My Wife Faked Her Death, So I Buried Her Lies

My wife died in a mudslide during her company’s team-building trip. Yet I wasn’t the least bit panicked, and I was even in the mood to go out drinking. That was because, in my previous life, I had dropped everything and rushed to the scene of the accident. After searching for half a month without finding my wife’s body, I could only erect an empty grave containing her belongings. Before I even had time to grieve, the bank called demanding repayment of a debt, and it turned out my wife had taken out an enormous loan to expand her company. I was the sole heir to her estate. I began working myself to the bone to pay off the bank loan, all while looking after my wife’s parents and younger brother. Twenty years later, I had gradually built the nearly bankrupt company into a thriving business, cared for her parents through their old age until their deaths, and raised her younger brother into adulthood. Years of exhaustion finally caught up with me, and I collapsed. At the very end of my life, as I lay dying, my wife appeared with a man and a little boy. Their happy little family thanked me for all my hard work, saying the fortune I was leaving behind would be enough for the three of them to enjoy the rest of their lives. I died of rage on the spot. When I opened my eyes again, I was back on the day I received the phone call about the mudslide! This time, I would make them reap what they had sown. “Your wife was swept away in the mudslide, and we’re doing everything we can to find her, so please get here as soon as possible!” my wife’s secretary, Zhao Li, said urgently over the phone. “Okay, okay, I’ll buy a ticket and head over right away...” Memories flooded my mind. At this point in my previous life, I had immediately gone to the train station to buy a ticket, and it had taken me two days to reach the remote mountains where my wife and her colleagues had been traveling. Once I arrived, I searched like a madman for half a month, only to come up empty-handed. Of course, finding a woman who had faked her death and deliberately set me up was nothing short of a fantasy. Why would I repeat the same mistake in this life and let those two cheating scumbags play me for a fool? I walked into the bedroom, where there was a safe whose combination Shao Yayun had never told me, but that hardly posed a challenge, and the safe opened on my second attempt. The company seal, property deed, and household registration booklet were all inside. I also found the bank’s loan disbursement agreement in the safe. The funds were scheduled to be released today. No wonder the bank staff had insisted that I was the one who transferred the money after her accident. After all, as far as any normal person was concerned, Shao Yayun had been swept away by a mudslide and was dead, so how could a dead person transfer money? That meant the only person who could have transferred it was her husband—me, the ultimate sucker. Of course, even if I had wanted to transfer the money, I would have needed both the company seal and her signature, so in theory, no one but her could touch that enormous sum. “Why are you still at home instead of booking a ticket, and do you even care about my daughter, or have you been hoping she’d die all along?” my mother-in-law demanded just as she, my father-in-law, and my wife’s younger brother arrived. In this life, I was far calmer than I had been before. Looking closely, I noticed my mother-in-law was wearing makeup and a brand-new outfit, while my father-in-law had brought a suitcase; they looked less like parents rushing to the scene of their daughter’s accident and more like tourists heading out on a trip. What was more, after the accident, their standard of living hadn’t declined at all, but had actually improved. They had known about Shao Yayun and Gu Feng all along. Shao Yayun must have kept secretly sending them money after faking her death, which was why they had all lived so comfortably. I was the only idiot kept in the dark, working myself to death to repay her debts. To put it bluntly, her entire family had been bleeding me dry. “I’ve already bought the train tickets, and the train leaves in an hour, so let’s hurry to the station!” said my brother-in-law, being so fucking thoughtful for someone who usually made me book his rides even for a trip to the supermarket, all because he was terrified his sister would come home and run into me. He wanted to cover for her. “Okay, let’s leave now,” I said, nodding quickly. I had already emptied the safe and put everything in the bag I carried with me, and I had changed the combination as well. Of course, that alone was nowhere near enough. Shao Yayun was smart, and if she noticed anything wrong, she could simply come back from the dead by emerging from the mudslide, leaving her with nothing to lose. Instead, she could transfer the money whenever she wanted and run off with Gu Feng to enjoy herself. So if she was supposed to be dead, I had to make sure she stayed dead. As soon as I got into the car, I called my best friend, Ren Fan, and asked him to bring some people over to stay at my house and watch it for me. I specifically told him that the contents of the safe were extremely important and that someone had to guard it around the clock. “Even when you’re sleeping, you’d better have your arms wrapped around that safe!” I made that very clear. In short, I didn’t want to give Shao Yayun any chance to approach the safe, even though I had changed the combination and emptied it. Because once she got near it, she would become suspicious. On the other hand, as long as she couldn’t get to the safe, she would keep clinging to hope and continue pretending to be dead. She wanted an opportunity, while I wanted to buy time.“Damn it, why is someone in the house?” Shao Yayun muttered as she arrived outside the villa wearing a mask and clothes that concealed her features shortly after I left. Her face darkened when she saw people inside. According to Shao Yayun’s plan, I should have left home by now. Then she could open the safe and get to work. First, she would use the house, the cars, and the company as collateral for loans. She would transfer out all the company’s available funds, then immediately transfer the bank loan as soon as it arrived that afternoon. She could finish everything in a single day, then run off with Gu Feng. With twenty or thirty million, they could stop working altogether and enjoy life. As for the mess at the company and at home, it would all land in my lap, and why the hell should she care? But now that someone was in the house, how was she supposed to get the company seal and everything else? “Gu Feng, go over to my house right now and find out what’s going on,” Shao Yayun said, taking out her phone to contact him. Both the phone and the number were new, and she had even arranged a new identity in advance, the perfect disappearing act. She had gone to great lengths to vanish without a trace. “That son of a bitch was worried about someone stealing the valuables, so he specifically asked some people to watch the house!” Gu Feng reported after looking into it. “Damn it, how did this happen!” Shao Yayun was so frustrated she could have coughed up blood. “If this won’t work, why don’t we try something else, since we’ll have plenty of opportunities later?” Gu Feng suggested, happy as long as he had money to spend and a woman to fool around with. “No, this is the best way, because then I won’t have to look after those two old fossils, and I can leave them to him along with my brother, whom he’ll definitely take care of too, so he’ll be the one earning money while my whole family gets to spend it,” Shao Yayun said, having long since figured out exactly what kind of man I was. Once she died, I would inevitably devote myself to caring for her family. “But there are people in the villa, so we can’t even get inside!” Gu Feng said helplessly. “I’m the only one who knows the combination to the safe, and I refuse to believe they’ll stay home every single day, so if one day isn’t enough, we’ll wait ten, and if ten days aren’t enough, we’ll wait a month; sooner or later, I’ll get to that safe, and then we can secretly take everything out, get a huge pile of money, and live the good life!” Shao Yayun said stubbornly. She dared to take that gamble because no one could touch a cent of the company’s money without the things inside the safe. Shao Yayun was even hoping her death would become an established fact as soon as possible. Once that happened, who would believe a dead person could transfer money? Even in the worst-case scenario, if I forced the safe open and tried to touch her money, she could simply come back from the dead; she had thought through every possible move. “We found these things downstream from the mudslide.” When my in-laws and I arrived in the mountains, Zhao Li handed me a small bag covered in mud. Inside were a phone, an ID card, and a diary. I already knew what was in that diary—it was all fucking calculated to manipulate me and tug at my heartstrings. The first time I read it, I had sobbed my eyes out. There were entries like, “I love my husband more than anything, and if anything ever happens to him, I’ll treat his parents as my own.” And, “If my husband dies, I’ll never remarry, and I’ll stay faithful to him for the rest of my life...” Every word had struck me deep in my soul. That was why, in my previous life, I had slaved away like an idiot to pay off her debts and support her parents and brother, never marrying again. “Keep looking—I have to find my wife.” I deserved an Oscar, because in this life, I cried even harder than before and searched for her like a madman. “That idiot is searching everywhere for you, and he’s passed out from crying a few times, hahaha!” my brother-in-law secretly texted Shao Yayun. Seeing her brother’s message made Shao Yayun even more confident. Just as in my previous life, I searched for a week, and throughout that week, Ren Fan stayed at my house, keeping a close watch on the safe. After a week, Shao Yayun was presumed dead, and we erected an empty grave for her. In my previous life, I had gone straight home after the burial and begun my miserable existence of working myself to the bone. This time, I was in no hurry to return. While my brother-in-law and the others were taking an afternoon nap, I made a special trip to the relevant authorities to obtain a death certificate. Word of my search for my wife in the mudslide had already spread, and the authorities had helped me search for some time. By then, they were virtually certain Shao Yayun had died in the mudslide. So they readily issued the certificate. “Please look up all the phone numbers registered under this ID!” I said at the mobile carrier’s store, presenting my wife’s death certificate and ID. I was certain that if I transferred the money now, Shao Yayun would immediately receive an alert on her phone. Just as I suspected, in addition to her old number, Shao Yayun had registered a new SIM card a week before the accident. Once I had the new number, I headed straight to the bank, knowing I had only one chance and had to think through every step without making a mistake.“Please cancel the bank alerts going to this number and redirect all notifications to this one!” I said, producing Shao Yayun’s death certificate, ID, and company seal. Since the phone number and bank account were registered to the same person, the bank was cooperative as well. “Please transfer all the money into this account!” I said, taking out my own bank card after everything else was done. The bank manager gave me a strange look, clearly thinking my earlier efforts had been completely unnecessary. But I was a major client, and the money would still remain in their bank, so whatever doubts she had, she kept them to herself. The death certificate proved crucial. When the deposit notification appeared on my phone, I broke into a grin. The money had originally been in the company’s corporate account. Transfers from a corporate account to a personal account were generally limited to fifty thousand, and anything above that required the company seal, the financial seal, and the legal representative’s personal seal. Without those seals, even if Shao Yayun wanted to transfer the money now, she could only move up to fifty thousand, and unfortunately for her, all the seals were in my hands. I was certain Shao Yayun was still completely in the dark. “I’d like to freeze all the money in my account for forty-nine days, during which no one, including me, can withdraw any of it!” I said, pulling another unexpected move. “Mr. Zhou, why would you want to do that?” The bank manager was thoroughly confused. “This money belonged to my late wife and me, and even if I need to use it, I want to wait until after her first seven-day mourning period as a way of honoring her memory,” I explained. The bank might not have bothered with an ordinary depositor, but I was a major client with over twenty million in deposits, so they promptly froze the account. I was doing this to prepare for the next stage of my plan. In my previous life, that bitch had not only taken every penny but also borrowed against our house, our cars, her parents’ house, and even the company. Now I would follow her path and leave her nowhere to go.