The System Forces Me to Be a Scumbag Male Lead [Quick Transmigration] - Chapter 11

At 9:00 PM, a black private car pulled to a stop just outside a dark, narrow alley.

Leaning against the car window, Shen Siyang stared at the small, single-story house deep within the alley. He turned to the man in the driver’s seat. “Dad, are you absolutely sure Luo Qifeng is in there?”

“Positive,” Shen Shiwu replied confidently. “Your dad came straight here to stake the place out right after work. I watched him come out around six o’clock, spend ten minutes eating noodles at the shop next door, and head right back inside. Besides, I asked around. He spends almost all his time in this underground gambling den. See that bathhouse next to the house? Word is, if the people inside want to get some sleep at night, they just head over there to crash for a few hours.”

Shen Shiwu had parked the car about a dozen meters away from the house.

Shen Siyang rolled the window down a crack to listen, but after a long moment of hearing nothing, he rolled it back up. “I’m going in to scout it out.”

“No way!”

Two voices echoed simultaneously through the car.

Shen Shiwu reasoned earnestly, “Son, even if it’s just a small-time gambling den, it’s bound to be a sketchy, foul place. How can a kid like you go into a place like that? Tell me what you want to see, and Dad will go look for you.”

Yuan Linfei was even firmer. “Don’t forget what you promised me.”

“It won’t work. You adults are too conspicuous if you go in,” Shen Siyang argued. “I just saw a kid walk inside, which means kids are allowed. If anything goes wrong, I’ll just pretend I walked into the wrong place and turn right back around.”

Negotiating his terms, Shen Siyang added, “Give me twenty minutes. If I’m not out by then, you guys come in and get me.”

Ultimately, Shen Siyang won the negotiation. However, Yuan Linfei cut his requested time exactly in half—twenty minutes became ten.

The small house had only one entrance.

As Shen Siyang drew closer, he noticed the door was wide open. It hadn’t looked that way from a distance because a heavy, dark curtain hung over the frame, completely blocking the light from spilling out.

Before lifting the curtain to step inside, Shen Siyang felt a knot of nervousness tighten in his chest. He braced himself to bolt the second anything felt off. But once he actually stepped inside the den, he realized he had overthought it.

The place was foul and chaotic, but it was also true that absolutely no one bothered to look toward the door.

Calling it a casino wasn’t entirely accurate; it was merely a place where people gathered to gamble. Card and mahjong tables were scattered haphazardly around the room. Shouts and arguments erupted in waves, thick smoke hung heavy in the air, and the floor was littered with cigarette butts, fruit peels, and scraps of paper.

Shen Siyang took a few steps inward. A few bystanders watching a game noticed him, but after a casual glance, they turned their attention right back to the table.

Soon enough, Shen Siyang discovered why a kid’s presence failed to draw any attention: there was a child roughly every five or six steps he took.

Some were around his age, dragged along by men at the card tables to help draw cards. “Kids have good luck. Quick, draw two cards for your old man! Stop writing that worthless homework—it’s not like your grades aren’t already at the bottom of the class.”

Others were much younger. He even spotted a baby in diapers lying in a cradle next to a gambling man. When the infant cried, the man simply gave the cradle a careless rock or two.

Suppressing a strong urge to call the police and have the place raided immediately, Shen Siyang walked the entire perimeter of the room. He eventually spotted Luo Qifeng at a card table, playing with bloodshot eyes, clutching his cards tightly. Luo Qifeng seemed to be on a winning streak; a smug, triumphant grin plastered his face, and his focus was so entirely glued to the game that he was completely oblivious to his surroundings.

In the entire house, only one corner looked strikingly out of place.

At the very back sat a computer desk. A heavily built, burly man sat with his legs crossed, playing Spider Solitaire on an old-fashioned desktop computer. Every two clicks of the mouse, he would pull his hand back and rotate a brand-new watch on his wrist. Shen Siyang peered at it from a distance and recognized it as a very expensive brand.

Suddenly, a commotion broke out at one of the card tables.

From the noise, it sounded like someone was accusing another player of cheating. The two men quickly traded blows and fell into a scuffle. The surrounding crowd deliberately backed away to form a circle, while the players at the other tables simply kept to themselves, acting as if the fight wasn’t even happening.

The burly man behind the computer desk uncrossed his legs unhurriedly. He carefully unbuckled his watch, placed it on the desk, cracked his knuckles, and walked toward the brawling pair. Built like one and a half normal men, he separated the two fighters in a matter of seconds, barking a fierce warning, “If you want to play, shut up and play. If you don’t, get the hell out of here right now!”

The two men were clearly terrified of him. Trembling, they instantly quieted down.

Shen Siyang withdrew his gaze, glancing briefly at the watch on the computer desk before looking up to scan the room. He spotted two surveillance cameras positioned in opposite corners of the ceiling.

Realizing his ten minutes were almost up, he turned and slipped out of the house amidst the lingering chaos.

As the car neared their front yard, Shen Shiwu’s puzzled voice sounded from the driver’s seat. “Whose kid is that? Wandering back and forth in front of our yard in the middle of the night.”

Yuan Linfei squinted through the headlights, then turned to Shen Siyang. “Yangyang, look ahead. Isn’t that the Ge family’s boy?”

Shen Siyang had spent the entire day figuring out how to deal with Luo Qifeng. Having slept for only a few hours during the day, he was currently curled up in the back seat, fighting off intense drowsiness. Hearing his mother’s voice, he gave a muddled murmur, rolled down the window, and rubbed his eyes to look out. It really was Ge Jiabao.

Ge Jiabao was pacing back and forth in front of their gate. He would walk a few steps away, turn around, walk back, and then walk away again, looking utterly conflicted.

The warm night breeze rushed into the car, waking Shen Siyang up a bit. He rubbed his face, opened the car door, and said, “It’s Ge Jiabao. He’s probably looking for me. You guys go on inside, I’ll go talk to him for a bit.”

He got out of the car and walked toward Ge Jiabao.

Ge Jiabao was completely lost in thought. He didn’t notice anyone approaching until Shen Siyang was right in front of him, making him jump back in startlement.

“You, how do you walk without making any sound?”

Exhausted, Shen Siyang let out a yawn and cut straight to the chase. “What do you want?”

Ge Jiabao glanced at him, then awkwardly turned his head away. “Who said I was looking for you?”

“If you’re not looking for me, I’m leaving.”

Hearing this, Ge Jiabao panicked. “Wait a minute! I, I heard Sang Xiaoshi is sleeping at your house tonight. I came to find him.”

Shen Siyang raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, he’s upstairs sleeping right now. What do you want with him?”

Ge Jiabao hemmed and hawed uncomfortably. “Yesterday, thanks to him calling the ambulance in time, my mom is okay. So, my mom wants to thank Sang Xiaoshi.”

“Oh? Just your mom wants to say thank you?”

Ge Jiabao’s face instantly flushed crimson. He gritted his teeth and held his breath for a long moment before finally closing his eyes with an expression of total resignation. “I already thanked him and apologized to him, but he didn’t seem to accept it.”

Shen Siyang showed a look of understanding, as if he had expected this all along. “Oh, that’s normal.”

Ge Jiabao immediately looked curious. “Why?”

“When you gathered people to mock him and bully him back then, did you ever ask him if he wanted to be bullied by you?”

Blushing furiously, Ge Jiabao fell silent.

Shen Siyang threw his hands up. “By that same logic, you apologized. Does he have to cater to your feelings when deciding whether or not to accept it?”

Ge Jiabao opened and closed his mouth as if trying to say something, but the words wouldn’t come out.

Shen Siyang watched him quietly. After a long pause, he finally spoke up and asked, “When exactly did you start leading people to mock him? It couldn’t have started the moment he arrived in town, right?”

Ge Jiabao looked up in surprise. “How did you know? It really only started about a month ago.”

“Xiaoshi told me that he once reached out to you for help,” Shen Siyang explained. “He’s a very smart kid. There’s no way he would ask for help from someone who had always mocked and bullied him.”

“How is that possible? When did he ever ask me for help? I, I didn’t know.”

“He risked getting beaten by Luo Qifeng just to crack the window open so you could see him being forced to crouch in the corner and eat with the dog. That was his cry for help. But instead of helping, you turned it into a joke to mock him.”

Ge Jiabao stared at Shen Siyang, utterly dumbfounded. The color rushed to his face, turning it a deep, burning crimson, before he finally lowered his head in sheer shame.

After a long, heavy silence, he spoke up in a small, tentative voice. “I didn’t, I didn’t mean to turn it into a joke at first. When I saw it that day, I just thought it was weird, so I brought it up at the dinner table. Who knew that the moment I mentioned Sang Xiaoshi’s name, my parents would start screaming at each other? My mom blamed my dad, saying all he ever does is drink all day and recklessly lend money to anyone. She said Sang Xiaoshi’s uncle lives right next door, but he hasn’t paid back a single cent of the tens of thousands of yuan he borrowed all those years ago. My dad got furious. The two of them started shoving each other, and all the food on the table ended up smashed on the floor. I didn’t even get to eat dinner, so I felt like, like it was all Sang Xiaoshi’s fault. After that, whenever my parents fought, I just felt irritated whenever I looked at him.”

Shen Siyang crossed his arms, studying Ge Jiabao quietly. “And do you still feel that way now?”

Ge Jiabao shook his head. “I think I finally understand what you meant the other day by ‘putting myself in someone else’s shoes.’ Yesterday, while I was staying with my mom at the hospital, I tried imagining myself as Sang Xiaoshi. It made me so angry at myself that I wanted to give myself a beating.”

“Since you’ve thought it through so clearly, why are you still lurking around my gate?”

Ge Jiabao looked at him rather reluctantly. “Well, aren’t you incredibly, sigh, incredibly smart? Is there really no way to make him forgive me?”

“None,” Shen Siyang replied mercilessly. “No matter how smart someone is, they can’t erase a scar that’s already there. When you break a plate with your own hands, you have to accept the reality that the pieces might never fit back together. And even if you do glue them back, the cracks remain. It will never be the original plate again.”

Ge Jiabao processed Shen Siyang’s words for a moment, his shoulders slumping in defeat.

“Okay. But my mom really wants to thank Sang Xiaoshi. The doctor said if we had been even half an hour later yesterday, my mom might have been in serious danger. My mom, hic. I don’t even dare to think about what I would do if my mom wasn’t here with me anymore.”

As he spoke, his voice began to crack with emotion. “Mom is the only one who has ever truly been there for me since I was little. My dad, all he knows how to do is drink every single day. Last night, when Sang Xiaoshi—hic—when Sang Xiaoshi said he was the one who called the ambulance when his parents got into that car accident, that was when I realized how terrible my actions were. Just seeing my mom faint made me—hic—this heartbroken. Watching his own parents leave him forever must have been ten times more painful for him. Waaah. I never knew before how devastating it is to not have parents. I’m never going to bully anyone ever again, even if some people are really, really annoying.”

Shen Siyang caught a specific detail in Ge Jiabao’s sobbed confession, his brow furrowing slightly. “You said when Xiaoshi’s parents were in the car accident, he was the one who called the ambulance?”

Ge Jiabao nodded through his tears. “That’s what he told me. My mom even said last night—hic—that when she was drifted awake for a moment, she saw Sang Xiaoshi holding her hand. He was crying and calling out ‘Mommy’ while telling her that she’d be okay once the ambulance arrived. Hic, waaah. Why am I only learning how to ‘put myself in others’ shoes’ now? If I knew sooner—hic—I would have paid attention in class.”

A sharp pang of sorrow pierced Shen Siyang’s heart. He lowered his eyes, falling into a deep, somber silence.

However, Ge Jiabao was crying so hysterically that his loud wails quickly pulled Shen Siyang’s thoughts back to reality.

After a brief moment of consideration, Shen Siyang looked at the weeping boy. “I have a favor to ask. Will you help me?”

Having fallen into Shen Siyang’s traps several times already, Ge Jiabao had finally learned to be a bit more cautious.

He shot Shen Siyang a deeply suspicious look. “Help you? Hic. You still have my Bumblebee toy. There’s no way I’m helping you.”

“It’s to help Xiaoshi,” Shen Siyang clarified. “But let me make one thing clear beforehand: whether you help or not is entirely up to you. Just because you help doesn’t mean Xiaoshi will automatically forgive you for the wrongs you’ve done in the past.”

Ge Jiabao stared at Shen Siyang, his sobbing gradually slowing to a halt.

Having barely managed to crawl out of his last pit of trouble, he promptly and willfully dove right back into another one. “Fine, tell me what it is.”