After My Guarantee Defaulted, I Picked Up Scrap Paper in the Human World

The moment my brother signed his name on the guarantee, I took on a debt of tens of millions for him.

Overnight, department chief Li Haoran became a deadbeat. His girlfriend went straight into the arms of his sworn enemy, and someone splashed paint on his parents’ home to humiliate them. It took him just three days to go from an elite government official to society’s scum.

Then I woke up in a pit in a scrap heap and discovered that wastepaper could “talk.”

A shredded report revealed the rival company’s Achilles’ heel. A yellowed diary recorded old scandals officials dared not mention. Even discarded supermarket receipts could be pieced together to reveal the secrets of market fluctuations. This wasn’t a superpower. It was reality delivering one final, crushing blow to my head when I had nowhere left to turn.

I began using this “trash” to “tell fortunes” for the city.

I helped a bankrupt businessman find the contract that would turn his fortunes around, untangled a decade-old problem for an overwhelmed district chief, and persuaded an arrogant tycoon to willingly pay me an astronomical consulting fee. The people who once saw me as an ant began calling me “Master Li.”

When the brother who once ground me into the dirt showed up again in a Rolls-Royce,

when the girlfriend who abandoned me came crying and said she regretted it,

when the daughters of wealthy families approached me with their own agendas,

I just smiled. I saw every calculation behind every look, as clearly as I once saw the truth that people had deliberately erased from every scrap of wastepaper.

This time, I would be the one picking through scraps who set the rules of the game.

I would use the “trash” rejected by the whole city to build the tallest tower and find the purest notes, until everyone who had betrayed me could no longer reach my shadow.

This is a story of betrayal, destruction, and rebirth.

It is also the story of how one man uses the humblest means to fight his way back to the highest form of dignity.