Liang Meng’s heart sank, and she cast a slightly reproachful glance at Wang Zaiwu.

She should have known better than to make an exception today.

Wang Zaiwu blinked, urging her to stay calm, and stayed by her side listening to what was happening outside.

He had only encountered Lin Qing once or twice, yet for some reason he had total confidence in this small, seemingly delicate young woman.

There was a distinctive energy about her, which Wang Zaiwu described to himself as “the confidence of someone who hasn’t seen enough of the world.”

“An informal booking, is it?”

Lin Qing swept her gaze across the group of people advancing with such intimidating force.

Several of the dealers, having spent years living in comfort and luxury, had grown into men with thick, fleshy faces and great protruding beer bellies.

Atop those beer bellies rested oversized belt buckles of varying styles, each bearing the large letter H.

If you ran into them on the street, you’d genuinely think they looked like trouble.

Lin Qing was unfazed in the slightest.

She knew exactly what she was dealing with.

This was a company. It was broad daylight, and surveillance cameras were everywhere.

The dealers had come to intimidate Liang Meng. They wanted to scare her, not actually cause a real incident.

“Fine! Then I’ll book you in.” Lin Qing smiled, pulled a stack of forms from the drawer, and directed the proceedings on the spot. “Everyone line up! I’ll fill out a form for each of you, and once the form is done, you can go in.”

The dealers actually believed her. Immediately one of them pushed to be first.

“Name?” Lin Qing asked, pen in hand.

“Zhang.” The dealer flipped his eyes impatiently, clutching his black clutch bag.

“Zhang as in ‘bow and long,’ or as in ‘stand and early’?”

“Bow and long!”

“First name?”

“Jianguo.”

“Which ‘Jian’? Which ‘Guo’?” Lin Qing feigned complete ignorance.

The dealer found it too much trouble and just grabbed the form to write his own name.

“Gender?” Lin Qing continued recording.

“Are you blind?! Can’t you tell?!”

“Oh, so that’s male then. I’ll put male. Age?”

“Fifty-two.”

“Fifty-two? Is that your nominal age or your actual age? Born in the year of the pig or the rat?”

“Rat.”

……

“Phone number?”

“138xxxxxxxx.”

“Office landline?”

“How would I remember that off the top of my head?”

“That won’t do! Company policy — it’s required!”

……

After several minutes of this, the ones at the back started getting suspicious.

One dealer covered his mouth and said to another: “Am I imagining things or is this little girl stringing us along?”

“I think so too. We’ve been here ten minutes and she’s only done one. There are seven or eight of us — at this rate it’ll take an hour. I’ve got a parent-teacher conference to get to later!”

The lead man’s patience finally snapped. He sent Lin Qing’s registration forms flying with one sweep.

He fumed: “Are you messing around with us?! We’re here for President Liang! Not to give you our personal information! Call her out here now — we have real business to discuss with her!”

Liang Meng, hearing everything clearly from inside, stood up to open the door so Lin Qing wouldn’t have to bear this alone.

Wang Zaiwu pressed her hand down once again, tilting his head. “Have you figured out what to say to them when you go out?”

Liang Meng paused, then shook her head helplessly.

She genuinely had hit a wall with Daiwei.

She had used the “Boxed Pig” game theory and the “one-code-per-customer” model to argue with Daiwei for a long time, but Daiwei simply refused to accept her live-streaming plan.

Daiwei insisted on keeping the distribution rights for Longquan’s flagship product line in the dealers’ hands.

He called it “stable operations.”

Liang Xing and Jiang Han couldn’t openly oppose her, so they were channeling the dealers to come and apply pressure on Liang Meng from the outside.

“If there’s really no other option, should I go out and explain things to them?” Liang Meng said, without much confidence.

Wang Zaiwu smiled and shook his head. “If these people were willing to listen to reason, they wouldn’t have stormed your office door. Trust me — learn the turtle method I’ve been practicing lately: when it’s time to pull your head back in, you pull it back. Retreating may be shameless, but it works!”

“Wang Zaiwu!” Liang Meng was both frustrated and amused as she stood. “What on earth have you been doing with the first half of your life?! The things that come out of your mouth are just — genuinely something. The most important thing in life is responsibility — responsibility for yourself, and to others! Did your parents never teach you that people need to have a sense of accountability? When you run into something difficult, you just tuck your head in and ignore it — no wonder you can’t hold down a steady girlfriend!”

Wang Zaiwu pushed back without hesitation: “Fine! Go be responsible! Go out there right now and let those dealers rip you apart until you’re covered in blood! After that, you’ll have no standing inside or outside the company. And when the day comes that you can’t accomplish a single thing you set out to do — go ahead and use that great sense of responsibility of yours to clean up the wreckage!”

“Wang Zaiwu!”

“Yelling my name won’t change anything!” Wang Zaiwu also got to his feet. He was a full head taller than Liang Meng. “I, Wang Zaiwu, have never in my life done anything that gave me no benefit! I never let myself be guilted into things! I’ve lived like this for over twenty years — am I not doing just fine? Is my family’s business not thriving? Without that sense of responsibility you keep talking about, what exactly am I missing? Is anyone suffering because of me?”

Wang Zaiwu unleashed an entirely unrestrained stream of arguments at Liang Meng.

And Liang Meng found herself with absolutely nothing to say in return.

The truth was, she had no practical or effective way to keep the dealers in line right now.

Going out there was a dead end no matter how she looked at it.

“Then tell me — what do we do now?” Liang Meng sat back down in frustration.

Wang Zaiwu took an indignant sip of water, then slid his cup across to Liang Meng: “Trust those you employ, don’t employ those you doubt. Leave this to Lin Qing. If she can’t handle it, fire her tomorrow and bring in someone who can!”

Liang Meng stared at Wang Zaiwu for a long moment.

This person didn’t just navigate life with astonishing ease — his way of handling things was equally simple and uncompromising.

If Jiang Han were like Wang Zaiwu — candid, unafraid, saying exactly what he meant — perhaps the two of them wouldn’t be stuck in the murky, complicated tangle that had become their relationship.

For now, Liang Meng had no choice but to try the dead horse remedy and follow his lead.

Seeing the dealers refusing to leave while things inside remained quiet, Lin Qing understood her boss’s intent.

In that case —

Don’t blame her for going all out.

Lin Qing rolled up her sleeves and decided to cast aside all personal dignity and give herself over wholeheartedly to being thoroughly shameless.

“That’s right — I was playing you!”

Lin Qing drew herself up, and flipped from her previous pleasant warmth to outright cold defiance in an instant!

“Hey! You, little girl —!”

“Don’t ‘you’ me!” Lin Qing stepped forward again, unyielding. “Every country has its laws, every family has its rules, and every company has its regulations! You need an appointment to see President Liang! You came here insisting on breaking those rules — so you started it!”

“Why, you little—!”

The lead dealer, a man who had been a regional power player at Longquan for years, was not used to being on the receiving end of this.

“Get the HR manager! Who exactly do you think you are?! Do you know who I am?! Talking to me like this?!”

“I don’t care who you are!” Lin Qing waved her hand and leaned into the chaos. “We are all just employees of Longquan! Why should workers give other workers a hard time? We’re all just out here earning our own money, aren’t we? The company tells me what to do and I do it — same as you. You think you’re a big deal? Go be a big deal back in your own territory. I wasn’t hired by you. My wages aren’t paid by you. So what gives you the right to come in here acting like the lord of the manor? Who’s going to listen to you?!”

“You, you, you…!” The dealer was so furious the top of his head was practically smoking. “Is this really the kind of person the company is hiring now?! Absolutely no manners!! Who do you think you are?!”

Lin Qing fired back: “I’m an only child. You tell me what rank I hold.”

“Everyone stop arguing with her — we’re going in!”

The dealers were worked up and started egging each other on.

Lin Qing planted herself in front of the door and pulled a safety hammer from the drawer, slamming it down on the floor with a loud crash!

“Go ahead! The door’s right there! Whoever dares to break it down, I’m calling 110 right this instant! You want to blow this up? I’ll tell you straight — I literally just walked out of a police station yesterday! Picking fights and brawling — as long as no one dies and no blood flows, worst case is detention. A couple of weeks and you’re back out. I’m single with no dependents — one person fed, the whole family taken care of. I might as well see it as free room and board somewhere else! Whoever’s feeling bold — come on! Pick it up and start swinging!”

“You little brat — don’t think I won’t dare!”

“Come on! Come on! Swing it then!”

Faced with this formidable presence, a few of the dealing bosses were thrown completely off their footing.

Still, one cunning older dealer in the group, seeing that the direct approach wasn’t working, switched to soft tactics and stepped up.

He forced a chuckle and grabbed Lin Qing by the arm, trying to play friendly while applying pressure at the same time: “Young lady, young lady — take it down a notch! We didn’t come here to start trouble today. We just have some things we want to bring to President Liang’s attention. You blocking us like this, shutting up old colleagues who just want to speak — isn’t that a bit heartless?”

Lin Qing gave a cool smile and shifted into an aggrieved, overwrought tone: “Is that so? Am I really that heartless? I don’t feel that way at all. Heavens — I hesitated nineteen times, I softened thirteen times, and twice I had the urge to just let you in. But my sense of responsibility wouldn’t allow it! I had to mentally slap myself several times before I could maintain an outward appearance of calm indifference while turning you away. You have no idea the battle raging inside me — torn between going soft, respecting my elders, and doing my job! Uncle, please don’t keep saying I’m heartless. Are you not satisfied until you’ve pushed me to a complete breakdown, crushed my spirit, and shattered my heart? Is that what it takes for you to feel you truly understand me? The kind of warmth you want — I simply cannot give…”

“Hmph.” Another dealer was so incensed he ran completely out of steam.

At this point, an older dealer who liked to play the authority card dared to speak up.

“Young person, you need to think about the bigger picture! We’re here on very important business. Don’t get caught up in petty details!”

Lin Qing replied: “Big picture? Uncle, you’re really asking too much of me! I’m just a little assistant — I haven’t even gotten into the game yet. How could I possibly have a ‘bigger picture’ like yours? Don’t talk to me about big pictures — big tangerines, big apples, big bananas, big watermelons — I have none of those! You say I’m petty, but being detail-oriented is literally my job! If I don’t pay attention to details at work, should I wait until I’m dead at the crematorium to start being careful? Should I count how thoroughly I’ve been roasted?”

“You —!!”

Several of the dealers had arrived with righteous momentum and force, but Lin Qing’s relentless, circular, completely unanswerable logic had deflated them, one by one.

Faced with this young woman’s one-person stand, the dealers felt like landing powerful blows on cotton — completely at a loss, their intimidation and fury unable to find any purchase.

To top it all off, Daiwei had told them before they came: don’t completely burn bridges with the CEO’s office. Just pressure Liang Meng for answers. That was all.

So the dealers resorted to their final move: a sit-in.

See who could outlast whom.

“Fine, then we’ll just sit here and not move! Liang Meng can’t go without food or water or a bathroom break forever!”

With that, seven or eight large men settled themselves firmly onto the floor of the CEO’s office. Several unsolicited human lumps appeared on the carpet out of nowhere.

Hmph. Try to outlast me.

Lin Qing wasn’t the slightest bit concerned.

The moment the dealers sat down, Lin Qing cranked the office air conditioning to full blast on the hottest heat setting and moved the water cooler out of reach.

Then she got out her personal mini electric hot pot and started cooking stinky tofu noodle soup.

“What is that smell?! It smells like something died in a pot!”

Before long, the dealers were wrinkling their noses.

“Right? And this hot air blasting — my throat is bone dry, and I can’t take this smell at all!”

Lin Qing ignored them completely. She ordered a durian via food delivery, tipped it into the pot, and stirred everything together.

In less than ten minutes, the entire CEO’s office had emptied of all visitors.

Everyone was pinching their noses and hunching forward, fleeing the unbearable, noxious atmosphere.

As they left, the dealers still couldn’t resist one last shout in the direction of Liang Meng’s office: “Liang Meng! Don’t sit in there hiding like a turtle! You think you can do live streaming and cut off our income — do you actually think we dealers are going to just roll over and let you?! Until you change your company’s strategy, we’ll be back here every single day!”

“Ugh, can we just go?! Talk in the group chat! It absolutely reeks! I’m about to pass out!”

“Alright, alright — let’s go, let’s go — I’m dizzy too.”

Once everyone had gone, Lin Qing pulled off her face mask and quietly cleaned up the aftermath of the battle on her own.

Hearing complete silence outside, Liang Meng and Wang Zaiwu finally approached and opened the door.

“Whoa—!”

The moment the door opened, Wang Zaiwu — who had never encountered anything like this in his entire pampered life — immediately retched on the spot.

Liang Meng frowned helplessly and looked at Lin Qing.

Lin Qing simply spread her hands. If she’d had any other way, she wouldn’t have gone to such outrageous lengths either.