Chapter 27 A Storm is Brewing
When Lian Huaiyang came out, Song Wan had already been picked up. He took a taxi to send Fang Xia back to the hotel first, and then asked the driver to turn around and drive towards a bar.
The bright lights and bustling nightlife are a drunken revelry for the wealthy.
Lian Huaiyang was not used to the loud, almost hysterical music and drumbeats that made his heart feel like it was about to explode, nor was he used to the stale, mixed smells that filled his breath, and even less was he used to seeing a group of men and women dancing intimately with their bare skin. His stomach churned; it was a physiological aversion.
He covered his mouth and ran out of the bar.
A gust of cold wind and fresh air entering the throat relieved the discomfort.
Lian Huaiyang took a while to calm down before taking out his phone to send a message to someone.
There is a coffee shop diagonally opposite the bar.
It was late, and there were only a few customers left in the store. Lian Huaiyang sat alone for a while before the person he had arranged to meet showed up.
"Speak," Jiao Qian said, placing her bag on the table, crossing her arms and legs, and getting straight to the point as soon as she sat down, "What do you want?"
The wait was a bit long, and the coffee in his palm was now only lukewarm. As Lian Huaiyang gently stroked the ceramic cup, he calmly stated his conjecture: "I suspect that Chen Jianjin has installed a tracking device on Wanwan."
"...?!" Jiao Qian raised an eyebrow, quickly switching to an expression as if she were looking at someone who was crazy. "Why are you setting up a location tracking?"
She immediately denied it, saying, "Chen Jianjin would never do something so pointless."
“Really!” Lian Huaiyang suddenly looked up and affirmed firmly.
He took a deep breath and began to explain in detail what had been wrong with him over the past two days.
After listening, Jiao Qian felt complicated and her attitude softened slightly, but rationally, she still couldn't believe that such an absurd thing, which seemed like a rumor, would happen to Chen Jianjin.
What's so good about Song Wan? Why does he protect her like the apple of his eye?
She asked, annoyed, "How do you know it's not a coincidence?"
"Once might be a coincidence, but the second time definitely wouldn't be. He went to great lengths to get his hands on me, so how could he possibly let Wanwan off the hook?!"
Lian Huaiyang couldn't help but curse under his breath.
Chen Jianjin is a pervert!
"Let me think about it." Jiao Qian rubbed her temples irritably. "Where do you think... the GPS tracker would be installed?"
"The most likely explanation is a mobile phone," Lian Huaiyang analyzed clearly. "These days, almost everyone has their mobile phone with them at all times."
——
On the day before the May Day holiday ended, Fang Xia suddenly received news that she had passed the preliminary round of the photography competition. In order to prepare well for the semi-finals, she changed her high-speed rail ticket a day in advance. Just like when she came, Song Wan and Lian Huaiyang went to see her off when she left.
As dusk fell and the sky was ablaze with crimson clouds, Song Wan stepped out of the high-speed rail station and prepared to hail a taxi, but after searching high and low, she couldn't find her phone.
Lian Huaiyang noticed that the person hadn't followed and turned around to ask, "What's wrong?"
While frowning and rummaging through her bag, Song Wan replied, "I think I've lost my phone."
Lian Huaiyang looked away slightly and said gently, "How could that be? Look again carefully."
Song Wan's bag didn't have much to begin with, and now it's been turned inside out.
She searched several times but couldn't find it. Helpless, she slumped her shoulders. "It seems... it's really lost."
"Where do you think you might lose it?"
Song Wan thought hard for a while, then shook her head, "I can't remember. I remember keeping it safe in my bag the whole time, even when I had lunch..."
As she spoke, Song Wan suddenly looked up, "Could it be that it was left at the hotel?"
The more she thought about it, the more likely it seemed. She immediately wanted to go back to the hotel to look for it, but Lian Huaiyang grabbed her wrist. "It was still there when we had lunch. It's unlikely that you left it at someone's restaurant, right? Could it be at the station? There are so many people. What if you encountered a pickpocket? Think carefully again. Did anyone deliberately bump into you or something?"
Song Wan looked around with a bitter face. There were so many people in this sea of people that she had accidentally bumped into them.
"It's alright," Lian Huaiyang said. "I'll go with you to find the staff to check the surveillance footage."
They looked at it for several hours, but still couldn't figure out if the phone had been lost at the high-speed rail station.
"Is it possible that you left it somewhere else?" The diligent staff member who had spent a long time reviewing the surveillance footage said, "I don't see any suspicious people here."
Having troubled them for several hours but getting nothing in return, Song Wan felt both guilty and disappointed.
Lian Huaiyang gently rubbed the girl's fluffy head to comfort her, "Don't be upset, let's look for it again tomorrow. It's too late today, I'll take you back to school first."
Song Wan took a step to the side, subtly avoiding his hand, and asked in return, "Aren't you going back?"
Lian Huaiyang looked at his empty hand, his fingertips trembling slightly, and withdrew his hand. "I have something to do tonight, I'll take you home first."
"I can go back by myself." Song Wan sighed softly, still not liking to trouble others. "You should focus on your own business first."
"My business isn't urgent, and besides... you probably don't have any money on you."
Song Wan felt slightly embarrassed and pinched the fluffy charm on her shoulder bag; this was something she hadn't thought of.
"It's settled then. I'll take you back to school first."
Lian Huaiyang made the decision in a few words and hailed a taxi.
Chen Jianjin didn't pick up Song Wan today because she had told him beforehand that Fang Xia wanted her to stay overnight.
At 6:30 p.m., he checked the monitoring software and found that the location was the hotel the girl had booked.
Opening his chat with Song Wan, Chen Jianjin typed: "What time is your friend's train tomorrow? I'll give you a ride."
He put down his phone and buried himself in his work again.
Before I knew it, the clock struck eight.
There was an unexpected knock on the office door. Chen Jianjin took off his blue light blocking glasses and, looking slightly tired, pinched the spot on his nose pad that had been pressed against it for so long. "Come in."
Tao Ji pushed open the door and entered, beginning the last work process before leaving get off work each day—reporting tomorrow's schedule to his supervisor.
"At 10 a.m., we held a seminar on the first phase of the Killer King project. In the afternoon, Mr. Yang from Mancheng Animation invited you to discuss the derivative works copyright of the Dark Knight game. Also... the marketing department prepared a promotion plan based on Mr. Qi's previous suggestions before the holiday."
As she spoke, she placed the light blue folder next to Chen Jianjin. "This is a list of companies that we can consider cooperating with. Please see when it would be convenient for you to meet with their representatives after the holiday."
Chen Jianjin listened to the report expressionlessly and said in a low voice, "I'll look at the promotion plan later. I'll give you an answer about the meeting tomorrow. You can go home now. You've worked hard. You haven't been able to rest properly even during the holiday."
"It's not hard work, it's what I should do." Tao Ji smiled sheepishly, but in his heart he was happily calculating his triple overtime pay.
"Mr. Chen, I'll be going home now. Don't stay up too late, and take care of yourself."
Chen Jianjin didn't even look up and just gave a low "hmm".
Turning off the light in the secretary's office, Tao Ji looked around. In the huge office area, only the boss's office was lit. She couldn't help but sigh and secretly marveled: being a capitalist isn't as easy as one might imagine.
She was among the second batch of people to join the company, and compared to her other colleagues in the secretarial office, she was the most senior.
Tao Ji still remembers that this was her second job. She majored in directing in college, and her first job was film and television editing. She worked hard for a year and a half, but all she got was a poor health and a notice of layoff due to poor performance.
Large factories only have cattle and horses, not people, so for his second job, Tao Ji deliberately avoided large companies and the film and television industry, and carefully selected this place with fewer than twenty employees at the time.
Tao Ji still remembers the day of the interview. She bumped into Chen Jianjin in the elevator. He was wearing a hoodie and sweatpants. At the time, she thought he was an intern from some company in the building. It wasn't until the elevator doors opened, until the two of them walked in the same direction, until they were separated by a table, and she saw the boy walk in and sit down with the HR person on the other side, that she realized he was one of the owners of this game company—Chen Jianjin.
Tao Ji had done his research before the interview and naturally knew that the small workshop he was interviewing at actually had three controlling shareholders.
Chen Jianjin, Qi Yan, and Zhou Xiangyuan.
Before joining the company, including at the beginning of his employment, Tao Ji always viewed his new company as a dabbling startup by a rich second-generation heir.
Her original intention was to find an easy job with less work to recuperate.
It was indeed very easy at first. There were fewer than twenty employees in total. At that time, her position was not the assistant she is now, but an administrative one. Her daily work consisted of trivial tasks such as ordering meals for overtime and booking hotels and plane tickets for the boss's business trips.
Once inside, she learned that the company's initial motivation was simply a very rudimentary yet addictive web-based game.
The developers were their two college student bosses.
One success might be due to luck, and Tao Ji didn't think this makeshift team would be able to pull off a second project.
Until that year, once Dark Knight's closed beta test was completed and it was launched, it quickly took over half of the domestic single-player game market share.
Tao Ji doesn't like playing games and rarely touches them. However, due to work reasons, he learned about the product and downloaded it on his computer. Only then did he realize that such a small single-player game could contain so many ingenious ideas from the designers.
She later went out of the company's earliest version of the web game and had to admit that the good fortune of success was earned through hard work, not the windfall she had previously thought was unrepeatable.
That year, the administration department hired a new person, and she officially became the boss's assistant.
And so it went, day after day, year after year.
Tao Ji witnessed firsthand how this makeshift team grew from a startup with fewer than twenty people into a small to medium-sized enterprise with three to four hundred employees, becoming a rising star in the gaming industry in just three or four years.
Many times, she found it hard to believe that such remarkable achievements came from two male college students who had not yet graduated.
Tao Ji felt a deep sense of unease because she couldn't imagine the scene of powerful business owners sitting obediently in the final exam hall writing papers.
The next morning at nine o'clock, Tao Ji clocked in and immediately got to work. When the clock struck nine fifty-five, she got up and knocked on Chen Jianjin's office door to remind him, "Mr. Chen, the first phase of the Killer King project seminar starts at ten o'clock."
"good."
Chen Jianjin responded softly, temporarily finished his work, got up and walked out, glancing at his phone in between his busy schedule.
Song Wan still didn't reply to his message.
Today's meeting was mainly for the R&D department to report on recent work progress, while the planning and development departments were arguing so much that they had a headache.
From the project's inception until now, a full month has passed, and major problems remain unresolved while minor issues continue to arise.
Chen Jianjin looked at the things they handed over, his face as cold as ice.
Chen Jianjin tapped his pen lightly on the table, interrupting the report from the person on stage, "Team Leader Wang, on the previous PPT slide, why hasn't the tenth level, which we discussed in the previous meeting, been changed? What's the reason for insisting on this design? What is our theme? Don't you think the character development logic will fall apart later on?"
After saying that, he tapped the paper document in front of him with his pen, turned his head to look at the person next to him, and said, "Team Leader Yi, don't you usually play the game with your competitors? Why is it that for a simple tracking design, something that others have already launched, you're still telling me you can't do it?"
“President Chen,” Yi Cong sighed helplessly, “because what you want is different from what others have.”
Chen Jianjin chuckled at his idiocy, but there was little amusement in his eyes. "Is there any need to make the same thing again? Have you even played the new game that Frye released?"
Yi Cong lowered his eyes and shook his head slightly.
Chen Jianjin's breathing became slightly heavy. "You need to understand the underlying logic before you talk to me about the implementation method. If you can't do it, I need to provide concrete data to support my reasons why you can't do it."
Just as he was gathering his breath, wanting to say something more, his phone, which was lying to the side, rang.
As Chen Jianjin picked it up to look at it, he lightly tapped the table to remind him, "Continue."
It wasn't a message from Song Wan, but a text message from an unknown number.
The black pen twirled nimbly between the boy's strong, slender fingers, and Chen Jianjin pointed it in with his long fingers.
"Thud—"
A soft, but not loud, noise interrupted the meeting again. Chen Jianjin slammed his pen on the table, losing his composure in front of everyone for the first time in his life.
The veins on the back of the hand gripping the phone bulged without Chen Jianjin noticing, his jaw tightened, and his phoenix eyes gradually darkened.
Wang Shoucheng thought there was something wrong with his report again, and a fighting spirit immediately arose in his heart. The other employees in the conference room also held their breath.
Because their boss's expression was truly terrifying, more terrifying than I'd ever seen before.
A storm is brewing.
Having worked with the two bosses for so long, Tao Ji had never encountered a situation where someone left a meeting without reason. In addition, Chen Jianjin's complexion was really terrible. She subconsciously thought that an extremely urgent problem had occurred, and she couldn't help but tense up. When Chen Jianjin got up to leave, she hurriedly followed him out.
As Chen Jianjin strode out, he instructed, "Go back and keep an eye on them. After the meeting, compile the meeting minutes and send them to me. Also, cancel my appointment with General Manager Yang of Mancheng Animation this afternoon. I have an urgent matter to attend to."
Chen Jianjin looked down and searched for Ding Shao's phone number.
As Chen Jianjin's personal assistant, Ding Shao had been by his side since he was a child, taking care of his daily needs. In the past year, however, he had only seen his boss a handful of times, as he was constantly traveling around the world preparing for a wedding.
Ding Shao's first thought upon seeing Chen Jianjin's call was that his boss was calling to inquire about the progress again. So, as soon as he answered, he proactively reported, "Mr. Chen, the wedding rings have been retrieved from the designer, and the invitations..."
Before Ding Shao could finish speaking, Chen Jianjin interrupted him, "I'll send you a number, help me check the user information."
"There's urgent work to be done," Ding Shao quickly replied, "Okay."
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