Rebirth: Slice-of-life Cultivation

Chapter 1708 - 931: Unbearable_2

Bai Yuxia snapped back to her senses. How did her thoughts get that derailed?

She immediately started repenting in her heart for her soul that had just gone off-color.

"How about I go comfort her? I’m afraid if this keeps up, she might do something stupid!" Chen Siyu suggested. Her thoughts might be dirty, but at heart she was still a kind, good girl.

Bai Yuxia: "You can, but... are you actually close to her? Sometimes concern from a stranger just comes off as presumptuous."

Chen Siyu felt a bit guilty at that: "In a certain sense, she and I are still familiar with each other."

Bai Yuxia was puzzled: "How come I don’t know about that?"

Xin Youling was a transfer student who came later, and on top of that she was the class monitor in charge of discipline. ’Power’ corrupts people’s hearts.

Someone like that in a class actually has a hard time having any real friends.

Chen Siyu started listing "evidence": "Xin Youling and I didn’t know each other when we were little. When I was a kid, I played at my house, she played at her house. Isn’t that kind of a shared past?"

Bai Yuxia was choked by that and went straight for the personal attack: "Your IQ is too low, I don’t want to talk to you."

Chen Siyu was unhappy: "You said this morning my IQ was 140, and I even tested it. It really is 140!"

"I just said that casually, it doesn’t mean anything. Those online tests are useless too. Unless you got an IQ 140 from a hospital, then yeah, you’d be a genius." Bai Yuxia shattered her fantasy.

Chen Siyu: "No way, it was a professional website. The test took a full half hour!"

...

Third period, English class.

Jiang Ning swept his Divine Sense around; the English teacher Chen Haiyang wasn’t here. He’d been dragged off by the Chinese teacher Dai Yongquan to act as an ally, and was currently in the principal’s office arguing with the PE teacher.

A showdown between teachers was on the verge of breaking out.

Class 8 had another self-study period, with Wang Longlong guarding the entire class up at the podium.

In the back row by the window, Wang Yong was shivering.

’Fuck, where’s Brother Jin? How could you ditch me?’

Last period they’d still been brothers in hardship; this period Gong Jin had bailed, leaving only Wang Yong sitting alone in this dark forbidden zone. The nearby Wu Xiaoqi and Duan Shigang cast sympathetic looks his way.

Wang Yong was panicking now. He could only pull out his English test paper and use knowledge to numb himself.

Wang Yong was a slick, smooth operator, good at dealing with people. But what he was good at was interacting with higher-level people like Lin Zida and the others. Once it came to dealing with low-level types, Wang Yong’s patience dropped to zero.

The bizarre whispers between Pang Jiao and Wang Yan Yan drifted into his ears, continually polluting his soul.

"I don’t dare wear makeup outside. I’m afraid guys will ask me for my contact info."

"My wish is to find a handsome one."

"Last time some guy confessed to me online. I turned him down. In real life he doesn’t even have the right to talk to me."

"I’m done. What’s it gonna take for them to feel inferior?"

Wang Yan Yan: "After you rejected him, what did he say?"

Pang Jiao covered her thick lips with her Big Pig-hoof hands: "He said he lost at truth or dare. Hoh hoh hoh!"

"He totally flew into a rage from embarrassment!"

These scattered little bits of chatter gradually started to draw Wang Yong’s attention.

Heat excites the sympathetic nervous system, making people irritable. That’s a normal physiological reaction.

Constant noise also makes people irritable. And if the noise happens to be incredibly anti-intellectual crap, it stirs up a demonic fire in your heart even more.

That demonic fire got stoked in Wang Yong for no reason, and he suddenly snapped: "You ever think about it, him confessing to you is already a dare in itself?"

As soon as the words left his mouth, the air went quiet.

Wu Xiaoqi and Duan Shigang looked at him with admiration, as if saying: "Bro, you’re a real hero!"

The next second.

Pang Jiao suddenly whirled around and roared. She grabbed Wang Yong’s desk with both hands and flipped it, her enormous strength sending the pile of textbooks smashing into Wang Yong’s face.

Up on the podium, Wang Longlong realized there was drama. His first instinct was to roll up the book in his hand, open his mouth and start doing live commentary...

Then suddenly, something twitched in his brain: ’Wait, no, I’m the class monitor!’

His position was totally different now!

Wang Longlong barked sternly, "What are you doing, what are you doing!"

"You’ve flipped, Pang Jiao. Didn’t you get enough fighting with Song Sheng? Cut it out, now!"

He charged down from the podium to stop the conflict.

Pang Jiao glared at Wang Yong: "Apologize to me!"

Wang Yong’s fire was instantly extinguished, and he suddenly remembered Pang Jiao’s terrifying record.

He chickened out in a second and forced an explanation: "Pang Jiao, what I meant just now was, you’re so beautiful that him confessing to you is, for you, basically an adventure in itself!"

The flames of anger in Pang Jiao’s big cow eyes gradually died down.

Wang Yong couldn’t help wiping the cold sweat on his forehead. Thank god he hadn’t gotten pinned to the floor and beaten.

Wu Xiaoqi and Duan Shigang looked disappointed. They clearly saw Wang Yong’s cowardice: ’You bootlicking little bastard!’

The chaos slowly settled back into calm.

Wang Yong sat alone, trapped in his cage.

’Brother Jin, I regret this.’

...

At the same time, in a shabby commercial office building in the urban area, the cheap rent had turned it into a cluster of small companies skirting the edge of the law.

Gong Jin looked around. The walls were plastered with little stickers for credit loans, diploma services, and "home visits."

The man in the suit led a few burly, vicious-looking men over to greet Zhuang Jianhui.

They immediately fawned, "Young Master Zhuang!"

"Mm, you came early." Zhuang Jianhui’s reaction was very flat; he didn’t take this group seriously at all.

His father was one of the absolute top figures in Yuzhou City. As a rich boy, if not for needing something done, these people would never have the chance to see him face to face in their entire lives.

They went downstairs. The man in the suit invited Zhuang Jianhui and the other two into a Mercedes, while the rest got into a Buick minivan.

"That Wu guy owes us a hundred grand and can’t pay it back now. Don’t worry, Young Master Zhuang, we’ll definitely make you satisfied today," the man in the suit promised.

When Zhuang Jianhui heard that familiar surname, he couldn’t help touching the arm that had healed from a fracture. The steel plate was still bolted to the bone. That was the biggest loss he’d ever taken in his life.

The car drove for twenty minutes and stopped in front of a residential house. Up close, you could even hear the sound of mahjong tiles clacking behind the roll-up door, along with a man’s angry shouts.

The man in the suit yanked up the roll-up door. The big men behind him, carrying steel pipes and ropes, immediately rushed inside.

A bald man in the middle of a mahjong game stood up in fear. "What do you want!"

What greeted him was a steel pipe whistling down on him.

In later years, people in debt were barely afraid of collection. The reason was that violent collection had basically disappeared. As long as you were a dead pig unafraid of boiling water, they practically couldn’t touch you. How was that even a debt? It was obviously just selling your credit record!

But right now, it was 2015.

After a round of savage beating, the bald man was sprawled on the floor like a dead dog.

One of the big men banged his steel pipe: "Motherfucker, not paying your debt!"

Zhuang Jianhui stood on the edge of the crowd, hands in his pockets, quietly watching the show.

Not a single one of the Wu Brothers’ lackeys would get away.

Gong Jin clicked his tongue in amazement beside him. "They’re really going hard!"

The man in the suit said, "This is nothing. Next month is when it’s really gonna be hard. We’ll definitely let him bleed a bit then."

After finishing with the bald guy, they headed to the next spot, only to find it empty.

The man in the suit pulled out his phone, dialed, and turned on speaker.

He asked, "I let you off during last month’s New Year and didn’t chase you. This month I give you a week’s grace and you still don’t pay? Playing missing?"

A hoarse, heavy male voice came through the speaker: "Got no money."

Man in suit: "You got no money, you still gotta pay. Where are you now?"

"No idea!"

Man in suit: "Fine. Don’t let me find you."

"Come on, come find me. I’m about to have no money to eat anyway. I wanna see if you lot kill me first, or I kill you first! Come on!" The man’s voice grew more and more manic, hoarse and heavy.

The man in the suit hung up and said apologetically, "Young Master Zhuang, sorry you had to see that joke."

Zhuang Jianhui: "It’s fine."

He looked at Gong Jin. "Heading back to school now, or you want to hang out with us a bit more?"

Gong Jin checked the time. The school would still be in fourth period. He hurriedly said, "Let’s keep playing, keep playing!"