Miss Wheelchair - Chapter 23

“Ah! Husband! I—I think I just saw her hand move!”

Xu Qiuxin’s sharp shriek echoed twice through the cavernous living room before being instantly cut off by Gu Peisheng’s harsh hiss:

“Keep your voice down! Move where? It’s just your own guilty conscience playing tricks on you! Shut up, or you’ll wake them all up—and then see what you’ll do!”

As the two of them conversed in hushed, paranoid whispers, Gu Peisheng gestured toward the front door. Two men dressed in black stepped inside.

“President Gu, your orders.”

Gu Peisheng had already briefed the two men on the murder plot beforehand, so there was no need for further explanation. He cast a casual, chilling glance toward the figures slumped on the furniture and said smoothly:
“Follow the original plan. Get them into the car.”

With that, Tan Xin and the assistant, Julie, were carried out, while Gu Ci was wheeled into the vehicle along with her wheelchair. Before starting the engine, one of the thugs detached the dashcam, ensuring they left behind absolutely no digital trail.

The sedan wound its way up the mountain pass, finally pulling over near a steep precipice at the very end of the road. It was a perfect blind spot for surveillance cameras. The thugs dragged Julie into the driver’s seat and started the engine, leaving the car to slowly coast forward in neutral.

Afterward, the two men casual walked over to a nearby vending machine to buy two bottles of water. Knowing there was a security camera positioned right next to the machine, they struck up a casual conversation with a passing middle-aged cleaning lady, complaining about how terribly gloomy the weather had been lately—meticulously constructing their alibi.

The car was coasting at a snail’s pace. From where it was parked to the edge of the cliff, it would take roughly seven to eight minutes. The thugs planned to wait until the absolute last second before screaming to catch the cleaning lady’s attention. That way, all three of them would serve as eyewitnesses to a tragic accident, perfectly clearing the thugs of any suspicion.

“Hey! What is that car doing?”

Seeing the sedan drawing perilously close to the edge, one of the thugs roared dramatically.

The cleaning lady spun around, her face instantly turning pale with horror. In her sheer panic, she swung her broom wildly, accidentally delivering a brutal smack across the thug’s face before sprinting toward the black sedan.

“Stop the car! Stop it! Stop right now!”

The two thugs strolled lazily behind her, entirely confident in their success. It’s useless, they thought. The car is at least a hundred meters away from us and only two meters from the precipice. Even at a crawl of one meter per second, it’ll plummet in two seconds. Not even Usain Bolt could catch up, let alone a middle-aged Chinese cleaning lady.

The cleaning lady ran like the wind, but seeing that she still couldn’t close the gap, she frantically waved her broom and screamed at the top of her lungs:

“Balala Energy! Woo-hoo-la-hu—FREEZE!”

The thugs burst into laughter behind her. Did this lady seriously never grow out of magical girl anime? This is the real world, not Fairyland. What good is a half-baked magic spell going to do?

The very next second, the sharp, agonizing screech of tires pierced the mountain air.

Screeech!

The sedan, which should have plunged straight off the rugged cliffside, came to a dead, shuddering halt!

The thugs stared at each other in utter bewilderment. Did the tires get wedged on a rock?

Exchanging frantic glances, they decided to check it out and give it an extra push if necessary.

However, having apparently reawakened her youthful vigor, the cleaning lady was running faster and faster.

“It stopped! It actually froze! Balala Energy!”

Behind them, the high-pitched wail of police sirens suddenly echoed from the mountain road.

Wee-woo—wee-woo.

They whipped their heads around to see two police cruisers tearing up the pass, executing flawless, drifting turns at the bends with a precision that would put rally racers to shame.

Meanwhile, inside the cliffside sedan.

Having scrambled up from the backseat to yank the handbrake, Tan Xin was drenched in a cold sweat. Once she was absolutely certain the car was secured, all the strength drained from her body, and she collapsed back into the rear seat, gasping for air.

“Hah, hah, scared the absolute life out of me.”

Turning her head, she looked at the cool, collected Gu Ci sitting beside her and asked, “Are you okay? You’re not hurt, right?”

Gu Ci’s expression was as unreadable as ever, save for her lips, which were pressed slightly thinner than usual, making her delicate features look incredibly sharp.

“I’m fine.”

She pressed a button on the inner door panel with her slender index finger. The window rolled down smoothly, bringing in the deafening chorus of approaching sirens, punctuated by an occasional, robust shout of “Balala Energy!”

Back at the Gu Family Villa, Gu Peisheng and Xu Qiuxin were putting on a tearful performance in front of the police.

“Officer, please! Xiao Ci is my biological daughter! Even if I completely lost my mind, I would never harm her!”

“Exactly, Officer! You have to investigate thoroughly! I have always treated Xiao Ci like my very own daughter, even better than my own biological son! Back when she wasn’t paralyzed as a child, I even signed her up for dance classes!”

“I just got back from the police station this morning, as you well know. How could I possibly have had the time to orchestrate a plot against her?”

“Yes, yes! Gu Ci didn’t even come home today! They must have just happened to go up the mountain for a drive, and happened to almost get into an accident. It has absolutely nothing to do with us!”

“I swear, none of us have even seen Gu Ci today!”

In the adjacent room, facing the exact same questioning from the police, Gu Gu was confidently running his mouth:

“Of course, Gu Ci came over. That Tan Xin girl was with her, too. I gave them a presentation on my business blueprint for the upcoming quarter, and they were completely starstruck by me. Gu Ci even said she wanted to invest her entire net worth into my project, but I turned her down. After all, she could only scrape together ninety million, and I’m looking for nine hundred million.”

Thanks to Gu Gu’s staggering honesty, all three family members were promptly loaded into police cruisers and taken back to the station for formal interrogation.

Watching the trio get escorted away, Tan Xin felt a complex whirlpool of emotions. A snake-hearted stepmother, an incredibly stupid and malicious biological father, and a half-brother who is just purely, unadulteratedly dumb. What kind of hellish childhood did Gu Ci have to endure?

Growing up surrounded by such a den of monsters, it was a miracle Gu Ci turned out so breathtakingly beautiful and exceptionally capable. She truly was a wife worthy of her immediate, unyielding devotion.

God, I love her even more now.

Ding-dong!

The system abruptly materialized.

[System]: “Hello, Tan Xin. Congratulations on completing the mission: Save Gu Ci. Please select your quest reward.”

As expected, Tan Xin thought. The true objective of “Saving Gu Ci” hadn’t been the initial loan negotiation, but navigating the deadly escape that followed.

Tan Xin looked up at the holographic screen hovering in mid-air, where four choices floated:

[Tea Leaves Sample] [Financial Statements] [Bidding Document] [Property Deed]

Wonderful. A bunch of items with zero context, she noted dryly.

Tan Xin felt a headache coming on. With no owner listed and no content previews, it was incredibly difficult to deduce the actual utility of these rewards based on titles alone.

Tea Leaves Sample—Since it’s tea, it’s presumably meant for brewing. But what did “sample” imply?

Financial Statements—Whose financials? Gu Ci’s? Gu Peisheng’s? Or her own? What would she even do with them? Perform a personal tax audit, or report Gu Peisheng for tax evasion?

Bidding Document—Makes zero sense. Pass.

Property Deed—If it belonged to Gu Ci, she didn’t need a deed; the more properties her wifey owned, the better. If it belonged to Tan Xin herself, that was impossible—a penniless ghost like her didn’t own a square inch of brick. If it belonged to Gu Peisheng and his wife, what good would holding the deed do? The system couldn’t exactly transfer the house to her name legally.

Difficult. Truly difficult. The system really wasn’t human.

Tan Xin was forced to fall back on her old trick for guessing multiple-choice answers during the College Entrance Exam: The odd one out is usually the correct answer.

Tea Leaves Sample — Pertains to personal leisure.

Financial Statements — Pertains to corporate assets.

Bidding Document — Hard to understand, but clearly corporate-related.

Property Deed — Pertains to real estate assets.

Looking at it this way, the pattern became crystal clear. Only the [Tea Leaves Sample] was related to ordinary, daily lifestyle, making it completely incompatible with the other three corporate-heavy options.

In these scenarios, the most absurd option was almost always the one closest to the truth.

“I choose the [Tea Leaves Sample].”

Tan Xin locked in her choice with absolute certainty.

The next second, the system logged out. The holographic screen dissolved into thin air, and a palm-sized tea bag appeared in her hand. Dangling from the end of its cotton string was a fingernail-sized paper tag with the character “Qiu” printed on it.

This logo.

A sudden realization struck Tan Xin. She bolted over to the Gu family kitchen and flung open the tea cabinet. Inside stood four neat rows of tea bags, and every single string was affixed with the exact same “Qiu” tag.

Meaning, the [Tea Leaves Sample] she had risked her literal life to earn as a quest reward was actually sitting right here by the hundreds?

If she had known it was this easy, why bother running a whole survival mission? She could have just raided the cabinet!

As she cursed the system’s absolute laziness in her head, she failed to notice a wheelchair rolling into the kitchen behind her.

Gu Ci stopped her wheelchair, her brow furrowing slightly as she watched Tan Xin acting incredibly shifty and muttering to herself in front of the tea cabinet.

“What are you doing?” Gu Ci asked.

“Huh?”

Tan Xin felt a violent jolt run through her body. She turned around with a shaky laugh, her eyes instantly locking onto the text hovering above Gu Ci’s head: Orange: +10.

Orange = Confusion.

Thank goodness, she thought. It’s just confusion, not anger.

Forcing a straight face, she held up the tea bag in her hand and gave it a little shake, biting the bullet to explain herself. “Nothing really. I just thought this particular tea looked a bit strange.”

The moment the words left her mouth, a sudden memory flashed through her mind like a reflex—a specific line Xu Qiuxin had wailed to the police just moments before:

“Back when she wasn’t paralyzed as a child, I even signed her up for dance classes!”

Wait a minute, Tan Xin thought.

That meant Gu Ci hadn’t been paralyzed as a child. The paralysis had only happened after Xu Qiuxin married into the family.

The official plot guide, Five Years in the System, Three Years of Simulation, never went into detail regarding the cause of Gu Ci’s condition, summarizing it in a single, vague phrase: “Paralyzed due to illness.”

But was this “illness” truly natural or was it entirely man-made?