Chapter 41: A Critical Hit on the Pervert
After experiencing the events of yesterday, Ge Kai dared not put on airs anymore, terrified that any delay would spawn more trouble. With Jiang Si’s terrible temper, he might just turn around and leave again.
Zhao Susu had a completely different mindset. With a reverent, worshipful attitude, she respectfully invited the man into the office.
“Ahem… sit down first.” Ge Kai sat upright, adjusting his collar. Just as he was about to speak to Zhao Susu, she had already started asking after Jiang Si’s needs. “Brother Jiang, what would you like to drink? Coffee or tea? We have freshly bought Da Hong Pao tea. Oh, we have juice and soft drinks too.”
“Tea is fine, thanks,” Jiang Si smiled.
Zhao Susu immediately responded and went out to prepare the tea. Ge Kai watched the entire process, dumbfounded.
What is wrong with this Zhao Susu!
She has no sense of propriety today!
That’s my private stash of tea! How could she give it to Jiang Si!
“Let’s talk business,” Jiang Si reminded him. “You’re this stingy even when meeting clients? You really are living with a smaller and smaller heart.”
Ge Kai took a deep breath, ignoring the jab. “Regarding the copyright issue, the company paid the copyright fees years ago. Currently, all rights to ‘The Recluse’ belong to the company. You have no objections to this point, right?”
“None.”
“Good. State your demands first. Whatever can be done, I will do my best to achieve.”
Jiang Si raised an eyebrow, turning his head to look out the window with an extremely strange expression.
Ge Kai: “What are you looking at?”
“I’m checking to see if the sun rose from the west.”
Ge Kai clenched his fist, gritting his teeth. “I’m perfectly fine.”
It did seem like his brain hadn’t been squeezed by a door, which meant there was a larger benefit preventing Ge Kai from fussing over Jiang Si’s minor details.
As Jiang Si was thinking, Zhao Susu pushed the door open to deliver the tea. She very meticulously moved the cup to Jiang Si’s hand for easy reach. For Ge Kai, she just placed it randomly and retreated.
Jiang Si took a sip of tea and slowly stated his conditions. “First, I want Zhang Shuo to issue a statement and apologize publicly on the entire internet.”
“Done,” Ge Kai said without hesitation.
“The company also needs to send an official letter clarifying the reasons for my resignation and restoring my credit as the director. Even if I’ve resigned, I filmed the movie. It’s not appropriate for you to just replace me with someone else.”
“That can’t be done,” Ge Kai said. “I asked you here to solve this privately and not blow things up. How would the company look if you did that? Besides, this movie has already been sent for review and is about to go online. Adding you now… there isn’t enough time.”
“Alright.” Jiang Si spread his hands. “Then there’s nothing to talk about.”
“You—”
“Gaslighting me won’t work. Don’t keep saying ‘the company this, the company that.’ Does your company have anything to do with me?” Jiang Si said.
“Just wait for the lawyer’s letter and the lawsuit.”
Before Ge Kai could continue, Jiang Si stood up and opened the door. Unexpectedly, he saw Zhang Shuo standing not far away, followed by an old acquaintance.
“…”
Jiang Si turned back, speaking earnestly, “Old Ge, you’d better make a choice quickly. Otherwise, I’m afraid you guys won’t live to see my lawyer’s letter.”
Lou Qilei, who had been shrinking inside the pocket, manifested his form. Floating beside Jiang Si, he stared straight at that leader of his—Qin Zhansheng.
“Jiang Si…” Zhang Shuo’s eyes were more terrifying than Lou Qilei’s. If looks could kill, Jiang Si would have died no less than a hundred times.
Jiang Si didn’t glance sideways, nodding at Qin Zhansheng. “President Qin, long time no see.”
As soon as he approached, Qin Zhansheng subconsciously took half a step back. Realizing it, he felt ashamed, pretended to adjust his clothes, puffed out his chest, and assumed a leadership posture.
“It’s you.”
Jiang Si smiled. “I heard an employee under President Qin had an accident at the company. My condolences.”
“Hmph.” Qin Zhansheng said nothing.
Jiang Si didn’t care either and walked straight out. He didn’t give Zhang Shuo a single glance the entire time, making the man so angry he almost shattered his teeth.
In the elevator going down, Lou Qilei kept muttering, “Why did you stop me? I’m dead anyway, but I have to vent this anger!”
Jiang Si: “There are ghosts helping you vent already, don’t crowd the excitement. There’s one lying on his back, one hugging his leg, and another riding on his neck. If you go over, where would you squeeze in? Hug his waist?”
“…Then what do I do?”
“Let’s go see your daughter first.”
Downstairs, Jiang Si specifically found the security guard to ask about the murder case from yesterday.
The guard said the police had cleared it up; it was an accident.
According to the surveillance, Lou Qilei didn’t notice the elevator car hadn’t arrived when the doors opened. He stepped into empty air and fell.
Afterward, the security guard discovered the elevator malfunction and cordoned it off. But because the technician was busy, it took several days to come for repairs.
Lou Qilei only survived until the next day. The injuries plus the long-term exhaustion caused a cardiac rupture, leading to his death.
It just so happened that the day Jiang Si arrived coincided with the elevator’s first run after being fixed. He noticed something wrong and called the police.
As for why the security guard hadn’t discovered the accident from the surveillance in time… looking at his evasive expression, both the human and the ghost understood.
“It’s my fault.” Lou Qilei murmured. “If I hadn’t gone downstairs, the accident wouldn’t have happened.”
“See, you’re gaslighting yourself again.” Jiang Si put on his headphones, pretending to make a call, but was actually talking to him.
“You shouldn’t have been at the company at that time anyway. If Qin Zhansheng hadn’t made you work overtime, how would you have encountered such a thing? Now we just have to see if he has a conscience and how much he’ll compensate you.”
Contrary to Jiang Si’s expectations, Qin Zhansheng’s character refreshed his understanding of how low a person could go.
The hospital corridor was filled with the smell of disinfectant and the sound of crying children. It was the age most full of vitality, yet it was intertwined with the aura of death in the hospital.
Guided by Lou Qilei, Jiang Si pushed open the door to his daughter’s ward.
A quiet, thin little girl lay on the bed, intubated with oxygen tubes, motionless like a lifeless doll.
A middle-aged woman sat by the bed, her face full of worry.
“Who are you?” Seeing Jiang Si, the woman immediately showed vigilance. “Go back and tell your boss I won’t sign the settlement agreement. My brother died inside the company; that is a work injury. Don’t think you can dismiss me with a little bit of money.”
Lou Qilei’s sister?
Jiang Si introduced himself. “I’m Brother Qi Lei’s friend. I heard about the accident and came to see the child. How is she?”
The woman’s expression softened considerably, and she apologized awkwardly. “I’m sorry, I misunderstood. I thought you were someone sent by his boss… The child just finished chemotherapy yesterday and hasn’t woken up yet. Thank you for coming.”
Jiang Si handed over the fruit basket he had just bought, looked at the little girl, and lowered his voice to ask, “Qi Lei’s boss is that guy named Qin, right? Did he approach you privately about a settlement?”
“Yes, that’s him. That bastard said my brother didn’t die during work hours and that he stepped into the empty shaft because he didn’t look properly. He claimed it was a property management failure, not a work injury, and had nothing to do with the company. He also said the company could only offer a small amount of humanitarian aid, and if we continued to pester them, they’d sue us for extortion.”
The woman covered her face and wept. “I’m just an ordinary housewife. My husband is just a small clerk, and we have a child to raise. Now that Qi Lei is gone and his daughter is like this, money is needed everywhere. How can I possibly come up with it on my own?”
“Little Yue’s body needs to go through four cycles of chemotherapy. Each cycle costs at least eight thousand, plus medicine and rehabilitation later… I can’t just stop her treatment; wouldn’t that be harming her? She’s only four or five years old, still so young.”
Mindful that the little girl was resting, she kept her voice very low, letting out the intermittent wails of an ordinary person pushed to a dead end.
Jiang Si handed her a tissue and continued to ask, “Aren’t you going through legal channels? Go to the labor bureau to defend your rights! Compensation isn’t something he alone can decide.”
The woman swallowed her sobs, waving her hand, almost unable to speak. Her eyes were swollen red from crying. It took her a long while to recover before saying, “You don’t know. That boss has connections. For him, crushing us is as simple as crushing an ant.”
Jiang Si fell silent.
Beside him, Lou Qilei clenched his fists tight, his eyes blood red, wishing he could fight Qin Zhansheng to the death.
“Big Sister, don’t worry yet. Take good care of the child. I’ll find a way to talk to that President Qin,” Jiang Si comforted her.
“You know him?”
“Sort of.” Jiang Si patted her shoulder. “I’ll do my best.”
The woman thanked him repeatedly and saw Jiang Si out.
Jiang Si didn’t leave immediately. Instead, he stood in front of the ward, looking in through the small window on the door. After crying, the woman sat in front of the hospital bed in a daze. Her messy hair was tied behind her head, her back severely hunched, her body once again crushed by fate.
“I’m going to kill Qin Zhansheng!” Lou Qilei’s eyes were congested with blood, gritting his teeth. “I’m going to kill him. I worked like a dog for him, holding him up on a pedestal for so many years. I only have this one daughter, and he doesn’t want to leave her a single path to survival.”
“He clearly knows my daughter has cancer and needs chemotherapy, he clearly knows… that beast!”
Lou Qilei wheezed heavily—ghosts don’t breathe, but he still subconsciously maintained human habits.
For the first time ever, Jiang Si wanted a cigarette. Leaning against the wall, he said to him, “Do you know why I beat Qin Zhansheng?”
“…Why?”
“Because that dead pervert sexually harassed me in the workplace.” Jiang Si added, “He wanted to sleep with me. I smashed a vase over his head, and then I quit.”
Jiang Si still remembered it. He had been working overtime until late at night at the company. Unable to fight off the drowsiness, he fell asleep on his desk, only to be woken up by Qin Zhansheng touching him.
At the time, he was wearing a thin short-sleeved shirt with a blanket draped over his back. Qin Zhansheng reached under the blanket to stroke his back. When Jiang Si looked up, he was met with Qin Zhansheng’s face full of suggestive smiles.
Relying on the fact that it was just the two of them, Qin Zhansheng stated his intentions directly: “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time. Do you want to go a step further and replace Ge Kai?”
That incident caused a huge scene. Jiang Si grabbed a vase a colleague used for flowers and smashed it over his head. Porcelain shards exploded like fireworks, and blood spilled all over Qin Zhansheng’s head.
Jiang Si even pulled out a fruit knife, pinned him to the floor, stepped on the back of his hand, and planned to cut off those disgusting fingers.
“Which finger was it? Are you going to say it? If you don’t, I’ll chop them all off right now!”
Qin Zhansheng was scared into a mess of snot and tears, his face pressed tight against the floor, begging ceaselessly, saying he was wrong and shouldn’t have had crooked thoughts.
Jiang Si was in a rage and was about to use the knife when Ge Kai, who had come to work, stopped him.
The hand wasn’t cut off, but the man was scared out of his wits.
Qin Zhansheng trembled as he crawled up from the floor, thinking he was safe. Pointing at his blood-covered self, he shouted that he was going to sue Jiang Si for intentional injury.
“I’m telling you, me looking at you is giving you face! Don’t refuse a toast only to drink a forfeit! This isn’t over. I’ll make you suffer consequences you can’t handle! Just you wait!”
The knife in Jiang Si’s hand was forcibly taken by Ge Kai. Disarmed and with his waist held back by Ge Kai, the standoff continued. He could only curse him as a dead pervert in the most vicious and disgusting way.
Qin Zhansheng took the opportunity to loosen his tie and tried to loop it around Jiang Si’s neck, wanting to strangle him right there.
Jiang Si had long legs. He kicked him over with one foot and almost broke free of Ge Kai’s restraint to beat the man to death.
In the end, it was Ge Kai, afraid of being implicated, who desperately stopped him, dragging Jiang Si into his office to lecture him. “Let it go today; you’ve vented your anger. You’re a grown man; being touched twice won’t make you lose a chunk of meat. Don’t be so petty.”
Jiang Si didn’t speak.
He continued, “President Qin is over forty, with money and status. There are plenty of men and women who want to throw themselves at him. If you really don’t want to be with him, just stay away from him. Appear in front of him less.”
“But you, you were too impulsive just now. What can’t be talked out calmly? If I hadn’t stopped you in time, were you really going to kill him? You… you’re just too young, too impulsive. Just for a moment of anger, you didn’t think about how you’d stay in the company? If you just explained it nicely, President Qin wouldn’t actually force you.”
Jiang Si’s reply at the time was extremely venomous. He looked at Ge Kai coldly and asked, “You understand him so well; did you two sleep together too?”
Ge Kai’s face flushed red, and he cursed him. “Ungrateful! You are simply ungrateful!”
Jiang Si threw his ID badge in his face and said crisply, “I quit. Screw your ‘ungrateful’! If you like him, crawl into his bed yourself. Don’t disgust me.”
Perhaps frightened by his ferocious glare, Ge Kai didn’t dare speak again. Jiang Si kicked the door open, grabbed his things, and went home.
Later, perhaps due to Ge Kai’s mediation, Jiang Si was never approached by Qin Zhansheng again until he left Ning City.
Memory pulled back to reality. Meeting Lou Qilei’s shocked face, Jiang Si pulled the corners of his mouth into a cold sneer.
“Did you see the ghosts around him today?”
“I saw them.”
Jiang Si said, “I didn’t want to say it originally, but now I can’t be bothered to hide it. I’ll just say it straight. Those are his own wife and children.”
“The children are his biological kids.”
The reason Jiang Si knew this was because after he resigned, he wanted to settle the score with Qin Zhansheng. He had arrived at Qin Zhansheng’s door and saw from a distance the two children being led into a car by Qin.
Next to them was his wife.
Jiang Si stared at those two children for a long time, and in the end, didn’t take that step. He packed his things and returned to his hometown.
Unexpectedly, three months later, Qin Zhansheng’s wife and children were all dead.
Lou Qilei received too much explosive information at once; his brain couldn’t quite load it. He stood frozen, looking at Jiang Si. “Then what should we do?”
“…” Jiang Si hooked his finger at him. “Tonight, you go play with him.”
Didn’t Qin Zhansheng think he was powerful? So many connections in the human world—hopefully, he had connections in the underworld too.
Otherwise, what was he going to do?
It was a sunny day. Jiang Si came out of the inpatient department and wandered aimlessly into the small garden downstairs.
Many elderly people in hospital gowns were gathered here.
Hospitals never lacked ghosts. The wandering spirits floating around were almost equal in number to the living. With the shadows as the boundary, the two sides were distinctly separated.
Someone suddenly called him from behind. Turning around, he found it was actually Hai Di. He was wearing a casual suit, walking over as if strolling in a courtyard.
“Why are you here?” Both were puzzled and spoke at the same time.
Jiang Si: “…”
“I came to visit someone,” he explained.
“I came for a checkup myself. You’re visiting a friend?” Hai Di studied his expression. “Are you in a bad mood?”
“Visiting a friend’s child.” Jiang Si shook his head and asked, “Do you have a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke. You’d better not smoke either; it’s bad for your health.” Hai Di thought for a moment and added, “Yesterday you told me to take care of my health, but you don’t value your own?”
“… ” Jiang Si was helpless. “Forget it then. I still want to live to a hundred.”
“Walk together?”
Jiang Si nodded. “You don’t have work today?”
“I’m the boss. Giving myself a day off is simple,” Hai Di said. “I heard you opened your own shop. You’re freer than me, right?”
“It’s okay. Better than working for someone else.”
“Careful.”
Just as Jiang Si took out his phone to check it, he was suddenly pulled by Hai Di. It turned out he hadn’t noticed he had walked to the edge of a flowerbed, where a corner jutted out. He almost walked right into it.
However, instead of hitting the flowerbed, he crashed into Hai Di’s body.
Jiang Si let out a muffled groan. His face instantly drained of blood. He barely managed to stand straight, his arm slightly bent to shield the space between them.
“You—” Hai Di was stunned, not expecting such a big reaction.
The collision had hit right on Jiang Si’s wound. The injury, which was mostly healed, started throbbing with pain again. Jiang Si lowered his head halfway, exhaling gently and slowly to suppress the pain, responding to Hai Di’s concern.
“I’m fine. Accidentally flashed my waist.”
Hai Di didn’t comment. He supported Jiang Si and helped him sit on the edge of the flowerbed. “Rest a bit and recover.”
“It’s an old problem,” Jiang Si explained, his lips pale. “Before I changed careers, let alone my waist, I had old injuries on my shoulders and neck too. It’s actually better now; rare for it to flare up.”
“Jiang Si.” Hai Di was silent for a few seconds.
“Hm?”
“Generally, waist injuries are on the lower back.” Jiang Si wasn’t pressing on his back; that spot wasn’t even the waist.
Hai Di’s thick eyelashes lowered slightly, looking down at Jiang Si face to face. He didn’t say anything, yet it seemed he knew everything.
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