He continued kneading her shoulders while she squinted with her eyes half-closed; he didn’t know what she was thinking.
The atmosphere grew tense in an instant.
Yang Haoran grew anxious inside. They couldn’t run out of things to talk about now, or it would fast-forward straight to the beating stage.
Just as Yang Haoran racked his brains, desperately trying to come up with something to say, Liu Ruoxi spoke up.
“That’s enough. Stop. Open the computer.”
At her words, Yang Haoran’s heart skipped a beat. He kept kneading her shoulders and feigned nonchalance. “Mother, why open the computer? Is yours broken?”
“Heh… My computer’s fine. It’s your brain that’s broken—and your guts have gotten pretty bold.” Liu Ruoxi’s voice was chilling to the bone. “What are you dawdling for?”
“Right away, right away.” Yang Haoran didn’t dare pull any more tricks. He knew that if he kept whining, the feather duster treatment was inevitable.
He crouched down, fumbled for the computer’s power switch, then stood and turned on the monitor.
After the startup chime, the Windows login screen appeared.
Thank goodness—rebooting didn’t restore the page from before shutdown.
“Step aside.”
Liu Ruoxi rose to her feet and shot her son a glare. Yang Haoran meekly shuffled to the side.
She sat down at the computer chair and maneuvered the mouse, clicking through each drive one by one. Whenever she spotted a folder, she dove in to check it out.
Seven or eight minutes later, she had scoured every folder. No sign of the video she was after. Yang Haoran, standing nearby with his head slightly bowed, let out a quiet sigh of relief. Good thing he was one step ahead. Ever since Mom had found and deleted those videos from his folders last time, he’d gone online to learn how to hide them.
And it had worked like a charm!
From the corner of her eye, Liu Ruoxi caught the upward curve of her son’s mouth. She let out a cold laugh. “One more chance. Are you going to confess, or do I find it myself?”
“Find what?” Yang Haoran played dumb. “Mother, just tell me what you’re looking for. I’ll find it for you.”
“Last chance.”
Liu Ruoxi turned to her son, her gaze locking onto Yang Haoran with icy intensity as she repeated herself.
Under that stare from his mother, Yang Haoran felt a chill run down his spine. But he’d held out this long—there was no way he was confessing now.
“I don’t get it.” Seeing her gaze grow even colder, he hurriedly added, “I really don’t.”
He was betting she couldn’t find it. If she could, why pressure him like this?
It didn’t add up. He was brimming with confidence.
“Hmph…” Seeing her son stubbornly cling to his denial right up to the end—like a mule with its mouth locked shut—Liu Ruoxi smirked, her lips curving into a beautiful arc. She gave him a smile that wasn’t quite a smile. “I gave you your chance, but you didn’t cherish it. Don’t blame Mother later.”
Yang Haoran caught that expression, and a bad premonition surged in his heart. That look, that tone—she had him dead to rights. Did she really know where it was?
Liu Ruoxi clearly had no intention of saying more. With practiced ease, she opened the browser and typed into the search bar: “how to find hidden folders on a computer.”
Yang Haoran stared at those words, dumbfounded.
Hoist by his own petard! He’d thought to search how to hide folders, but never considered she could search the opposite.
With a right-click and search, the page loaded a slew of methods. Liu Ruoxi clicked one at random and scanned the instructions.
A few minutes later, as the screen displayed the folder labeled “Study Materials,” Yang Haoran wanted to cry.
“Anything else to say?”
Liu Ruoxi asked flatly.
“My beautiful and merciful Mother~”
With a thud, Yang Haoran dropped to his knees, his face a picture of misery. “Can you give me one more chance? I swear I’ll never do it again.”
Liu Ruoxi watched her son on the floor, hamming it up like a drama queen. Her face remained impassive, though the corner of her mouth twitched faintly.
How had she given birth to something like this?
“Old rules. Butt or hand?”
Liu Ruoxi sat in the computer chair like a queen on her throne, issuing her command.
“Ca… can I pick neither?”
Yang Haoran gazed up at his Mother with hopeful eyes, asking timidly.
“What do you think?” Liu Ruoxi sneered.
“Fine, Mother.”
Looking utterly deflated, Yang Haoran wilted as he fished the chicken feather duster out from under the bed.
The motions were all too familiar—not his first rodeo.
He handed it over to the Old witch with great reverence, making one last desperate plea before the end. “My beautiful and merciful Mother~ Could you go easy?”
“No.”
Liu Ruoxi replied indifferently.
“Fine!”
With no hope left, Yang Haoran resigned himself to his fate and sprawled across the bed. Compared to his hand, his butt had more padding to take the hits.
“Take off your pants.”
Just then, a chilling voice from behind sent him plummeting into an abyss.
“No way, Old witch!” Yang Haoran jolted upright, the curse almost slipping out.
“What did you call me?”
Liu Ruoxi’s icy gaze pierced like eternal frost, bone-chilling.
Realizing his slip, Yang Haoran switched to a fawning smile faster than a face-change in opera. “I meant my beautiful and merciful Mother! Why go this far? You’ve never made me drop trou before.”
“The past is the past. Now is now. If I don’t teach you a real lesson, will you even keep your mother in your eyes anymore?”
Liu Ruoxi sneered. “Take them off? Or not?”
Was that even a choice? Yang Haoran didn’t think so.
His face crumpled in despair, his heart turning to ice. Three days off his feet, at least.
Resigned, he reached for his waistband, about to pull down his pants—then noticed his mother was still watching.
“Mother… Mother, could you turn around first?”
Yang Haoran’s face flushed with embarrassment.
“Heh…”
It was the first time she’d seen her shameless son look so bashful. Liu Ruoxi couldn’t help but chuckle. In that instant, her coldly beautiful face—so like eternal ice—seemed to melt away, stunning in its radiance.
Yang Haoran stared, transfixed. He’d always known his mom was breathtakingly beautiful. When he’d read the [Li Yannian Song], the first image in his mind had been her heavenly visage.
There is a beauty in the north,
Unparalleled and peerless.
One glance topples a city,
Another topples a state.
And would you not know
How cities and states fall?
Such a beauty is hard to find again.
At the same time, a rush of heat surged in his lower body. He grew aroused without realizing it.
But all his attention was fixed on his mother’s exquisite face.
Catching her son’s leering gaze, Liu Ruoxi snapped back to her senses. Her cold mask returned as she snapped expressionlessly, “Hurry up and take them off. Do I need to help you?”
“Oh! Oh!”
Yang Haoran came to and yanked at his waistband without thinking—completely oblivious to his erection standing at attention.
In his distraction, he pulled too hard. The zipper’s teeth raked harshly across his upright member.
Everyone knew the male organ was the most vulnerable spot. Any injury there brought excruciating agony.
“Ah~!”
A wretched scream tore from Yang Haoran’s throat. He staggered, his face twisting in pain as he collapsed onto the bed. His complexion drained to white, cold sweat pouring down as his hands instinctively clamped over his crotch, as if that could ease the torment.
He wailed nonstop, writhing on the bed in torment.
His sudden scream stunned Liu Ruoxi. Seconds later, she came to herself. The tension vanished from her face, replaced by raw panic and worry. “What happened? Haoran? Where does it hurt?”
“It hurts… hurts so much…”
Yang Haoran’s features contorted faintly, his face bloodless and pale, drenched in cold sweat. He could barely speak in fragmented gasps.
In that moment, the searing pain blotted out his mind entirely.
His hands clutched his groin desperately, but trickles of fresh blood seeped through his fingers, dripping onto the bed. Soon, his hands were slick with it.
Seeing her son clutching his crotch, hands drenched in blood—this sight made Liu Ruoxi’s head spin with dizziness, as if the sky itself had fallen.
Everything else forgotten, her heart burned with anxiety beyond words. Her own face paled, etched with worry, her trembling hands fumbling across her body for her phone.
Liu Ruoxi certainly knew where her phone was, but in her panic-stricken state, her mind had gone blank. She fumbled around for what felt like ages before finally pulling it out.
Her trembling fingers unlocked the screen with shaky swipes. She navigated to the dialer, and her finger instantly hovered over the 120 emergency key.
But at that exact moment, disaster struck. Sweat from her tense grip made her finger slip, hitting 20 instead. She didn’t have time to think. She wiped the sweat away, deleted the number, and punched in the correct digits in one frantic blur of motion before hitting call.
The pain was too excruciating to bear. Yang Haoran’s brain triggered a defensive shutdown, and he passed out cold from the agony. In his fading consciousness, he vaguely heard his mother’s anxious voice, dreamlike and illusory, growing ever more distant.
Neither of them noticed that strands of blood from Yang Haoran’s gore-soaked right hand had seeped into the black ring on his index finger.
The ring was pitch black all over, with a recessed layer in the center of its surface etched with all sorts of mysterious, unknown patterns.
A closer look would reveal that those enigmatic patterns were actually divided into two distinct sections, one above the other.
A few seconds after the blood soaked into the ring, a faint ethereal glow flashed across its surface. It was as if something had been awakened. The first pattern in the recessed inner layer lit up, emanating a soft light. The glow then spread downward like liquid, flowing toward the second mysterious pattern at the ring’s base.
As the light coursed over the base pattern, more than half of it illuminated. Just as it seemed poised to continue, a jagged crack—like an unfathomable abyss—halted its progress. Beyond the abyss lay the remaining portion of the pattern.
The incomplete design clearly couldn’t fully activate. Before long, the glow at the ring’s base dimmed and faded back to normal.
Only the first pattern continued to emit its faint light.
That initial pattern flickered three times, then released an invisible pulse of energy that rippled outward in all directions, scanning like a radar sweep.
Liu Ruoxi, standing right beside Yang Haoran, was the first to fall within its range.
A few seconds later, a voice echoed in her mind.
【Conditions met. Game Program loading…】
All of this happened in the span of just ten seconds. But Liu Ruoxi, burning with anxiety, didn’t notice the prompt that had rung out in her head.
Her entire focus was on her son, Yang Haoran.
