Chapter 1

1: 1

It hurt to watch my parents break their backs in the fields, so I dug into my own pocket and bought a sixty-thousand-dollar combine harvester.

For five years, whenever relatives or friends came to borrow it, we never charged them a cent.

Then, while I was out of state doing rural-aid work, my sister called out of nowhere.

"Sis, Uncle Brendan Cobb and his people borrowed our harvester and won't give it back, and they smashed a hole in Mom's forehead!"

In the photo she sent, my mother's face was covered in blood and my father's whole body was tracked with mud footprints.

Across a paddy full of ripe rice, ours was the only crop still standing, uncut, already lying flat and sprouting.

I tagged Uncle Brendan in the Cobb family group chat: Why did you hurt my mother? Why won't you return the machine you borrowed?

Uncle Cobb was the first to snap at me: Watch your manners. That's your uncle.

Aunt Cobb: Your mother had it coming. The village is renting the machine out to make money, and getting hit is the least she deserves for ruining village business.

I said the harvester was mine, and I had the ownership papers to prove it.

The group went silent for a few seconds.

Brendan's wife was the first to send a voice message: Once the machine comes into Cobb Village it's communal property. You were the one who said we're all family and could use it freely. Now that you see us reaching out to other villages to earn money, you're jealous and want a cut?

My eldest cousin jumped in right after: Don't be so greedy. You've bled the village dry all these years, made yourself a fortune, and now you won't even let us earn a little?

That line got likes from the whole village.

The year I graduated, I brought thirty million followers back to the village to help. I turned grain that used to rot in the fields into cash, straight into every villager's pocket.

And now that made me a bloodsucker?

I screenshotted every message, took my mother to the hospital to have her injuries documented, and filed a police report.

Then I made a call.

1

The call connected. On the other end was my college classmate's husband, one of the top civil litigation lawyers in the capital.

I laid out the situation, and when I finished he asked whether I had evidence.

I said I did.

The injury report, the group chat screenshots, and the video my sister took.

His reply came fast:

"That's enough. Clear ownership, clear physical injury, and they even admitted what they did in the group chat. This case isn't in doubt."

"Lock down your evidence chain first. I'll have my assistant send a letter tomorrow."

I hung up. My sister came over.

"Sis, are you really going to sue them? But they're our relatives…"

"A courtroom doesn't recognize relatives. Only evidence."

I thought back to the video. Uncle Brendan had brought seven or eight men to seize the harvester by force. My mother stood in front of the machine and wouldn't move, so Uncle Brendan grabbed a carrying pole and swung it straight down onto her forehead.

If family ties meant anything, I never would have come to the point of a lawsuit.

I got a room for my sister and sent her to the hospital to stay with our parents.

Once everything was arranged, I drove out to Cobb Village.

At six in the evening, as my car turned in at the village entrance, I saw two people crouched at the bridgehead from a distance.

The moment they spotted my car coming, one of them jumped up and ran into the village.

Word traveled fast. I hadn't even cut the engine in front of our own yard when Aunt Cobb, our neighbor, came rushing out.

"Leo, why are you back all of a sudden?"

I shut the car door and looked at her.

"My mother's head got split open and the harvester got seized. How could I not come back?"

The smile dropped halfway off Aunt Cobb's face, and she started spinning excuses.

"What do you mean, split open? Your mother's just in poor health. We barely touched her and she knocked her own head."

I spend twenty thousand a year on a full physical for my mother, and the doctors always say her body is in better shape than mine, and I'm the young one.

A woman who's done thirty years of farm work, sent to the ER by a light touch?

"Dislocated arm. Intracranial hemorrhage. She needs brain surgery."

My voice was so calm it sounded strange even to me. "You call that barely touching her?"

The color drained from Aunt Cobb's face, and she quickly started making things up again.

"You came back for the medical bills? Let me tell you, if I hadn't given your father a bowl of food back then, you'd never have existed at all."

I stared at her for a full three seconds.

"After that bowl of food, my father fixed your family's irrigation ditch for seventeen years."

"You do the math. Figure out what that's worth in wages."

My mother told me it was a bowl of spoiled food she'd meant to feed the dog, that she'd handed it to my father just to toy with him.

Aunt Cobb had no comeback, and then the loud aunt-in-law came out of the house.

Hands on her hips, her voice booming:

"Leonora Cobb, since when does a junior talk back to her elders like this? Made a little dirty money and now you think you're something? Came back to the village to throw your weight around, is that it?"

It was right around dinnertime, and people from inside and outside the village had all crowded up at the yard gate to watch the show.

"Not enough to cause a scene in the group chat, she has to come back and cause one in the village too. So arrogant."

"Ungrateful wretch. The kind who forgets her roots the moment she has money."

My eyes went to the swaggering uncle who'd said it, and I couldn't help a cold laugh.

"The harvester cost sixty thousand. I bought it. For five years, anyone who came to borrow it got to use it, and I never took a single cent."

"Renting one out for a day brings in four or five thousand gross. You do the math. Add up how much you all saved using it free for five years."

"And that's forgetting my roots?"

When I finished, everyone fell silent.

Just as someone was about to speak again, a cough came from the back of the crowd.

The mayor stepped out through the gap in the bodies.

"Little Leo." He lowered his voice. "People coming and going everywhere, and you're not even ashamed."

"Come inside with me!"