Chapter 100: Bittersweet Regret

Watching Liu Yinyan, I kept feeling he had something on his mind he wanted to tell me. This wasn’t the Liu Yinyan I usually saw—he was never one for small talk. But now he’d cleared everyone else out of the room.

He burst out laughing so hard his eyes almost filled with tears.

I had a feeling whatever he was about to say would be important.

I kept quiet, but Liu Yinyan was almost excited as he said, “Do you realize? The average person could work their whole life and never earn a hundred million, not even in three lifetimes. But me—I have several billion. Billions! What does that even mean? I don’t know, to me it’s just a string of numbers on a bank card.”

“To be honest,” Liu Yinyan waved his cane, looking for a moment like the ambitious young man he must’ve once been, “the first time I made one hundred million, I reserved it at the bank months in advance and withdrew it all in cash. I covered my house with the money, put on my most serious face as I counted it… but no one saw how I practically burst with joy when I got home.”

A wild light flashed across Liu Yinyan’s face. “I started out with nothing, just a poor kid from the countryside, and fought my way up to where I am now. When I first arrived in Dongxing City, I only had twenty yuan in my pocket. From that, I turned it into ten thousand, then a million, then ten million, until finally a hundred million!”

“Money’s a wonderful thing!” Liu Yinyan sank back down on the sofa. “You can buy whatever you want. It gives you everything you could possibly wish for.”

I frowned, noticing the glimmer of tears in his eyes. A suspicion tugged at the edge of my mind, and I said quietly, “But it can’t buy you peace inside, can it?”

My words seemed to knock the wind out of him. For a second, Liu Yinyan looked like a robot with its spring wound down—he slumped on the sofa, all his strength gone. He was a seventy-year-old man now, eyes clouded with age, his body bowed by the years—the heroic figure of his youth long faded.

He slowly wiped the cloudy tears from his eyes. “I really thought, after thirty-five years, that no one but me would ever know the truth. I thought as long as I kept my mouth shut, I’d be able to forget. But I never thought that even after three and a half decades, I’d finally have to let it out. You have to save my daughter.”

He nearly fell to his knees in front of me.

Liu Yinyan had tried hard to forget that memory, but the more you try to forget something, the more it carves itself into your mind—like a knife pressing deep, impossible to erase.

He’d spent the whole day after I left turning things over in his mind, but eventually decided to tell me the secret he’d buried for so long.

I knew what was coming—Liu Yinyan was finally going to tell me what happened in the gold shop that day.

Thirty-five years ago, with no way out, Liu Yinyan went to a gold shop. He spent a whole month there, persuading the owner day after day. At the end of the month, the owner finally agreed to his request.

From that day on, this became the deepest, most hidden secret for both Liu Yinyan and the gold shop owner—sealed away forever.

Two months after Liu Yinyan left, someone else walked into that same gold shop.

The shop was in a spot that wasn’t exactly remote, but it wasn’t right downtown either. Whoever came picked the day perfectly—during inventory, when most of the staff was out. It was evening, the sunset gleaming off the jewelry in the shop, making everything shine.

After stepping out of his car, the man checked his surroundings—no one around—then slipped inside.

Inside, only the shop manager and a single clerk remained. No one else. The man wore a shabby pair of socks over his head, his face distorted beneath the stretched fabric.

With a heavy accent he barked, “Robbery! This is a stick-up!”

The owner and the clerk jumped in shock. The man tossed a nylon bag onto the floor and shouted, “Hurry up! Put all the gold in the bag, or I’ll smash your heads in! I mean it—move fast!”

The owner and clerk exchanged glances, then started, slowly, loading gold and jewelry into the bag.

The clerk, trying to be clever, surreptitiously pressed the silent alarm under the counter with her foot. It was supposed to alert the police quietly, but nothing happened. Suddenly she remembered—the owner had said the system was being tested today, so it was switched off.

Talk about timing. It was like someone had planned it down to the minute.

No one wants to gamble with their life. Between money and survival, life always wins.

Once the bag was stuffed full of gold, the man left and drove away. His getaway car was an old, battered van with no plates. Blocking the clerk protectively, the owner asked, “Are you alright?”

The clerk was touched—she never expected her boss to care so much. “I’m okay, but after losing all that gold, how much did you lose, boss?”

The owner just shook his head and sighed. “Money lost isn’t a big deal. As long as everyone’s safe, that’s what matters. And anyway, there’s insurance. We won’t really lose much.”

The gold shop was insured. According to the policy, after a robbery like this, the owner would get about eighty percent of the value back. Since the robbery happened during inventory, the claim went through smoothly with the clerk’s help.

The missing gold was estimated at close to a hundred million in market value. The owner got eighty million in compensation—a substantial recovery.

The insurance company did investigate, but everything was just too coincidental. No security guard on duty, alarm system offline, surveillance under maintenance—it all seemed almost staged. The insurance company wasn’t blind to the possibility of fraud.

But it didn’t take long to catch the suspect. Or rather, they found his body.

This migrant worker had no relationship whatsoever with the gold shop owner—their lives had never intersected.

He had a teenage daughter who’d tragically developed kidney failure. Out of money, desperate, he’d taken a terrible risk. The timing fit, the evidence lined up, and his motive was plain to see. The day before he killed himself, his daughter died at home.

In the end, everyone came to the same conclusion: To save his terminally ill daughter, Ren committed the robbery at a gold shop three kilometers from the construction site. No one thought he picked the timing, just that he happened to strike when security was at its weakest.

Hauling off a bag stuffed with gold and jewelry, he fled in a white van. Three days later, before he had a chance to get rid of the loot, his daughter died. Unable to bear it, he threw himself into the sea.

Two months later, his corpse washed up on shore. But that bag of gold—no one’s ever found it, even now.

So the gold shop case was declared solved, even though the gold itself never turned up.

Ten years ago, the gold shop owner passed away peacefully, aged sixty-seven.

Now, only Liu Yinyan knew the full truth about what really happened back then.

And now, I was the second person to know.

What I’d heard was a story I’ll never forget, not as long as I live.

Another month went by—a transfer of fifty million landed in Liu Yinyan’s account. He used that money to invest in an internet company, and from then on he became a legendary venture capitalist.

That money was a payment from the gold shop owner to Liu Yinyan. To be blunt, the entire incident had been orchestrated by Liu Yinyan himself.

When he was young, Liu Yinyan did every kind of job, including hauling bricks on the construction site. While working there, he made a lot of friends among the other laborers. By thirty-five, he was self-taught in economics and finance, and had left the site behind—but his old workmates kept toiling away.

One of them was Ren Tian, who had a daughter suffering from kidney failure.

That day, Liu Yinyan “accidentally” ran into Ren Tian, who was just leaving the hospital.

They had a meal together at a run-down roadside restaurant and drank until they were both a little tipsy. Ren Tian confided his daughter was beyond saving—the daily cost of her hospital stay was far more than he could ever make as a laborer.

Ren brought his daughter home and waited—for the end.

Yes, he waited for death.

Liu Yinyan was drunk that day and said, “Brother Ren, I don’t have a family or a daughter myself, but I can understand how you feel. If it were me, I’d rob someone to get the money if I had to!”

“Robbery?” Ren Tian laughed. “Little brother, you’ve had too much. It’s not that easy, you know. Don’t you think I’ve already considered it? Forget it—it’s a pipe dream.”

Still drinking, Liu Yinyan argued, “Come on, Ren. Don’t talk like that. Isn’t there a gold shop nearby? It’s not exactly a fortress. If I were you, I’d just stick on a mask and go. I even know their inventory is at the end of each month, hardly any staff or security around.”

“You’ve had too much.” Ren Tian quickly said.

“What else could you do? Keep hauling bricks?” Liu Yinyan scoffed. “If your daughter died, I’d jump into the sea myself.”

“You’ve definitely had too much,” Ren Tian repeated.

“Who says I’ve had enough?” Liu Yinyan slumped onto the table. “They call me the Iron Liver—thousand drinks, never drunk! I can keep drinking! Anyone tries to stop me, I’ll fight ‘em!”

That night, Ren Tian booked a cheap hotel room for Liu Yinyan.

Through the window, watching Ren Tian walk away, Liu Yinyan suddenly sobered up.

Most of the time, it’s not the alcohol that gets you drunk—it’s you who wants to be drunk.

Liu Yinyan hadn’t really been drunk that night.

But Ren Tian was.

The next day, Ren Tian went to the gold shop.

The gold he took was fake—underneath a thin layer of cheap gold plating, it was all iron. The whole bag might have fetched a few hundred bucks at most.

But in the end, it was Ren Tian’s own choice. No one told him to do it. Can you really blame Liu Yinyan? He’d just been rambling while drunk that night—who takes drunken talk seriously?

Ren Tian stood at the ocean’s edge, clutching that bag of fake gold.

His daughter still died—all he could do now was wait for the end.

He no longer wanted to live.

Clutching the bag of worthless gold, he leapt into the sea.

Ren Tian never knew—not even at the end—that it hadn’t been a chance meeting with Liu Yinyan that day.