madnovel Chapter 26 Money Fell From the Sky Again
Chapter 26 Money Fell From the Sky Again
Su Yu was woken up by being strangled.
It wasn't a dream; something was really wrapped around his neck, tightening its grip. He sat up abruptly, gasping for breath, and reached out to grab it, but grasped nothing.
Water was dripping from the ceiling of the semi-basement, drip, drip. Su Yu looked down and saw a line growing out of the center of his chest.
Dark red, like dried blood scabs, only as thin as a fingernail, stretching into the dark corner of the wall.
"Damn it," Su Yu cursed. He used to only be able to see the lines on other people's bodies, but now it was his turn.
He didn't dare cut it, and instead followed the thread down to the bed.
At three in the morning, Seoul's streets were as empty as a ghost town. The streetlights cast Su Yu's shadow long, and the dark red line stood out starkly under the lamplight. It didn't seem to be attached to anything; rather, it seemed to be alive, moving across the asphalt, carrying Su Yu as he ran wildly.
After walking for forty minutes, we arrived at Gangnam District.
The wire didn't stop; it went straight through the wall into an office building. Su Yu stood downstairs and looked up, his scalp tingling with fear.
The entire exterior wall of the building was covered with a dense network of wires.
They were colorful and varied in thickness. Some grew wildly like ivy, while others hung in mid-air like dead snakes. The building was like a giant spider web, and everyone was prey in it.
"This place has bad feng shui," Su Yu muttered.
The dark red line emerged from the second-floor window, waving in front of him as if beckoning. Su Yu followed it to the abandoned building across the street.
On the third floor, the door at the end of the corridor was ajar.
The wire had gotten stuck. Su Yu pushed open the door; the motion-activated light was broken, and it was pitch black. He groped his way to the desk, where the wire was tightly tangled in a black briefcase.
Su Yu reached out to untie it.
The zipper wasn't locked. He yanked it open.
There were no bundles of US dollars, nor gold bars. Only a thick stack of documents.
Su Yu took it out and glanced at it. It was all in Korean, but he recognized the key words: "equity transfer", "dual contracts", and "tax evasion".
A bank card was tucked into the top of the document.
Su Yu stuffed the file back in, grabbed his bag, and went downstairs. The dark red thread, as if it had completed its task, wrapped around his wrist once, then snapped with a "snap" and disappeared into thin air.
Back in the semi-basement, Su Yu pulled the rubber band out from under his pillow. It was old and loose. He put it on his wrist, then glanced at the new one Shirley had given him on the table.
After hesitating for a second, he put the new one on as well.
Two rubber bands, one new and one old, were tied together. Su Yu's fingers caressed the new one, feeling a cool sensation on his fingertips. This rubber band seemed different from the others; it was connected to an extremely thin silver thread that extended all the way out the window, pointing to the mansion deep inside the Jiangnan District.
Those were the threads on Sherry's body. Proud, cold, with a metallic sheen.
Su Yu followed the silver line and his pupils suddenly contracted.
At the end of the silver line, Shirley was sitting in front of the French windows. But on her, Su Yu saw a thicker, more terrifying line—a jet-black line, like a giant python, tightly wrapped around her neck, the other end connected to a gloomy old house.
That's family control.
Su Yu felt a strange tightness in his chest. That woman who always seemed so aloof was, in fact, just a puppet on a string.
The next day when Su Yu went to the company, she had huge dark circles under her eyes.
Cai Xiubin was wiping tables on the second floor when he saw him come in, and he stopped wiping with the rag in his hand.
"Did you steal manhole covers last night?"
"More tiring than that." Su Yu threw his briefcase on the table. "I went to the King of Hell to sign a document."
Cai Xiubin rolled her eyes and went downstairs to bring him an iced Americano. "Drink it. Don't die in my company, it's bad luck."
Su Yu took a big gulp and his head throbbed from the cold. He raised his hand to scratch his head, and the two rubber bands on his wrist twitched.
Cai Xiubin's gaze swept over him instantly, like an X-ray.
"Oh, changed your gear?" She walked over, grabbed Su Yu's wrist, and flicked the new elastic band with her fingertips. "A gift from Sherry?"
"Um."
"Then why haven't you thrown away that tattered rag in your hand?" Cai Xiubin tugged at the old rag with disdain. "It's all frayed. Are you planning to keep it to wipe the table?"
"The old one is more comfortable." Su Yu pulled her hand back. "The new one is too tight, it's uncomfortable."
"Tch, men." Cai Xiubin slammed the rag on the table. "They're always looking for something better, even though they're eating what's in their bowl, and they call it 'it's convenient'."
"It's about sentimentality," Su Yu said, spouting nonsense with a straight face.
Can nostalgia put food on the table?
"No, but money can."
Su Yu picked up the briefcase on the table, unzipped it, took out the bank card, and waved it between two fingers.
"What's this?" Cai Xiubin squinted.
"I don't know. Maybe it's hush money from God." Su Yu tossed the card to her. "Take this and check. If there's money in it, I'll buy you meat."
Cai Xiubin caught the card and weighed it in his hand. "You'd better not be going to sell a kidney."
"You can't just sell a kidney for a card." Su Yu slumped in his chair, eyes closed. "I'm selling my life."
Cai Xiubin ignored him and took the card upstairs to check.
Ten minutes later, a scream came from upstairs.
"Su Yu!!"
Cai Xiubin scrambled down the street, nearly dropping her phone. "Three million! US dollars! There are three million US dollars in this card!!"
Su Yu opened his eyes and yawned. "Oh, quite a lot."
"A lot? That's a huge sum! Where did you get it?!"
"I found it."
"You're kidding me! Where did you find it? I'll go find one too!"
"From the sky," Su Yu pointed to the ceiling, "I dreamt last night that money was thrown in my face."
Cai Xiubin stared at him for a long time, as if he were a madman.
"Su Yu, have you broken the law?" she whispered. "If you have, run away quickly. I... I'll split this money and give it to you for your travel expenses."
"I didn't break the law." Su Yu sat up straight and looked out the window. "Someone did break the law, and money fell from the sky and hit me. I caught it, it's that simple."
Cai Xiubin didn't speak. She looked at Su Yu and suddenly felt that this man was a bit of a stranger.
He sat there, listless, like an unemployed bum waiting to die. But he had two rubber bands on his wrists, a card with three million US dollars on it, and his eyes were empty.
There was no surprise, no greed, not even fear.
It was as if the money was just a stone that fell from the sky, hit him hard, he picked it up, looked at it, and then casually tossed it into his pocket.
"Alright, stop looking." Su Yu took the card back, stuffed it into his pocket, and said, "I'll treat you to meat tonight. The best Korean beef."
"I need to eat three meals."
"Okay, ten meals are fine."
Su Yu stood up and stretched.
The moment he looked up, his gaze passed through the window and landed on the other side of the street.
The woman selling fried rice cakes was packing up her stall. Su Yu was surprised to find that the woman no longer only had that gray line representing her fate.
A thin gold thread appeared on the woman's chest.
The golden thread glittered in the setting sun, like a red-hot iron wire, greedily pointing to the young man counting money not far away—that was her son.
Su Yu blinked.
There are more gold threads now.
It wasn't just the older women; everyone walking down the street seemed to have this color of thread on them. Some were thick, some were thin, and some were tangled together like a mess of hemp.
That's the color of desire.
Su Yu silently set a rule for himself: the thicker the gold thread, the stronger the desire, and the more dangerous the person.
His gaze unconsciously returned to Cai Xiubin.
Cai Xiubin was holding the bank card up to the light, examining the anti-counterfeiting label.
Su Yu narrowed his eyes.
Cai Xiubin did not have gold thread on her body.
But connected to her chest was a transparent thread. The thread was so thin it was almost invisible, yet it was terrifyingly strong, like a piano string, taut and straight.
It cuts through walls, through streets, and stretches far, far away—towards Chungmuro, the heart of Korean cinema.
Su Yu's heart skipped a beat.
It turns out, her desire wasn't for money.
It's about wanting to stand at the highest point, to be seen by everyone. This pure ambition is more terrifying and more alluring than the allure of greedy gold threads.
"Su Yu? What's wrong?" Cai Xiubin saw him standing there in a daze and waved her hand in front of his eyes. "Did you get scared out of your wits because you have too much money?"
"It's nothing." Su Yu looked away, a playful smile playing on his lips.
He subconsciously touched his chest. The dark red line was still there, as if it had grown into his flesh. The sensation at his fingertips was no longer cold, but a burning, searing heat, as if fire was burning inside.
"I just felt that since the money had fallen, I might as well catch it."
Anyway, he's just someone who's at the bottom of the hierarchy.