Chapter 4

I contacted an entertainment company and paid a fortune to hire 108 deadpan actors.

I also required each of them to wear the best noise-canceling earbuds available.

Then I rented out the city center’s biggest stand-up comedy stage.

Everything was ready.

I called my brother and filled my voice with guilt and apology.

“Bro, I’m sorry. I was wrong this afternoon. I shouldn’t have blown up at you.”

“Aren’t you always saying you want to be a stand-up comedian?

I booked you a stage. Tonight. Think of it as me making it up to you.

There’ll be a lot of people in the audience watching you perform.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line, followed by a burst of ecstatic laughter.

I held back the corners of my mouth.

He must have thought he was about to make a killing.

Little did he know, this time I was going to make him lose everything!

When he saw me backstage at the theater, he excitedly hugged me and then immediately told a joke.

But I just turned my back to him, pretending to straighten my collar, my face completely blank.

The smile on my brother’s face faded a little. He suspiciously glanced at his watch, but there was no reaction at all.

Still, the excitement of going onstage soon overwhelmed him, and he confidently walked out onto the stage.

The spotlight hit him. He cleared his throat and took the mic.

“Hello, everyone! I’m the star of the show tonight—a stand-up comedy genius whose business career got in the way, Leon Davis!

I know everyone’s tired after a long day of work, so let’s start with something simple to loosen up.

Tell me, what animal is most likely to fall down?”

He paused, then confidently dropped the punchline: “A fox! Because it’s very sly... and also very slippery!”

I looked at him and didn’t laugh. Neither did anyone else in the audience. The theater was dead silent.

The smile on his face stiffened. Awkwardly, he cleared his throat and forced out what he thought was another killer line.

“Do you know, when the farm animals held a meeting, the sheep went baa baa baa, the cow went moo moo moo... so what does the horse say?”

“‘Ma Shuo’ Tang! Han Yu! Hahahahaha!”

What answered him was a stretch of cold silence.

The way everyone looked at him was like they were staring at a fool.

My brother was visibly panicking. He started firing off jokes like crazy:

“Why did Hua Tuo prescribe Sima Yi medicine twenty times the normal dose?”

“Because Sima thought he was treating a hippopotamus!”

“Where do mice go after they die?”

“To Australia, because they become die-mice!”

...

No one responded.

He took a deep breath, his expression twisted as if he was about to march to his death:

“What do you do if watching stand-up comedy is so cold it freezes you to death?”

“Draw a right angle, because a right angle is ninety degrees—it’s warmer!”

But 108 blank faces just stared silently at him.

In that eerie silence, I saw cold sweat bead on my brother’s forehead.

At the same time, the screen on that digital watch on his wrist started flashing red like crazy.

“Five consecutive failures on a major task. Punishment mechanism triggered. The deduction amount will now grow exponentially!”

【—100,000 yuan】,【—500,000 yuan】,【—1,000,000 yuan】...