Chapter 48: A Family Reunion!

Chapter 48: A Family Reunion!

It was currently Saturday afternoon, and the ladies had headed out to a local beauty salon to ensure they looked their absolute best for tonight's joint gathering with the Lang and Tang families. They claimed the elaborate pampering was entirely to make me seem more impressive to the high-ranking guests, but both they and I knew they simply wanted a convenient excuse to get thoroughly spoiled and enjoy a nice shopping trip.

I wasn't hurting for money right now by any stretch of the imagination, so whatever kept my beautiful wives happy ultimately made me happy. Left alone in the quiet house, I booted up my self-made hacker-grade supercomputer to handle some highly classified digital business. I pulled up the media file Nadia had quietly taken of me buried deep inside Nichole's folds, the image capturing the overflowing love fluids leaking down her skin to make it undeniably clear what had transpired between us.

Moving quickly through the system interfaces, I systematically stripped away the digital footprints and metadata attached to the file, then clipped and blurred the margins of the layout so our faces couldn't be clearly identified by an outside party.

When the day finally arrived that I could openly reveal to Scott exactly who had been riding his wives and what we were doing behind his back, this visual evidence was going to hit his pride like a freight train.

I routed the anonymous file transfer through the personal email server of his former lover and maid, Mei Xia, knowing the two still maintained steady contact while I kept their private text streams permanently monitored. Utilizing my programming training, I configured a localized script that would automatically push the message straight to the top of Scott's phone inbox with a bright, undeniable notification he couldn't possibly miss, setting the entire event to trigger the exact second I pressed a specific macro button on my smartwatch during the dinner.

I wasn't entirely certain what kind of public or private reaction he would display, but watching him swallow his pride was going to feel immensely satisfying either way.

With the delivery system locked into the network parameters, I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the old family pictures resting on the shelf, my eyes settling on the face of my mother, Sally Tang.

I let out a heavy sigh, the cold reality settling deep into my chest. Finding out that I was unofficially a member of the main Tang bloodline was definitely the last thing I had ever expected to encounter in this new life, hands down a significantly larger psychological shock than having a magical video-game interface take a total shit inside my brain.

I stared at her faded image, whispering to the quiet room, "So your younger brother Anthony immediately stepped up to take your place as Head after you passed away, but how am I supposed to treat my uncle moving forward? Do I openly tell him that I know the truth about my lineage, or do I just stay far away from the family capital exactly like father always wanted? For some strange reason, Anthony has never once approached me about my background after father died, but does he possess his own internal reasons for keeping his distance?"

Seeking clarity, I brought up the compiled background dossiers I had recently scraped regarding Debby Tang, my uncle's first wife and the maternal origin of both Helen and Scott. Debby Tang, formerly of the high-ranking Song clan based in the Eastern White State, was currently thirty-eight years old. She had been a mere eighteen-year-old noble girl when she entered into a strict political marriage alliance with the next Head of the Tang dynasty.

Anthony had originally been betrothed to another woman whom he deeply loved, but due to this woman demanding the first-wife ranking and leveraging her family's immense influence, his true love was forced to settle for the second-wife spot. Anthony's second wife had lived an incredibly miserable, oppressed existence under Debby’s tyrannical control of the household, eventually causing her and her two children to packing their bags and flee back to her own family estate

. She refused to grant her husband a divorce because she still loved him deeply, but she adamantly declined to reside within the same state boundaries as Debby. Because of the geographic fracture, Uncle Anthony was only capable of visiting his second family twice a year under a heavy layer of sadness due to them residing far away in the Southern Black State.

I found the domestic arrangement incredibly odd and dug significantly deeper into the historical network logs, discovering that the powerful Song clan had routinely placed massive financial and political pressure on the second wife's family structure until they successfully forced her to vacate the Azure State entirely. It was glaringly obvious that this Debby woman was absolute human trash, explaining perfectly why Scott had developed into the exact same brand of arrogant, entitled crap. Fortunately, because Anthony had taken the precaution of keeping Helen close to his side and completely insulated her from her mother's daily toxic influence, he had managed to prevent her from adopting those structural behavioral traits. Scott, however, had been left entirely to his mother’s direct care and rearing, and now the entire university was forced to witness the magnificent results of her parenting style.

Uncle Anthony could only be held partially responsible for Scott's terrible personality, because the Heads of the great four families were truly consumed with the exhausting duty of running the nation's top ten business empires. Sadly, their respective spouses took up the vast majority of the home rearing, acting as the true backbone of the household, a structural reality that mirrored why my own father had completely abandoned that garbage woman who birthed Ashley Hue.

Digging further back into localized surveillance databases, I uncovered documentation proving that Debby and Scott Tang had routinely hired high-priced private investigators over the years to actively monitor my daily activities, track the websites I visited, and catalog the friends I associated with.

It seemed that well before my System awakening took place, they had made a coordinated effort to ensure I was thoroughly alienated from any potential allies. I even managed to locate financial receipts detailing paid bribes slid directly to my high school teachers to intentionally lower my academic grades, ensuring that I passed my required courses with minimal marks to keep me moving along at the absolute bottom of the student rankings.

I let out a sharp chuckle at the digital files. I was never nearly as dumb or incompetent as the school system had made me believe; I had been a perfectly exceptional student until Scott made his presence known in my life, and now everything finally made complete sense. I resolved right then to ensure Scott received the exact same systematic treatment throughout his university career.

Much like the twins had accomplished within their own boundaries, I managed to capture clear electronic evidence of systematic embezzlement occurring within the Tang corporate accounts, detailing millions in family fortune being quietly transferred directly into the Song clan's banking nodes over the years. The transactions were relatively small and cleverly disguised as standard business transfers or highly lucrative, under-the-table contract variations designed to steadily strengthen the Song clan's position.

I meticulously documented every single financial anomaly, locking the encrypted files away into my secure drive parameters to serve as premium blackmail material for future leverage. As a major noble house, the Song clan maintained a heavy commercial presence right inside Star City, and my technical readings indicated that Scott spent a significant portion of his free time lounging around their family-owned businesses, including his absolute favorite local hangout, a luxury bar owned directly by his mother's relatives.

I immediately initiated a low-level observation protocol on those specific locations, mapping out his routines to open up premium revenge opportunities so I could start making life incredibly difficult for the Song family the second they pushed my buttons.

I uncovered an incredibly fun fact buried deep within the political family registries: the Song clan and the Ning clan were actually bitter, historical rival families. It appeared the two factions were currently maintaining a temporary, fragile truce executed strictly through the forced political marriage of Scott and the Tang twins. I tapped my fingers against the desk, contemplating the variables. I wasn't entirely certain how I would utilize this deep structural animosity just yet, but the information possessed immense merit, and I firmly placed the rivalry onto my mental list of strategic possibilities.

My technical preparations weren't just limited to the Tang family lineage, however; today I decided to dig exceptionally deep into the historical records of the Lang family, and the raw clues I uncovered completely turned my understanding of the past upside down.

Pillaging through dozens of deleted archives and high-security government networks hidden entirely from public scrutiny, I located top-secret information concerning the exact operational parameters of the bank heist that had resulted in my father's death. Professional data-wipers had deliberately buried every scrap of information concerning the incident surrounding the Lang family and my father's ultimate sacrifice.

I took a slow, deep breath, utilizing the centering emotional control techniques hardwired into my mind from the Kung-Fu Grandmaster skill to bring my racing thoughts back into sharp focus, forcing my dark impulses down as I accepted that no matter how powerful my training became, I couldn't change the past. I looked back up at the picture of my father and my stepmother, whispering, "Mercy Mu and Linda Lang were the two little girls you manually saved back in that bank vault, sigh... Fuck, Dad, you really managed to pull a massive one over on your son, didn't you?"

With a heavy heart, I systematically uncovered absolutely everything that had been hidden from the world and from my own broken memories. I accessed the internal, unedited bank security camera recordings from that fateful afternoon, fast-forwarding directly to the primary footage where my father, my mother, and the rest of the terrified hostages were speaking, desperate to hear my family's last recorded words. A couple of hot tears spilled over my eyelids as the low-quality audio echoed through my headphones, listening to my father making calm, steady promises to the people around him. In the end, he truly had died a magnificent hero.

The exact segment of the footage that absolutely shattered my composure was the revelation of his motive: he had broken cover to save Linda Lang's life strictly because he knew that I had a massive childhood crush on her.

The screen flickered, displaying my father’s calm face as he shielded the trembling young girl beneath his uniform jacket, his voice clear on the security feed. [Hi, I am Officer Lee. Don't cry, little girl, you are going to be completely fine. You're Linda Lang, right? My son Rick explicitly told me that you were the very first girl in high school he ever met. Do me a favor and tell him that I am so sorry. Now stay down low and don't you dare look up.]

I watched the unedited, brutal reality of what followed next on the monitor, my chest tightening as I noticed that despite the horrific violence exploding across the vault room, young Linda Lang had not looked away from my father's sacrifice for a single microsecond.

I dug further into the private medical networks, pulling up the sealed psychiatric files for both Linda and her driver, Mercy, discovering that Linda had been hospitalized for consecutive weeks following the heist due to severe, near-catatonic psychological trauma.

The timeline aligned perfectly; she had made her sudden return to the high school hallways on the exact same afternoon that Scott's thugs had beaten me into an absolute coma, and my fractured memory of her standing over my broken body to apologize suddenly made perfect sense. She wasn't trying to apologize for the local gang loss or my physical injuries; she was desperately trying to tell me how deeply sorry she was because she harbored an internal conviction that she was directly responsible for my father's death.

Following the traumatic incident, Linda had remained in intensive therapy sessions for a couple of years before finally stopping her visits two years ago.

Immediately after exiting treatment, she had utilized her immense inheritance funds to purchase the luxury estate located right next door to our boundary lines, choosing to live a completely secluded, quiet life driven entirely by an acquired, crippling fear of violence and the sight of blood. I let out a long, internal sigh. Computer Use Mastery had proven to be an incredibly powerful tool in my arsenal, but it was also entirely heartless.

The digital facts you learn don't care a single bit about your emotional state; the information is just raw, brutal, and permanently there. I stared at the blinking cursor on the monitor, wondering if I should immediately share these uncut files with Mary.

One side of my brain desperately wanted to pull her into the room, to show her our parents' final heroic moments out in the open, but the second I recalled how completely destroyed her mental state had been back then, combined with the fact that she was currently carrying our developing baby, I made a definitive administrative decision. Mary had already waited four long years to uncover the truth, so waiting another nine months wouldn't change the underlying reality of the situation. I would take the precaution of waiting until her physical conditioning was perfectly stable after the baby was safely delivered before I ever showed her this security footage. If she were to experience a sudden miscarriage driven by a deep wave of depressive trauma, I would never be able to handle the guilt. I would just have to table the issue and think about the exact timing a bit more thoroughly down the line.

Glancing at the clock, I realized the evening was drawing close, and I was running out of time to execute a proper background search on Linda's father, George Lang. I quickly wrapped up my technical sessions and shut down the supercomputer arrays, because my beautiful wives and my in-laws were scheduled to arrive at the house in less than an hour to collect me so we could all walk over across the property line together.

I stepped into the bathroom to wash the tension from my face, taking a fast shower to clear my head. As I stepped back out into the bedroom and began drying off with a towel, the sound of the front door opening echoed from the stairs, followed quickly by the familiar, sweet voice of Hana calling out for my position.

"Rick, honey! I put your formal suit and your tie neatly out on the bed for you," she called up, her tone bright. "We are all waiting downstairs in the living room whenever you are ready to come down!"

I came out of the bathroom and immediately smiled at what my beautiful wife was wearing. Hana had put on a stunning black spaghetti-strap miniskirt dinner dress that absolutely screamed super-hot trophy wife. Her hair was elegantly tied up into a sexy, tidy bun, and her soaring high heels didn't look comfortable in the slightest, but they brought her height just close enough to match mine. She was wearing matching gold earrings, along with a flawless gold necklace and matching wrist accessories to perfectly complement the gold tie and black suit I had worn at our wedding and was wearing again tonight.

She caught me staring and flashed a playful grin, murmuring, "Oh? You look like you desperately want to kiss me right now. Well, you better go exceptionally easy on my makeup if you do, fufu."

I leaned in, gently catching her lips with mine for a soft kiss before stepping back to reply, "You better hurry right along downstairs while I finish changing out of this towel, or I am absolutely going to mess up your makeup, dear. You look far too exciting for me to hold back right now."

She squinted her blue eyes, thoroughly happy with the intense compliment, and gently rubbed the side of my face before sexily turning around to leave the bedroom.

A few minutes later, I made my way down to the living room and greeted the rest of the family. Mary was wearing a beautiful, sleeveless blue dinner dress paired with a golden-colored silk scarf and a matching handbag. She had styled her shorter black hair with fancy-looking gold hair clips to keep the strands completely out of her face, and she rounded out her attire with flawless gold jewelry. It seemed my lovely ladies had a massive preference for the gold aesthetic tonight.

I let out a silent chuckle, thinking that if I suddenly told them I was technically this generation's reborn Yellow Emperor, they would never believe a single word of it.

My in-laws were both wearing tasteful, casual dinner wear, utilizing an earthy light-tan tone to keep their presentation perfectly neutral among the corporate titans.

Our close group of five traded a few quick, perfunctory greetings and then made absolutely sure we were fully prepared to walk across the property lines. Once everyone was set, we locked up the front door and left our house behind to navigate the completely unknown variables of the meal ahead.

Right before we stepped off our porch, I fired off one simple, direct text message to Linda Lang's device.

[Rick Lee: We are walking over to your house right now.]

Ding-dong.

Father-in-law pressed the front doorbell, and the five of us stood waiting on the grand porch for the heavy front door to swing open. When the lock clicked, there stood Linda Lang. Her face maintained its usual serious composure without a smile, but the subtle alertness in her posture indicated she had been thoroughly eager to answer our ring. She held her hand out with absolute elegance toward the expansive interior of her home, offering a simple greeting.

"Thank you all so much for coming tonight, and please make yourselves completely at home," Linda said, her voice smooth and refined. "Our formal meal will officially start in about a half-hour while the Lang kitchen staff finishes preparing the main courses."

Linda was wearing an incredibly long dress that cascaded all the way down to her ankles, the sleeves reaching fully to her wrists to conservatively cover her entire body. The combination of the dark black dress and her raven hair gave her a highly refined but noticeably sad atmosphere, making it look as though she were actively protesting this entire mandatory family meal as if it were a funeral. But despite her protest attire, her striking features made her look undeniably attractive.

Mary stepped forward, acting exactly like she and Linda were close companions as she noted, "It is so good to finally come and see the inside of your home, Linda. We are all incredibly excited to be here tonight."

Hana then moved in, giving her one of those careful, barely touching air-hugs to ensure they didn't ruin their fresh makeup or crush their dresses. "We brought a few premium bottles of wine along with us as a proper first-time greeting. Thank you so much for having us over."

Watching the interaction, I felt a deep wave of inner calm. No, I absolutely did not blame Linda in any way, shape, or form for what had transpired inside that bank vault four years ago. She honestly had absolutely nothing to do with my father's ultimate death. He and my stepmother had consciously chosen to make that heroic sacrifice entirely on their own merits, and Linda had clearly suffered just as much psychological trauma as I had over the years. I stepped forward, offering her a genuine smile as I greeted her.

"I am thoroughly looking forward to tonight, Linda, even if the entire family dynamic bombs spectacularly," I told her, my tone light. "Thanks for having us over."

Linda looked up, staring directly into my face as she fell into a bit of a daze. I wondered if I was accidentally looking at her with a completely different expression than normal, or if the background data I had read was altering my perception. It was a surreal moment; out of everyone in this neighborhood, Mary, Linda, Mercy, and I could be considered the only surviving fragments of the exact same tragic incident.

She eventually snapped back to her senses, her shoulders relaxing as she almost managed to form a real smile. She offered a slight nod, a distinct bit of light appearing in her gray eyes. It seemed the absolute only place she was capable of showcasing her true underlying emotions was within the depth of her gaze.

Father-in-law then stepped up to offer a warm greeting on behalf of himself and his wife. "It is a true pleasure to join you tonight, Miss Lang. Your family and your father have provided immense assistance to the university administration over the years."

Before long, we were guided into the expansive living room, taking our places across two massive leather couches to wait for the rest of the guest list to arrive.

Within minutes, Mercy Mu came walking out from the corridor, smoothly pushing a refreshments cart toward our position to offer us a selection of drinks. She was currently dressed in a long, pristine maid outfit.

Mercy was in her mid-twenties, an undeniably attractive woman with short blonde hair styled into a tight bob-cut that looked remarkably similar to Mary's. But much like Linda, her facial expression remained completely serious, and my combat instincts immediately picked up on the hidden tension in her frame. This woman had seen real blood before, easily experiencing far more violence than what had unfolded in the bank vault. Analyzing her weight distribution and fluid movements, I could tell her martial arts capabilities sat at least at the Advanced tier, marking her as an absolute genius in hand-to-hand combat.

She paused by my seat, and much like her mistress, she looked at me with a strangely intense expression, tracking the way my analytical gaze observed her posture, acting as if it were the first time she had ever truly seen me out in the open.

Linda took a formal seat on the primary couch alongside the Dean and his wife, while I settled onto the adjacent cushions sandwiched directly between my two beautiful wives. Just as we took our first sips, the loud chime of the doorbell echoed through the foyer, signaling that the next round of high-profile guests had officially arrived at the estate. We had managed to be the first ones through the door.

Mr. and Mrs. George Lang entered the living room, dressed in immaculate white formal wear. They offered our group a series of polite corporate greetings before sitting down on another cluster of the many couches and chairs filling the massive room. Linda immediately moved over to sit flush beside her parents to maintain proper family propriety.

Ding-dong.

The final, high-ranking guests finally stepped through the grand entrance of the home. Marching into the living room with an air of immense authority, the father, the mother, and Scott Tang took their places on the last of the four massive leather couches. Scott’s four wives moved in a row behind them, taking their places on two separate double chairs situated off to the side of the main circle. The expansive living room was now completely packed to the brim with explosive family tension.

Mercy continued to silently navigate the space, serving premium refreshments to the guests while the older generation of family Heads and the university Dean exchanged perfunctory, polite greetings. Scott remained entirely silent in his seat, saying absolutely nothing as he simply glared grumpily across the room at my presence.

I did notice his eyes linger on Hana for a brief moment, silently admiring her daring, hot outfit, but it wasn't the predatory, lustful look that Woo usually displayed; it was just the standard, instinctual reaction of a fresh eighteen-year-old male noticing an attractive woman.

As I sat there scanning the room, I caught Nadia secretly flashing me a quick, reassuring wink from her double chair, her blue eyes dancing with silent amusement. But before I could acknowledge her, the heavy, resonant voice of a man completely captured my attention.

Anthony Tang turned his head, his sharp eyes locking onto my position as he spoke clearly across the room. "Rick Lee, on behalf of the entire Tang family corporation, I wish to offer a formal apology for the past unacceptable behavior of my immature son. Please accept my sincere apology."

Internal shock rippled through my brain. Okay, I absolutely did not see a move like that coming from the Head of the family!