Beautiful Fools Were Born to be Spoiled by Their Husbands - Chapter 1

Fucheng, July 2002.

“Ah!”

With a soft sob, Ruan Zhijuan woke up from his dream, his hands and feet kicking in a panic. His body felt weak as he shifted his numb legs, staring at his intact limbs in confusion.

“My hands and feet… why are they still attached? Shouldn’t they be…”

Separated into pieces?

The thought, spoken with a nasal whine, hadn’t even fully dissipated before Zhijuan terrified himself. He had just had a nightmare. He dreamed he was lying in a cramped kitchen sink, his limbs chopped up like segments of lotus root or radish, soaking in the water and scattered across a cutting board.

Next to him was a pressure cooker, whistling and puffing out steam. It seemed to be boiling meat, as he could vaguely see white chunks through the glass lid and smell the aroma. Then, a clump of black hair got caught between the pot and the lid, and from the gap… blood began to seep out.

Blood! There was blood!

Zhijuan’s beautiful apricot eyes widened. A chill ran down his spine as he looked fearfully toward the kitchen sink, which was covered in rust and grime.

It was empty.

Nothing was there.

Thank goodness, Zhijuan let out a sigh of relief. But he seemed to remember that in the cabinet under that very sink, there really was a pressure cooker.

“Hiss…” A sudden sharp sting at the base of his thigh grabbed his attention. He quickly looked down and pulled at the edge of his underwear. It was chafed red. “It hurts.”

He had a lot of meat on his butt and thighs, but his waist was very thin, so it was hard to find underwear that fit properly. They always ended up rubbing him raw.

It was July, the peak of the heat. There was no air conditioning in the room, only an old electric fan sitting a short distance away. However, it wasn’t spinning, it was broken.

So, Zhijuan could only lie there stiffly, watching sweat pour off his body like water. A few drops of sweat rolled down from his hip bone, and the moment they touched the raw skin on his inner thigh, the pain intensified.

“So annoying,” Zhijuan pouted his small lips aggrievedly. He grabbed some tissues and lowered his head to carefully dab away the sweat.

BANG.

Suddenly, there was the sound of a key turning and the front door being pushed open. Zhijuan’s body gave a small jerk from the fright, and his hand accidentally pressed down too hard on the tissue. He let out a small but clear cry of pain, “Ah!”

When Zhou Gangxun pushed the door open and entered, this was the scene he encountered:

A few crumpled balls of white tissue were scattered on the sofa and the floor. Zhijuan was splayed out on the sofa like a little overturned turtle with its shell flipped, belly exposed. His two plump, snowy-white thighs were spread toward Zhou Gangxun without any cover, the inner thighs rubbed red and coated in a thin layer of sweat. Zhijuan’s hand was frozen right there…

The palm-sized, light pink tight shirt he was wearing had ridden up due to his posture, barely covering his chest. A large portion of his fair body was exposed to the air. The red string that usually sat around his waist had slid up crookedly to his chest, cinching him and causing the three-finger-wide solid gold longevity lock hanging from it to tilt upward.

Whether it was from the red string bleeding dye or just pressure marks from sleeping, there were faint red marks on his chest. From a distance, it looked as if he had just been roughly grabbed.

Gangxun’s dark eyes swept over Zhijuan, his gaze deepening. So filthy, what a slut.

“You… why don’t you know how to knock?” Zhijuan raised his small, heat-flushed face. He pulled his clothes down and tucked his legs together, looking at Zhou Gangxun with a complaining shout. “What if I was changing? You would have seen everything!”

Zhou Gangxun looked up at him. “This is the house I rented. Why should I knock? You’re my wife, what is there that I can’t see?”

“Or have you forgotten how you were squirming all over me like a disgusting white maggot that night?”

He retracted his gaze and placed the bag in his hand on the coffee table, his voice deep. “Food.”

Zhijuan was choked up by the retort. He let out a huff, thinking that Zhou Gangxun was unusually talkative today.

He sat up, his eyes falling on the transparent bag. A white styrofoam meal box and a plastic pouch of milk, it was clearly the cheap boxed lunch from a construction site.

He curled his lip, complaining with disdain, “Zhou Gangxun, can’t you earn any money? Why bring back leftover scraps from the site for me to eat? Didn’t I say I wanted braised pork ribs today…”

“Not enough time.” Zhou Gangxun looked at Zhijuan, who was covered in sweat and flushed pink from the stifling heat. His gaze fell on the fan that usually served Zhijuan twenty-four hours a day, but was currently resting.

“You… you must be hot. Hurry up and turn on the fan.” Zhijuan spoke evasively as he opened the meal box. The food was still lukewarm, one box for the side dishes and one for rice.

There was only one portion.

He didn’t care if Zhou Gangxun had eaten or not, as long as he was full. Anyway, he was Zhou Gangxun’s wife now, so Gangxun had to support him.

However, Zhijuan was a bit distracted. Without even looking, he poked a meatball into his mouth and chewed, his eyes fixed on Zhou Gangxun, who was adjusting the fan.

Click. The switch was pressed, but the expected scene of the blades spinning and blowing a cool breeze didn’t happen.

“Mph!” Zhijuan suddenly shouted excitedly. Before he could even swallow the meatball in his mouth, he spoke urgently and unclearly, “Zhou Gangxun, did you break the fan? It must be you! Fans are so expensive, can… can you even afford to pay for it?”

“When the landlord asks for money later, you can’t blame me. Even if you have to sell your blood or your kidneys, or even sell yourself, don’t… don’t involve me!”

Once he finished speaking, Zhijuan finally felt the burden lift from his heart. He kicked his feet, finally in the mood to see what was in the food box: fried meatballs, cold wood ear mushrooms, stir-fried sausage with oilseed rape, and a chicken drumstick. The box was packed full.

Zhou Gangxun glanced at Zhijuan, who acted like a cowering quail one moment and a shifty-eyed rat the next, then walked behind the fan to inspect it.

Gangxun ran his hand through his sweat-soaked hair to push it back, leaving only a few stray strands on his forehead. His grey-black sleeveless undershirt was completely drenched, clinging to his chest muscles. His tanned skin was glistening with beads of sweat that gathered into streams, flowing down his neck and back muscles.

“It’s not broken. The plug was just loose.”

Zhijuan stared at him without saying a word, afraid that Zhou Gangxun was tricking him. He didn’t dare respond, fearing that if he spoke, he’d have to chip in for the repairs.

The fan had stopped spinning around two or three in the afternoon.

At the time, Zhijuan, who was happily ready for a nap on the sofa, was stunned. He didn’t know if he was too hard to cool down and had blown the fan out, so he didn’t dare move. He just turned the switch off and pretended he hadn’t used the fan at all today.

He had been planning how to pin the blame on Zhou Gangxun once he returned.

Whirrr— whirrr.

Zhou Gangxun pushed the plug back in firmly, and the fan immediately started spinning.

So it really wasn’t broken…

Zhijuan sullenly stuffed a huge mouthful of rice into his mouth, chewing fiercely. Hmph, what’s with the plug being loose for no reason? It made me suffer in the heat for so long, and now my butt, thighs, and body are stinging from the sweat.

Trash plug, trash fan, trash house, trash Zhou Gangxun.

As Zhijuan thought this, he began to grumble at him. “It’s all your fault for being poor, renting a house where even the fan plug is loose… and you can’t even afford an air conditioner.”

He saw the other man look up at him. “If I installed an air conditioner, would you stop being a fake young master? A counterfeit belongs with junk.”

Counterfeit… junk?

Zhijuan glared at Zhou Gangxun, fuming. Zhou Gangxun’s face was actually quite annoying to look at, his features were deep and well-defined, his brows sharp, and he was undeniably handsome.

But those pitch-black eyes were bottomless, laced with an indescribable gloom. The overbearing pressure he gave off made people feel he was not someone to be messed with.

In fact, before going bankrupt, Zhou Gangxun was exactly like that. In Hong Kong, if he didn’t rule the sky with one hand, he certainly controlled the rain with the other. It was always others who yielded to him, never the other way around.

But Zhijuan wasn’t afraid. Because the System said Zhou Gangxun was stupid, and with his own IQ, he could play Zhou Gangxun like a dog.

Yes, in his head, from childhood to now, there had always been a System teaching him how to do bad things. The System said that people liked it when he did bad things, so the worse he was, the more love he would receive.

Since he was kicked out of the Ruan family, the System in his head had vanished. But he had no choice; he had to keep doing what the System taught him so that people would like him.

However, Zhijuan had actually died once, but he never told the System.

In his past life, his family was very poor. He was always hungry and cold; forget air conditioning, they didn’t even have a fan. Later, when his younger brother needed money for school, his parents sold him to an old blind man in the village who was in his sixties or seventies.

Afterward, on the night of the wedding, the old blind man pushed and shoved him roughly a few times. He felt a terrible pain in his head, as if it had sprung a leak, and something kept flowing out.

Then, he died.

When he opened his eyes again, he was in the Ruan family.

To avoid going back to the life of his previous existence, Zhijuan worked hard every day to be “bad.” By now, he was thoroughly rotten.

So, he was indeed a fake young master, both in identity and to his very core.

Strangely, though it had only been half a month since he was kicked out of the Ruan family, he seemed to have forgotten the details of his life as a young master. Instead, the memories of his past life were becoming clearer and clearer.

It was as if… he was being returned to his original form.

“Hmph!” Zhijuan slammed his chopsticks onto the table with a clack. He made sure the food didn’t spill before he shouted exasperatedly, “You’re the junk! It’s just a broken fan… acting like you’ve never seen one before. I’ve seen plenty! Besides round ones, I’ve seen square ones and even triangle ones…”

Before Zhijuan could finish his sentence, Zhou Gangxun reached out and turned the fan to its highest setting.

“Have you… seen… Zhou Gang… cough…” From his spot on the sofa directly facing the fan, Zhijuan immediately made a loud sound as he inhaled the air. “Heh… ugh… hic…”

The rest of his incessant rambling was cut short by the wind.

Zhou Gangxun looked at Zhijuan, who was forced to shut his mouth, blinking his eyes repeatedly like a stubborn, whimpering dog. He gave a light snort.

Idiot.

From the moment he met Zhijuan, Zhou Gangxun felt the boy’s brain didn’t work right, that his intelligence was a bit low.

His wife was a slutty, malicious, pretty idiot.

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