Between masters, a single pointed exchange is enough. No need to press further.

Liang Xing had made her position clear. She picked up her glass, rose, and took her leave.

She had walked only a few steps when Jiang Han suddenly looked up with an expression of anguish and, unable to let it rest, asked, “Does it have to be this way between us?”

Liang Xing turned her face toward him. Her gaze was cold, and she regarded Jiang Han with a look of cool disdain.

A pair of fake spouses — and still they investigated each other behind the scenes.

Liang Xing had not always been like this. For many years, she had also depended on Jiang Han, and he had treated her like a younger sister.

In a person’s life there can be many loves; but once you are grown, no one can go back and live through childhood again. The bond formed growing up together — Jiang Han had it, and it was with Liang Xing and Liang Meng.

At some point — she couldn’t say when — Liang Xing had become increasingly distant and cold toward Jiang Han. Between the two of them, a thick wall had gradually been built up, brick by brick.

She had been investigating the past for a long time.

Her sudden decision to hand Longquan’s operations to Liang Meng was most likely so she could free up her own energy to dig for the truth.

So exactly how much did she already know?

“Liang Meng cannot go on a blind date with Wang Zaiwu,” Liang Xing said simply, her tone flat. “But I don’t want her to know the real reason. Her matters — I’ll still be counting on you to look after them.”

Having said that, Liang Xing left without once looking back.

The cause of Liang Meng’s parents’ deaths had been murky and unresolved all these years. Liang Xing had never given up, but she did not want Liang Meng to be involved.

She had only uncovered half the truth, and Jiang Han had a quiet, gathering dread that if Liang Xing kept digging like this, those long-sealed, buried old affairs would eventually surface, one by one.

In the empty, hollow room, only Jiang Han’s solitary figure remained.

His outward appearance was brilliant — in public he moved through the world in fine clothes, riding high, and wanting for nothing; but who could know that inside, his past surged like a current, and he was lonely, isolated, and wounded.

Jiang Han had made himself what he was today. He had sought it himself and blamed no one.

Everything he had suffered today was the inevitable price of success in his career.

How filthy the origins of his first fortune truly were — he had only, today, understood it completely.

Jiang Han had always believed that back in those early days, he had shadowed Wang Xiancheng everywhere, running his errands, solving thorny problems for him, impressing Wang Xiancheng with his diligence and sharp mind — that Wang Xiancheng, as a senior figure in the trade, had been willing to bring him along and had quietly passed him the crucial tip about the Western District development, giving him the means to make money.

To this day, a long, deep scar ran along Jiang Han’s left arm — where he had taken a steel rod meant for Wang Xiancheng, and been stabbed.

At the time, Wang Xiancheng’s enterprise was nowhere near its current scale. He was, at most, the city’s largest construction contractor.

At year’s end, workers came to demand unpaid wages and cornered Wang Xiancheng at the construction site.

Wang Xiancheng was only about forty then — young and hot-blooded — and within a few exchanges he had come to blows with the workers.

Jiang Han had been a teenager, an uneducated street tough who burned with the desire to make something of himself.

He had no credentials. No connections.

He knew that if he wanted Wang Xiancheng to take notice of him, he had to do something extraordinary — something that proved his total allegiance.

So when one of the workers lost all reason and lunged at Wang Xiancheng with a steel rod, Jiang Han didn’t hesitate for even a second. He stripped off his leather jacket, rolled up his sleeve, and threw himself forward — took the blow meant for Wang Xiancheng.

Blood poured freely. Every person present was stunned by Jiang Han’s display of loyalty.

Sure enough, from the moment he walked out of the hospital after getting a tetanus shot, Wang Xiancheng’s entire attitude toward Jiang Han changed. He no longer treated him as someone to boss around — he treated him like an adopted son.

So Jiang Han had always believed his first fortune had been bought with blood — literally, earned with a wound.

The amber liquid poured again, trickling down along Jiang Han’s old scar as his grip on the glass weakened and it tilted.

In the cold, sharp lines of Jiang Han’s profile, his lips curved into a complex smile.

Bitter and gone in an instant. He tilted his head back and let out a self-mocking laugh, and tears welled in his eyes.

So it had all been a lie. Raw loyalty never bought glory and riches.

Perhaps the reason Wang Xiancheng had quietly slipped Jiang Han the inside tip about the Western District development was simply that Jiang Han’s father had stepped back from his entanglement with Liang Meng’s mother — clearing the way for Wang Xiancheng to move in.

What a joke.

What a complete and utter joke.

Jiang Han had never felt life to be so absurd.

He looked around at the carefully appointed elegance of Tan Gong, surveyed everything he possessed — and then, with full force, crushed the glass in his hand until it shattered.

Jiang Han. You are the greatest joke in the world.

Liang Meng followed Lin Qing back to the serviced apartment.

She acted as though nothing had happened — showered, dried her hair, put on a face mask.

Lin Qing couldn’t hold it in any longer and muttered, “You have quite the steady nerves.”

Liang Meng glanced at her and went back to working the beauty device against her face in the mirror, pressing in the serum.

“What did you want to say?” she asked.

Lin Qing quickly came over and crouched beside her. “Boss, I’m this many years old and I’ve never once been inside a police station. A model law-abiding citizen my whole life! First time, because of work.”

Liang Meng laughed. “So what do you want — for the company to give you a Brave and Righteous Citizen Award?”

“Not quite… necessarily.” Lin Qing laughed along, then leaned a little closer and took the opportunity to make her pitch: “Boss, in light of me throwing myself into the line of fire for you tonight — could you let me take the lead on the live-streaming division?”

“Oh?” Liang Meng grew alert.

She had always kept professional and personal matters clearly separated.

What Lin Qing was asking for, this “reward,” might seem to read the moment well — but it was, in reality, somewhat ill-timed.

But Lin Qing had no choice but to do it.

She had thought it through clearly in the time Liang Meng was showering.

She couldn’t lose herself in being an assistant!

Tonight’s events were a warning to her. Liang Meng’s personal life was a tangle, and her relationship with Jiang Han and Liang Xing was complex and murky. As a small assistant, if she just kept dealing with all this private chaos, she would gradually become nothing more than a housekeeper and hired hand.

If she wanted to establish herself at Longquan, she needed results. Results only come when people are given actual work. She needed Liang Meng to assign her something real.

It had to be said — her reasoning here was not entirely different from Jiang Han’s in his early days. The same logic, a different generation.

Both of them came from the bottom. Both understood that they had no inherited resources from a previous generation they could exchange with others — so any chance to distinguish themselves, however it arose, had to be immediately converted into an opportunity to move up.

No one is young forever, but there is always someone young.

Liang Meng continued to apply her serum without responding.

Even if Lin Qing had performed admirably tonight with her loyalty — and she had — Liang Meng could not let a moment of feeling cloud her judgment and assign her work carelessly.

She was not a foolish ruler.

However clever and capable Lin Qing might be, she was still someone born in the 2000s, and there was a great deal she lacked in experience.

“Do the work in front of you first.” Liang Meng did not agree.

Lin Qing was deflated.

She finally understood the bitterness Li Bai must have felt — even after Gao Lishi helped remove his boots, he remained unrecognized and his talent unused.

Emperor Xuanzong had taken Li Bai — a man who harbored ambitions of governing and reforming — and treated him as nothing more than a poet of flowers and moonlight.

Just as Liang Meng took Lin Qing — and treated her as nothing more than an adaptable and clever “little assistant.”

Frustrating…

Early the next morning,

Lin Qing was jolted awake by a series of WeChat notification sounds.

She rolled over and picked up her phone — it was Lu Zhou!

Ten messages in a row, all asking: where are you? Are you awake yet?

Lin Qing sat bolt upright with delight.

She replied: at your place, just woke up.

Open the door.

Lu Zhou sent back those two simple words and then went quiet.

Open the door??

Lin Qing didn’t catch on immediately, then suddenly understood.

She threw off the covers, stepped off the sofa, and ran barefoot to the front door. She pressed her eye to the peephole — and sure enough, Lu Zhou was standing right outside.

Lin Qing excitedly pulled the door open — then pulled it shut again.

She was simply too thrilled to see Lu Zhou so unexpectedly. In the rush of it, she had no idea what to say.

“It’s… your place,” Lin Qing said with a laugh. “You have the door code!”

Lu Zhou glanced inside, his luggage by his feet, and smiled. “Didn’t you say you had a guest?”

For some reason, the phrase “a guest at my place” gave Lin Qing an oddly warm, intimate feeling — as though she really were the mistress of this home.

“You could still have rung the doorbell.”

“Didn’t want to wake you.” Lu Zhou smiled, a little abashed.

“Come in, then.”

Flushed with the joy of reunion, Lin Qing grabbed his arm and made to pull him inside.

But Lu Zhou quickly caught himself and held her back with a gentle pull. “Wait — not a good idea. If your guest happens to be a woman and I just walk in unannounced like this, it won’t look right.”

“What do you mean ‘happens to be’ — it’s definitely a woman!”

The two of them laughed.

Lu Zhou scratched his head awkwardly, momentarily uncertain whose apartment this actually was.

But when Lin Qing stopped to think about it — ever since Liang Meng had moved in here, she had made herself completely at home. She’d often go padding around the apartment in a cartoon animal fleece onesie with a black lace face mask on, and Lin Qing had been startled half to death more than once.

Who could have guessed that the cool, goddess-like President Liang, in the privacy of home, could be this absolutely chaotic in the most endearing way.

“So… where should we go?”

Lin Qing found herself at a loss too.

Lu Zhou made a suggestion: “There’s an all-season hotel right across the way. Come with me to drop off my luggage, then we’ll find somewhere nice to have a proper breakfast.”

“Sure!” Lin Qing wheeled out his suitcase and started walking.

After a few steps, she suddenly felt that something was off and stopped to ask him seriously: “Hold on — this is your apartment. How is it that you now have a home you can’t go back to and have to check into a hotel? And also — didn’t you say you weren’t coming back until tomorrow? Why are you back so much earlier?”

Lu Zhou gave a helpless, faintly embarrassed laugh and turned the question back on her. “That’s exactly what I want to ask you! What happened last night? How did you end up at the police station?”

Lin Qing waved it off. “Don’t even start. It was a work thing. Let’s talk while we walk.”