RBCT Chapter 60 Confessing Her Identity to Her Stepfather
Chapter 60 Confessing Her Identity to Her Stepfather
Before the divorce, the stepfather decided to have a good time, so he took the two children into a clothing store.
A men's clothing store located on the third floor of a shopping mall.
My stepfather usually wears clothes from street vendors; he'd wear faded T-shirts with loose collars but still wouldn't throw them away. Today, however, he was uncharacteristically different. As soon as he walked in, he told the shop assistant to bring out all the new styles.
First, he picked out a nice outfit for each of the two children. He chose a pale yellow dress for Chu Qingning and a navy blue light jacket for her younger brother, Luo Jinnian. The two children changed into their clothes and stood in front of the mirror. Their stepfather grinned with satisfaction.
Then his gaze fell on a suit.
It was a dark gray suit hanging on the mannequin in the center. The stepfather walked over, reached out and touched the fabric of the cuffs, and then his eyes were glued to it.
He tried it on. His stepfather in the mirror looked like a completely different person; his back was straighter, his chin was higher, and even the fine lines around his eyes seemed more sophisticated. He looked at himself again and again, turned around, and finally sighed, preparing to take it off.
"Stepfather, buy it if you like it," Chu Qingning said.
Chu Xiang shook his head. He didn't have that much spare money. He liked it but didn't necessarily have to buy it. He could just look at it.
Luo Jinnian didn't say anything, but silently handed her stepfather a bank card.
This is her card, isn't this a bit much? Chu Xiang thought to himself, that woman (his nominal wife) was unjust first, so it's not wrong for him to collect some interest.
Bought it.
The shop assistant wrapped the suit up with a smile.
The moment the card was swiped, Chu Xiang regretted it. "You took your mom's card! What if she finds out there's less money?"
Luo Jinnian was stunned. "Who said that was her card? That's my card, and it's full of my money."
Chu Xiang was shocked to learn that he had been spending a child's money.
"Where did you get so much money?"
"It's because you don't know, you don't know I have another identity." Luo Jinnian's calm tone contained a sense of pride.
Chu Qingning's eyes lit up. Finally, finally, her younger brother was going to reveal his true identity to their father? Ever since she learned of her brother's identity, she had been keeping it a secret from their father, covering for him many times, but she also really wanted her father to know how capable her brother was.
She clenched her fists, her palms sweating.
"Besides being an actor, I also have another identity: I like to write things in my spare time," Luo Jinnian said.
Knowing that his father probably didn't read magazines or pay much attention to the internet, he simply took out his phone and opened his Weibo account.
There are still quite a few people leaving comments on it.
[How long has it been since the author last published a piece in "Tales of the Tang Dynasty"? What are we supposed to read without your suspense stories?]
[Science fiction, please provide the latest science fiction, thank you.]
[Was "Leaving Home at Eighteen" really published in "Harvest"? The author is amazing; getting published in a top-tier literary journal on the first try.]
[I'd like to start writing; could someone please take a look at my work? I'm not easily offended.]
The stepfather scrolled down the list one by one, his fingers moving slower and slower. When he saw the number of followers, he counted them twice: 56 followers, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands—to make sure his eyesight wasn't failing him.
So, after half an hour, Chu Xiang reluctantly accepted the fact that his stepson was a young writer, a very successful one, so successful that he could support himself with his royalties alone.
"So you won't need to take on that extra job anymore. Your sister needs you by her side too." Luo Jinnian put her phone back in her pocket and added, "More importantly, we're about to launch our attack, and we need an adult to protect us."
A series of question marks popped into Chu Xiang's mind: Have I been hired as a bodyguard?
Yes, that's exactly what Luo Jinnian thought. Her stepfather could act as her bodyguard, and Uncle Qin would be her future manager. She wouldn't need a little assistant.
Nepotism was Luo Jinnian's way of protecting his own interests when he was young.
Still in shock, the stepfather didn't ask any more questions.
a few days later.
"Uncle Qin, I'd like to see you about 'The Little Prince'."
The boy, dressed in new clothes, met Uncle Qin at the hamburger joint. Uncle Qin had just returned from vacation and was tanned dark. The tip of Uncle Qin's nose and cheekbones were peeling from the sun, making him look like a piece of burnt toast.
But he was in high spirits, and as soon as he entered the door he shouted, "Give me a Big Mac!"
"What's wrong with 'The Little Prince'? Do you have some new ideas?" Uncle Qin asked while unwrapping the hamburger paper.
The first book Luo Jinnian copied in this world was "The Little Prince," and he regarded it as the final piece of the puzzle.
"Yes, I think the full version is right here."
He pulled a brown paper envelope from his bag, inside which was the manuscript he had written long ago.
Uncle Qin handled it like a precious treasure. He washed his hands at the sink, carefully dried them with a paper towel, and then gently opened it. He had been waiting for the contents for half a year.
"Five thousand words?" Uncle Qin flipped through it. "That must be forty or fifty thousand words."
"The complete version," Luo Jinnian said. "What I gave you before was just the beginning. This is the whole thing."
Uncle Qin didn't say anything more and looked down at the manuscript.
The hamburger shop was dimly lit, with warm-toned energy-saving bulbs that cast a faint golden glow on the manuscript paper. Uncle Qin read very slowly. In the middle, Luo Jinnian ordered himself a Coke, bit off one end of the straw, and sipped it half-heartedly.
About twenty minutes later, Uncle Qin turned to the last page and closed it.
"Finished reading?" Luo Jinnian asked.
Uncle Qin took a deep breath, picked up the manuscript again, as if he were weighing a gold brick.
"I have something to do first."
"What is it?"
"Find a lawyer," Uncle Qin said. "So that the copyright is in your name, the kind that even your mother can't take away."
Luo Jinnian was taken aback. Uncle Qin had always taken care of the copyright for his previous works, but this time the special emphasis showed that he really valued "The Little Prince".
Uncle Qin seemed to read his mind and added in a low voice, "Your previous short stories could at most sell for a film or television adaptation, maybe three or five hundred thousand at most. This one is different."
Uncle Qin nodded, stuffed the envelope into his briefcase, and zipped it up twice.
As he was leaving, his sister asked him curiously, as she had read the beginning of "The Little Prince" before and was also curious about what happened next.
"Tell me, little brother. What happened to the Little Prince later?"
Luo Jinnian leaned against the car window, his voice calm: "Later, he went to many planets. He met a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer. Finally, he came to Earth and met a snake, a fox, and a rose garden."
Outside the car window was the street scene at dusk; the streetlights had just come on, and the orange light receded in strings.
"And then?" Chu Qingning asked softly.
"Then he died."
"...Huh?" Chu Qingning's face fell, and her eyes reddened slightly.
"He's not really dead," Luo Jinnian said. "He just left his body in the desert and returned to his planet. The rose is still waiting for him."
"That's considered death."
"It counts as moving," Luo Jinnian said.
Chu Xiang glanced at him in the rearview mirror, sniffed, and thought, "Damn dry humor."
The car turned into the residential area, the light from the security booth shining in and then dimming again. Luo Jinnian turned his face to the window, where his own face was reflected in the glass—the face of a fourteen-year-old boy.
The stepfather parked the electric scooter and removed the key.
"I'm home," he said.