“Say it again, who are you mounting?”
“Ah… um… this… that…”
How is anyone supposed to answer that?
While Geng Nuo’s brain was short-circuiting, Gu Chengyan had already stood up and walked over to the side of the bed at some point.
Against the backlight, his tall figure appeared dark and towering, exuding an intense sense of oppression. Geng Nuo’s last shred of common sense told him that the guy was simply looking to pick a fight, all of it was just an excuse, and he clearly just hated his guts… just accept your fate!
Thinking this, Geng Nuo still quietly inched backward.
He couldn’t just sit here and wait to die.
And then—
Plop!
With a miserable shriek, Geng Nuo tumbled right off the bed, sprawling flat on his back.
The air seemed to freeze for a single, lingering moment.
From Gu Chengyan’s perspective, after Geng Nuo fell off, his entire body was shielded by the bed, save for a single arm shooting straight out past the edge, its palm gripping that stack of bank notes for dear life.
Gu Chengyan: “…”
What tenacious willpower; he really would rather die than let go.
Lying flat on his back on the floor, Geng Nuo shifted his gaze from his raised arm to his clenched fist. He was hoisting those bank notes, just like someone lifting up a drowning life in the middle of a flood, or like a bamboo shoot breaking through the soil to declare its indomitable vitality, or even more like a blazing flame igniting right within his palm.
This was life, this was faith, this was hope—
Yeah, we Betas have got power!
This time, whatever he had lost, he would absolutely never let go again!
With a mighty heave of his lower back, Geng Nuo sat straight up. The moment he raised his head, he locked eyes with Gu Chengyan on the other side of the bed.
“…”
The corners of Gu Chengyan’s lips curved into an inscrutable smile. “Have you counted them? Is the amount right?”
Geng Nuo nodded instinctively. “…Enough.”
“Good to know.” Gu Chengyan stared down at him with a smile that carried an unadulterated, chilling menace.
Bad. Extremely bad.
A jolt of electricity surged from his tailbone straight up to his crown. A sense of crisis shattered the cage of his consciousness, racing through his bloodstream into all four limbs. Geng Nuo glanced at the money in his hand, then back up at the General whose forehead veins were bulging.
Without a second thought, he decisively tossed the money aside, scrambled onto the bed using all fours, and crossed over to the other side, throwing himself into a tackle-like embrace around Gu Chengyan.
“General Gu! Thank you for getting my money back for me! You’re truly a good person!”
Clinging tightly to the man’s waist, Geng Nuo shouted with crisp, articulate clarity.
He took the opportunity to pin Gu Chengyan’s arms against both sides of his body, terrified that the man would raise a hand and strike him.
Gu Chengyan recognized his little trick without exposing him, though he didn’t offer any grace in return.
“You’re thanking me for getting it back? I thought I heard someone say it was impossible it was me. Thanking me?” Gu Chengyan let out a hum of a laugh. “And now you’re calling me General Gu again? What were you calling me just a moment ago? Say it again so I can hear.” With arms frail as a baby chick’s, he could have broken free with the slightest exertion, yet he chose not to, remaining calm and collected as he reminded him, “You weren’t finished cursing me out, were you? Go ahead and keep cursing.”
Geng Nuo offered a sincere confession, “This humble one was blind and failed to recognize Mount Tai.”
Today, he had finally and profoundly understood that age-old truth, the very first thing you must do when opening your eyes every single day is verify whether anyone else is in the room! Whatever you can mutter in your heart, you must resolutely refuse to speak out loud!
This was the ultimate esoteric secret of “being watchful over oneself when alone” that the ancients always talked about!
Otherwise, every single instance of bad-mouthing someone behind their back ran the risk of blowing up right in your face…
How stupid can you get, Geng Xiaonuo!
Geng Nuo closed his eyes and began talking sheer nonsense: “In this cold, heartless club, who else would ever help someone as helpless and pitiful as me? Only you, General Gu. I’ve simply suffered too many hurts, and I’ve grown afraid to trust anyone else.”
Convinced his emotional delivery was pitch-perfect, he rubbed his face against Gu Chengyan’s chest and tilted his head up, desperately channeling raw sincerity. Little did he know that this entire sequence of vivid, expired clichés made Gu Chengyan twitch his lips in silent speechlessness.
Seriously, enough already.
“How much money did they steal from you in total?” Gu Chengyan pushed him away and tossed a set of clothes onto him. Looking down, Geng Nuo saw it was the full set of formal western-style trousers and jacket he had worn the day before. Catching them, he obediently slipped them on, answering as he busied himself with the buttons: “Two hundred and thirteen galactic bank notes.”
Gu Chengyan hummed. “So just twenty thousand galactic credits.”
What do you mean—just?!
Geng Nuo panicked instantly, itching to argue with him about what those two hundred and thirteen galactic bank notes represented. The moment he raised his head, however, he caught sight of Gu Chengyan’s gaze turning abnormally cold and bone-chilling, causing him to instantly shrink back into cowardice.
To cry so pitifully and pull out such clumsy, flawed acting over a mere twenty thousand galactic credits.
Gu Chengyan thought: The most laughable part was that he had actually believed him.
Just because the little Beta had cried outside of a bed?
He had even assumed that with how aggrieved the tears were, at least hundreds of thousands had been lost.
After all, even without previous customers, the money he earned directly through his hands should have easily started at twenty thousand galactic credits minimum, leaving aside the commissions from cigarette, alcohol, and entertainment sales, alongside the hefty personal tips handed directly to Pix’s servers to keep the act looking authentic.
He had turned Shark Club upside down the entire night, only to find out upon asking that the person had only made off with two hundred notes.
Two hundred notes, two hundred, a mere twenty thousand. He was practically laughing with fury.
How many years ago was the last time he went out to collect a debt?
Back in the black market, he had never stooped to recovering such a paltry sum of money.
His thoughts hovered between the past and the present, and the tangled, chaotic threads condensed into a hemp rope that bound and wrapped around the Beta, winding tighter and tighter up to his neck, feeling just like his palm pressing against the skin, inching upward before suddenly tightening around the slender throat. Lost in the dark daydream of his own malicious desires, Gu Chengyan was abruptly pulled back by a faint voice. It was Geng Nuo down below, offering a weak rebuttal: “It’s twenty-one thousand three hundred.”
What? He hadn’t registered it.
“Those one thousand three hundred galactic credits are money too,” Geng Nuo’s voice grew softer, yet every single word remained stubbornly clear.
It seemed he had gone through quite a bit of mental construction before blurting that out, and his face plainly radiated the serious declaration: This is a massive sum of money, seriously, you cannot round it down.
Gu Chengyan: “…”
He ground his back teeth, smiling in anger.
Once Geng Nuo finished that sentence, he turtled his head back down and struggled with the very last button on his shirt collar. Caught under Gu Chengyan’s glare, his fingers failed to obey, missing the loop several times in a row.
Gu Chengyan reached out, shoving his hands aside. Pulling open the collar, he stroked his neck to tilt his chin upward, forcing Geng Nuo to raise his head high while his hands rested lightly like feathers against Gu Chengyan’s forearm.
He showed no intention of pushing him away.
This yielded a moderate sense of satisfaction for Gu Chengyan.
The large palm nearly swallowed half of Geng Nuo’s face. Both his cheeks and the side of his neck could feel the rough, calloused texture of the fingers, while the blood vessels carrying his heartbeat thudded rhythmically against the skin of the palm.
Gu Chengyan’s state of mind at this moment was starkly different from last night’s.
Fran had even defined his uncharacteristic emotional fluctuations last night as anger and embarrassment. While he didn’t view it that way, at the very least he hadn’t planned to vent his emotions onto Geng Nuo.
This Beta was clever, knowing how to make others willingly step up to bat for him without even opening his mouth.
Regardless of whether the story about the stolen money was true or false, Gu Chengyan was more than willing to back him up. As for the reason for his annoyance, it was simply because the sum was pitifully small… and he was fully aware of what he was doing.
Yesterday evening had merely been the reward he wanted to claim.
Yet right before Pix pulled him aside for a private conversation this morning, he had received a piece of concrete intelligence.
Based on that intelligence, he needed to re-evaluate this Beta.
Cast a long line to catch a big fish. To lure a massive fish like him, they certainly had gone to exhaustive lengths.
Trading like he was making casual conversation, Gu Chengyan posed a question: “Before me, you had no customers. How on earth did Pix tolerate keeping you around here?”
That, of course, was because Baron Percy’s banquet required a main course.
Daring neither to openly denigrate nor secretly slander, Geng Nuo shifted his eyes evasively and gave a vague reply: “Probably because Pix thinks I’m special, or perhaps I have some other use.”
To Gu Chengyan’s ears, this answer firmly validated his own suspicions.
He sneered. “Quite honest, aren’t we?”
Too bad.
Geng Nuo never expected that upon hearing those words, Gu Chengyan’s face would drop like a mask, turning instantly as gloomy and dark as dripping water, while his sharp gaze pierced straight through him like a sword.
Sensing the man had definitely misunderstood something, he wanted to open his mouth and explain further, only to be cut off. “Alright.”
“I get it.” Gu Chengyan dropped the topic. Abandoning his usual routine of toying with him, he gave a light, flippant pat to Geng Nuo’s face and instructed, “This time, remember to keep your money safe.”
Geng Nuo nodded.
Instantly, Gu Chengyan released his grip, rounded the foot of the bed, and headed outward. Turning around in a rush, Geng Nuo blurted out, “Are you leaving?”
This was entirely an instinctive reflex on Geng Nuo’s part. Perhaps those recovered two hundred and thirteen galactic bank notes had left him harboring a shred of gratitude toward General Gu, or perhaps his tone carried an unbidden trace of panic and urgency that sounded like a plea for him to stay. Gu Chengyan paused his stride, turning slightly sideways with a hard-to-detect indifference lingering at the corners of his brows and eyes.
“You look rather good in this suit, wear it like this these days.” His tone was light, as though nothing had changed from before. “Don’t worry, you’ve done well. As Pix’s great meritorious hero, he won’t give you a hard time over such a trivial matter.”
“General Gu, wait…” No matter how slow-witted Geng Nuo was, he could tell that “great meritorious hero” wasn’t a compliment, but the man refused to linger, walking straight out the door.
What just happened?
Geng Nuo could clearly sense a shift in Gu Chengyan’s attitude. In the span of time before he woke up, what on earth had transpired?
His heart hammered against his ribs; an ominous premonition washed over him. The current situation no longer afforded him the luxury of overthinking. Hastily straightening his clothes, Geng Nuo pulled out his detector and began scanning the club’s layout.
Servers like them weren’t permitted everywhere. Over his days here, Geng Nuo had realized his understanding of the place barely scratched ten percent. The routes they walked daily, whether going up and down stairs or heading to private suites for service, were always crowded with people. This well-trodden route was clearly unfavorable for his escape.
A virtual screen the size of a human face materialized out of thin air above the instrument. The club’s floor plans for each level appeared sequentially, even detailing monitoring coverage zones with crystal clarity. The more Geng Nuo looked, the heavier his cold sweat grew. Aside from patrolling guards and drones, an astonishing number of cameras were hidden away in the shadows, though interiors thankfully lacked them, presumably because Pix lacked the spine to record the unsightly debauchery of these high-rolling figures. The patrol frequencies of drones and guards matched his observations down to the letter.
Following his memory, Geng Nuo located the spot where that gang had led him. Sure enough, that area had fewer people, practically zero cameras, and made finding a blind spot effortless. Pulling up the blueprints level by level, he found nearly every floor featured a similar spot.
Probably left deliberately for them to pull dirty tricks.
He discovered three routes along the building’s exterior perimeter with high breakthrough rates. While not guaranteeing a hundred percent evasion of patrol drones, careful maneuvering would allow him to slip away using the shadows of the woods for cover.
Aside from those, there was one other location with extremely weak security.
Geng Nuo’s heart pounded furiously; he hadn’t expected everything to be this easy.
He was actually going to escape.
Imprinting those routes firmly into his memory, a surge of uncontrollable, wild joy erupted within his chest, making him want to charge out and put the plan into action right this second.
Hold back, hold back, Geng Nuo admonished himself. A single misstep will ruin everything.
He still needed a suitable window of opportunity. Naturally, the timing had to be at night, escaping amidst the chaos while everyone was distracted.
When should it be?
He had acutely sensed that Gu Chengyan’s attitude had undergone a subtle shift. Continuing down this path would likely make it impossible to rely on his protection to keep Pix in check much longer.
Though he couldn’t pinpoint what had triggered this change, he had no intention of investigating it deeply; perhaps the man simply grew tired after a while. He figured he hadn’t done anything to offend Gu Chengyan, and since the other’s interest was waning, he needed to make good use of that.
By his estimation, the prime window would be right after Gu Chengyan’s attention toward him dipped, but before Pix had time to confirm it.
Knock, knock. The suite door was tapped.
Straightening his clothes, Geng Nuo went to answer it. Standing outside was He Fei.
The moment the door opened, He Fei recoiled slightly as if choking on something, turning his face away and offering a knowing, teasing chuckle. “My, General Gu is certainly forceful.”
Though Geng Nuo couldn’t smell it himself, he knew his body was drenched in Gu Chengyan’s pheromones.
This was precisely the effect he wanted. Even if Gu Chengyan’s gaze drifted away from him, the lingering pheromones served as a clear declaration of ownership, deterring Pix from making any sudden moves for the time being.
At this exact stage, it was the absolute golden window for escape.
Feigning complete indifference, he asked He Fei, “What is it?”
“I’m here to congratulate you in advance. You’re about to make it big!” He Fei struggled to contain his joy.
“What?” Geng Nuo didn’t follow.
“Didn’t you know? General Gu has already reached a cooperation agreement with Boss Pi. Three days from now, a grand banquet will be held here.”
Geng Nuo was so shocked his voice warped out of tune. “Really?”
When? Why didn’t I know about this?
“Of course it’s true!” He Fei said excitedly. “After this banquet, General Gu will definitely take you back with him. Good brother, once you make it big, don’t forget about me!”
This time, Geng Nuo couldn’t suppress his agitation either, wearing an expression that looked thoroughly filled with anticipation for He Fei’s news. Deep down, however, he knew clearly that this was the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he had been waiting for.
At the grand banquet three days from now, no one would be paying attention to him. Slipping away in the chaos without a single Beta server around wouldn’t trigger a massive, full-scale manhunt. This was practically the heavens showing favor to Geng Nuo.
Immersed in his joy, Geng Nuo failed to notice that He Fei’s ecstatic smile seemed to mask a hint of bizarre strangeness.