting relied entirely on the element of surprise and didn’t dare to linger in the fight. Seizing this brief window, she turned around and darted into the woods, preparing to sprint away at full speed. However, before she could even take two steps, a pig-slaughtering shriek of agony suddenly echoed behind her.
“Awooo!!!”
Ultimately, Gu Ting couldn’t overcome the human flaw of curiosity and couldn’t resist looking back. Where the flashlight beam hit, she saw a blurry figure writhing frantically like a snake pinned to the ground, looking as though he had been stabbed by something.
“Who the hell threw… a banana peel! Screw your… father!” After struggling a couple of times, he passed out from the pain.
Gu Ting: “…” Truly a sight to behold!
It wasn’t over yet. Thug Number Two, filled with a sudden surge of brotherly loyalty, took a vigorous leap forward, lunging at her with his knife. The next second, due to his overly excellent jumping ability, his head slammed dead center into a tree trunk. Under the force of the recoil, he crashed back down to the ground, his skull smacking squarely against the concrete. He fell silent instantly.
Gu Ting: “!!!” Holy crap, the best part was at the end!
With this kind of brotherly devotion—sharing the same burdens, living and dying together—even the three legendary brothers Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei would probably voice their self-abasement if they saw it, wouldn’t they?
Gu Ting walked over and tentatively ground her foot against their wicked hands. After grinding for a minute with no reaction, she boldly used her phone’s flashlight to illuminate their faces. The more she looked, the more familiar they seemed. After opening her phone’s photo album, she fell into silence.
Gu Ting quickly called the police. “Hello, I’ve found two fugitives on the wanted list. Please dispatch a vehicle to arrest them immediately! Oh, it’s best to bring some medical staff. They are both injured and have been lying there like dead dogs for a while now. The address is…”
In less than ten minutes, a group of uniformed police officers arrived in a rush.
“Are you saying that these two thugs had malicious intentions, and then one of them accidentally stepped on a banana peel, fell, stabbed himself in the stomach with his own knife, and knocked himself out?”
Gu Ting nodded. “Mm-hmm.”
“And the other thug, because he jumped too high while attempting to assault you, ended up slamming his head into a tree trunk, fell to the ground, and knocked himself out cold?”
Gu Ting nodded again. “Exactly.”
“And then you discovered that these two individuals happen to be fugitives on the wanted list? The kind with a combined bounty of 100,000 yuan?”
Gu Ting clapped her hands together. “Isn’t it just a coincidence! I only went to the police station this morning, so I happened to remember their faces.”
Everyone present: “…”
For a moment, they didn’t know whether to say the thugs were too unlucky, praise the girl in front of them for her incredible luck, or marvel at how wildly imaginative the director named Fate was to arrange such a surreal method of capture.
Regardless of what others thought, Gu Ting didn’t have many traces of panic left in her heart anyway. There was only the continuous pleasant surprise of “I’ve hit the jackpot.” That was 100,000 yuan!
In the morning, she had been fantasizing about when she might catch a fugitive to earn some bounty money, and by the evening, her dream had come true? This efficiency was faster than the speed of her own dreams!
Therefore, even though she had to go to the police station late at night to give a statement, Gu Ting had absolutely no complaints. For the sake of this 100,000 yuan, everything was worth it!
She had initially thought tonight’s encounter was a cruel joke played by fate, but who would have known it was actually a gift quietly sent by Heaven! She had delivered a good beating, hurled her insults, and watched a thoroughly entertaining joke, and in the end, she could even happily walk away with 100,000 yuan. My goodness, please bring on another dozen of such wonderful events!
All the way from the police station to the subway, Gu Ting was beaming with joy, right until her path was blocked by a man huddled in a wall corner, wearing shabby clothes, with messy hair and a stubbly beard.
“Beautiful lady, beautiful lady…”
Gu Ting was forced to stop her pace, and then she let out a sigh.
“Beautiful lady, why are you sighing?” the bearded man asked.
Gu Ting said gloomily, “Once upon a time, someone called me a beautiful lady. At that time, I didn’t know this title would accompany me for the rest of my life.”
Bearded man: “%*#￥&@” A stream of curse words flooded his mind—he wanted to say them but couldn’t bring himself to, feeling more uncomfortable than being constipated.
The bearded man adjusted his expression into a serious one. “Beautiful lady, I observe that your eyebrows are elegant and high-arched, your eyes are clear and bright, your pupils are like lacquer, and the whites of your eyes are like jade. Furthermore, the bridge of your nose is refined and upright, and your property palace is full and prosperous…”
Gu Ting: “Alright, alright, how much do you want?”
The bearded man responded smoothly, “Not much, not much. Just thirty yuan will do, enough for me to have a bowl of beef noodles with two extra eggs.”
Gu Ting rejected him ruthlessly. “Thirty yuan is enough for me to take a carpool ride home, yet I still choose to take the subway. Why? Is it because I don’t want to carpool? Fifteen. Take it or leave it.”
If it weren’t for the fact that she had gained quite a bit of windfall fortune over the past two days and needed to give a little back to charity, she wouldn’t be willing to give money to someone for nothing.
The bearded man hurriedly said, “Alright, alright, thirty isn’t too much, and fifteen isn’t too little. Mainly, I just want to… catch a bit of the financial luck on you, noble lady, hehe.”
Gu Ting scanned the code and transferred the money to the bearded man. Before leaving, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a broken bowl on the ground. With a speed faster than thunder could strike, she scooped it up, stuffed it into her pocket, pulled some distance away, and said, “I like this broken bowl. I’m taking it.”
The bearded man opened his mouth but hesitated. How was he supposed to explain to this beautiful lady that the bowl wasn’t his, but was actually a stray dog’s food bowl?
Forget it. At worst, when he ate his beef noodles later, he would leave a few green onions and cilantro bits for his stray dog brother. He didn’t like eating that stuff anyway.