NH chapter 023
by VolareJust as Huo Ye felt he was getting to know Shen Tingyu better, Shen Tingyu felt as though he was increasingly unable to see through Huo Ye, especially regarding this matter, which he found hard to understand.
In Shen Tingyu’s dictionary, the idea of a hero saving a beauty absolutely did not exist; unnecessary kindness was rather a trivial thing.
He disliked those who kicked someone when they were down but also had no interest in helping those in dire situations, especially not for a stranger like Gao Xiaoyuan, whom he had met by chance. It was completely unnecessary.
The people of the Shen family could not comprehend this kind of value system.
From a very young age, Li Luoyin had taught him that anything unrelated to one’s own interests was trivial and should be ignored.
One time, Li Luoyin took Shen Tingyu to school. In contrast to other parents who showed up to personally drop off their children, Li Luoyin was often absent in this regard, so the rare occasions when she did were cherished memories in Shen Tingyu’s childhood.
While driving, they encountered a cat lying in the middle of the road. Li Luoyin suddenly slammed on the brakes, causing young Shen Tingyu to be tossed around in the backseat. He peeked his head out, gripping his backpack straps, and asked his mother, “What happened?”
Li Luoyin ignored his question, knitting her brows and murmuring, “What bad luck,” before unbuckling her seatbelt and getting out to check.
It was a little cat, probably only two or three months old, slender and small, seemingly injured by a car, with blood by its mouth, lying pitifully in front of Li Luoyin’s car.
Shen Tingyu also opened the car door and approached, squatting down next to the cat to examine it for a moment. He pointed at it and said, “Mom, it’s still alive.”
Li Luoyin smacked Shen Tingyu’s finger, warning him not to get too close. “Don’t touch it; it’s filthy.”
Shen Tingyu had to retract his hand, casting a somewhat aggrieved look at his mother, then returning his gaze to the little cat. “It’s not dirty.”
“Mom, I think it’s really cute,” he said softly.
A mother knows her child best; Li Luoyin immediately saw that her son had developed some impractical thought. She grabbed him by the nape of his neck and forced him to bottle it up. “Shen Tingyu, no.”
At just over ten years old, the age when children are eager to dig down to the roots of things, Shen Tingyu persisted in asking, “Why not?”
“We have money; we can save it. We can take it home and I will take good care of it,” he insisted, even as Li Luoyin held him up like a chick, desperately trying to negotiate with her.
However, Li Luoyin remained cold and implacable. Shen Tingyu’s self-talk gradually lost confidence, and his voice grew weaker.
Li Luoyin asked him, “Does this little creature have anything to do with you?”
“… No.” Shen Tingyu shook his head.
“Did I injure it when I ran over it?”
Shen Tingyu shook his head again. “No.”
“Then, since we are rich, why should we waste our efforts and resources on it? Shen Tingyu, you are thinking too simply and too immaturely. You want to rescue it, but first you must take it to a vet for treatment, which means going to the pet hospital every few days. This will take up your school time; besides, looking at it being half-dead, it might not even survive. In the end, what you’d bring home would be a dead body. It’s not injured by you, but you’d end up carrying a burden of responsibility and guilt that doesn’t belong to you.”
Weighing the pros and cons, Li Luoyin laid out her points. Shen Tingyu listened, stunned, each point seeming all too reasonable.
“If we assume it can be cured, stray cats are difficult to tame and need companionship. If you want to keep it long-term and build a relationship with it, you would need to spend more time filling in its emotional void from the first half of its life. But you are just an elementary school student who still needs care from others; where would you find that much time? Just don’t trouble us, and it will be good enough.”
After Li Luoyin finished speaking, she stood up and returned to the car, leaving Shen Tingyu still dazed next to the little cat.
He looked at the cat, then at his mother, feeling somewhat at a loss.
Li Luoyin didn’t have time to engage in the mental turmoil of a prepubescent child; she was in a hurry to pick up someone for work. She got into the driver’s seat and honked the horn, her urgency obvious.
Shen Tingyu was startled by the honking and hurried back to the backseat, his small hands pushing to close the car door.
He must never pester Li Luoyin, for she could definitely leave a ten-year-old on the street and let him walk a few kilometers to school by himself.
Don’t ask; just know Shen Tingyu had been left before.
In the end, Li Luoyin drove past the little cat, turning right and speeding away. To this day, Shen Tingyu still didn’t know if that little cat was still alive or had already died.
But Shen Tingyu no longer cared about that; through long exposure, he seemed to have become another Li Luoyin.
Therefore, regarding Huo Ye’s commitment to helping Gao Xiaoyuan, Shen Tingyu from the start thought it unnecessary, a self-inflicted trouble, even overly foolish.
Shen Tingyu was an only child.
The emotional relations within his family were naturally indifferent, so he could not understand why Huo Ye, just because he had a younger sister, would go through so much for someone else’s girl.
There were moments when Shen Tingyu even thought, was it because Gao Xiaoyuan was a girl that Huo Ye felt pity for her?
Surrounded by a group of young boys going through adolescence, Shen Tingyu believed himself to be apart from the world, awake while all others were intoxicated, having long seen through worldly affairs. He detested how humans, once entangled in romance, became senseless animals controlled by emotions.
If others became this way, he simply offered them respect and well-wishes; but if it were Huo Ye, Shen Tingyu inexplicably felt annoyed and angry.
Shen Tingyu originally thought that Huo Ye was the same type of person as himself.
Standing side by side, how cool was that!
At this time, Shen Tingyu could not yet realize that the strange feelings he secretly harbored for Gao Xiaoyuan were what they truly were.
Only later did he finally understand.
It turned out to be jealousy.
Proud as he was, he could actually feel jealous of a girl.
When Huo Ye was called to the office by Bald Zhang, Shen Tingyu just happened to go to the restroom. Life was indeed ironic; typically, the two were inseparable, and even going to the restroom had Shen Tingyu needing Huo Ye’s support to walk like a queen. If they weren’t in cold war these days, he would have insisted on going with him to the office.
When he came back and found Huo Ye missing, he immediately guessed what had happened after asking his classmates—Huo Ye had saved the little cat due to his compassion, but the cat had bitten him back.
During these days of cold war with Huo Ye, Shen Tingyu frequently called home, but it was not to speak to his parents; rather, he had someone check out how many “scallions” there were in Lanjing connected to the Liao family.
After all, this was not Lingshan’s turf, where a powerful dragon could not defeat a local snake. Those who recognized the situation were wise men. Even if Shen Tingyu’s status was high, his reach did not extend that far, especially since he had yet to inherit the family business and was merely a “prince” in name.
Elitism always bore an arrogant tendency to bully others, while being completely unaware of it, and he disliked anything slipping out of his control right under his nose. Therefore, Shen Tingyu’s every move was bound to be watched from Lingshan.
Li Luoyin scrutinized him closely; any trace of privately using the Shen family’s connections and resources would likely be discovered by her.
Shen Tingyu did not want to alert the people over there.
But saying that, relying solely on himself to investigate the Liao family’s details would become very difficult. Until there was a conclusion in this matter, Shen Tingyu would not inform anyone about what he was doing.
Completely unaware, Huo Ye thought he was just sulking.
But fate had a way of playing tricks, and destiny often did not develop in the direction they wished—Huo Ye as well as Shen Tingyu.
On that morning at Lanjing Private High School #2, while students were still diligently studying, Huo Lijun walked out of the school gate with Huo Ye following closely behind him.
No one was in the mood to recall the backpack left in the classroom, because starting today, Huo Ye would probably stop going to school—earlier in the headmaster’s office, even though Huo Lijun had humbled himself to ask school leaders for leniency, they still couldn’t escape Liao Zheng’s ridicule. Liao Zheng declared that if Huo Ye was willing to publicly apologize to him in front of the entire school and kneel down to beg for forgiveness, Liao Zheng might begrudgingly allow him to avoid expulsion.
For a moment, Huo Ye felt as if he had returned to his third year of middle school at that private school, where the supervisor first proposed that good students were those who would obediently lower their dignity and crawl through the dog hole, while those who dared to resist would be defined as bad kids, needing to face harsher punishments as an example to others.
However, being the worst of the bad kids and the toughest of the tough, no one had yet been able to make Huo Ye lower his head.
A dead pig isn’t afraid of boiling water; there’s a saying that goes, “In this life, besides death, everything else is a scratch.” Huo Ye never regretted anything he had done or said.
Therefore, even if backstabbed, persuaded for withdrawal, or humiliated, it was nothing significant to Huo Ye, nor could it shake him in the slightest.
He always calmly and peacefully endured everything, accepting all sudden luck or misfortune with neither arrogance nor resentment.
Back at home, standing in the alley below, Huo Lijun wore a heavy expression like dark clouds signal impending storm, instructing Huo Ye to go up first, saying he would be back soon. Huo Ye said nothing and turned to leave.
Similar to the relatable dynamic between Li Luoyin and Shen Tingyu, the relationship between Huo Lijun and Huo Ye was also extreme and strange.
This was reflected in what happened ten minutes after he arrived home.
Huo Yan had gone to school, and only Song Jianlan was home. When she saw Huo Ye open the door, her surprise was evident. Glancing at the old-fashioned wall clock, ensuring she wasn’t imagining things, she stammered, “L, Little Seven?”
“You don’t have to cook lunch today. Mom, remember to pick up my sister later, and then take her to Aunty’s house,” Huo Ye said casually as if discussing everyday matters, his tone betraying no unusual sentiment.
Upon hearing this, Song Jianlan froze entirely, her limbs becoming somewhat flustered.
She naturally understood that the phrase “going to Aunty’s house,” though commonplace in its surface meaning, implied something very special.
Following this would soon usher in a storm.