Chapter 45: The Younger Brother Living in My Shadow
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 45: The Younger Brother Living in My Shadow
"I didn't apply to Lesser Demon Academy. They’ve got the wrong person. Just send them away," I replied, my voice remaining calm and indifferent.
After all, my previous thoughts were merely conjectures. I wanted to see if I could bait him into revealing more.
However, the fact that Lesser Demon Academy had already arrived was likely true. They were moving fast; there was still plenty of time before the semester started. Their speed was second only to the Witch Academy.
Even the Witch Academy didn't force students to arrive early—unless, of course, they were students who had been "abducted" like me.
They were in such a hurry, likely because Lesser Demon Academy had shown up only to find I was gone. Had the academy put pressure on them?
The thought almost made me want to laugh.
"My dad already made the arrangements with Lesser Demon Academy! Everything was settled, and then you just vanished. Do you have any idea how much face you're making my dad lose?"
"Right, right. I'm making your dad lose face. But when exactly was this 'settled' with me? You're throwing a tantrum over something completely fabricated?"
I adopted an air of impatience, sounding as if I might hang up at any second.
I even pointedly said "your dad" instead of "our dad." He was the one who started it, though he probably didn't even realize it. He had likely already excluded me from the family in his mind, yet they still wanted to use that connection to squeeze every last drop of value out of me.
"You! You're my dad's son! Of course you should listen to him! Is this any way for a son to act?"
"You won't even call me your brother, so is this any way for a younger brother to act?" I shot back. So he did know I was his father's son? The way he spoke, I thought he’d forgotten.
My younger brother had grown up pampered by our parents. They protected him well, but unfortunately for him, he had me as an older brother.
To my parents, I was probably just a mental patient. Under their constant influence, my brother had accepted that label as fact.
But I was a transmigrator. I won't claim my IQ was leagues above his, but my sheer breadth of experience was enough to keep him perpetually suppressed.
If he hadn't called me a "psycho" with such disgust when he was little, telling me to "go get treated if you're sick," I wouldn't have bothered holding a grudge against a child.
But since he started it, I wasn't going to show him any mercy.
Besides, back then I was still adjusting to the irrational power of Spirit Vision. I could perceive the emotional information he projected with agonizing clarity. I didn't have the mental energy to forgive a child's malice.
So, while my parents believed my brother would grow up to be exactly who they wanted under their protection, only Yang Yunhan himself knew that he had always lived in my shadow.
Because of this, he often went to our parents to complain about me. But he could never articulate exactly what I’d done; he would just cry. Crying, however, was a devastating weapon. Consequently, I fell further and further out of their favor.
Now that my brother was older, he knew those old tricks were useless. This realization was actually thanks to me inadvertently "enlightening" him.
In a family where profit was weighed more heavily than affection, one had to prove their worth to be loved.
Since then, he had been constantly competing with me—or rather, trying to show me up. My parents were delighted by his change in attitude. To prove their younger son's excellence, they even had him skip grades. Although he was several years younger than me, his academic progress was nearly catching up. Next year, he would be taking the College Entrance Exam and filling out his applications.
He had awakened his Spirit Vision as well. It happened naturally, progressing step-by-step like most people in this world.
It was the polar opposite of my experience. If others gradually stepped into the "Inner World" of Spirit Vision, I was like someone standing on the cliff of the "Surface World" who was suddenly shoved into the abyss of the Inner World by the act of transmigration. The effects of Spirit Vision had manifested with a violent, horrific intensity.
For a long time, Spirit Vision was the shadow over my second childhood. I even suspected the experience had left me with depression, which was why I occasionally displayed bouts of selfishness and coldness that were entirely unlike my old self.
This was the only thing I envied about my brother. Even with how much my parents favored him, I never felt a shred of jealousy over that.
Perhaps the simplest reason was that my soul didn't belong to this world.
As these thoughts swirled through my mind, the voice on the other end of the line became meaningless static, no longer even registering in my conscious mind. I imagined his expression would be quite a sight if I hung up right now.
I pulled the phone away from my ear and held it in front of me. The noisy shouting became a faint buzz. The screen displayed the contact name for my brother.
Without hesitation, I tapped the end call button.
Following the dial tone, I cleared the phone app from the background, opened the payment app linked to the device, and transferred all the money to my new phone.
As I worked, I wondered how long it would take for him to call back.
To my disappointment, even after I finished the transfer, the phone remained silent. Was the situation not that serious after all? Did he call just to scream at me?
If so, I could only conclude that my brother’s brain really wasn't functioning at full capacity.
To be honest, I felt a bit of pity for him. My parents' love didn't come without a price. His desperate drive to surpass me wasn't entirely born of his own resolve; my parents' harshness played a significant role.
He had his own hobbies once. For instance, he loved assembling things and was quite good with his hands. That lasted until a classmate introduced him to computers, and he fell in love with building PCs. Naturally, my parents disapproved. It was an expensive hobby, so they strictly forbade it.
Now that I was gone, he’d probably gotten his hands on the computer in my room.
I wondered if he’d taken it apart yet.
My parents had promised him that if he got into a good Transcendent Academy, they would buy him a computer or let him build his own.
I wasn't particularly interested.
The family's finances weren't so dire that they couldn't afford a single computer.
Did they just not want to spend the money? Did they want to "recycle" me? The 50,000 credits from Lesser Demon Academy would certainly leave a lot of change after building a decent PC.
I just found it hard to believe I was valued so cheaply.
The money I could make just by working would be more than that.
If they were better at manipulating people, they could have gaslit me into working and sending money home. That would have been far more profitable than selling me off to Lesser Demon Academy.
Maybe I should give them more credit. Perhaps they knew I wasn't the type to be easily manipulated, so they chose a method that solved the "problem" once and for all.
Right now, I was calmer than ever. My good mood from earlier had been shattered by a single phone call.
However, I needed more information to seal the cracks in my resolve.
For instance, I wanted to ask Sister Bai about the specifics of Lesser Demon Academy. Although we had both agreed it was a "trap" during our chats, I didn't know the gritty details.
I only had a stereotypical impression formed from the internet and our conversations.
I needed to confirm and strengthen my loathing for Lesser Demon Academy. I wanted to set the nature of these events in stone, ensuring that no matter what twists or "revelations" occurred later, my heart would remain unshaken.
Only then would this chapter of my life truly be closed.
But just as I sent the question to Sister Bai, my old phone began to ring again.