Chapter 265
Chapter 265: Save It for the New Year?
Standing beside Du An Rao, Auntie felt a ball of stale air stuck in her chest. She was so angry she wanted to start swearing on the spot.
“Good grief, when I heard you say the third son hated her and the eldest son so much because of this, I thought he really had worked hard, scrimped and saved to pay the money back himself. But this? This! So what exactly is he hating for? Is everyone in that family sick in the head?”
Du An Rao was amused by how worked up she was and sighed: “For people like them, something like this is just an excuse. What he really hates is that even though he is favored, he is not the one who is favored the most. For this kind of person, no matter how much you give, he thinks he deserves it. But if there is even one thing you do not do for him, he will hate you.”
Kindness measured in a liter of rice earns gratitude, kindness measured in a bucket of rice earns hatred. That was all there was to it.
The eldest son was like this, and so was the youngest son. So it was really impossible to feel even a bit of sympathy for the situation a certain someone had ended up in.
“To pay back a debt that should never have fallen on him in the first place, the second son had no choice but to take on the hardest and heaviest jobs. Right when he was about to finish paying off the money, an accident happened. Because he had been working nonstop and was too exhausted, he nodded off for a moment while working, and three fingers on his right hand were cut off.”
“Hiss…” It was like the old saying: a rope always snaps at its thinnest point, and misfortune loves to find the most miserable. This second son was really too pitiful.
“Originally, if he had been treated in time, although some function would have been affected, there was still hope to reattach those severed fingers. But…”
Everyone’s hearts tightened. “But what?”
“But the family he had poured everything into to support was not willing to spend even a little extra on him. They watched him writhe in pain and struggle, until he ended up permanently disabled.”
“Ugh! They really are something else!” Auntie in Yellow could not help spitting in Madam Kou’s direction. If it were not for Du An Rao and the others being there, she would have already rushed over to kick her.
Madam Kou’s eyes flickered. She looked flustered, but still insisted stiffly: “I gave him his life. Even if he gave it back to me, that would only be right. Besides, it is not like we did not want to save him. His brother was still in college at the time, and the family already had no money. Where were we supposed to get extra cash to treat him?”
Hearing that, Du He Xuan and the others were furious. “So the youngest son knew enough to borrow money to go to college, but when the second son suffered such a serious injury, neither you nor his brother thought of borrowing money to save him. You sure are something as a mother, and as a brother, he sure is eye-opening.”
“And he was injured while working. That counts as a work injury. As long as you applied, he could get work injury compensation. In the end, you would not even have to pay that much on your own. Not knowing the law really kills people!”
“They are not ignorant.” Listening to her fourth sister explain, Du An Rao’s eyes turned cold. “If they had spent the money at the time, the work injury payout later would only have filled that hole.”
Everyone was stunned for a moment, then quickly understood what she meant.
“They… they were planning to swallow all that money, were they not? They must have gone crazy for money!”
Looking at her family’s stunned faces, Du An Rao only felt that they had still underestimated how low these people’s moral bottom line could go.
“They did not just want to swallow the money. They wanted to make it even more, so on purpose they delayed his treatment, letting the second son become disabled so they could go and extort even more from the factory later.”
“Animals. How can anyone’s heart be that black?” A few hot-tempered people clenched their fists, looking like they wanted nothing more than to rush up and beat her.
Madam Kou’s face was deathly pale. She instinctively took a step back and tried to sound fierce, though she was weak inside: “W-what do you think you are doing? Hitting people is against the law!”
“Oh, so you do know hitting people is illegal. Someone like you, even if the law cannot do anything to you right now, when you die you are going to fry in oil.”
Du Yi Han nudged his sister and asked curiously: “In the end… did they get what they wanted?”
“They did. Except…” Thinking of something, a trace of a smile finally appeared on Du An Rao’s face.
“Except what?”
“Except they overplayed their hand and finally angered the second son and his girlfriend.”
The compensation that the second son had earned at the cost of three fingers and a lifetime of disability was something Madam Kou wanted to keep all to herself, to use as the money for the third son to marry a wife after he graduated.
Already heartbroken over his disability, the second son completely lost all hope in these so-called relatives and in this so-called family.
His girlfriend, who already felt sorry for everything he had been through, was even more furious. She marched straight to the Kou family home and had a huge fight with Madam Kou and the third son.
Talking about this, Madam Kou actually felt wronged first. “I raised him for so many years, fed and clothed him, and in the end that cheap slut from outside just said a few words and turned his head. He turned on me, his birth mother, and his own brothers. He is nothing but an ungrateful white-eyed wolf!”
Du An Rao’s face darkened. “You did give him food and clothes and gave him his life. But that does not mean you have the right to take whatever you want from him. No matter how much he owed you, for the sake of your beloved eldest and third sons he gave up his education and his life, earned so much money for you, and even lost three fingers. That debt is long paid.”
“Paid? Paid what? I gave birth to him and gave him a life. He is supposed to repay me for his whole life and listen to me forever.”
Du He Xuan curled her lips and commented on the spot: “So did you give birth to a son or did you give birth to a slave?”
Realizing that trying to reason with an idiot made her look like an idiot too, Du An Rao rolled her eyes and said coolly: “He called you mother, and you treated him like a donkey, working him day and night and still whipping him. It serves you right that such a filial son would harden his heart and cut ties with you. You earned every bit of it.”
Du Yu Xi and Auntie in Yellow, who was standing next to Du An Rao, both had their eyes light up. They looked delighted. “Her second son cut ties with her?”
“If a so-called mother wants her own child’s life and spends all day thinking about sucking their blood and eating their flesh, if you still do not cut ties with her, what are you keeping her for, the New Year festival?”
Everyone agreed with that, but they were still confused. “Would she and those two ungrateful sons really agree to that?”
To them, he was the family’s blood bank and ATM, a free laborer they could exploit for life.
A faint smile finally appeared on Du An Rao’s face. “She had no choice but to agree.”
It turned out that after the girlfriend stormed into the Kou home and had that big fight with his mother and brother, the second son finally woke up from decades of PUA. He firmly decided to cut ties with the whole family. No matter how Madam Kou and his brothers tried to suppress and insult him or morally blackmail him, they could not change his mind.
He even demanded not only the work injury compensation, but also that Madam Kou hand over the extra payout she had extorted from the factory using his injury.
“This woman and those two money-obsessed sons of hers would agree to that?”
“Of course they would not agree. But the second son had a powerful person backing him, so they had no choice.”