Chapter 114 - 111: Ancient Contract Scroll
Traffic lights, crosswalks, pedestrians, vehicles...
Sun Tian’s Visual Sense felt disconnected from his mind as he drove at a low speed, his thoughts endlessly replaying the recent events.
Driving in such a distracted state was a surefire way to get into an accident. Fortunately, he had driven this road at least a thousand times; the route was so familiar it was muscle memory. Half an hour later, he arrived home safely.
It was already 10 PM, and the villa was quiet.
He quietly opened the Door to his daughter’s room to check on her. The adorable child was sound asleep.
Tiptoeing out, he returned to his bedroom, where his remarkably well-preserved wife was eating fruit and watching some obscure, low-budget foreign comedy.
"You’re back?"
The brief question served as a greeting.
Sun Tian was a fairly upright man. After all, his old friends had nicknamed him the "Martial Monk." Though he didn’t have to follow monastic vows, he wasn’t one for fooling around, which was something his wife had always been confident about.
But Sun Tian was a little different today, seeming distracted even as he returned her greeting.
"Yeah. What time did Xiao An go to sleep?"
"Eight o’clock. She played for a bit after finishing her homework, then went to sleep."
Sun Tian took off his jacket, set it aside, and flopped onto the bed, rubbing his forehead as he mulled over something.
His wife used the remote to lower the TV volume, then leaned over beside Sun Tian, helping him rub his forehead.
"Are you exhausted? Did you run into trouble with the business?"
He took her hand and kissed it.
"It’s nothing. I was just suddenly missing Mom and Dad."
Despite his words, Sun Tian’s mind was still preoccupied with what had happened earlier.
"If you miss them, we can take Xiao An to visit. You should take a break from work once in a while. You have so many people working under you."
"Mm."
Saying he missed his parents was just an excuse to comfort her. His two trendy parents knew how to have fun better than he did, constantly vacationing all over the world. Even if he really wanted to see the old couple, he’d have to wait for them to come back.
Sun Tian hesitated, wondering if he should ask his parents what they thought about today’s events.
「The next morning」
The first thing Sun Tian did after arriving at the office was call the company’s IT guy on the internal line to come take a look at his computer.
Meanwhile, he stood by the floor-to-ceiling window with a cigar in his mouth, gazing at the skyscrapers outside and, in the distance, the street corner from last night.
"President Sun, there’s nothing wrong with your computer. The hardware and software are all running normally. Did you find some malware, or what’s the issue?"
"Oh, good. It’s nothing. It blue-screened on me last night, so I thought something was wrong. I don’t know much about computers, so I figured I’d have you take a look."
The IT guy, wearing large-framed glasses, checked again.
"There is a record of a blue screen, but it was likely caused by an accident, something like the CPU overheating."
"I see. Thanks for your hard work. You can get back to it."
"Yes, President Sun."
Once the IT guy had left the office, Sun Tian finally stepped away from the window and returned to his desk.
He could have just said that his computer had been hacked last night, that text had appeared on the screen, but the words died on his lips.
Sitting by his computer, Sun Tian had his secretary take the files he had annotated last night and distribute them to the relevant people. With that done, he finally had a moment of free time.
He turned toward his computer screen, opened a search engine, and subconsciously typed the single word "contract."
A string of familiar definitions appeared.
He chuckled self-deprecatingly, then changed his search query, typing in "mysterious robed person."
This time, the results were a mix of curiosities and gossip, along with some photos from the Middle East Region and anime pictures.
’Seriously, what am I doing?’
He felt like he was becoming neurotic.
Just then, however, something like a small pop-up ad on the webpage caught Sun Tian’s attention.
"Feeling like your thoughts are sluggish? Can’t seem to think through your problems? One simple click to solve all your worries!"
It was the kind of trashy sales ad common online these days. Normally, Sun Tian wouldn’t have given it a second thought and would have closed it immediately.
But today, he was inexplicably fixated on last night’s events, his heart restless, as if being scratched by a cat’s paw.
The robed man’s appearance and disappearance had been just too bizarre, especially when he compared the reactions of those around him to his own.
Since he had nothing better to do, he clicked it.
Unsurprisingly, clicking it led to exactly the kind of content he had braced himself for.
The entire page was covered in: "Stay young! Keep your mind sharp and your memory outstanding! You need XXX Rejuvenation Pills!"
It even went so far as to list some kind of research report on the webpage.
The first few sentences praised this phony, unheard-of medicine to the skies, claiming that taking it would turn you into Einstein and Sherlock Holmes.
Sun Tian felt his intelligence was being insulted. Just as he was about to close the page, some text on a floating bar on the left made his heart skip a beat.
"Do you ever feel powerless? Do you feel like you’re being deceived by your husband, that your family is hiding things from you? Choose us and you can’t go wrong! XXX Rejuvenation Pills..."
Sun Tian didn’t care why such a miraculous-sounding pill ad existed, and he didn’t bother reading the rest of the nonsense. But the phrase "your family is hiding things from you" seemed to magnify before his eyes.
The Sun Family, a contract?
It wasn’t hard to figure out. When the robed man mentioned "the Sun Family," he clearly wasn’t just referring to Sun Tian, but the entire family.
The thought of contacting his parents from last night resurfaced.
He closed the webpage and sat silently in his chair, thinking for a good ten minutes until his secretary interrupted him with her routine delivery of freshly brewed coffee.
After the secretary left, Sun Tian made his decision. He would just ask casually. If it turned out to be nothing, he’d just write himself off as being paranoid.
He picked up his phone and dialed his father’s number.
It rang nearly ten times before someone answered.
The sound of wind, waves, and boisterous laughter came through from the other end.
"Hello, son? What’s up? Your mother and I are at the beach."
The old man was shouting on his end.
"Nothing much, just miss you guys!"
"Anything else besides missing us? If not, I’m hanging up. The beach volleyball game is about to start, and I’m going to go watch."
Sun Tian slapped his own forehead.
"No, no, no, Dad, don’t hang up yet. I have something else to ask."
On a beach thousands of miles away, an old man shot a triumphant look at the old woman sitting in a nearby beach chair.
"Go on, son. What is it?"
"Um, Dad... does our family have any kind of ancestral pacts or anything? The kind that would be, like, really secret?"
Hearing this, the old man on the phone was baffled.
"What? What the hell are you talking about?"
Sun Tian wasn’t quite sure how to explain it to his old man.
"You know, the kind of thing where you make some contract, and after a long time, you have to pay it back."
"Son, are you being blackmailed? I told you not to go chasing after those stupid wealth rankings! When my grandpa—your great-grandfather—was still around, he’d always say that the real wisdom is in getting rich quietly!"
His father’s tone didn’t sound like he knew anything. Instead, he had started lecturing him again.
"Dad, I’m not being blackmailed. Besides, in today’s society, fame is its own kind of business card. You wouldn’t understand these things. Even Great-Grand... pa... he also..."
Sun Tian’s voice suddenly trailed off.
Great-Grandfather?
Members of the Sun Family generally lived long lives. Aside from his grandparents, who died in a car accident, his great-grandmother had lived to be ninety-eight, and his great-grandfather to one hundred and one. The only thing was, his great-grandfather was much older than his great-grandmother, so he’d passed away many years before her.
’Why don’t I remember when Great-Grandma passed away... Holy shit! We were all abroad at the time!’
Memory is a strange thing. It’s often not as simple as loading a save file.
You can try your damnedest to recall something and come up with nothing, but the moment something clicks, the sealed-away memories can come flooding back, bringing all the emotions with them.
Sun Tian didn’t really have many affectionate memories of his great-grandmother, who was an old-fashioned, feudal-style matriarch, but there was one thing he could never forget.
That time he was "punished by family law."
He remembered that he’d been young, mischievous, and ignorant back then, and he had stolen something from his great-grandmother, causing her to fly into a rage.
What was it? What was it? A Gemstone or an ancient painting?
He had a vague mental image of a yellowed pattern.
The memory was hazy; he couldn’t quite recall it.
"Hello, son? Hello? Are you still there?"
On the other end of the line, Sun Tian’s father, hearing only silence for a long time, started shouting again.
"Ah, oh! I’m here, I’m here! By the way, Dad, do you remember that time Great-Grandma beat me when I was a kid?"
"Of course I remember! You’re the apple of our eye! It was your butt that got hit, but my heart that ached! But even I was afraid of my own grandmother. Who would have dared to plead for you? If the house servants hadn’t gone easy on you, you would’ve been laid up in bed for half a month!"
’Damn, and he calls that going easy on me!’ Sun Tian couldn’t help but curse inwardly.
"So, Dad, what was it that I stole from Great-Grandma back then? I can’t remember. Was it a painting? I just remember there was a picture."
"What painting? That was your great-grandmother’s antique! A silver-cased Ancient Contract Scroll!"
PS: Chapter 1/3.