Throughout the entire late-night snack outing, Ye Zhen had been remarkably considerate, like a virtuous and gentle man. It wasn’t just the shrimp peeling — the moment Jiang Xiaoyi felt her food was a bit too spicy, an iced cola with a straw already inserted was quickly delivered to her; when a bit of chili oil splashed on her hand, Ye Zhen’s slender fingers pulled out a wet wipe for her with perfect timing…

Had Ye Zhen truly changed? He’d become considerate, thoughtful — even gentle?

Especially when both of Jiang Xiaoyi’s hands were covered in crawfish sauce, and her phone rang with a call from Director Miao. Ye Zhen quite naturally reached into her pocket to retrieve her phone, then unlocked it by holding it up to her face and pressed the speaker button for her.

Before answering, Ye Zhen also thoroughly understood the principle of avoiding suspicion, specifically asking Jiang Xiaoyi whether he should step away for a moment, and only continued sitting there after she said no.

Director Miao’s call was mainly to report on the situation with one of Ruiyi’s offline print merchandise supply chains.

“In short, because environmental regulations have gotten increasingly strict, many paper mills are facing huge fines, or have invested too much in wastewater treatment upgrades, and in the end all these costs get passed down to us as the purchasing party. Paper prices have gone up across the board, so this supply chain absolutely cannot turn a profit this year — the best we can hope for is to break even. Our team has really done its best, but digital reading is also the general trend now…”

Director Miao complained at length, going on about how hard it was to get work done and beginning to lament that the budget wasn’t enough. Jiang Xiaoyi did her best to placate him, haggling with this old fox for a good while, and only after symbolically approving a bit of budget did the old fox finally hang up satisfied.

Once she’d dealt with Director Miao, Jiang Xiaoyi wiped her hands clean and looked at the supply chain profit sheet he’d emailed over, her mood turning quite heavy.

This was a massive loss.

Jiang Xiaoyi scrolled through the profit sheets for this production line from the previous few years and found that its profitability had been low for years — sometimes breaking even, sometimes even at a loss…

“What’s even the point of keeping a production line like this running? Even though the order volume every year is large, from what I can see, the domestic market is losing money on every single order. With such a large domestic order volume, it’s really not worth it at all — the only profit comes from exporting the products overseas.”

Jiang Xiaoyi rubbed her temples. “Why not just shut down the domestic production line? Since it’s losing money anyway, why not only run the overseas line? That way the overseas line would be pure profit, without being dragged down by the domestic losses, and the financial report would look better too, wouldn’t it?”

Jiang Xiaoyi thought it over and gave herself a mental round of applause for such an excellent idea, immediately intending to call Director Miao to inform him of this decision.

But before she could even pick up her phone, Ye Zhen stopped her. “That’s not how the math works.”

This man handed Jiang Xiaoyi a wet wipe while explaining, “If you shut down the domestic production line, the overseas line would turn into a massive loss instead.”

“Why?”

“‘Economies of scale’ — have you heard this term? The reason Ruiyi needs the domestic line’s volume in the first place is precisely because of this. Since we’re doing paper product printing merchandise, we need to purchase raw materials like paper. It’s only because our volume is large that we can get lower purchasing prices on these materials through bulk buying, which brings the overall cost down.”

“But if you directly cancel the domestic line — even though it loses money, it has high volume — and rely solely on the overseas line’s sales, our suppliers will definitely raise the price of paper and other materials significantly, and at that point costs would surge sharply, and the overseas line wouldn’t be able to turn a profit at all either. The entire line would collapse.”

So that’s how it was!

If Ye Zhen hadn’t explained it, Jiang Xiaoyi truly wouldn’t have understood the intricacies of it at all!

Jiang Xiaoyi sincerely marveled, “Ye Zhen, how do you know everything?”

Ye Zhen looked away, appearing somewhat uncomfortable. “It’s alright, I suppose.”

This man thought it over, then added, feigning nonchalance, “I suppose I know a bit more than your senior schoolmate, at least. After all, I received an elite education before — there really is a difference compared to an ordinary man.”

Ye Zhen continued, clearing his throat. “Running a real industry is genuinely difficult. Taking over a family business as a second-generation heir isn’t as easy as you might think either — a lot of things require careful balancing, so I know the work pressure on you right now is quite significant too.”

This remark struck a chord in Jiang Xiaoyi’s heart. Wasn’t that exactly it? Ever since becoming a boss, she’d discovered she simply couldn’t do whatever she pleased — the more responsible a person was, the greater power they held, the heavier the obligations that came with it.

These subordinates now had all once been comrades fighting alongside Jiang Xiaoyi, and although in this world they had no awareness of that at all, Jiang Xiaoyi still understood their lives quite well:

Wang Yani loved chasing celebrities and had a bit of a looks-focused streak — she was frugal with herself but generous when it came to spending on gacha games, having a favorite idol. She was normally quite responsible at work, but whenever her favorite idol held a concert, no matter what major issues were happening at work, she simply couldn’t focus properly.

Chen Zisheng had a long-distance girlfriend, and their relationship had recently hit a crisis, so every so often he needed time off to try to salvage things.

Li Junming’s father was a quadriplegic, and his mother showed mild signs of dementia, so to care for his family, he simply couldn’t accept work assignments that involved business travel…

…

“Every employee has their own difficulties, so every time I assign work, I feel a heavy weight on my shoulders, because I want to consider all of them and try to make Ruiyi’s atmosphere more welcoming, to make employees feel like it’s a family.”

Jiang Xiaoyi couldn’t help but voice her true feelings as she continued, “But it’s so hard to balance…”

“Actually, it’s not necessary.” Ye Zhen looked at Jiang Xiaoyi. “You’re the boss now — as a company manager, you should actually keep some distance from your employees, and not get too invested in their personal lives. A manager with warmth does get a good reputation, but managing that warmth well while not losing authority is genuinely difficult, and quite troublesome too. Once you lose control of that balance, it’s easy for employees to climb all over you, and you lose the ability to manage them.”

“You’re young yourself, and you’re also quite…” Ye Zhen coughed lightly and vaguely skipped over that topic, continuing, “In any case, I’d suggest you try not to go down the path of building rapport with employees. Getting along well with employees looks good on the surface, but when it comes time to give orders, it doesn’t look so pretty anymore. I’d rather my employees fear me — I don’t care about their personal lives or difficulties, that way there’s less psychological burden when assigning work.”

No wonder Ye Zhen, back when he was the boss and saw his low approval ratings in staff evaluations, hadn’t felt ashamed but rather took pride in it.

Jiang Xiaoyi had previously found this utterly baffling, only thinking Ye Zhen was being stubborn and unreasonable, but now that she’d truly stepped into a boss’s shoes herself, she’d come to understand the logic behind his thinking.

Except…

“I understand that it’s hard to have rapport while still maintaining authority, but I still want to try. From a boss’s perspective, of course it’s easier and perhaps more efficient not to bother understanding employees, to just treat them coldly. But I used to be an employee myself — your approach might be convenient for you, but for an employee, it just feels oppressive, and they can’t feel any respect from their boss.”

Jiang Xiaoyi glanced at Ye Zhen. “Ruiyi is indeed a leading company in the cultural entertainment industry, and the pay is high too, so even if employees get a terrible superior, most of them still grind through rather than quit. Some departments at Ruiyi even have this ridiculous overtime culture — as long as the boss doesn’t leave, no one below is allowed to leave either.”

Jiang Xiaoyi didn’t agree with this at all. “If the work is done, why stay at the office? You drain people’s energy through overtime, and then how are they supposed to keep going? Especially in an industry like entertainment that requires creativity. Overtime isn’t some badge of praiseworthy diligence, it’s a flawed model of low efficiency and worker exploitation.”

“I don’t want my employees to endure a terrible corporate culture and a harsh superior just for money, when management could improve so much of it with just a bit more effort and care. Why not do it?”

Jiang Xiaoyi’s eyes were bright and clear, staring intently and seriously at Ye Zhen. “Why turn a blind eye to employees’ pain and difficulties? Selfishness is human instinct, but isn’t the point of education to fight against that purely self-interested nature?”

Ye Zhen blinked.

Even though he’d shifted timelines and swapped identities, and had genuinely come to understand the plight of working people from the standpoint of a workplace employee, he learned quickly and had strong ability, so once he’d made up his mind to adapt, he hadn’t encountered much major difficulty. Though Jiang Xiaoyi had given him plenty of grief early on, thinking back carefully, she hadn’t really targeted him long-term or deliberately made things hard for him out of malice.

A person’s guiding principles are hard to change, and even though Ye Zhen was no longer Boss Ye now, he still instinctively believed in the survival of the fittest and the law of the jungle. Having him suddenly empathize with all his employees, understanding and caring for every subordinate, didn’t seem like it would come easily either, but…

But if this particular subordinate were Jiang Xiaoyi…

Ye Zhen stared at Jiang Xiaoyi’s bright eyes and porcelain-white face, and somehow it felt very easy to put himself in that position after all.

If he were the boss and Jiang Xiaoyi the employee, he’d definitely treat her better.

Thinking this, Ye Zhen suddenly felt a bit unsettled and restless. He no longer dared to meet Jiang Xiaoyi’s eyes directly, looking away instead. “I’m sorry, I was pretty terrible to you before.”

Jiang Xiaoyi probably hadn’t expected to hear an apology from Ye Zhen, and she froze for a moment, then lowered her head, fidgeting with the crawfish shell in front of her, muttering, “Yeah, you really were.”

Perhaps recalling the past, her voice carried a hint of grievance and resentment, and she seemed to grow angrier the more she thought about it. “Not just ‘pretty terrible’ — you were awful to me!”

Jiang Xiaoyi’s emotions didn’t seem particularly intense — she was, overall, someone with a rather gentle temperament, the kind of person who sometimes came across as having no distinct personality or edge. As an employee, she’d mostly kept her head down and behaved, and as Boss Jiang, she hadn’t bullied anyone with her power either. Even now, her tone remained calm, carrying a soft, gentle trailing note, without any particularly forceful accusation. And yet, Ye Zhen’s inner regret seemed to reach its peak in that very instant.

He almost hoped Jiang Xiaoyi would curse him out or hit him right then.

He even wished this universe had not only parallel timelines but a fourth dimension transcending time itself, so he could travel back and replace that version of himself who had nitpicked and spoken so cruelly to Jiang Xiaoyi.

“Take your revenge on me.”

As it turned out, this remark from Ye Zhen only drew a glare from Jiang Xiaoyi. “Haven’t I already taken my revenge?!”

She took a sip of iced cola, looking rather smug. “Didn’t I make you do basically everything you used to make me do, more or less exactly the same? What, weren’t you beaten down enough?”

Back when Ye Zhen first became her assistant, Jiang Xiaoyi had indeed made him go through the same things she’d endured before, in a tit-for-tat sort of way, but Ye Zhen felt this hardly counted as revenge at all — more like children playing pretend, scratching an itch through a boot.

Because someone truly bearing a grudge and seeking revenge, once their status and position had reversed, could push the darker side of human nature to its absolute limit, using the power in their hands to make their former enemy’s life a living hell.

Something as trivial as what Jiang Xiaoyi had done — what kind of revenge was that even supposed to be?

Besides, amid Ye Zhen’s genuine or feigned displays of contrition, Jiang Xiaoyi had more or less made peace with him fairly quickly anyway.

“Then let me make it up to you.”

As it turned out, this earnestly considered remark from Ye Zhen drew a burst of laughter from Jiang Xiaoyi. “I have money now, free time, and a cat too, and my parents are both alive and well. If anything, it’s you — everything that used to be yours got swept away by me — what could you possibly make up to me with? Shouldn’t you be asking me what I could make up to you with instead?”

Saying this, Jiang Xiaoyi scrolled through her phone’s memo notes again. “My parents are coming back from their overseas trip in a few days, and I’ve booked them a spa treatment — the place is supposed to be really good. Haven’t you been working a lot of overtime lately? Want me to book you an appointment there too, to try it out?”

“Oh, right, Jiang Lin gave me several movie theater gift cards recently, you could take some coworkers from your department to watch a movie together, both bond with your colleagues and take a break from work. You’ve really been pushing yourself too hard at work lately, you should balance work and rest properly too…”

…

Jiang Xiaoyi rambled on about ordinary, everyday topics like this, and for the first time, Ye Zhen felt an unusual sense of warmth settle within him too.

Back when he’d been Boss Ye, he’d barely had any personal time at all, every schedule practically priced and itemized like a product. He could never have imagined that one day he’d be curled up in a seat at a late-night snack shop, listening to the girl across from him talk about things his former self would surely have deemed utterly pointless.

It was a complete waste of time.

But Ye Zhen didn’t find it so terrible after all — he felt a lazy sense of comfort, a long-lost sense of everyday warmth and humanity.

In this world, he’d lost a great deal, and society’s rules and gender awareness had shifted dramatically, but Ye Zhen found that it truly was like the boiling-frog effect — from initially wanting desperately to go back the moment he arrived, to now feeling no such urgent desire anymore.

Once he’d accepted the rules of this world, it seemed it wasn’t entirely unbearable after all.

After all, besides himself, there was also Jiang Xiaoyi here.

Perhaps many of life’s turning points really did come like sudden clearings after a winding path, and just as Ye Zhen unexpectedly found himself feeling more at peace about returning to his original timeline, a turning point suddenly appeared.

Ye Zhen received a call from the head of the Chuyuan studio at that moment —

“Ye Zhen, I went back over that parallel timeline theory we discussed last time, and I even consulted my old advisor about it, combined with the reference materials and books you gave me — I think I found the trigger condition for time travel! Though it’s still just a preliminary theory, parallel universes are also closely tied to multidimensional spacetime.”

“It’s like how a ‘mirage’ comes from an optical refraction phenomenon — because of light, two completely different geographical locations end up overlapping in the same place, and the concept of parallel timeline travel is similar to this.”

“The ‘mirage’ phenomenon itself can actually be explained through quantum mechanics — microscopic quantum theory can also apply to the macroscopic world. Because quantum states carry uncertainty, and following the wave function collapse equation, the universe is multiple, space is also multiple, time is multidimensional — a ‘mirage’ can be said to occur when our spacetime and other parallel timelines collide and overlap under specific times, temperatures, geographic environments, and climate conditions, causing an instantaneous alignment of spatial phase, manifesting as a fleeting, shimmering visual phenomenon.”

The Chuyuan director grew more excited as he spoke. “In other words, under the right specific conditions, travel between parallel timelines is entirely feasible. Haven’t you always been interested in time travel? Come by the studio when you’re free, I can send you the theoretical materials I’ve found!”

Ye Zhen excused himself from Jiang Xiaoyi and stood up to take the call, and on the other end, the Chuyuan director’s voice sounded rather excited. “I’ve actually found there’s even a formula for this! I can fully calculate the time and location intervals for each instance of overlapping spacetime dimensions and timelines — I’ve derived the formula. Do you want to try testing it out?”

The Chuyuan director spoke passionately at length about theoretical support and scientific evidence. In short, it was good news — if his derived formula really worked, then Ye Zhen might not be without a chance to return to his original timeline after all.

On the other end of the call, the Chuyuan director was still inviting Ye Zhen, as a fellow enthusiast, to come study his derived formula together as soon as possible.

This was supposed to be uplifting news.

Yet once Ye Zhen hung up the phone, he found he wasn’t nearly as excited as he’d expected to be.

According to the Chuyuan director’s account, parallel timelines were based on a concept of multiple universes and multidimensional time, and each instance of spacetime overlap didn’t require any particular person, but rather particular external environmental conditions.

So once Ye Zhen wanted to travel back, he’d simply need to calculate the corresponding location and time of the spacetime overlap according to the formula — Jiang Xiaoyi wasn’t necessary at all. Whether or not Ye Zhen kept working at Ruiyi, whether he kept living with Jiang Xiaoyi at her villa, whether he maintained a good relationship with her — none of it actually mattered at all.

Even if Jiang Xiaoyi didn’t want to go back, Ye Zhen could still travel back on his own.

Ye Zhen hung up the phone and walked back.

Across the table, Jiang Xiaoyi, unaware of the content of Ye Zhen’s call, was earnestly scrolling through something on her phone, a smile appearing at the corner of her mouth as she looked.

Ye Zhen suddenly forgot everything the Chuyuan director had just said, forgot to even think about that momentous matter of traveling back.

Right now, in this instant, he had only one feeling inside him —

Even though Jiang Xiaoyi’s smile looked lovely, Ye Zhen found himself somewhat displeased.

He didn’t even notice his own tone had turned a bit sour as he spoke up. “What are you looking at? Smiling so happily.”

Fortunately, Jiang Xiaoyi generously turned her phone screen toward him. “Look at my parents, it’s hilarious. The two of them are on the beach arguing about who dances the grass skirt hula better.”

She seemed to be scrolling through her parents’ social media moments, examining each post carefully, her eyes very gentle, carrying a genuine, heartfelt smile.

Ye Zhen recalled a question he’d asked Jiang Xiaoyi not long ago — if she could travel back, would she be willing to?

Of course she wouldn’t be.

Watching Jiang Xiaoyi’s warm, happy eyes as she stared at her parents’ photos, Ye Zhen knew her answer would absolutely be no.

Of course, Jiang Xiaoyi could stay here and remain Boss Jiang, while Ye Zhen could travel back and be Boss Ye again — there was nothing wrong with that, and in fact, in the parallel timeline, once he returned to the past, there would even be a “Jiang Xiaoyi” working for him in his place — in short, everyone could still fulfill their own role.

But Ye Zhen still felt that if he went back, the world would surely already be different.

Because that Jiang Xiaoyi wouldn’t be this one right in front of him.

If he left, abandoning this present Jiang Xiaoyi here alone…

Ye Zhen thought about it, and felt that his sense of decency and responsibility wouldn’t allow him to do such a thing — Jiang Xiaoyi had only just barely scratched the surface of corporate management, nowhere near capable of handling old foxes like Director Miao; Ruiyi’s top-to-bottom reforms weren’t complete yet either, and needed a strong, capable executor to carry them through; that Dan Hui fellow hadn’t given up yet either, and if Ye Zhen left, he’d probably pester Jiang Xiaoyi endlessly — what if he had ulterior motives toward Ruiyi’s assets? And besides Dan Hui, there was also that Jiang Lin fellow, eyeing things covetously too…

Could he really call himself a man, abandoning Jiang Xiaoyi at a time like this?

Thinking this, Ye Zhen looked at Jiang Xiaoyi a few more times — she looked happy, her expression free of any shadow.

Although men had somewhat lower status in this world, Ye Zhen felt that once he’d truly adapted, it wasn’t so unbearable after all. If he made the most of the gender dynamics here, and given his own abilities, continuing to live in this timeline didn’t seem so intolerable after all.

His phone buzzed with another message from the Chuyuan director, urging him, the wording quite excited —

“I’ve done the calculations based on the formula! If my formula is correct, the next spacetime overlap should happen within the next two days! Are you interested in checking it out!”

Ye Zhen thought about it, and in the end, deleted the message.

At least for now, he didn’t want to go back to that other timeline alone.

Though he didn’t want to admit it, Ye Zhen realized that he seemed to have developed a bit of an unusual feeling toward Jiang Xiaoyi.