A Stranded Heiress Picked Up at Low Tide

Brooding, aloof poor boy ✘ soft-hearted rich girl who saves him

The night a landslide struck, I arrived soaked to the skin and knocked on the most rundown door in the fishing village.

The boy who opened it was Ke Mu, the poorest and most unyielding boy in the village.

He blocked the doorway, his eyes darker than the night tide. “Get lost at daybreak.”

I offered him money, and he burned it right in front of me.

I arranged a scholarship for him, but he tore up the application with his own hands.

Even the savings I secretly left for him were thrown back onto my windowsill, untouched.

Then, two months before his college entrance exams, he lost two fingers at a construction site while saving Uncle Sixth, who had been injured.

Red-eyed, I slammed the scholarship money I’d saved for three years onto his hospital bed. “This isn’t charity. It’s a loan! And you’ll owe interest!”

He stared at me for a long time, then finally rasped, “All right.”

Later, he got into my university, started a business, took it public, and became the youngest rising star in the tech world.

At the celebration banquet, he played an old, faded recording in front of everyone:

My nineteen-year-old self, shouting in the pouring rain, “Ke Mu! You have to get into college!”

Now, impeccably dressed in a suit, he slid a property deed and a check for an astronomical sum across the table toward me.

“I’ve paid back the principal, Mu Ke.”

“Now it’s time to settle the interest on you ‘buying’ the rest of my life.”