Li Duidui got his name because he dui (retorts, attacks) everyone equally and mercilessly.
The reason for this, in my opinion, is that Li Duidui, this vampire, probably hates everyone in the world.
Seeing Li Duidui arrive, Little Wolf choked on a mouthful of corn, unable to swallow it down. Meimei hurriedly tried to dive into the fish pond. I continued to grill meat with my head down. Li Peipei was the most combative of us, rolling up her sleeves, ready to fight her brother, but she was deflated by the first thing he said.
"Li Peipei, have you paid your rent?"
"..." Li Peipei silently put down her sleeves. "The school hasn't paid my salary yet..."
Li Peipei works as a teacher at a vampire school. Her working hours are from 10 PM to 4 AM every day, which is considered a civil servant in their non-human world. It's a fixed salary with no commission. But Li Peipei herself likes to live extravagantly, racking up a lot of debt, so she has to live in her brother's dilapidated apartment building, enduring a monthly dose of capitalist exploitation.
"Then why did you stand up?"
"I've been sitting for too long... I stood up to stretch." Li Peipei said this and obediently sat down again.
With Peipei suppressed, Li Duidui’s gaze shifted, catching Meimei still trying to squeeze herself deeper into the fish pond. Behind his gold-rimmed glasses, his eyes narrowed. “Yu Meimei, your fat is about to squeeze all the water out of the fish pond. Stop thrashing around and get up."
Yu Meimei sat up, dripping wet. "Landlord, hello... I'm just a little dehydrated..."
"What about your rent for this month?"
Yu Meimei made a bitter face. "Winter, the water is cold, the fish in the river are hard to trick, and there aren't many big ones anymore. Business is bad..."
Meimei sells fish at the market... using her mermaid powers to trick the fish in the river over, picking out a few big ones, and then dragging them to the market to sell. From a certain perspective, she is the "trafficker" of their fish world, and also the "cannibal" of the fish world.
I think she's actually a very scary mermaid, but she thinks she's very ethical because she never sells small fish and doesn't catch them all in one net, content with enough to cover her daily expenses.
Li Duidui stared at the grilled fish bones in her hand. “And you still have the nerve to eat fish?”
Yu Meimei pouted and threw the fish bones into the pond. “I was just licking… the bones…” She pointed to the side. “Little Wolf’s eating meat too!”
Li Duidui turned his head again and stared at Xiao Lang (Little Wolf), who was curled up in the corner, his face turning purple from the corn stuck in his throat. “You? And you think you have the right to eat?”
Xiao Lang's expression changed. He took a deep breath, puffing out his cheeks until they turned red, and his fur bristled, revealing his wolf head. His throat thickened, and he finally swallowed the corn. Before he could even catch his breath, he quickly said, “I-it’s vegetarian… I-I’ll go back to work right away!”
Xiao Lang owed Li Duidui about half a year's rent.
He is a part-time composer and a totally broke session drummer. Normally, he comes across as timid—even when in wolf form, he is just a soft, fluffy version. But the moment he gets behind a drum kit… he becomes a real werewolf.
Xiao Lang used to be in a band, letting the band sing his songs, but after the band went bankrupt, he has been living in Li Duidui's apartment building, continuing to write songs and submit them, frustrated and unsuccessful to this day.
Li Duidui gave a cold snort. “Not a single one of you pays on time.” His tone said it all: A bunch of trash. Not one worth a damn.
Then…
His gaze fell on me. "Su Xiaoxin." He wasn't polite to me either. "You owe three months, a total of four thousand five hundred yuan."
This eight-story old apartment building actually has two apartments on each floor, each with one bedroom, one living room, one kitchen, and one bathroom. The rent for the others is all one thousand, but because I live on the top floor, with a "roof garden," although the fish pond that Yu Meimei soaks in often leaks water into my living room, because of the "garden," Li Duidui forcibly increased my rent by five hundred yuan.
Meanwhile, Li Peipei lives on the same floor as me but pays the standard 1,000 because of the family discount.
I know that Li Duidui is targeting me.
Li Duidui hates everyone, especially me.
Because he is such a stubborn and old-fashioned person. But I broke his routine, glimpsed their world, so that he had to accept me, an ordinary human, living in this building that only allows "non-humans" to live in.
So I really don't believe a word of what my three monster buddies say about him liking me.
And even if Li Duidui targets me like this, I still have to live here. Even if my life is becoming more and more deviated from the path of a normal person, I still have to live here! Even if sometimes I am even threatened with life-threatening danger from these non-humans, I still have to live here!
It's not because I like this place so much, nor because I like these non-humans so much, but because they took me out of that bland, boring, and hopeless life. They gave me stories to tell, they…
Gave me royalties!
Although the royalties aren't quite enough! But I'm still very grateful that on that night, entangled with smog and fog, a werewolf snatched my rations, so that I could run into the other side of this world.
"My royalties will arrive next week." I replied to Li Duidui, indifferent to his attitude.
Because I also realized that for someone like Li Duidui who can't stand anyone, you can't expect to do anything to win him over even a little bit. The only thing you can do to him is to roast him back.
And when you're in the wrong and can't roast him back, it's best to have a cold expression and a calm voice, looking like you're confident and not afraid of him. Because in this way, even if he roasts me, he won't feel too good about it.
Sure enough, Li Duidui looked annoyed by my calm reaction. He crossed his arms.
Li Peipei nudged me twice with her elbow, like a classmate in elementary school trying to remind a deskmate who is being watched by the teacher.
"If I remember correctly, a few days ago, that classmate of yours who works as an editor came to find you and should have transferred a royalty payment to you? You have money to spend, but no money to pay rent?"
I turned my head and saw that the four people barbecuing on the roof, except for me, were as quiet as dead chickens. On the issue of money, no one dared to say a word in front of Li Duidui.
I decided I didn't want to be a dead chicken, so I raised my head, stared at Li Duidui, and said calmly, "The roof is leaking, the stairwell is missing lights, the toilet is often clogged, and the water heater is broken. I did a major overhaul of the roof for you, and the money was all spent on that. Logically speaking, the landlord should pay for these things."
I pointed. "That over there is the only bus stop here, three hundred meters in a straight line, but because Chongqing's terrain is mountainous, it takes fifteen minutes to walk down. Given the current housing prices in Chongqing, your eight-story old apartment building is in a remote location, the building is old, the transportation is inconvenient, and there's no property management or elevator. Renting a 40-square-meter small room for eight hundred yuan is inflating the housing prices. You've been charging me double the rent for several months. You're just bullying me because I'm human, right?"
After I finished speaking, the roof was silent. The three non-humans stared at me blankly, their eyes filled with respect.
But after a moment, Li Duidui said coldly, completely unmoved, "I'm just bullying you because you're human." He asked, word by word, "So what?"
I really wanted to smack that shameless vampire with a bag of charcoal. But… holding back my fury, I forced a smile and said, “I’ll pay next week.”
Only then did he swagger away. Before closing the roof door, he waved his hand and said, "Clean up the rooftop for me. If I find you secretly barbecuing again, I'll fine you all."
"Bang."
The door slammed shut. The four of us stood there like defeated chickens.
Li Peipei patted me on the shoulder. "Xiaoxin, try harder next time."
I took a bite of a slightly burnt skewer, thinking in my heart that for today's comic update, I'll draw Li Duidui as a pig.