Zhao Yuan first walked over to the man he had slapped.
The man was clearly still shaken. Seeing Zhao Yuan approach, he subconsciously took a step back.
Scarface frowned and barked, "Erhongzi, what are you backing away for? If he dares to hit you again, the brothers will get revenge for you!"
Hearing this gave Erhongzi a boost of confidence, and he stopped in his tracks. But he immediately realized his reaction might give the game away and quickly yelled, "Huh? Boss, what did you just say? I can't hear anything!"
His acting was a textbook case of a guilty man protesting his innocence. It couldn't have been more awkward.
But Zhao Yuan didn't expose him. He reached out and felt around both of the man's ears.
Just as the man opened his mouth to shout about how he couldn't hear, a Golden Needle appeared in each of Zhao Yuan's hands. Under the guise of examining his ears, he swiftly inserted and twisted the needles into the Tinggong acupoint in front of the man's tragus.
The Tinggong acupoint, where the Hand Shaoyang, Foot Shaoyang, and Hand Taiyang meridians intersect, is highly effective for treating conditions like tinnitus and deafness. However, using a special technique to needle this point can also cause a normal person to become deaf!
Zhao Yuan's movements—inserting and manipulating the needles—were incredibly fast and extremely covert. Not only did Scarface and his men fail to notice, but the man himself was completely unaware.
Before the man could close his mouth, Zhao Yuan removed the Golden Needles from the Tinggong acupoints and nodded. "Hm, it does seem like he's deaf. Fine, twenty thousand yuan it is."
Scarface was delighted. 'Heh, this kid actually gets it.' He had expected him to try and weasel his way out, but he never thought this would be the outcome. 'I get it,' he mused inwardly. 'The kid's just looking for a way to back down without losing face.'
With this in mind, he urged, "See? I told you he was deaf! You just wouldn't believe me! Hurry up and check on Xiaochao in the bed. Once you're done, pay up, and you all can go home and get a good night's sleep."
Zhao Ling, however, was stunned. She couldn't understand why her older brother was siding with them.
His father, Zhao Shiquan, and mother, Shen Lijun, were also dumbfounded, unable to fathom their son's intentions.
Zhao Yuan walked over to the hospital bed and used the same trick again. While pretending to examine the patient, he secretly inserted Golden Needles into several acupoints on the man's lower back. When he was finished, he clapped his hands together and said, "You really weren't lying. These two are genuinely sick. Alright, one hundred and twenty thousand, was it? Give me your bank account number, and I'll transfer the money."
"Straight to the point!" Scarface was overjoyed, and his crew was all smiles. None of them had expected things to end in such a dramatic fashion.
Only the man who'd been slapped felt aggrieved. 'Damn it,' he thought, 'if I'd known this kid would be so cooperative, I wouldn't have stepped up and been so rude. I took that slap for nothing! I just hope that when the boss splits the money, he'll see I bled for this and give me an extra share...'
Scarface rattled off his bank account number, watching intently as Zhao Yuan completed the transfer using his phone's banking app.
A moment later, Scarface received a text from his bank. He counted the zeroes carefully, and after confirming it was one hundred and twenty thousand, his ugly face bloomed into a smile like a chrysanthemum.
Just then, Zhao Yuan suddenly asked, "Oh, by the way, are they the only two with problems? What about the rest of you? Anything wrong with you guys?"
Scarface froze, and his lackeys stared in astonishment.
"What do you mean by that?" Scarface asked.
Zhao Yuan said with a completely serious expression, "You've all been guarding this hospital room for the past two days. You haven't eaten or slept well, and you've had to worry about your companion's injuries and fuss over the compensation. It's inevitable that you'd start feeling unwell. If there's anything wrong, just tell me. As long as I can confirm you really have these issues, I'll pay you another sum of money. Don't worry, my word is my bond. I won't go back on it!"
Scarface and his lackeys were stunned.
'What the hell is this situation? Did our extortion scam run into a Scatter Money Child? Our luck is way too good, isn't it?'
They wanted to be skeptical, but the one hundred and twenty thousand yuan Zhao Yuan had just transferred was real money!
After mulling it over for a moment, Scarface said tentatively, "Well, uh, I've been feeling dizzy and my head's been hurting these past two days. It's probably from worrying too much about all this."
The moment he finished speaking, Zhao Yuan began to examine his head.
As before, he secretly inserted Golden Needles into several acupoints on the man's head.
Scarface and his lackeys still didn't notice a thing.
When he was done, Zhao Yuan nodded. "Alright. For that problem, I'll compensate you another ten thousand yuan. Anyone else not feeling well?"
Seeing that Zhao Yuan kept his word, Scarface's lackeys got excited and scrambled over each other to claim they were sick. One said he hadn't been eating well and had a stomachache. Another claimed that worrying about his companion's injury had triggered acute prostatitis—God knows what the connection between those two is. Someone even blamed his diarrhea on the situation...
No matter how ridiculous their ailments were, Zhao Yuan examined each of them and readily agreed to provide compensation. As a result, every one of their faces was beaming with joy, completely oblivious to the fact that they had just been punished.
In the end, Zhao Yuan transferred another eighty thousand yuan to Scarface before leading his parents and sister out of the hospital room.
The group left the hospital and went straight to the pickup truck.
Zhao Shiquan was relegated to the front passenger seat, while Shen Lijun and Zhao Ling sat on either side of Zhao Yuan in the back. Zhao Shiquan really wanted to sit with his son too, but he was too embarrassed to fight his wife and daughter for the spot, so he could only accept the arrangement with a sigh.
Zhao Yuan said, "Mom, Dad, Little Sis, you haven't eaten yet, have you? Brother Huang, find a restaurant first. After we eat, find a hotel. It's too late now, so let's stay in the county town for the night and go back tomorrow."
"Yes, sir!" Huang Jie responded. Even though he had left the military, he still had the terse manner of a soldier.
Shen Lijun held on to Zhao Yuan tightly and asked, "Son, be honest with Mom. Where did you get all this money? You sent fifty thousand yuan home before and said you earned it by treating someone. How did you suddenly come up with two hundred thousand this time? You haven't done anything illegal, have you?"
It was no wonder she thought that way. For a poor family like theirs, two hundred thousand yuan was an unimaginable sum.
Zhao Yuan gently patted the back of her hand and said with a smile, "Mom, you don't trust your own son? Am I the kind of person who would break the law? It's like this: I went into a partnership with someone and opened a pharmaceutical factory in Rongcheng City. The health supplements we produce and sell are incredibly popular, so I've earned a lot of money..."
Zhao Yuan then explained how he had met Fang Yi and how they had started the pharmaceutical factory together. Of course, he left out the part about receiving the Witch Doctor's inheritance, merely claiming his formulas came from an Elder Daoist in the village's ruined temple.
P.S. For readers who experienced a bug with the previous chapter (missing or repeated sections), please go to the table of contents, then long-press the title of the last chapter to re-download it.
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