Reborn With A System: Your Bragging Lies; My Fortune

CHAPTER 2 - FIRST BLOOD

LIN FENG'S POV

My hand closed around the kitchen knife before my brain caught up with what my body was doing.

Someone was pounding on my door again, harder this time, with three heavy slams that rattled the frame in its hinges. I was sure it wasn't Cheng Ye. His knock was slow and even.

This one was angry.

"Lin Feng! Open up! I know you're in there!"

I recognized the voice a second before I remembered what day it was. Boss Han.

My landlord's cousin. He ran the pawnshop two streets over and had loaned me eight hundred yuan three weeks before I died the first time. In my old life, he'd shown up the morning of the reunion demanding it back with interest I never agreed to, threatening to tell everyone at the reunion I was a deadbeat if I didn't pay.

I set the knife down slowly, my pulse hammering in my throat.

This had already happened once and I knew exactly how this conversation went.

I opened the door. Boss Han was already leaning against the frame, his arms crossed, a gold chain glinting against his thick neck.

"You've got some nerve ignoring my calls, hmm?" he said, jabbing a finger toward my chest without touching me. "The eight hundred yuan is due today, Lin Feng. You think because I'm family to your landlord I'll just forget about it?"

"I don't have it," I said.

The same words I'd said in my old life. My voice was flatter this time, in a way that surprised even me. His face twisted into an ugly, pleased expression, like he'd been hoping I'd say exactly that.

"Of course you don't. You never have anything. You know what everyone says about you? You're still renting this same rat hole after ten years while the rest of your class is buying apartments in the Capital."

He sneered before continuing.

"My shop alone made more last month than you've made all year. Two hundred thousand yuan in cash, just from the electronics counter."

The words triggered a small, cold click inside my chest, like a key turning in a lock.

{Falsehood detected. Verifying.}

I went still. 

That was the voice from last night, quiet and clinical inside my skull. Boss Han kept talking, smugly listing numbers to make himself feel bigger in front of a man he thought had nothing.

I wasn't listening anymore. My whole body had gone tight.

{Verification complete. Falsehood confirmed. Asset located: electronics inventory valued at fifty thousand yuan. Transferring ownership rights to host.}

My phone buzzed in my back pocket.

Boss Han kept talking, oblivious.I pulled the phone out with fingers that weren't quite steady and stared at the screen.

A bank notification appeared first, then another message from an unknown number.

The message was from someone claiming to be his shop's accountant. They were confused about why a portion of the electronics inventory had suddenly been transferred under my name.

I stared at the screen, fifty thousand yuan, not two hundred thousand, but real. My heart began hammering. I looked up at Boss Han, who was still in the middle of telling me how people like me would always be beneath people like him.

"Two hundred thousand," I repeated quietly.

He blinked. "What?"

"You said your electronics counter made two hundred thousand last month."

"That's right. And you'll never see numbers like that in your whole miserable life." He put his hand to his waist, still standing on his lie.

I almost opened my mouth and said, It's mine now, just to watch his face change. But I stopped myself, I didn't understand the system yet. I didn't know what it could do, what it couldn't do, or whether there were rules I hadn't discovered.

So I kept quiet.

"Get out of my doorway," I said. "I'll have your money by tonight." He sneered, clearly not believing me, but something about my tone made him step back anyway.

"You'd better. Or everyone at that reunion tomorrow is going to hear exactly what kind of trash you are." He turned and stomped down the hallway, muttering under his breath.

I closed the door and pressed my back against it, my heart slamming so hard I could feel it in my ears.

The system was real, not a fever dream. Not a delusion brought on by dying and being reborn. I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor and stared at my phone.

Fifty thousand yuan.

I opened the message again, reading it twice. Then I searched for the shop's name, there it was, Han's Pawn and Trade.

The ownership records for a portion of its electronics inventory had been updated that morning, transferred to an account under my name.

My fingers tightened around the phone. "So it really works..." A shaky laugh escaped me. I wasn't rich, not yet. But yesterday, I had been a broke man waiting to die. Today, the system had handed me something worth fifty thousand yuan simply because someone had lied about his wealth.

I stared at the screen, there had to be a catch. Or rules. I needed to understand them before I tried anything else. One thing was already clear, the system didn't reward hard work, it didn't reward kindness.

It listened for lies, and somehow, it turned those lies into something real. My thoughts immediately went to tomorrow.

The reunion.

A room full of people who had spent ten years building lies about their success just to make me feel small.

My lips slowly curved.

What would happen tomorrow when they started bragging? And what would happen when Ryan opened his mouth?

My smile faded because Ryan, more than anyone else in that room, never knew when to stop bragging. My phone buzzed again, this time, it wasn't the system.

It was the class group chat.

The chat had been silent for months, but suddenly it was alive with a message from Ryan himself, posted only seconds ago and tagging the entire reunion group.

There was a photo attached, it opened it with a hand that wouldn't stop trembling. The moment the image loaded, my stomach turned to ice.