Since neither of the women can cook, and Zhou Ziwei has spent money to buy so many high-quality ingredients, he can't possibly hire a chef to cook for them, right? In that case... it would be better to just order takeout... So it seems that Zhou Ziwei himself is the only one who can cook.
Luan Yuqing shook her head, still finding it hard to accept that Zhou Ziwei, a mysterious and powerful figure in her mind who could practically fly and disappear into the sky, could actually cook.
Is it really true that the capable are omnipotent?
After the two moved their belongings to the kitchen, they locked the door and drove away from home.
Zhou Ziwei had no clue who the mastermind was who had hired assassins to kill his predecessor, but when Wang Xuewei mentioned that he actually owned 38 percent of the shares in the Zhou Group, and might even be the largest shareholder of the entire Zhou Group, he already had a vague answer in his mind.
This was the answer Zhou Ziwei least wanted to happen and least wanted to see.
But no matter what, he was determined to obtain concrete evidence to verify his suspicions.
No matter where the mastermind behind this came from, he had to find it, because he really didn't want to be constantly on people's minds anymore.
The secret about the 38% stake is most likely hidden in a bank safe deposit box. So Zhou Ziwei decided to go to the bank and open the safe deposit box before visiting his nominal father in the hospital.
Even if there was nothing inside the safe, Zhou Ziwei still wanted to check it carefully before making a decision.
Zhongcheng Bank is a local bank in this province. In order to compete with the five major state-owned banks, it naturally needs to provide better services.
In such a small city, very few people would use the safe deposit box rental service. However, even if there were only one person using their bank's safe deposit box, the bank would definitely not shut down the service.
When Zhou Ziwei and Luan Yuqing entered the spotless safe deposit box showroom, led by bank staff, they couldn't see a single ghost in sight.
The staff led the two to the safe that matched the number 275 on the safe key Zhou Ziwei was holding, and then left with a smile.
Zhou Ziwei looked up and saw that the lock on the safe was indeed the kind that required a password to open. Without hesitation, he immediately channeled a wisp of his soul power into it, quickly creating an independent soul entity within it, before gently inserting the safe key into it.
With a click, the safe opened instantly as Zhou Ziwei turned the key in his hand.
Luan Yuqing, who had been idly standing by, widened her eyes upon seeing this and said, "Huh... you didn't seem to enter the password yet, how did the safe open by itself... Oh no... this safe must be broken... maybe it was pried open before it broke... where is the staff member... we have to report this to the bank, this is a serious accident!"
"Shut up!"
Seeing that Luan Yuqing's voice was getting louder and louder, and that she really wanted to call out the staff, Zhou Ziwei immediately growled softly and then threatened, "If you keep talking nonsense, believe me, I'll stuff you into this safe when I leave."
"Ah..." Luan Yuqing realized that Zhou Ziwei might not have opened his own safe. However, she had clearly seen Zhou Ziwei show his ID card, which was exactly the same as the one registered on the safe. How could it be someone else's safe?
However, after hearing Zhou Ziwei's threatening words, Luan Yuqing became twice as bold and no longer dared to speak recklessly.
Although the safe seemed too big to fit a person, Zhou Ziwei's actions defied all reason. Luan Yuqing was genuinely afraid that Zhou Ziwei would roughly fold her up and stuff her into the safe.
Even if she wasn't ravaged to death by Zhou Ziwei, she would still be driven mad with depression.
Seeing that Luan Yuqing had stopped grumbling, Zhou Ziwei ignored her and slowly opened the safe door completely, then took out an old-fashioned kraft paper file bag.
He opened the file bag and glanced at it briefly. Seeing that there wasn't much inside, he frowned slightly, wondering if this was Zhou Ziwei's hidden treasure. However, after looking around and seeing that the safe was empty except for the brown paper bag, he didn't linger. He immediately locked the empty safe again, then picked up the brown paper bag and left the bank with Luan Yuqing...
"You drive for me..."
After leaving the bank, Zhou Ziwei immediately got into the passenger seat, giving the driver's seat to Luan Yuqing.
"Oh...okay..." Upon hearing this, Luan Yuqing immediately understood that Zhou Ziwei wanted to look through the things he had just taken out of the safe. She immediately became excited, and while climbing into the driver's seat, she smacked her lips and said, "But let's make it clear first...if there's anything good, remember to share some with me...hehe...it's the rule of the underworld, everyone gets a share."
Zhou Ziwei said with a wry smile, "There are just a few scraps of paper in here. If you want them, I'll give them all to you after I've read them."
Luan Yuqing curled her lip and said, "Scrap paper? If it were really scrap paper, would you carefully hide it in a bank safe deposit box? Humph... Nobody would believe you..."
Zhou Ziwei ignored her, closed the car door, opened the file bag, and pulled out the first item.
It really was a tattered piece of paper, clearly quite old, with several tears and even one that had been torn, now held together by transparent tape.
This is a birth certificate issued by the hospital when a boy named Song Bo was born 24 years ago.
Strange... This is just someone else's birth certificate, why would they hide it here?
Zhou Ziwei looked at the birth certificate, frowned, and fell into deep thought.
Luan Yuqing, who was standing next to him, didn't start the car immediately. Instead, she leaned over to take a look. When she saw the birth certificate in Zhou Ziwei's hand, she was slightly taken aback. After seeing the handwriting on it and the black and white photo of the baby pasted on the paper, she was slightly stunned and said, "Huh... this is your birth certificate? You weren't called Zhou Ziwei before, you were called... Song Bo?"
Zhou Ziwei's heart skipped a beat when he heard Luan Yuqing's words, and he quickly asked, "How did you know this was my birth certificate?"
Luan Yuqing snorted, pointed at the black and white photo with her finger, and said, "Isn't this a picture of you when you were little? Look... your facial features haven't changed much from how you are now, and... there's a mole on your left eyebrow, such an obvious feature, who else could it be but you?"
"It really is me."
If Luan Yuqing hadn't pointed it out, Zhou Ziwei really wouldn't have thought about it in this way. After all, Zhou Ziwei hadn't been in this body for very long, and as a grown man, he wasn't used to looking in the mirror all the time. So... he was actually quite unfamiliar with his current appearance, not nearly as clear as Luan Yuqing, an outsider.
Now that Luan Yuqing had pointed out the key point, he suddenly felt that the baby in the photo was indeed very similar to himself, especially the mole on his left eyebrow, which was located in the exact same spot as him now.
However, newborn babies have very light eyebrows, so they are very clear in photos. Now his eyebrows are very thick, and if you don't look closely, you can't tell that there is a mole in his eyebrow.
Could this really be my... previous self's birth certificate? But... why does it say "Zhong Bo" on it? And... the date of birth seems different from my previous self's birthday, it seems... more than a month earlier...
Zhou Ziwei still remembers his current birthday quite clearly, because when he was hiding inside the bullet and living as a wandering ghost, he was given to his ex-boyfriend as a birthday present, which gave him the opportunity to be reborn in this body.
Therefore, he would naturally not forget this birthday.
However... the birthday he remembered, whether calculated according to the Gregorian or Lunar calendar, did not match the birth date recorded on the birth certificate.
No wonder...it turns out he's not her biological child.
Seeing the birth certificate, Zhou Ziwei had a clearer understanding. However, a birth certificate alone didn't seem to explain much, so Zhou Ziwei put the birth certificate aside and took out something else.
Just then, a chilling sense of crisis suddenly arose. Zhou Ziwei's expression changed slightly, and he hurriedly whispered, "There's an assassin... Drive!"
Luan Yuqing was watching with growing interest when she heard Zhou Ziwei's roar. She immediately sprang to her senses, started the car without hesitation, and floored the accelerator.
"Boom—" Just as the Mercedes suddenly started moving forward, a whistling bullet shot out like lightning, grazing the rapidly accelerating car body and leaving a deep bullet hole in the road...
Volume 1, Rebirth of a Prodigy, Chapter 185: Killed Again
Startled by the sudden gunshot, Luan Yuqing didn't forget to drive. Although her driving skills weren't exceptional, they performed admirably in this life-or-death situation. As soon as she started moving, she sharply turned the steering wheel, darting into the fast lane. Just as Luan Yuqing swerved, another shot came from above, missing its mark again due to her rapid change of direction, leaving another crater in the dark road.
"That bastard's asking for it."
Feeling threatened with death, Zhou Ziwei felt a surge of anger and stared intently at the rooftop of a building to his right. Although the distance was considerable, Zhou Ziwei, whose vision had been enhanced sixfold, could clearly see a man who looked to be in his thirties aiming a very advanced sniper rifle at their location from one of the windows.
However, Zhou Ziwei knew he wouldn't have a chance to fire a third shot. The moment the ladybug spotted the creature, it immediately and without hesitation flew towards the assassin. The ladybug's flight speed was now almost as fast as a bullet, and the only reason it managed to get two shots fired was because the target was too far away; even a ladybug would need to fly for a while to reach it.
And now... Zhou Ziwei calculated with his eyes, estimating that before the assassin's index finger could press the trigger again, his head would be pierced by a ladybug.
"Pfft—" Just as expected, just as the sniper's index finger was on the trigger, before he could pull it, Zhou Ziwei clearly saw a bloody hole suddenly appear on the guy's forehead. The unlucky sniper twitched slightly and collapsed to the side.
"Damn it... how did I get killed again?"
Zhou Ziwei saw the sniper fall in a pool of blood, but he felt no excitement. The sniper hadn't died at the hands of the ladybug, but rather… been shot down by another sniper. Someone else had beaten him to it and silenced the assassin.
Zhou Ziwei quickly looked in the general direction from which the bullet had come, only to find that it was a commercial building. The building was almost full of people. No matter how good Zhou Ziwei's eyesight was, trying to find someone who might be the sniper there was no different from looking for a needle in a haystack.
Zhou Ziwei's senses were extremely sharp, even capable of detecting hidden killing intent a step ahead. However, he could only sense it when the opponent unleashed a strong killing intent towards him. The sniper on the other side was clearly only there to eliminate the assassin on this side to silence him, and had no intention of assassinating him. Therefore, he did not unleash any killing intent towards Zhou Ziwei, and thus, Zhou Ziwei naturally could not sense the opponent's presence.
"It's all right now, you don't need to drive so fast anymore."
While comforting the panicked Luan Yuqing, Zhou Ziwei frowned and pondered for a moment. He then felt that it was unlikely that the person who shot the assassin was trying to silence him.
If it was indeed a cover-up, it proves they were part of the same group. It's possible that his accomplices might have shot him to silence him if the first sniper had truly failed and was even in danger of being captured.
However... at that time, the first sniper had only fired two shots. Zhou Ziwei and his team's car was still exposed within the sniper's optimal firing range. So, although the sniper missed the first two shots, if it weren't for the presence of the ladybug as a hidden pawn, the sniper's third and fourth shots might not have failed.
However, Zhou Ziwei believed that the other side could not possibly have discovered the existence of the ladybug, which meant that... the other side did not kill the first sniper to silence him because the first sniper failed.
If the two snipers were indeed working together, then even with Ladybug's help, Zhou Ziwei would still have been shot if they had fired at him simultaneously.
So it seems... this wasn't murder to silence him at all, but rather someone was secretly protecting him.
So who exactly was protecting him? Was it the police, or... someone with ulterior motives? Zhou Ziwei couldn't guess until he found them, so he stopped wasting his brain cells and gestured for Luan Yuqing to drive slowly towards Dangyang People's Hospital, while he checked the contents of the file folder again. Inside was a bundle of letters, all quite old, the pages yellowed, some even torn. There were seven or eight letters in total, tied together in a leather case.
Zhou Ziwei untied his leather jacket, picked up a letter at random, and immediately frowned. It was a love letter, exchanged years ago between a woman surnamed Song and a man surnamed Zhong. As Zhou Ziwei read through the letters one by one, a clichéd and boring love story gradually surfaced. At the time of the correspondence, the woman surnamed Song was a young master's student, while the man surnamed Zhong was a university professor.
This was a doomed teacher-student romance... After all, in that era, teacher-student relationships were simply unacceptable, especially since... the man surnamed Zhong was already married. Therefore... this relationship could only end in tragedy. And the most tragic part was that, just when the two had decided to end this hopeless love, the man surnamed Zhong, driven by lust, took advantage of the woman surnamed Song.
Even more coincidentally... on this one occasion alone, the woman surnamed Song became pregnant.
In those days, teacher-student relationships were already intolerable to the world, and premarital pregnancy was an even bigger deal. Helpless, the woman surnamed Song, upon discovering the consequences, could only hastily marry a man surnamed Zhou who had been pursuing her, and gave birth to a baby boy nine months later... The woman surnamed Song did not want her husband to know this, so before giving birth, she specially used her connections to force her husband to go on a business trip to another city for more than two months.
In just over three months, the woman surnamed Song not only gave birth to her child, but also obtained two birth certificates for the child.
The two birth certificates bore different names and were dated almost two months apart… Of course, the husband could only see the fake birth certificate, which proved that the child was conceived by the woman surnamed Song after she married him, while the real birth certificate was hidden away by the woman surnamed Song…
After reading these letters, everything became clear. Zhou Ziwei's ex... that tragic man who was suffocated to death by the assassin with a car seat cushion was indeed not his father's biological son, but the son of some "professor" surnamed Zhong.
At the very end of that stack of letters, there was a letter written specifically to her son by a woman surnamed Song.
The letter said that she discovered she had cancer and knew she wouldn't live much longer, so she transferred a portion of the shares in the group company she had founded to her husband, Zhou Zhengxiang, who had been cuckolded for half his life, and another portion to her youngest son, Zhou Zixu.
However, she wanted to save the largest portion for Zhou Ziwei, the child she had with another man, "Zhong Bo".
At that time, her two sons were still young, so although the shares were divided into three parts, they were temporarily managed by her husband, Zhou Zhengxiang. She also stated that the shares must be fully returned to her sons no later than the time her two sons turned twenty-five.
As for her youngest son... since he was indeed her and her husband Zhou Zhengxiang's biological son, she had nothing to worry about. But as for her eldest son... although she had concealed everything very well back then, she vaguely sensed that Zhou Zhengxiang seemed to know something.
Fearing that Zhou Zhengxiang might embezzle her son's shares in the future, she took extra precautions and left her son a separate legal document proving that the shares had been transferred to Zhou Ziwei's name.
If he hasn't received his rightful shares by his son's 25th birthday, he can use that legal document to sue his father, Zhou Zhengxiang, at any time... The last item in the brown paper bag was the legal document proving that the shares had been transferred to Zhou Ziwei's name.
Zhou Ziwei opened the document and glanced through it. Sure enough... this shareholding represented a full 38 percent of the Zhou Group's equity. He had also seen in the previous documents that his adoptive father, Zhou Zhengxiang... the nominal chairman of the Zhou Group, actually only owned 21 percent of the shares, while his younger brother, Zhou Zixu, held only 15 percent.
The combined shares of the two of them amount to only 36%, which is far less than Zhou Ziwei's individual share. The remaining 26% is held by several smaller shareholders.
Just as I expected...
Zhou Ziwei closed the document in his hand, and had a clearer idea of what had happened to him recently, including the assassination attempts.
It is absolutely true that wealthy families are often corrupt.
The wealthier and more powerful a family is, the more ruthless and cruel they become in their struggles for inheritance rights or for money and power; this is nothing new.
Moreover… his predecessor's identity wasn't clean; he wasn't Zhou Zhengxiang's biological son at all. Therefore, it was only natural that an even more brutal struggle for power would erupt from this. It's likely that Zhou Zhengxiang already knew his wife was cheating on him, having essentially given him another man's child as a "buy one get one free" deal at the time of their marriage…
No man could remain indifferent to such a thing. If he didn't know, that would be one thing, but if he knew, it would be strange if he could let it go. If the Zhou family were just ordinary people, and if his wife hadn't left most of the property to that adopted son, then... Zhou Zhengxiang probably wouldn't have done anything too extreme. After all, there's no blood relation, but more than twenty years of upbringing can't just disappear.
However, this sense of family affection seemed so pale and powerless in the face of the temptation of shares worth hundreds of millions.
And so everything that followed seemed to fall into place naturally...
Before seeing this birth certificate, Zhou Ziwei had always assumed his ex-boyfriend was at least twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old. However, the birth certificate clearly stated that his current age was only twenty-four. The original agreement clearly stated that Zhou Zhengxiang would temporarily manage the shares of his two sons, but he would have to hand over all the shares to his sons after they turned twenty-five.
There are only half a year left until Zhou Ziwei's 25th birthday, and at this time, assassination attempts against Zhou Ziwei have suddenly occurred frequently. So... the sordid things hidden behind this are obviously obvious.
Zhou Ziwei smiled slightly, stuffed everything back into the brown paper bag, and then said to Luan Yuqing, who was still peeking around, "Stop looking around like a thief... Hurry up and drive to the hospital! Sigh... What a tragedy... That old man... He's actually quite pitiful... Really, the culprit is that old scoundrel surnamed Zhong... Don't let me run into that old guy, otherwise... I'll skin him alive with my own hands."
Luan Yuqing was driving, and although she glanced at the letter a few times, she couldn't make out anything. However, she clearly recognized the "professor" surnamed Zhong who appeared frequently in the letter. When she heard Zhou Ziwei say this, she couldn't help but exclaim, "No way! You...you're going to kill your own father?"