Liam pushed himself upright, climbed out of the medical pod, and went into the bathroom to relieve himself.
It had to be said that the Hall family was not entirely heartless toward the original owner. Even after he had cost them that much face, they still put him in a high-class VIP hospital room and gave him the use of the highest-grade medical pod.
The tearing pain he had woken up to was gone now, and the feeling of powerlessness had eased considerably as well.
When he had finished in the bathroom, Liam stood in front of the mirror looking at himself, blinking. Well now. Apart from being more than twenty years younger, this face was the exact copy of the one he had worn in his previous life. Liam found himself faintly displeased.
In his previous life, his face had taken after his mother’s a little too closely, which gave it a hint of femininity and made him look far too gentle and good-natured. That was why, when he first started out in business, he had been pushed around endlessly by the old foxes of the world. And now this face was carrying the same enormous sign: I am very gentle, come and bully me.
Liam touched his eyes, still faintly red and swollen from too much crying. Unbidden, his mind called up the sensation of skin against skin, and his face went on flushing pink. He bent quickly over the sink, scooped up a handful of cold water and splashed it over his face, then patted both cheeks lightly.
Wake up, you’re a forty-year-old man already. Stop behaving like some teenage boy in love for the first time.
What Liam had forgotten was that, counting both lives together, this had also been his first time being physically intimate with anyone.
In his previous life he had been so absorbed in studying and making money that dating and marriage had never once crossed his mind. Later, when his career reached its peak and Liam found himself worn out, the first thing he thought of was retiring and going home to garden, not going out to find someone to date.
Once he had cleaned himself up, Liam went out. There was no one outside but two Hall family guards keeping watch. Mr. and Mrs. Hall and his eldest brother Alexander were all extremely busy, and as for Elijah, apart from turning up briefly on the first day to put on a show of concern, he had vanished entirely afterward.
The doctor checked for any lingering side effects from the removal of the temporary mark. Seeing that his condition had stabilized, he signed the discharge papers on the spot. The two guards escorted Liam to the hospital entrance, where the Hall family’s hovercar was already waiting.
On the way back, Liam went through his smart watch from top to bottom, and could not find so much as a trace of the documents the original owner had put together with such painstaking care. A face surfaced in his mind, and his expression turned cold.
Betrayed by the person he trusted most. Had the original owner still been alive, it would probably have broken his heart outright.
Liam wiped every scrap of contact data off the smart watch then and there, leaving only the banking information. By the time he got home, Mr. and Mrs. Hall had gone in to work and Elijah had gone to school. The only one in the house was his eldest brother Alexander, sitting in the living room with a book. Perhaps today was his day off.
"Why are you back already?" Alexander was rather surprised to see Liam discharged ahead of schedule. He had been planning to go and visit him a little later.
"The doctor said I could go home." Liam answered him coldly, his feet never slowing as he headed straight for the stairs. Alexander frowned and called after him:
"Stop right there. What kind of attitude is that?"
Liam had already set foot on the first step. At the shout he paused for a moment, then kept climbing. He did not turn his head, and his voice came out perfectly level, every word dropping squarely into Alexander’s ears:
"Alexander, you’re the only one who knows the password to my smart watch. I don’t need to spell out what you did, do I?"
Alexander’s body stiffened slightly and his expression turned ugly. He stared hard at Liam’s back until it disappeared around the turn of the staircase, the hand hanging at his side closing into a fist. Liam had never spoken to him like that before. Whenever he saw Alexander, he had always smiled gently and called him eldest brother in that soft voice of his.
He admitted it: once he learned the truth, he had chosen to take Elijah’s side. Perhaps that was exactly why Liam’s attitude toward him had changed. But Alexander did not think he had been wrong, because when it came down to it, Elijah was his true biological younger brother.
Never mind. He would transfer a million silver stars over to Liam as compensation later. Give it a few days and the boy’s temper would burn itself out. With that settled in his mind, Alexander opened his smart watch and sent one million silver stars into Liam’s account.
Liam, meanwhile, was packing up the original owner’s belongings, or more precisely, the things the original owner had bought with money earned from the part-time work he had taken up for the experience of it. The original owner’s talent for drawing and design was far from poor. From the age of thirteen he had quietly bought himself a black identity, a forged identity card, opened an account on the Interstellar Connection network, and started taking on freelance design work.
In an age of advanced technology, AI could do a human’s job. But for work that called for creativity and fine attention, what AI turned out still struck people as lacking a soul. Which was why anyone with the original owner’s gift was always in high demand.
The work came easily to the original owner, and the money it brought in was considerable. The moment his first payment landed, the original owner went straight out to buy gifts for the three members of his family and for the butler who had looked after him since he was small.
The gifts could hardly be called precious, because with the Hall family’s resources, what was there they could not buy? The value lay in the thought behind them, and so whatever the original owner gave them, they had always kept with care.
It was only after the Hall family’s true young master came home that their affection for the original owner began draining away by the day. The butler threw the little magnifying glass that had decorated his breast pocket into the bin. Mrs. Hall handed the ocean-blue sapphire earrings to a servant as a reward. Mr. Hall tossed the new-generation smart signature pen somewhere nobody knew. And Alexander’s cufflinks, set with rare crystals, were already sitting on a bodyguard’s vest.
A ding ding pulled Liam back out of the original owner’s memories. Looking at the million silver stars that had just landed in his bank account, he let out a sneer. Alexander’s way of smoothing things over was as blunt as ever. If he couldn’t manage the sweet words, he simply threw over some extra pocket money and called it done.
The original owner had never needed that million, but he had never taken his brother’s money as an insult either. He had simply thought of it as an apology gift. Which was how Alexander came by the habit in the first place: whenever he made his younger brother angry, he sent money over by way of an apology.
A pity that the person he wanted to smooth things over with was already dead. And even had the original owner still been alive, he would not have forgiven Alexander any longer.
Liam took out everything the original owner had already packed away in the hidden drawer at the left side of the headboard. There was a smart watch the original owner had bought at the age of thirteen, and a spatial bracelet he had bought only recently.
Inside the smart watch were a network account and a bank account, both set up under the false identity. As for contacts, there were only the smart numbers of a few employers and someone listed as LS. Inside the spatial bracelet were a few sets of clothes, a few disguises, an electronic drawing tablet, personal effects, and a starship ticket to the Polaris star system, where the original owner’s biological family lived.
Every one of these things the original owner had bought with money he earned himself. Not a single item had come from the Hall family.
So it seemed the original owner had been planning to walk out of this house too, once he had cleared his name.
Who ever said it was only the Hall family’s affection for the original owner that had drained away? His affection for them had faded just as surely, with every unjust scolding, with every look of disgust turned on him, with every treasured gift discarded one after another.
He had wanted to leave without taking anything that belonged to the Hall family. Exactly as Liam wanted now.