And so, elder and younger seemed to have traded places. Lin Xiao opened his mouth, but in the end couldn’t get the question out, and only urged Lin Muyan to pick up her chopsticks.
This eatery was Lin Xiao’s choice, nothing fancy, just one of the little roadside diners you saw everywhere.
Lin Muyan wasn’t picky. Though the hygiene of a hole-in-the-wall joint was a bit hard for her to stomach, she picked up her chopsticks and started eating all the same.
Seeing that his second sister didn’t look down on him for only being able to afford a grubby little hole-in-the-wall, Lin Xiao quietly set his heart at ease.
“Sis, how did you come to be there?”
Lin Muyan pursed her lips, that was a question she should be the one asking.
But seeing that Lin Xiao was a bit awkward, and might just be making conversation so the meal wouldn’t fall silent, Lin Muyan thought it over and said:
“I’m looking for a house. Turning up there was just an accident.”
“Looking for a house? You’re moving out? Do Mom and Dad know?”
Lin Xiao’s first thought was that of course his sister wouldn’t live in the urban village, it was dirty, chaotic, and run-down, a genuinely bad environment.
He sighed inwardly, suddenly hating himself for being too useless to earn real money. If only he could work a bit harder, move Mom, Dad, and Xiaonuan into a nicer neighborhood, then maybe Muyan could live with them.
Lin Muyan shook her head. “Mom and Dad don’t know, and don’t tell them either, it’s not even settled yet.”
A house she’d definitely find. By the bullet comments’s account, if the apocalypse came, the place the Lin family lived now simply wouldn’t do.
But she still hadn’t decided whether to ride out the apocalypse together with her birth family.
For now, her parents, big brother, and little sister all did seem good people, but in the end she hadn’t built up much bond with them, and once the apocalypse truly hit, anything could happen. The thing that could least be ignored was the complexity of human nature.
Lin Xiao didn’t overthink it. He said to Lin Muyan in an earnest tone:
“Big Brother’s got a little money saved. I’d meant to help Mom and Dad pay off this month’s debt with it, but I’ve got a big deal about to close, so take this money first and go rent a better place outside.”
Lin Xiao assumed his sister was only renting, buying was still too extravagant a notion for him.
But Lin Muyan’s attention had landed on the debt. As it happened, with her big brother willing to talk to her, she could ask him about the family’s real situation.
So she asked, “Brother, tell me, what’s our family’s situation right now? What’s the deal with Mom and Dad’s debt?”
【What deal could it be? Brother-propping demon, that’s what. Your vicious mom is good to no one, except she’s good to her own birth family beyond all reason.】
【The relatives on that side have no shame either, not a shred of boundaries. And they have the gall to make a married-off daughter subsidize that whole crowd of her natal-family relatives, utterly absurd.】
【I remember Jiaojiao saying that over on the birth-family side, the sons getting wives and buying houses had to be paid for by the Lins, marrying off daughters meant the Lins had to chip in dowries, and even when a few distant-generation juniors started school, the tuition and living expenses all came out of the Lins’ pockets, scarier than vampires.】
Lin Muyan idly swept her eyes over the bullet comments. This time she wouldn’t listen to them, what they knew was all learned from Shen Jiaojiao, and unreliable. She wanted to hear it from her big brother.
Lin Xiao’s face fell, a little helpless. He thought to keep the family’s outside debts from his sister, so she wouldn’t worry, but he could tell this sister was very sharp, and even if he didn’t say it, she’d surely find out through other channels.
Take Jiaojiao’s illness, for instance: if Muyan hadn’t pressed, Mom and Dad certainly wouldn’t have brought it up themselves.
Lin Xiao considered his words and began. Though he kept it simple and his tone matter-of-fact, Lin Muyan still heard a great deal of helplessness and bitterness in what he said.
The Lin family’s debts really were tied to the birth mother’s natal family, and the people on that side really were a pack of ungrateful, cold-blooded creatures.
They forced Wang Yanqin to give them money, and when she didn’t, they played the rogue: blocking her door, spreading nasty rumors, slinging mud everywhere.
The worst time of all, Wang Yanqin’s reckless eldest brother, that is, Lin Muyan and her siblings’ uncle, racked up a mountain of gambling debt and actually led the debt collectors to the Lin family’s door.
After that, the Lins were marked by a crowd of people out for both their money and their lives. Unless they helped pay the debt, the children couldn’t so much as step out the door, especially with a ten-year-old Lin Xiaonuan in the house.
For the whole family’s safety, Father and Mother Lin had no choice but to swallow their anger and help pay it off.
Hearing this, Lin Muyan knit her brows tighter and tighter, aching with pity for them yet also at a loss for words. There were plainly other ways to put a stop to the natal family sucking them dry, but of all options they’d chosen the most foolish.
“Mom and Dad are too kind. Uncle knelt on the ground crying that he couldn’t repay the debt and would have to chop off his own hands and feet, and they just agreed.”
“Ah, Muyan, don’t blame Mom and Dad. They’ve never done a dishonest thing in their lives, they always feel that refusing Uncle would weigh on their conscience, that it’d never sit right. Uncle knows exactly the kind of people they are, and that’s why he takes advantage of them.”
“But don’t worry, there’s only a little over a million left, and the debt’s paid off. I’m not telling you all this to make you help repay it. With me here, this family won’t go under. Things will get better.”
Lin Muyan’s lips moved, but in the end she said nothing.
The matter was still on her mind even after she got home and lay down.
There was over ten million in her account, paying off the family’s debt would be easy. But Uncle’s family really did prey on honest folk. If the Lins could suddenly produce that much money to clear the debt, wouldn’t those people catch the scent and come back, twice as bad as before?
At that thought, Lin Muyan decided against putting up the million-odd herself.
The bullet comments grew lively again in the dead of night.
【How come even Lin Xiao is spouting nonsense now? Is there really not a single decent one in the whole Lin family?】
【He’s been brainwashed by Wang Yanqin, or maybe he was never any good to begin with. After all, our Jiaojiao was a bit naive at the start, and Lin Xiao’s good-looking, with that boy-next-door big-brother vibe. Men like that are real pros at deceiving girls.】
Lin Muyan really wanted to crack open these bullet comments-people’s skulls and take a look, to see who exactly had been brainwashed.
As far as she could see, that Shen Jiaojiao was absolutely not some naive girl. The bullet comments were a flock of brain-dead fans, and pretty exasperating.
Early the next morning Lin Muyan lazed in bed a while, and right there she dug the day’s first hole under the bed, turning up twenty square meters of White Space.
Together with the few digs she’d done later yesterday, the White Space was now forty square meters, clearly a very large room. She planned to put some practical storage racks in it, to pile up odds and ends that were otherwise hard to find.
Besides the White Space, Lin Muyan had also gained two gold nuggets yesterday, plus one thing she’d never have expected.
It was a contract deed, and what it contained was an offer to provide the holder one free Safe House renovation.
Looking at the details inside, there was a great deal even Lin Muyan herself couldn’t make sense of.
The method of use was simple too: just sign your name in the commissioner’s line at the end of the contract deed, and a construction team would naturally come to do the work.
Lin Muyan was already a little excited, but at the same time, it further confirmed how possible the apocalypse was.
If even things like Doomsday Fortress Safe Houses were turning up, then an apocalypse descending three months from now didn’t seem all that impossible, did it?