Chapter 79

Chapter 79

Ye Mingxi's words were met with unanimous agreement from the Ye family.

The Ye family had endured Hua Rui, the hidden venomous snake, for far too long and were no longer willing to tolerate her.

"Back then, when the Ye family acquired the Hua family's company, Hua Rui's father couldn't accept the reality and jumped to his death from his office building. Hua Rui was only in her twenties at the time and witnessed her father's suicide, which left her emotionally unstable. She blamed us for her father's death. To avenge him, she hired people to kidnap Mingyi, wanting us to experience the pain of losing a loved one."

Tears welled up in Mrs. Ye's eyes as she said, her voice heavy with remorse: "After the incident, Hua Rui fled abroad. Your father and I were unable to pursue her, and considering that the Hua family was left with only her and her mother, we didn't pursue her to the end. We never expected that she could extend her influence so far from abroad. She even bribed Chu Jianguo to adopt Mingyi under the pretense of adoption, only to abuse him for so many years."

Mrs. Ye wished she could turn back time, realizing that Ye Mingyi's eighteen years of suffering were the result of her momentary lapse in judgment. She would have strangled Hua Rui, that vile woman, with her own hands.

While the Ye family was filled with righteous indignation, Chu Hengyi himself remained indifferent. He even found it amusing and actually laughed out loud.

The Ye family was baffled by Chu Hengyi's laughter. Ye Mingxi couldn't help but ask, "What are you laughing at?"

"Nothing," Chu Hengyi shook his head. His gaze fell on Ye Mingzhao as he asked pointedly, "If you were me, what would you do?"

For Ye Mingzhao, anyone who posed a threat to the Ye family was his enemy. And when it came to enemies, Ye Mingzhao would never show mercy.

However, while he was ruthless in action, he never spoke in absolute terms, even in front of his family.

Ye Mingzhao maintained his composure and said, "I would ensure she faces legal consequences."

Chu Hengyi studied Ye Mingzhao intently, then smiled and said, "Then let's do it that way."

*

After fully integrating the resources and channels of the Zhou family business, the Ye family business's market value had surpassed one hundred billion yuan. What kind of influence could a multinational corporation with such a massive scale wield in the international market?

Hua Rui, hiding abroad and too afraid to show her face, soon discovered the consequences.

One by one, her publicly listed assets went bankrupt. Long-time suppliers and distributors found excuses to breach contracts, and her hidden businesses were uprooted. Her loyal followers of decades were either arrested or turned against her.

As more and more people were arrested, the secrets Hua Rui had worked so hard to conceal over the years were exposed to the light—

Back then, Hua Rui resented Ye Linyuan for using underhanded tactics to acquire the Hua family's company, leading to her father's suicide. But in the twenty-plus years since fleeing abroad, Hua Rui had done plenty of evil to establish herself, even surpassing Chairman Ye in ruthlessness.

Competitors who clashed with Hua Rui either met with misfortune or were ruined, never to recover. Some didn't even know until their deaths that their sudden calamities were Hua Rui's doing. Now that they knew, how could their friends and family let it go?

Others simply wanted to curry favor with the Ye family business or seize the market share Hua Rui had occupied.

Overnight, Hua Rui felt as though she had become the enemy of the world, surrounded on all sides. She didn't even know how many people were involved. But Hua Rui was well aware that her situation was becoming increasingly perilous.

So, before her arrested confidants could reveal more evidence against her, Hua Rui made a decisive move and fled.

"What? She's gone?" Upon receiving a tip from an informant, Second Brother Ye blurted out a curse: "That venomous snake is quite fast!"

But even though Hua Rui had escaped, her lairs remained.

Based on the confessions of the arrested suspects, international police raided several of Hua Rui's carefully constructed hideouts around the world. In one villa, they discovered a large number of video tapes and audio recordings. These recordings spanned over twenty years—so long that the original archives ranged from tapes to floppy disks, USB drives, and even categorized folders on computers.

The police brought all the evidence back to the station for review and found that the videos were all recordings of Chu Hengyi being abused from childhood. Given that almost all other hideouts had been cleared out, the fact that these videos were preserved intact suggested that Hua Rui had deliberately left them behind.

As Ye Mingzhao had pointed out earlier, the maximum criminal prosecution period in China is twenty years. Since Chu Hengyi's abduction had occurred twenty-one years ago, the prosecution period had long passed. As for the crime of inciting Chu Hengyi's adoptive parents to abuse him and secretly recording the videos, it was difficult to legally define the offense.

Moreover, Hua Rui had already fled. Even if the Ye family wanted to hold her accountable, they would first need to find her.

Hua Rui likely knew this, which was why she deliberately left the videos behind before escaping—to make the Ye family witness firsthand how miserably Chu Hengyi had suffered over the years.

This was Hua Rui's taunt against the Ye family! And it was also her retaliation!

After receiving the information from the informant, the Ye family managed to obtain the videos of Chu Hengyi being abused from the police in M country (assuming it refers to a specific country, e.g., 'Mexico' or 'Malaysia'). These videos spanned over twenty years of recordings, with the earliest ones being so blurry that they seemed to have been pixelated.

The Ye family members sat in front of the computer, watching the three or four-year-old Chu Hengyi, dressed in tattered clothes, crawling around in a yard full of yellow soil and mud, starving and fighting with dogs for food, almost being bitten by a protective wolf dog. Tears uncontrollably streamed down their faces.

Even with the unclear quality of the footage from over twenty years ago, one could still hear the desperate and piercing cries of the child as he was scared away by the wolf dog.

In the same frame, Chu Jianguo was carrying his biological son Chu Qingyi on his back, doing farm work in the yard. Hearing Chu Hengyi's cries, he scolded him gruffly: "What are you crying for? All you ever do is cry. Your father isn't dead yet, who are you mourning for?"

Not satisfied with just scolding, he slapped Chu Hengyi across the face and cursed angrily: "Even the pigs are out of food, and you still haven't gone to cut the pig feed? All you do is slack off. I'm telling you, if you don't bring back the pig feed today, don't even think about eating tonight. Our Chu family has no money; we can't afford to feed freeloaders!"

Hearing this, Mrs. Ye couldn't hold back any longer. She grabbed Chu Hengyi's wrist, her voice choked with sobs: "These bastards, I want to kill them."

This was undoubtedly an angry outburst. But at this moment, Mrs. Ye truly felt the urge to kill.

No mother in the world could endure such a thing. Mrs. Ye started watching the video from the beginning, pausing every now and then to catch her breath. After watching for a long time, she hadn't even finished one tape. One can imagine how cruel the content of the video was.

Ye Mingzhao thought of the scars on Chu Hengyi's body, the hideous scar left by a bear trap on his ankle, and how in the original story, Chu Hengyi would join forces with Hua Rui to destroy the Ye family from within.

At this moment, he also felt the urge to kill Hua Rui.

"This bastard! Lunatic!" Ye Mingchen's face also turned pale with anger. He noticed that Ye Mingyi, who was also raised in the Chu family, was beaten, scolded, and abused, reduced to skin and bones, while the Chu family's biological child Chu Qingyi was raised clean and well-fed.

They knew that Ye Mingyi was a child of the Ye family, yet they deliberately separated the Ye family's flesh and blood, and even abused them!

If they couldn't catch Hua Rui, couldn't they at least catch Chu Jianguo?

"These heartless monsters deserve to rot in jail!" Ye Mingxi paced back and forth in the study, feeling a surge of anger rising to the top of his head, making it impossible for him to sit down: "The two of them knew the identity of the third child, yet they concealed the truth, using the guise of adopting a child to abuse children."

"Isn't there anyone to deal with such a heinous act?"

Of course, there is! And it must be dealt with!

Ye Linyuan handed over the relevant evidence to the police and sued Chu Jianguo for child trafficking and abuse in the name of Chu Hengyi's biological father.

With the tapes, USB drives, and bank transaction records as evidence, Chu Jianguo and his wife had no room for rebuttal. They were well aware of this. After all, the bank transaction records were provided by them, and the clues about Hua Rui hiring people to record the videos were also provided by them. They never doubted the Ye family's capabilities. So from that moment on, Chu Jianguo and his wife had been waiting for this day.

Now, it had finally arrived.

Although Chu Jianguo and his wife confessed to their crimes without hesitation and even gave up the opportunity to appeal. To ensure that Chu Jianguo and his wife would be sentenced to more years, Chairman Ye still dispatched the Ye family's legal team to handle the case.

Facing the Ye family's relentless retaliation, Chu Jianguo and his wife offered no resistance. Only after being detained did they request to see Ye Mingzhao and Chu Hengyi one last time.

"I've told you everything I know, and you must remember what you promised me, to find the real murderer of my son, to make Zhou Yueze and the Zhou family pay the price!"

—That's right, in order to catch the real murderer of Chu Qingyi, Chu Jianguo and his wife had no choice but to exchange their hopeless future for Ye Mingzhao and Chu Hengyi's intervention. They now pinned their hopes on Ye Mingzhao and Chu Hengyi to find the mastermind behind the deliveryman who poisoned Chu Qingyi, to bring down the Zhou family who had bullied Chu Qingyi, and to send Zhou Yueze, the indirect murderer of Chu Qingyi, to jail.

"We are useless, we couldn't avenge Qingyi, it's up to you now." Wearing a blue prison uniform, Chu Jianguo sat in front of Chu Hengyi, tears streaming down his face as he repented: "I know, we wronged you, whatever you want to do to me and your mother is deserved. It's my fault that you couldn't reunite with your family, it's my fault that you suffered for eighteen years, but Qingyi was innocent."

"He was so young, he had just graduated from university, he had so many dreams and ambitions, his life had just begun, and he was killed. He died without closure, his eyes wide open in anguish!" Chu Jianguo's eyes were bloodshot, as if he wished he could shed tears of blood: "You must help me find the murderer! This is what you promised me, remember, you must find the murderer for me! Otherwise, I won't rest in peace even as a ghost..."

Chu Hengyi looked coldly at the weeping Chu Jianguo sitting in front of him.

Although he had long known that his adoptive parents only adopted him for money, and there had never been any emotional connection between them. But until this moment, seeing Chu Jianguo, who was willing to beg for his son's revenge, Chu Hengyi suddenly realized that there had been a slight emotional connection between them.

At least in the heart of the former Chu Hengyi, the Chu family had been his only family for many years.

It wasn't until Ye Mingzhao intervened and exposed the lies of the Chu family that Chu Hengyi truly realized that the Chu family, who had been with him for eighteen years, were not his family, but parasites leeching off him.

It was absurd that, after being utterly disillusioned with the Ye family, he still clung to illusions about these parasites.

Fortunately, before he could cling to the Chu family like a lifeline, trying to deceive himself into thinking that he wasn't universally despised, that he could also have family by his side, Ye Mingzhao personally intervened and severed his illusions.

That slight emotional connection was severed by Ye Mingzhao himself.

Like a lizard shedding its tail to escape danger, at this moment, Chu Hengyi suddenly felt an overwhelming sense of relief.