After Transmigrating as the Northeast CEO's Pampered Little Husband - Chapter 35

While Gu Jiaoyang was securing his first spiritual pet in this world, Zhou Cheng, on the other side of things, hadn’t slept for a very long time.

The reason was simple: he was suffering from ‘cyberbullying’.

Zhou Cheng had been waiting comfortably at home, only to wake up in the morning to find his private messages exploding. Every message asked practically the same question: was the information on Weibo true? Some fans managed to stay rational and sent him a link asking for an explanation, but when Zhou Cheng clicked on it, he was left speechless. How could he explain this?

The whistleblower was a verified ‘Big V’ account named “Can’t Stand Tofu Fish”. This person was a professional gossipmonger renowned for producing high-quality, genuine scoops. Everyone, from top celebrities to the general public, had to give him some face. Most impressively, every story he broke turned out to be true; he had never once been proven wrong or had a story backfire.

When Zhou Cheng clicked on the pinned post on this person’s profile, his heart skipped a beat. He collapsed into his chair, drenched in a cold sweat.

He was finished.

The glaring screen of his phone displayed evidence of every transaction he had made with the paid troll armies. Every uncensored conversation was categorised and posted as screenshots. There was absolutely no room for denial.

And that wasn’t even the worst part. The worst part was that when he tried to contact his own management, they ignored him completely. Even though he could see they were online, they didn’t reply with a single word; only automated responses popped up.

Did he have to shoulder all of this alone?

No… no, the Master… the Master could definitely save him!

Zhou Cheng jolted awake from his stupor and scrambled frantically to grab the phone on his desk. But unexpectedly, his vision suddenly went black. Something draped itself over his neck—something slippery and cold, like an object drenched in water.

He tried desperately to open his eyes, but it was futile. His hands refused to obey him; before he could even touch his phone, his limbs went weak and limp, and he rolled off his chair onto the floor.

“I hate it so much…”

“I hate it… why… why…”

Before Zhou Cheng lost consciousness, all he felt was an overwhelming, bone-chilling cold that seemed out of place in the scorching June summer, and a whisper by his ear that sounded like a sigh.

That soft voice held a terrifying familiarity, identical to the one that had haunted his dreams countless times at night.

“Alright, stop fake crying. The doctor lady left ages ago. The house you chose should arrive tomorrow. Get up, why are you even clingier than me?” Gu Jiaoyang helplessly peeled the little hedgehog off his sleeve and placed it into the makeshift nest inside his coat.

“Nuomi. How about that? Does that name suit your temperament? Or should we stick with Little White?”

“No, no, no, no! Boss, let’s go with Nuomi! Nuomi it is!!!”

Nuomi was rendered speechless by his Boss’s typical ‘straight bloke’ naming sense. Originally, his grand name was ‘Spike Tyrant’, but Nuomi had the self-awareness to realise his name shouldn’t overshadow his Boss’s. So, he had obediently waited for a new name, only for the Boss to open his mouth and suggest ‘Little White’.

Screw ‘Little White’ for a hedgehog.

Are all humans this blunt when naming things?

“Nuomi is good, Nuomi is wonderful, Nuomi goes squeak squeak. Boss, since we’re on the same team now, could I trouble you to remove this small array from my body?”

Freshly vaccinated, dewormed, and groomed, the newly minted Nuomi huddled inside his Boss’s jacket. He used a hind leg to push aside a specific quill on his back, revealing a tiny rune, about the size of a pinky fingernail, imprinted across three quills. If Nuomi didn’t have so many quills, this red character would have been visible from miles away.

“Is this… a Chase and Lock Array?” Gu Jiaoyang had spent those few years memorising almost every book in his sect’s library, so he knew more about arrays than most people. He was particularly familiar with these small arrays, having played with them one by one when his cultivation was still low.

“You mentioned earlier that an old scoundrel was chasing you. Is he a cultivator?” Gu Jiaoyang held Nuomi, wrapped in the clothes, in his arms and pinched the quills to examine them closely.

“That’s right, ji. It was just my bad luck. I’d been cultivating on the mountain for two hundred years and got tired of wild fruits. I wanted to come to the human world to find something different to eat that wouldn’t ruin my appetite. But I ran into this old scoundrel. The old man is probably about sixty, but he looks like he’s stuck at thirty. I took a close look; he definitely used some dark method to keep his appearance unchanged. Boss, I’m telling you, I could smell the yin energy around that old scoundrel from miles away!”

Speaking of the “old scoundrel”, Nuomi clearly got angry. His two black beady eyes widened into perfect circles, and he waved his little claws as he spoke, looking like he wanted to go and fight the old rogue one-on-one.

“Dark methods? The Record of Strange Gui mentions quite a few. Compared to the demonic cultivators who abide by the law nowadays, this sounds more like the techniques of the Nether Soul Faction.”

Gu Jiaoyang fell into thought. Those crooked and evil cultivation methods had been ordered to be burned. His sect’s library had a few copies, but they were kept as educational material; every secret technique was recorded alongside a detailed method to break it. It was one of the few inventories in his world that could be openly borrowed and read.

“Tell me more details. I haven’t heard of a cultivator practising Gui arts since I came of age.” Gu Jiaoyang’s curiosity was always robust. He urged Nuomi to continue while his hands worked effortlessly; it only took a few hand seals to remove the small array from Nuomi’s body.

“Sigh, that old scoundrel has done plenty of things. But when I met him two years ago, he only had a few cases in hand. The first two are a bit complex it’s a long story, and Boss might not want to hear it. I’ll just tell you about the most recent one.”

The removal of the array on his quills tickled a bit, so Nuomi stretched his leg to scratch his back. Assuming the posture of an old storyteller, he slapped his front paw down and began recounting the old scoundrel’s deeds.

“Speaking of the matter currently in the old scoundrel’s hands… that day, I was caught for the eighth time while trying to escape and was trapped in his bamboo basket. The old scoundrel didn’t trust me, so he took me along while he went to work. He had taken money to help a man transfer a vengeful spirit to settle karma. This man was called Zhou Cheng. He had shifty eyes and a mouse-like appearance—clearly not a good person, ji. And guess what, Boss? The human heart, ji ji—that man named Zhou Cheng actually wanted the old scoundrel to use a diversion technique to transfer the vengeful spirit, created by his own sins, onto a close friend of his!”

“Tell me, how can a human heart be so rotten? That Zhou Cheng took his good friend Zhu Zhengwen’s hair, clothes, and a watch he had worn for years, and gave them to the old scoundrel…”

“Who? Who did you just say?” The hand Gu Jiaoyang was using to play with Nuomi’s quills paused. Had he just heard a familiar name?

“The old scoundrel?” Nuomi looked up, glancing at his Boss in confusion.

“No, the one after that.”

“Zhou Cheng?”

“No, the one after that.”

“Zhu Zhengwen? What’s wrong, Boss?”

Oh ho.

Gu Jiaoyang asked Nuomi to repeat it again, discovering it really was the name of the fat man who had come to find him earlier.

“It’s fate… Nuomi, you’ve really done me a huge favour.” Gu Jiaoyang patted Nuomi on the nose, smiling as he watched the scenery retreating rapidly outside the car window.

It’s done. A second windfall from the heavens.

“Cough, cough, cough…” Zhu Zhengwen, having just woken up from a nap, rubbed his shoulders. He hadn’t slept well for the past two days due to the haunting. Now, after sleeping for so long, he felt incredibly light and refreshed. The cold, eerie feeling in his house was completely gone.

“A Master is indeed a Master. impressive.”

Zhu Zhengwen got out of bed to pour a glass of water. Looking up, he saw the antipsychotic medication the quack doctors had prescribed him sitting on the table. In a fit of anger, he grabbed them and threw them straight into the bin.

Ignorant Western medicine couldn’t even compare to a young Daoist priest from our Hua Dynasty.

“In the first month comes the New Year~ Ah! The very first day of the lunar year~”

Free of his worries, Zhu Zhengwen wiggled his ample backside and picked up his mobile phone to switch it on.

Without even thinking, he knew Zhou Cheng must have sent him a multitude of messages. So, before all the notifications could even pop up, Zhu Zhengwen, with quick eyes and hands, tapped ‘Clear All’.

“Bye-bye to you! Cheers to my stifled past life!”

Zhu Zhengwen raised his glass of plain water towards the vanity mirror in a toast, then happily returned to his seat and glugged down the entire glass in one go.

He was actually a bit afraid to go online right now. After all, he had sent all the evidence regarding Zhou Cheng’s transaction records to that Big V account. But he hadn’t asked for the outcome, didn’t know if the influencer cared or believed him, or what kind of storm would brew after it was published.

To put it bluntly, he was actually quite a cowardly person; otherwise, he wouldn’t have been oppressed by Zhou Cheng for so many years over some ancient history.

“Tsk, I wonder how the Master is doing…”

“Forget it, forget it, just one look…”

“Just one look and then I’m off, just one look…”

Zhu Zhengwen sat in his chair, a war raging in his mind. Eventually, his curiosity about the outcome won out, and he extended a chubby hand to move the mouse.

“Just one look, just one look, then I’ll log off… Holy crap!!!”

“It really is true that ‘what the eye doesn’t see, the heart doesn’t grieve over’, but I’m uncultured!”

Zhu Zhengwen was hypnotising himself to just take a peek and log off. But the moment he opened the web version of Weibo and scrolled to his direct messages with the Big V, he saw the influencer had messaged him several times to verify the authenticity of the story. Since he hadn’t been online, the Big V had actually sourced proof from other streamers, so the story had already been published.

“Zhou Cheng, oh Zhou Cheng. I really didn’t expect so many people to hate you. But how did this person know I sent the message anonymously?”

Zhu Zhengwen knew that these famous whistleblower accounts had their own principles. If you asked who helped verify the news, they wouldn’t tell you. So, Zhu Zhengwen went directly to search for related information, only to find that in such a short time, a ‘Super Topic’ had already been created.

“??? You’re joking…” Zhu Zhengwen refreshed the page again. He discovered that in the evidence he sent to the Big V, anything related to himself had been very kindly censored. Only Zhou Cheng’s evil deeds were laid bare for the netizens to see.

“Master bless him. I didn’t expect a random whistleblower account to have such professional integrity.”

So now, Zhou Cheng had become the target of public criticism. The people who had originally been chasing Gu Yangyang to abuse him shifted their attention and flocked to Zhou Cheng’s Weibo.

Unlike Gu Yangyang, who used to livestream mechanically under the control of a virus system and never opened a Weibo account, Zhou Cheng ran his Weibo very successfully with a large number of fans. So, although Gu Yangyang’s scandal was shared by many, there hadn’t been any extreme actions because there was no specific place to direct the abuse.

But Zhou Cheng, as luck would have it, loved to build a persona. In his desire to take advantage of fans and accept their gifts, he had proactively exposed his home address. When all these scattered pieces of information were pieced together, it was enough to ensure Zhou Cheng faced a bloody disaster.

After all, the internet certainly didn’t lack intelligent yet ruthless extremists.

This was exactly why Zhou Cheng felt he was finished.

Gu Yangyang never exposed his own information. The downside was that people could spread rumours about him freely; the upside was that it protected him to a certain extent. How could Zhou Cheng have anticipated this? He just wanted fame and profit. He hadn’t planned ahead for the ever-changing nature of the internet, where the unlucky one could turn out to be you.

“Heaven wants you dead; you deserve it. Tsk tsk tsk.”

Zhu Zhengwen put the water glass aside and squinted happily at the sun outside the window.

“Once you’ve tasted what this feels like, go and have a nice cup of tea with the police uncles.”

Support