When Ji Mingshu was in her mid to late second trimester, Jiang Chun and Tang Zhizhou got married.
They held two wedding ceremonies. One was by the Aegean Sea, where they flew in only close relatives and friends on a chartered plane. The other was at the Imperial City’s Junyi Huazhang, which was extravagant and magnificent, filled with distinguished guests.
The Tang family spent a full year preparing for these two ceremonies. They custom-ordered four main wedding dresses for Jiang Chun, clearly showing their love and appreciation for their daughter-in-law.
Even a month after the wedding banquet, people in their circle would occasionally make sour comments, essentially saying that Jiang Chun was lucky—that the nouveau riche whom Yan Ru had rejected had married into the Tang family.
Ji Mingshu asked, “Did you two sign that thing?”
Jiang Chun tilted her head and asked, “What thing?”
“The prenuptial agreement,” Gu Kaiyang casually answered from the side, crossing her legs while flipping through Ji Mingshu’s parenting magazine.
Jiang Chun shook her head. “No, we didn’t. There’s nothing we need to agree on.”
After finishing a pudding, she picked up another piece of light cheese from the table.
Ji Mingshu thought about it and realized that it made sense. Seeing Jiang Chun devour another piece of cake in less than a minute, she grimaced, rolled up the magazine in her hand, and tapped Jiang Chun’s head with it. “Can you stop eating?”
“I starved myself for three whole months to fit into that wedding dress! What’s wrong with eating some cake?”
Jiang Chun gave her a sideways glance, her face clearly saying, “My husband doesn’t mind, so why are you fussing about it?”
Ji Mingshu righteously retorted, “You call this ‘some’? Is that how you use the word ‘some’? You’ve eaten four cakes in less than half an hour. Why don’t you start a mukbang channel?”
Jiang Chun was left speechless.
Gu Kaiyang looked up and snorted lightly, saying to Jiang Chun, “Don’t mind her. She’s just unhappy herself and wants to make us unhappy along with her.”
Ji Mingshu’s death glare quickly shifted to Gu Kaiyang. “You weren’t this sharp-tongued at the mixer.”
Since Jiang Chun had joined the ranks of married people, the two of them were particularly keen on finding prospects for Gu Kaiyang. They even persuaded her to attend several mixers. However, ever since her dating reality show, Gu Kaiyang seemed to have lost interest in dating and was solely focused on her career. She barely spoke at these mixers.
The dating reality show she participated in had attracted a large number of young female fans. Her Weibo followers now exceeded Ji Mingshu’s, rapidly approaching five million. Plus, being an editor herself, she had her own set of skills for managing social media. Her image as an independent, financially self-sufficient modern woman was soaring, and her income had skyrocketed after connecting with self-media platforms.
At this moment, she simply shrugged, not bothering to argue with the pregnant woman, and exchanged a knowing glance with Jiang Chun.
Gu Kaiyang was quite accurate—Ji Mingshu was indeed very unhappy lately.
After attending Jiang Chun’s wedding, Cen Sen had forcibly terminated all of Ji Mingshu’s work and entertainment activities.
If she wanted to go out, the bodyguards wouldn’t let her, and the driver wouldn’t take her. She had to wait for Cen Sen to have time to accompany her personally. Most of the time, she could only idle away in their unremarkable luxurious mansion.
Jiang Chun might have had a grudge against her. To congratulate her on her pregnancy, she had joyfully given her a small robot designed by Tang Zhizhou.
The little robot was cute and adorable-looking, but it was like a nagging monk, buzzing around behind her all day, reminding her to drink water, to stand up and walk around, to go outside to look at flowers and grass and breathe fresh air…
The most terrifying part was that it had high-definition monitoring capabilities. Using the excuse of staying in constant contact with her, Cen Sen was legitimately monitoring her through the gift from her best friend.
If she spent too much time playing on her phone or watching TV, and happened to be caught by Cen Sen, the robot would suddenly transmit Cen Sen’s artificial reminder: “Mingshu, get up and move around a bit.”
At first, she would adopt an uncooperative attitude of “not listening, not listening,” but Cen Sen didn’t say much about it. Instead, the next day, he simply blocked her signal, making her a beautiful but lonely pregnant woman on the lake island.
Later, she even had the idea of throwing the thing into Mingshui Lake to destroy all evidence, but when she thought about how she could reverse-annoy Cen Sen during boring times, she pushed that thought away.
“Mr. Cen Sen, are you there? When are you coming home today?”
Finding the variety show boring, Ji Mingshu glanced at the little robot.
The little robot quickly transmitted a voice: “I’ll be a bit late today. I still have a video conference.”
Ji Mingshu: “You’re too much! You won’t accompany me, but you won’t let me go out either!”
Cen Sen: “I’ll come home to accompany you after I finish these busy days. Be good.”
Ji Mingshu compromised and wheedled, “Then I want to eat your homemade spare ribs tonight.”
Cen Sen paused briefly, “Alright, I’ll cook them when I get back. Have a snack first.”
“Mmm, then kiss kiss.”
Cen Sen ignored Zhou Jiaheng knocking at the door and said in a slightly lowered voice, “Mmm, kiss kiss.”
Cen Sen kept his word. When Ji Mingshu was a month away from her due date, he moved his office to their home, freeing up more time to accompany her. All business trips were delegated to other executives, and apart from necessary meetings and social engagements, he rarely made public appearances for work.
Under Cen Sen’s strict care, Ji Mingshu safely gave birth three days before her due date.
Whether to prevent a repeat of the mistake from twenty-some years ago or for some other reason, the hospital had cleared out early. On the day of delivery, more than a dozen people from both the Cen and Ji families were anxiously waiting for the birth of the little one.
Fortunately, the delivery process was relatively smooth.
A baby boy, six pounds and six ounces.
Although they hadn’t checked the gender in advance, and the Cen family hadn’t expressed any requirements or expectations regarding gender, everyone secretly breathed a sigh of relief when they learned it was a boy. The thoughts of a major family regarding an heir didn’t need to be explicitly stated.
Actually, before this, Ji Mingshu and Cen Sen had discussed the gender issue. Ji Mingshu initially thought Cen Sen would say, “I’ll like any child you give birth to,” but after pondering for a moment, Cen Sen said, “I’d prefer a boy. If the first child is a boy, he can protect his sisters in the future.”
“…?”
Although what he said seemed reasonable—she had enjoyed being protected by her cousins when she was little—but…
“Who said anything about having a second child? The first one hasn’t even been born yet. Aren’t you thinking too far ahead?”
Cen Sen answered rather nonchalantly at the time, “Life is like chess. When you move one step, you should be looking ten steps ahead.”
He then took out the small notebook he had used to write their dating plans and showed it to Ji Mingshu. “These are some plans I wrote during my breaks. They’re not very complete. I’ll make a comprehensive plan when I have time.”
Ji Mingshu suspiciously took it and glanced at it. The plan continued with CEO Cen’s consistently rigorous style, categorized into one, two, three, and four sections, so comprehensive that if transcribed into a computer, it would be a beautifully structured planning table.
She didn’t know whether to be happy or to mourn for the baby. Their father had casually written a twenty-page life plan for them from ages three to eighteen during his breaks, with various planning branches based on different interests, and even explicitly stated that they could only start dating after turning eighteen.
Of course, as a meticulous father, Cen Sen naturally took on the important task of naming.
In the Cen family genealogy, boys of this generation had single characters starting with “Shi,” and girls had single characters starting with “Yu.” He had already chosen names for the baby: for a girl, the single character would be “Zhuo,” and for a boy, the single character would be “Yan.” Like a gentleman, proper and dignified, like jade and inkstone.
As Cen Sen wished, baby Cen Yan was born first.
After the baby was born, everyone automatically called him “Yan Bao” (Baby Yan), but Ji Mingshu, seeing him wrinkled and a bit yellow, looking not very clean, insisted on calling him “Little Slob.”
Cen Sen corrected her several times, but Ji Mingshu refused to change, and would ask daily:
“Is Little Slob sleeping?”
“Has Little Slob gone swimming?”
“Has Little Slob had his milk?”
“Is Little Slob crying?”
Perhaps to express his dissatisfaction with his mother’s nickname, Little Slob/Yan Bao grew to be cleaner, whiter, and more delicate. There was a hint of Cen Sen’s coolness in his brows and eyes, but when he smiled, he was adorable, like he was carved from the same mold as Ji Mingshu. His eyes were as clear and bright as two crystal grapes.
Additionally, the family’s nanny changed his clothes N times a day, keeping him neat at all times. He became less and less associated with the word “slob.”
But his mother had become accustomed to calling him that and couldn’t change it right away. Ji Mingshu’s first and second uncles heard it and scolded her twice, but they couldn’t change it either.
In fact, during Little Slob/Yan Bao’s first year, Ji Mingshu and Cen Sen’s lives didn’t undergo any earth-shattering changes. The two didn’t even have much awareness of being parents, as the child was mostly taken care of by several nannies.
After her postpartum confinement, Ji Mingshu slowly began preparing for her design studio. Although she would spend a few hours each day with Yan Bao, most of the time she just had the nanny bring him over to play for a bit.
She would also take various silly photos—putting her feet under Yan Bao’s nose, holding a chicken leg near Yan Bao’s mouth, placing Yan Bao on her closet display shelf—and add captions like “Mommy’s feet smell so good,” “Want to eat? You have no teeth,” and “Clearance sale, one yuan each.” Then she would send them to her girlfriends’ group chat, shamelessly brainwashing the childless Gu Kaiyang and Jiang Chun: If babies aren’t born to be played with, then there’s no meaning to them at all.
In comparison, although Cen Sen didn’t have much time to spend with Yan Bao, he seemed slightly more dutiful when he did accompany him.
He would feed Yan Bao milk, feed him porridge, take him out for walks, and play with him using small toys.
Every time Ji Mingshu saw Cen Sen doing these things, she found it a bit jarring and even somewhat amusing.
Because when Cen Sen did these things, he was very much in his CEO mindset, portraying the image of a strict father, as if he were training his employee on what to do and when.
When Yan Bao was three months old and still couldn’t roll over, Cen Sen postponed a day’s worth of business to stay home and practice with him.
But no matter how patiently he coached, Yan Bao remained completely motionless and utterly uncooperative.
Seeing Cen Sen’s patience followed by the heavy, gloomy pressure radiating from him, Ji Mingshu couldn’t help but laugh, feeling that Cen Sen might coldly say to Yan Bao at any moment: “Your performance in the corporation would be at the bottom of the assessment, and HR would have negotiated your termination long ago. You can’t even roll over. How are you qualified to be my son?”
Perhaps sensing his CEO father’s earnest expectations, although Yan Bao had lost the initiative in the “roll at three months, sit at six, crawl at nine” timeline, he caught up quickly, actually surpassing expectations in the latter two milestones, and even began saying “Baba” (Dad) at ten months.