Chapter 148: The Canopy Star

Qi Fei pushed the fabricated medical record toward Chen Shan: "So, it wasn't the son you wanted, but the incense to extend your life."

Chen Shan's nails suddenly dug into his palm lines, and he vaguely heard the green paint peeling off the fence of the experimental primary school. The sound of Zhuangzhuang's schoolbag charm brushing against the iron bars that day strangely overlapped with the dull thud of his shackles. "I pounced on her like a hyena that hadn't eaten for three days!" He stared at the cracks in the floor tiles, speaking neurotically. "These tiles are the same as the ones I knelt on at that Ying Shuigen's house..."

The one-way glass suddenly reflected Qi Fei's shaking blood type report, the "O" type twisting like a snake skin under the bright light. "I grabbed her mink collar and said, 'Bone marrow matching is a one-in-a-hundred-thousand chance of survival.' This bitch actually laughed like Ying Shuigen chanting spells at an altar! Her newly done crystal nails scratched the needle marks on my arm, saying, 'How can a tribute offered to the Snake Immortal be taken back?'—as smooth as when she tricked me into breaking up!"

It was time to identify the scene.

Chen Shan's shackles dragged dark red iron filings across the ferry deck. He stared at the murky river water churning outside the ship's side, as if he had returned to that day:

The salty river breeze of Jiangting Island hit Chen Shan's face. He curled up behind the rusted railing of the ferry, staring at the red Porsche fifty meters away. The echo of She Xiaohui's high heels stepping across the bluestone alley strangely overlapped with the crisp sound of red dates scattered at their wedding twenty years ago.

The snake-shaped bronze door knocker twisted in She Xiaohui's fingers, and the warm light leaking from the door crack flickered with the figures of two boys chasing each other.

What made him more desperate than death was She Xiaohui's ruthless trampling of his dignity as a man.

When he kicked open the ajar side door, her hand, painted with scarlet nail polish, gripped her crocodile-skin bag tight. "Are you crazy to come to the island to seek death?" She protected the children and let them go upstairs, her diamond-encrusted phone case knocking against the golden snake statue worshipped in the entryway. "Shuigen will be back soon!"

"That charlatan can't save me, but Zhuangzhuang can!" Chen Shan roared, the veins on his neck bulging. In the house with high walls and deep courtyards, all the shouting was scattered into the air by the river breeze blowing across the island; no one heard.

"Leukemia needs to extract Zhuangzhuang's bone marrow?" She Xiaohui took off her high heels and threw them into the corner. "To tell you the truth, I won't let Zhuangzhuang extract bone marrow..." She suddenly bloomed with a contemptuous smile. "Guess why?"

"Was your conscience stolen by the Snake Immortal?!" Chen Shan grabbed She Xiaohui's hand, the purple-red jade bracelet shaking on her wrist as she struggled violently.

"This is what Ying Shuigen gave you when I sent you to the island. You really haven't taken it off for more than ten years!" Chen Shan gritted his teeth. The room was filled with a faint fishy smell of snakes, and he felt waves of nausea, not knowing if it was the smell or the woman in front of him. When She Xiaohui shook off his fingertips from her wrist, her voice pierced his eardrums like broken ice: "Zhuangzhuang is really not your son."

"Just because I have leukemia, you can make up such a lie?" Chen Shan heard his own hoarse laughter echoing in the corridor. "If you want to lie to me, you should have changed to a decent reason..."

She suddenly stumbled and hit the storage cabinet. Chen Shan watched helplessly as the medical report rustled in her fingers. Zhuangzhuang's school medical report was thrown into his face—how could two parents with Type A blood give birth to a child with Type O blood?

When the paper slipped from Chen Shan's stiff fingers, the incandescent light on the ceiling began to spin. In a trance, he heard the baby's cry from the delivery room at the other end of the corridor twelve years ago. That "mother and child are safe" that once made his eyes fill with tears now turned into countless glass shards, rampaging through every blood vessel.

The glaring red and blue lights of the police car cast eerie shadows on the mottled walls. The sound of Chen Shan's shackles dragging on the ground was like the rustling of snakes on the day of the crime, echoing in the ruins like some ancient spell.

It had only been a few days, but this place was already as desolate as a tomb, exuding the aura of the dead.

Chen Shan looked at the stairwell that still had axe marks, as if he saw She Xiaohui shamelessly saying to him: "The night Ying Shuigen taught me the secret art of dual cultivation, you were still moving cement at the construction site!"

The knuckles of Chen Shan's clenched fists suddenly turned white, and blood marks were squeezed out between his shackles and wrists. Memories surged like a tide—the crooked snake-shaped bronze statue on the altar table at Ying Shuigen's house, incense ash scattered in the cracks of the family photo frame.

"When I was rummaging through the safe on the third floor, the overturned prayer wheel rolled into a pool of blood." Chen Shan's vocal cords sounded like they had been soaked in corpse oil, every word wrapped in viscous hatred. "The family photo floating in the blood made me realize that the corpse downstairs was just a scapegoat." He suddenly laughed neurotically, the shackles on his wrists clashing with the crisp sound of a soul-summoning bell. "I thought at that time, 'Let the whole world hunt the 'murderous demon Ying Shuigen,' isn't that more satisfying than hacking him to death directly!'"

Qi Fei watched the madness jumping in Chen Shan's pupils. He was so gritting his teeth, immersed in the pleasure of revenge.

Qi Fei looked down at the report in his hand that had long been soaked by his body temperature, and finally handed it to Chen Shan. When he saw the content, his nails scratched a dent on the "99.99%" in the conclusion column. His whole face was almost pressed against the paper, his pupils trembling into needle points under the pale light: "Bullshit! I've seen the medical report with my own eyes! Zhuangzhuang's blood type... he can't be my son!"

Qi Fei looked at him coldly and said: "You're right, you and Zhuangzhuang are indeed not father and son. The owner of the other sample is not Zhuangzhuang, but Huang Daqiu."

The air suddenly stagnated. Chen Shan suddenly tore up the report, and the snow-white debris drifted from his fingers mixed with cold sweat: "What a joke! I grew up in an orphanage! Back then they said my parents threw me away!"

"We checked. You were indeed abandoned at the gate of the welfare home. However, according to the information we learned, the ones who abandoned you were not your parents, but your maternal grandparents, because Huang Daqiu gave birth to you with a classmate named Tang Zhaoxu when he was 16. Tang Zhaoxu's parents threw you into the welfare home for their daughter's reputation. I think they probably didn't expect Huang Daqiu to become a billionaire years later. Of course, they wouldn't have thought that, by a twist of fate, you would personally kill your own father."

The shackles scraped a harsh sound on the ground. Chen Shan suddenly looked up and burst into a shrill laugh like a night owl: "That old charlatan Ying Shuigen was right! My fate really comes with a Canopy Star, born rich!" His frantic eyeballs turned toward the shattered glass tank, reflecting his own fragmented image.

"You did inherit Huang Daqiu's gambler genes." Zhong Kui walked up step by step, the shadow covering the man who had personally severed his own bloodline. "However, the Canopy Star brings loneliness and restraint. Your wealth, after all, has to be filled with the flesh and blood of your closest relatives." ===== CHAPTER 149 =====