Payback: Reversal

1 - Dirt on My Leather

To some extent, a house reflected the personality of its owner.

In a certain penthouse of a luxurious apartment, a young man in his late twenties walked in while looking at his surrounding in disdain. The further he went, the deeper his frown.

From the moment he walked into the penthouse, the place was decorated with lavish, gaudy ornaments that cared not for harmonious aesthetics, but how much it could blind the visitors with its price tag. Rather than looking splendor and classy, it looked cheap and tasteless instead, no matter how expensive those things were.

The young man quietly clicked his tongue at this display of ostentation. It made his blood boil how some of this tasteless, expensive junk had to come with the money out of his pocket.

With something like a penthouse, they usually provided an interior designer to help the owner decorate their home, and the young man definitely remembered this place had one too. But the fact that this place came out like this only meant that the owner had no regard for the designer's advice.

A gaudy, selfish, authoritative person.

The young man loathed the very fact that he had to face this person often. But the disdainful scowl on his face vanished when he entered the sitting room where that person was. Instead, a gentle, respectful smile appeared on his handsome face.

"You're here," the penthouse's resident, a woman clad in expensive clothes and jewelry, sat on a chaise facing a fireplace—even though it was summer.

The young man walked forward and greeted the woman with a trained, fake smile. "Are you well, mother?"

The woman he called mother without any sincerity looked up from the catalog she'd been reading. "That would depend on your report," the young man groaned inwardly, knowing that he'd walked out with that catalog and a list of things to buy.

"Nothing changes much. There's no one better than me anyway, so the support will always go to me."

The woman narrowed her eyes. "Always? It only goes to you after that brat's accident, what are you being so smug for?" her word was sharp and cold, as if she was talking to a business partner rather than her son. "Can you even guarantee that you won't lose it once he comes back?"

"Even if he comes back, what can he do?" the young man smirked. "He's total trash now, I make sure to turn him into one."

The woman rubbed her chin in contemplation, before asking him. "So he truly becomes trash now?"

"I send people to befriend him and make him play and fight all the time. He barely passes his classes, and from the amount of money he took, he seemed to bribe the professors so he can graduate."

At the young man's nonchalant report, the woman laughed in a grating voice, prompting him to groan inwardly. "So there's no way he will recover, right?"

"They only support him because he acted like a goodie two shoes for his mother," the man shrugged. "Now that the woman's gone, it's so easy swaying him around."

The mother clapped her hands in a shameless display of delight. "Ahh...it's really a good thing that woman's dead," she leaned her head back and closed her eyes in bliss. "But you should keep watching that brat. Continue to shove him down even after he comes back. Until you are officially announced as successor, you can't slack off."

The young man responded with practice patience. "Yes, mother."

"Is that third-rate woman still prancing around the house?" she suddenly had a scowl on her face.

Where else would a wive be? The young man wanted to roll his eyes, but managed to hold them in. "Unfortunately," he said.

"Tsk—I shouldn't have left that place," the woman clicked her tongue. "To think my palace will be ruled by a wench..."