Chapter 1

My wife died in a mudslide during her company’s team-building trip.

Yet I wasn’t the least bit panicked, and I was even in the mood to go out drinking.

That was because, in my previous life, I had dropped everything and rushed to the scene of the accident.

After searching for half a month without finding my wife’s body, I could only erect an empty grave containing her belongings.

Before I even had time to grieve, the bank called demanding repayment of a debt, and it turned out my wife had taken out an enormous loan to expand her company.

I was the sole heir to her estate.

I began working myself to the bone to pay off the bank loan, all while looking after my wife’s parents and younger brother.

Twenty years later, I had gradually built the nearly bankrupt company into a thriving business, cared for her parents through their old age until their deaths, and raised her younger brother into adulthood.

Years of exhaustion finally caught up with me, and I collapsed.

At the very end of my life, as I lay dying, my wife appeared with a man and a little boy.

Their happy little family thanked me for all my hard work, saying the fortune I was leaving behind would be enough for the three of them to enjoy the rest of their lives.

I died of rage on the spot.

When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I received the phone call about the mudslide!

This time, I would make them reap what they had sown.

“Your wife was swept away in the mudslide, and we’re doing everything we can to find her, so please get here as soon as possible!” my wife’s secretary, Zhao Li, said urgently over the phone.

“Okay, okay, I’ll buy a ticket and head over right away...” Memories flooded my mind.

At this point in my previous life, I had immediately gone to the train station to buy a ticket, and it had taken me two days to reach the remote mountains where my wife and her colleagues had been traveling.

Once I arrived, I searched like a madman for half a month, only to come up empty-handed.

Of course, finding a woman who had faked her death and deliberately set me up was nothing short of a fantasy.

Why would I repeat the same mistake in this life and let those two cheating scumbags play me for a fool?

I walked into the bedroom, where there was a safe whose combination Shao Yayun had never told me, but that hardly posed a challenge, and the safe opened on my second attempt.

The company seal, property deed, and household registration booklet were all inside.

I also found the bank’s loan disbursement agreement in the safe.

The funds were scheduled to be released today.

No wonder the bank staff had insisted that I was the one who transferred the money after her accident.

After all, as far as any normal person was concerned, Shao Yayun had been swept away by a mudslide and was dead, so how could a dead person transfer money?

That meant the only person who could have transferred it was her husband—me, the ultimate sucker.

Of course, even if I had wanted to transfer the money, I would have needed both the company seal and her signature, so in theory, no one but her could touch that enormous sum.

“Why are you still at home instead of booking a ticket, and do you even care about my daughter, or have you been hoping she’d die all along?” my mother-in-law demanded just as she, my father-in-law, and my wife’s younger brother arrived.

In this life, I was far calmer than I had been before.

Looking closely, I noticed my mother-in-law was wearing makeup and a brand-new outfit, while my father-in-law had brought a suitcase; they looked less like parents rushing to the scene of their daughter’s accident and more like tourists heading out on a trip.

What was more, after the accident, their standard of living hadn’t declined at all, but had actually improved.

They had known about Shao Yayun and Gu Feng all along.

Shao Yayun must have kept secretly sending them money after faking her death, which was why they had all lived so comfortably.

I was the only idiot kept in the dark, working myself to death to repay her debts.

To put it bluntly, her entire family had been bleeding me dry.

“I’ve already bought the train tickets, and the train leaves in an hour, so let’s hurry to the station!” said my brother-in-law, being so fucking thoughtful for someone who usually made me book his rides even for a trip to the supermarket, all because he was terrified his sister would come home and run into me.

He wanted to cover for her.

“Okay, let’s leave now,” I said, nodding quickly.

I had already emptied the safe and put everything in the bag I carried with me, and I had changed the combination as well.

Of course, that alone was nowhere near enough.

Shao Yayun was smart, and if she noticed anything wrong, she could simply come back from the dead by emerging from the mudslide, leaving her with nothing to lose.

Instead, she could transfer the money whenever she wanted and run off with Gu Feng to enjoy herself.

So if she was supposed to be dead, I had to make sure she stayed dead.

As soon as I got into the car, I called my best friend, Ren Fan, and asked him to bring some people over to stay at my house and watch it for me.

I specifically told him that the contents of the safe were extremely important and that someone had to guard it around the clock.

“Even when you’re sleeping, you’d better have your arms wrapped around that safe!”

I made that very clear.

In short, I didn’t want to give Shao Yayun any chance to approach the safe, even though I had changed the combination and emptied it.

Because once she got near it, she would become suspicious.

On the other hand, as long as she couldn’t get to the safe, she would keep clinging to hope and continue pretending to be dead.

She wanted an opportunity, while I wanted to buy time.