【…Remember the agreement. Don’t covet things that don’t belong to you.】
The man’s features were blurred beyond recognition, but the threatening warning conveyed through his cold, deep voice—the unmistakable menace of someone accustomed to standing above others—could not have been clearer.
Tang Can listened with a thoroughly loopy expression: Don’t~ covet~ things~ that~ don’t~ belong~ to~ you~
What kind of idiot was this? How was his brain even more clogged than Tang Can’s old boss’s? Tang Can was still surrounded by question marks when a ringing phone jolted him awake.
So it had been a dream… Wait. Hadn’t he died?
The moment Tang Can opened his eyes, his vision filled with television static. Then a massive novel of more than a million characters was forcibly poured into his brain.
It took a long while before the violent dizziness eased. Though he had only managed to sort out the rough outline of the plot that had been rammed into his head, he was already baring his teeth and raising both middle fingers.
Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!
He had actually transmigrated into a book and become a vicious cannon fodder character with the exact same name—one who met a miserable end and, worse, was full-time childcare cannon fodder!
Tang Can had spent three full years as a kindergarten teacher working like a beast of burden on a 007 schedule before finally making the painful decision to leave the public system under the stares of people who thought he had lost his mind.
And what happened? He quit his job during the day and quit breathing that very night.
Dying suddenly the night he resigned was bad enough. Now that he had been given a second life, they wanted him to keep taking care of children? He was going to riot!
And this was no ordinary child. This kid was the future final villain of the novel, abused and tormented from infancy by the original host—his scumbag biological father—until he was already on the brink of turning dark at such a young age…
The capable should do more work, so let the capable do it. He was dead, and the dead deserved priority. Taking care of a child was impossible. He would never do it, not even in his next life.
Cursing under his breath, Tang Can flipped through the plot in his mind while the phone beside him rang without pause, as though it intended to keep going until the battery died unless he answered.
In the chaos, he glanced over and saw the word “Manager” on the screen. His mind automatically began searching the inherited memories.
First he remembered that the manager was the original host’s so-called cousin. Then he remembered that this cousin had forced his way into becoming his manager armed with nothing but a middle-school dropout’s education… Of course, none of that was important. The important part was the passage before it—
【His wealthy husband was someone he had drugged and forced into marriage using the child. The man treated him as nothing but a male nanny, never came home despite his vast fortune, and gave him only a cold hundred thousand every month, as though tossing alms to a beggar…】
Every month. A hundred thousand. Tossing alms to a beggar…
What an incredibly niche use of language.
Tang Can froze for a beat, then sprang upright on the bed. “Wait, how much? A hundred thousand every month???”
Like someone with trypophobia suddenly discovering they had no fear whatsoever of a pile of gold nuggets, Tang Can realized at that moment that what he had hated was never childcare itself.
Nor had it been the endless poems to teach, piano practice to supervise, classroom decorations to make, or children to coax… It was that goddamn pathetic monthly salary of three thousand, combined with endless 007 exploitation and empty promises from his idiot kindergarten director!
Change that to a hundred thousand a month, and this old servant would make a dazzling entrance!
Four years studying preschool education and three years of hands-on beast-of-burden experience had all been preparation for this moment of perfectly matched employment. What future little villain? This was his precious darling! He was absolutely taking this job as the male nanny!
Where was the child? Where was his child?!
Tang Can instantly transformed into the money-grabbing version of a melodramatic madwoman, his restless hands searching all around. When he failed to find the little future villain—his precious golden lump—he finally remembered that the original host, that child-abusing scumbag, never allowed the child into his bedroom.
Tang Can got out of bed to look for the kid and casually answered the still-ringing phone on the way.
The cheap cousin-manager on the other end had clearly been waiting impatiently. The instant the call connected, he launched into a furious barrage. “Tang Can, did you fucking sleep yourself to death?! You only answer now—are you trying to make everyone panic?!”
“I told you to go to the pre-interview a little later, not drag it all the way into the evening! The production team has already chased you several times, and your shitty phone was fucking impossible to reach…”
Tang Can already had a retort on the tip of his tongue—“After fresh rain in empty mountains, why does your mouth smell like sewage?”—when he suddenly remembered something fatal: this cheap cousin’s thirty-thousand-a-month salary as his manager came straight out of Tang Can’s hundred-thousand monthly allowance.
Tang Can’s breath stopped.
Tang Yaozu cursed for another few lines on his own. Seeing that the idiot Tang Can did not dare fart back, his anger eased considerably, and he could not be bothered wasting more breath on him.
“…Fine. I’ve got important things to handle here. Hurry over by yourself. Oh, right, my dad’s rheumatism flared up and his leg hurts, so he can’t drive you there today. Take a taxi yourself.”
Tang Can’s breath stopped again. The “dad” Tang Yaozu referred to was the original host’s cheap uncle, who had forced his way in as the original host’s driver. His monthly salary was… twenty. Thousand.
On top of that, Tang Yaozu was planning to sweet-talk the original host into hiring his cousin—another middle-school dropout who had gone to work in a factory and then been fired for theft—as an assistant.
Great, great, great. Everybody who saw the money got a share, huh?
That hundred-thousand monthly salary was Tang Can’s life, and these two things alone had chopped away half of it. Blood rushed upward so violently he nearly blew the top of his skull off.
Then a coquettish voice floated through the phone: “Brother Yaozu~ Hurry over~ It’s your turn to play~” Tang Can laughed from sheer fury. “I get it now. Between ‘being moved by the scene’ and ‘feeling emotion,’ you father and son each took one word. Neither of you needs to come again. You’re fired.”
He hung up and launched a flying kick, treating the bedroom door like Tang Yaozu and kicking it open.
Then he unexpectedly found himself face-to-face with a tiny toddler barely two heads tall.
…His first thought was: Isn’t he way too small?
Tang Can might not have been a veteran kindergarten teacher, but he knew the normal height and weight ranges for a three-year-old boy.
Even allowing for the fact that this was a mixed-race toddler with gray-blue eyes, and that mixed children before three or four could sometimes be a little smaller than other Asian children, this kid was much thinner and smaller even compared with Western children his age.
There was barely any flesh on his entire body. Even the baby fat on his face had disappeared, making his huge gray-blue eyes look disproportionately large, like those of a skinny little monkey.
Of course, the child had excellent raw features. He had inherited some Slavic ancestry from his grandmother: huge gray-blue eyes, delicate and deep-set features, and soft black hair that curled slightly and fluffed around his head like a doll’s.
So even starved down to a monkey, he was still the pretty kind—a golden snub-nosed monkey. It was only that when those enormous eyes stared straight at someone, the malnourished little face remained completely expressionless, giving him an inexplicably eerie air.
No one could blame the child for becoming like this. The original host was the sort of rotten person who bullied the weak and feared the strong. He did not dare provoke his powerful in-laws, nor did he dare cause trouble for his wealthy biological family. Even the trash from the Tang family could bleed him dry at will.
Any dissatisfaction the original host felt was vented entirely on the three-year-old toddler in front of him.
Simply because the boy looked so much like his wealthy husband—and because the man had ignored both of them since the marriage, behaving as though this only child did not exist—the original host had grown increasingly unscrupulous.
At first, he hated hearing the child make any sound. Crying, laughing, even walking too loudly would earn a beating or scolding. Later, he escalated to finding even the child’s expressions and movements offensive. Once he was displeased, even breathing became a crime.
A slap or a few curses were nothing. The original host preferred making the child stand beneath the blazing summer sun until he fainted or kneel in the snow during the dead of winter until his body froze stiff. There were too many underhanded ways he tormented the child to count…
By the time the plot in Tang Can’s head reached this point, his fists were clenched hard enough to crack. Growing up in an environment like this, it would have been stranger if the child had not turned dark.
To reduce the punishments, the kid could only work hard to turn himself into a little wooden figure: no crying, no fussing, no expressions, and never appearing in front of the original host unless absolutely necessary.
Tang Can did not even need to think to know that this pitiful little thing must have been starving before he dared come over on his own.
But he probably had not expected his garbage biological father to fly into such a rage immediately after waking. A flash of terror crossed those beautiful gray-blue eyes, and the bony little body visibly stiffened.
Tang Can’s heart trembled. Out of instinct, he put on his signature kindergarten-teacher sweet smile, and when he opened his mouth, his cutesy coaxing voice was dialed all the way up. “Baby, are you hungry?”
The contrast with the original host was so enormous that the child’s eyes flew wide. He turned and ran.
The little fellow had plenty of experience escaping, but in the end, short legs were short legs. Even moving them so fast they blurred could not give him Usain Bolt’s speed.
Tang Can, meanwhile, had plenty of experience catching children. One long stride, a bend at the waist, and he scooped the child up like an eagle snatching a chick.
Holding the boy in his arms, Tang Can first swore inwardly. He had known the child would be underweight, but he had not expected him to be this light. He was practically made of paper.
The moment little Huo Dengdeng was picked up, his painfully thin body immediately curled into a ball. He went rigid in Tang Can’s arms, not daring to move, and pleaded in a trembling baby voice, “Daddy, sowwy… Dengdeng was wrong. Dengdeng will go roll…”
He meant the original host’s latest ingenious method of torment—rolling down the stairs. As the name suggested, he made the child roll down the spiral staircase by himself.
The spiral staircase had a gentle enough slope that serious injuries were unlikely. The original host did not even have to touch him; he could make the child tumble down and cover himself in superficial wounds. Even if something really happened and he was held responsible, he could claim the child had simply fallen by accident… Even Satan would have to tattoo this man on his back!
Tang Can drew in a deep breath and pulled the toddler firmly into his arms. “Dengdeng, don’t be scared. No one will ever hurt you again…”
Before the words had even finished leaving his mouth, the little body in his arms stopped being rigid—and began trembling outright from fear.
Tang Can also realized that a promise like this coming from the mouth of this scumbag body was basically farting into the wind. With a low sigh, he carried the child toward the kitchen, deciding to deal with the little one’s most urgent problem first.
Yet after searching every cabinet in the open-plan kitchen, Tang Can not only failed to find a scrap of food, he also retrieved memories showing that the original host had always fed the child garbage convenience food—the absolute cheapest, unbranded, near-expiration junk from bargain-shopping apps.
And even that was fucking rationed. A ten-yuan box of little bread rolls, and the child was allowed only two a day. Forget looking like a big-eyed golden monkey—being alive at all after lasting this long was already impressive.
Tang Can immediately pulled out his phone and ordered three kids’ meals from the nearest McDonald’s.
It was not only the kid who was hungry. His own stomach was growling too. The house had completely run out of provisions, father and son were stuck in the most remote villa district in Yun City, and that old bastard Uncle Tang had driven off with the car.
Besides, very few human toddlers disliked McDonald’s or KFC, and the kitchens of major global fast-food chains were relatively sanitary. It was genuinely the best option for quickly appeasing both their stomachs.
The delivery app soon switched to the payment page. Tang Can instinctively selected WeChat Pay—declined. He switched to Alipay—also declined.
Refusing to believe it, Tang Can tried every linked bank card one by one. Every single payment failed. In the end, he had to temporarily cover it with his credit line.
Tang Can: ???
Where the hell was my hundred-thousand-a-month income? Even if the Tang-family vampires sucked away half, there should still be fifty thousand left!?
Very soon, Tang Can—who had spent years carrying everyone else’s burdens—discovered that far more members of the Tang family had been enjoying peaceful lives on his back than merely Cheap Cousin and Cheap Uncle.
The reason they were “cheap” relatives was that the original host was actually the biological young master who had eventually been recognized by his real family. His wealthy birth parents simply did not care about him.
As for the poor Tang family who had raised him, their situation could be summarized at a glance—a mother who ran away, a father who gambled himself to death, a grandmother who faked illness, and one thoroughly broken him.
The moment the original host married into wealth, a whole pack of relatives formed a group and came to suck his blood. The original host—vicious, stupid, and gullible—actually believed every line of nonsense and cooperated enthusiastically.
Which was why his account balance contained not even a fraction of a cent.
The record of transfers to the Tang family was longer than his life expectancy.
Tang Can wished he could turn into an octopus on the spot and slap eight people at once!
His fingers flew as he rapidly canceled every scheduled transfer, his face twisted ferociously as he prepared to call the police and recover the money.
The little wooden child sitting quietly nearby remained expressionless, his eyes vacant.
Huo Dengdeng was not surprised at all by Daddy’s sudden rage and mood swing.
Ordering delivery for him?
It was only another new way to punish him. He would never believe this bad daddy again… His pale, skinny little hand clenched into a fist, ready at any moment to endure Daddy’s anger.
