Fengning City!
A prefecture-level city of Yuanhai Province. As the country as a whole made large strides in development, this city was one of the more economically flourishing ones, a medium-sized city with a higher level of per-capita consumption. When compared to the metropolises that were the provincial capitals, Fengning City only lacked when it came to population and area. Besides that, its development had started a few years later.
It was a thriving and growing city.
The camera zooms in on a three-floor building. It's a rather old apartment, only two blocks away from the city's main thoroughfare and right next to a food market. The only greenery was the ivy growing on the back wall.
Love Family Apartment!
The first floor had been rented out to stores: a noodle shop, a hot and spicy soup restaurant, and a convenience store. The two other floors were apartments, set up as a single long corridor with apartments on both sides. When both floors were added together, there were about thirty apartments.
Tap tap tap!
Luo Su rapped on the door of 213 with a wooden face. He was the landlord of this apartment and had come today to discuss the extension of the lease. If the renter didn't plan to continue the lease, he would terminate the contract and start advertising online.
Luo Su had been knocking for five minutes and had no intention of stopping. He knew that there was someone inside, as the renter was a female streamer who worked at night. She usually spent the daytime catching up on sleep.
As expected, Luo Su's dogged determination to knock on the door until there was a hole in it finally produced some activity from within. Accompanied by a string of curses aimed at his relatives, the female streamer, still wearing her pajamas, opened the door. It was a full ten seconds until she was able to focus her sleepy eyes.
"Oh? Isn't this my handsome landlord? What sort of wind was blowing today that you knocked on my door?" The female streamer immediately wrapped her hands around Luo Su's arm and began to act coyly.
Such high sugar levels!
"Heheh, you've got sturdy arms. It's not obvious, but you've got a lot of muscle."
But Luo Su pretended not to see. He pulled back his arm and took a step back to maintain his distance.
Luo Su didn't do this because the female streamer was too ugly. She had the standard face for an internet celebrity, and many people called her a goddess while she was streaming. This was also not a question of Luo Su's orientation.
Luo Su had seen the female streamer's ID card, so he knew that her double eyelids, an oval face, and high nose bridge were all fake. She originally had small eyes, a flat nose, and a square face. Her beautiful face was due to the modifications of two wondrous arts.
Luo Su got straight to the point. "Beautiful miss, your lease is up next month. I've come to ask if you want to extend the lease. If you are, please submit the rent for half the year today."
"Ugh, it's so heartless to talk about money. Why not give me a discount on the rent?" The female streamer blinked her pretty eyes. It wasn't that she lacked money. She just liked to mess around with people.
After growing accustomed to all those internet nobodies who were willing to kiss her feet, she was extremely interested in people like Luo Su, who didn't try to put on false appearances. Hooking them would make her feel even more proud of her beautiful face.
Luo Su put on a smile. "I'm sorry, you're not my type! I prefer natural looks!"
"..."
The female streamer rolled her eyes, folded her arms, and leaned against the door. "I'll be frank with you. The toilet here clogs up once every two or three days, so I don't plan to continue staying. I'm moving out at the end of the month. My adoptive father has already prepared a place for me to stay."
"Very well. I'll come at the end of the month to pick up the keys. Remember to find someone to clean the room up. You can also pay an extra 100 yuan, and I can have housekeeping clean the place." Luo Su was someone who treated business and business. He kindly added, "Although our contract ends here if there's any chance to work together in the future like if your adoptive father abandons you, you are always welcome to come back."
"..."
This conversation was infuriating to squeeze out silicone gel. The female streamer took a couple of deep breaths, unwilling to argue with a loner like Luo Su. "Landlord, when you come at the month to get the key, remember to come at night. Don't disturb my beauty sleep. And also...send me a message on WeChat beforehand. I certainly don't want to open the door for you while I'm streaming and cause my fans to have misunderstandings, you get me?"
"That's no problem! Let's add each other on WeChat so we can get in touch!"
"Don't you have my WeChat?" The female streamer was dumbstruck. "We added each other as friends when I first moved in."
Luo Su shook his head and replied without the slightest hint of embarrassment, "I deleted you when you sent me a selfie in the middle of the night."
The woman's eyes twitched. She placed her hands on the waist and attempted to suppress her rage as she replied, "Since you deleted it, you don't need to add me again. Just give me a call to notify me!"
"Also deleted!"
Female Streamer: "..."
Once they were done adding each other on WeChat, the female streamer gave Luo Su's back the middle finger and slammed the door shut. She had material for tonight's stream now. The pure and innocent female tenant was bullied and humiliated by the tyrannical landlord, almost losing both her life and money. She needed some donations to soothe her tender and injured heart.
...
Luo Su, male, twenty-five years old, single, no bad habits...
This was someone who owned a three-floor apartment building in the middle of the city, and while this apartment was quite old, it still cost quite a lot of money. It was impossible to get all that money through a pure effort at such a young age.
It had all started one afternoon, half a year ago. Luo Su had been a police officer back then, and after getting off work, he had the sudden inclination to buy a lottery ticket. After that, he had received a phone call telling him that his parents had gotten in a car accident...and had passed.
Their deaths had been fast, and they had left behind this apartment building for Luo Su.
The driver who had caused the accident was an entrepreneur of some reputation in the city who had even won an award for outstanding entrepreneurship. He could barely be considered a minor celebrity. The reason for the accident was that he had just finished signing a big contract with a customer at dinner, and then he went out drinking and driving with his female secretary. On the road, he suddenly lost focus, and his hands and feet went soft. He lost control of the steering wheel, causing him to drive onto the other side of the street and crash into the sedan, which carried Luo Su's parents, causing this tragedy.
Just like that, Luo Su's parents were gone, as were the entrepreneur and his secretary. The incident was handled very quickly. Based on the results of the investigation, the entrepreneur's family had full responsibility. There was no attempt to bully or pressure, and the entrepreneur's family voluntarily took on all responsibility and paid a large compensation. They only requested that Luo Su remain silent and not publicly announce the results of the investigation so that the deceased entrepreneur could maintain a little reputation.
Of course, the entrepreneur's relatives might have been so easy to work with because Luo Su had been wearing his police uniform.
After seeing the entrepreneur's parents, two white-haired elders, kneeling on the ground, and weeping for the sake of their son's reputation, Luo Su could only choose to remain silent. The man himself was gone, so there was no meaning in causing further trouble.
While cleaning up his parents' house, Luo Su discovered a diary hidden in the bookshelf. Within was a bunch of nonsensical characters, newspaper scraps, and randomly arranged Arabic numerals.
A normal person would just find it strange, but Luo Su was a police officer, so he immediately realized that this diary was a codebook.
This left Luo Su incredibly confused. His father, Luo Hantang, was a big man with male pattern baldness, a beer belly, and a habit of scratching his feet. Besides taking in rent, he just played mahjong. His mother, Fang Yanqing, was an out-of-shape middle-aged woman who lived the same life, taking in rent and playing mahjong. They were just two ordinary people, so what secrets could they have that they needed to hide them in a codebook?
Luo Su spent three days, taking the first book on the left-hand side from each shelf and arranging them by the Arabic numerals, to break the cipher. In the end, he reached an eye-popping conclusion: his parents were assassins!
They had the mysterious status as assassins, so what in God's name were they doing collecting rent and playing mahjong every day?
Experts hid among the people? Concealing themselves in the city?
Even if one considered that assassins needed to intentionally be inconspicuous, one at least had to look the part. But Luo Su's parents didn't even have hair gel, much less western suits, leather shoes, and dark sunglasses.
When he thought about how his father's beer belly would juggle two or three times everyone he slapped it or his mother's bucket-sized waist, Luo Su sensed that his parents had been extremely successful in hiding their profession. No one would ever think of them as assassins. This was especially the case for his father, Luo Hantang. The first thing he would do every day after he woke up was carefully combing the bald sea on the top of his head so that the hair on the sides covered as much of the center as possible.
Who could ever believe that this greasy middle-aged man who fought over every last strand of hair was an assassin!
And just what did his assassin parents think when they decided that they would raise their son into a police officer?
Life was even more nonsensical than novels. After breaking the cipher, Luo Su found even more headache-inducing information. For example, more than half of the marriage partners his mother, Fang Yanqing, had arranged for him were people who worked in the industry. The ex-girlfriend who had been called away to work abroad, causing them to peacefully break up, had been one of them. He had even been wracked by grief over this parting for some time.
"I hate assassins!"
Luo Su covered his face with his hands. His emotions had almost led him to have a family made up almost entirely of assassins.
After a period of depression, Luo Su resigned from his job as a police officer. He couldn't expose his parents, but he also didn't have the face of continuing wearing the uniform. He decided to just take over management of the three apartments, and he had also recently begun to learn how to play mahjong.
Luo Su thought that things would end here, but he had underestimated that death-seeking heart of his. Out of curiosity for his parents and his ex-girlfriend, he took control of the chat account used by his father and lurked the assassins' chat group.
The account ID was found on the computer, and Luo Su only needed two tries to get the password right: his mother's name in Pinyin followed by the numbers 520. Based on his understanding of his parents, he was sure that his father had been forced to make the password this.
The assassin chat group was very lively, and he would often hit the max notification count of 99+. Besides using code words to discuss work, these people spent the rest of their time bragging. They came from all walks of life: manhua artist, film reviewer, cameraman, script editor, and even someone on welfare. All of these were careers with an extremely high level of freedom.
Most absurd of all was that out of ten assassins; six were web novel authors.
At the start, these assassins wrote manuscripts for large publishing houses. Still, after physical books were massacred by e-books, causing many bankruptcies in the publishing industry, they collectively changed professions to web novel authors. They were mixing very well and were experts in writing commercial fiction with stereotypical plots.
Luo Su believed that none of them were honest about their careers, and the reason was obvious. If these people were serious, then eighty percent of web novel authors were worth careful consideration, particularly those authors who had a habit of writing bad endings, abruptly stopping updates, and playing dead. If these people were investigated, they would be found out almost immediately.
As these people bragged day after day, Luo Su gradually began to understand the true life lived by his parents and ex-girlfriend. It wasn't as impressive as seen on television, and these people often felt disgusted and hatred for their profession.
Alas, this line of work wasn't something you could just do once and then never get involved in again. They hated their profession, but they couldn't escape. Not unless the group owner...in other words, the person who knew their true identities, kicked the bucket. Otherwise, they just had to accept their fate!
Luo Su's father, having left the army completely penniless, had been pulled down this pit by his boss to scrounge up money to marry Luo Su's mother. By the time Luo Su was born, it was too late for him to back out, and even Luo Su's mother had been dragged into the pit. She was responsible for ordering train tickets, gathering information, determining assassination plans, and managing finances.
From this point on, Luo Su lurked in the assassin chat group and watched them brag. These people came from all parts of the country, and they loved to argue. Luo Su managed to learn quite a few bits of obscure knowledge from them.
...
The innermost room on the third floor of the apartment building was where Luo Hantang and Fang Yanqing had spent the most time, and it was also where Luo Su had found the codebook. This room had many secrets, and Luo Su had cleaned up all the ones he had found. However, he worried that there were still some secrets hidden within, so he had stayed there the entire time.
Luo Su first checked the mobile phone he had found in a small crack in the bedside cabinet. Seeing that there were no unanswered phone calls or notifications, he put it on the side to charge. He then turned on the computer, logged into the account, and began his daily lurking.
At this moment, a mechanical voice resounded through the room. To be more accurate, the voice was in Luo Su's head only. No one else could hear it.
[User, please note that the third Mission World is about to begin. The ten-minute countdown is now starting. Please make your preparations!]
The voice repeated itself three times. Luo Su said nothing. He took a cigarette from the desk and lit, and then he just sat there. He didn't smoke, but he would occasionally light a cigarette to relax.
Luo Su, male, twenty-five years old, single, no bad habits...has a system!