“Let’s break up. Actually, I’m a man.”
Cheng Jinwei typed out these rather provocative words.
As soon as she sent the message, her fingers immediately moved to the upper-right corner of the screen. She opened the other person’s profile and, without giving him any chance to respond, quickly blocked and deleted him.
Looking at the chat list, now clean and empty again, she let out a long sigh of relief.
The weather this spring had been unpredictable, with alternating rain and gloom.
Outside the window, the world was a hazy gray-blue. Mist seemed to cling to the glass, blurring the scenery beyond recognition.
The long string of zeros in her bank account, however, was perfectly clear.
As the screen gradually dimmed, it reflected the girl’s delicate and beautiful features.
Her lips were pale, and her fair face was free of excessive makeup. Her long, jet-black hair fell smoothly over her shoulders, stirring slightly in the breeze.
She looked quiet and well-behaved.
Nothing about her appearance suggested that she was the kind of person who would deceive someone online for love and money.
…
The story went back six months.
Given Cheng Jinwei’s law-abiding and well-behaved nature, committing such an outrageous act of online romance fraud was completely out of character for her. But even a rabbit would bite when cornered, and even the most mild-tempered person had a breaking point.
She and Zheng Zetong, the second young master of the Zheng family, attended A University. The two had been at odds for a long time.
Zheng Ze was accustomed to throwing his weight around. Every day, he would either mock her for being the daughter of a housekeeper or accuse her of being a scheming, gold-digging woman who was only after rich men’s money. His words were filled with malice, and he went out of his way to humiliate her.
That much, she could tolerate. Cheng Jinwei was used to it and didn’t particularly care.
But later, for reasons she couldn’t understand, Zheng Ze suddenly seemed to have lost his mind.
He began apologizing to her, sending her flowers and gifts, and making every effort to get close to her.
Although she found his behavior inexplicable, she didn’t say anything.
She simply kept her distance in silence.
Then, one day six months ago, Cheng Jinwei happened to pass a corner of the hallway and accidentally overheard his plan.
It turned out that Zheng Ze had deliberately approached her with malicious intentions. He planned to coax her into becoming his girlfriend first, then pretend that his parents had frozen his assets and taken control of his finances.
His goal was to watch her desperately scheme to hold on to her wealthy boyfriend, only to end up paying for his expenses out of her own pocket.
Once he had had enough fun and squeezed every last bit of money out of her, he would simply dump her.
At that point, Cheng Jinwei, who already had very little money herself, furrowed her brows tightly.
She simply couldn’t take it anymore.
She thought that if he enjoyed deceiving people so much, then perhaps it was time he experienced what it felt like to be deceived by a gold-digging woman.
Acting on impulse, she went home and used an alternate account to add Zheng Ze on WeChat.
Things were extremely difficult at first.
Cheng Jinwei had never expected that Zheng Ze, a notorious playboy who had countless girlfriends and never turned anyone away, would be so cold and indifferent in private.
She carefully crafted a persona to suit his preferences, presenting herself as an impoverished dance student.
For two whole months, she used AI-generated selfies to maintain a presence on her social media feed, hoping to catch his attention.
He didn’t react at all.
He didn’t even bother replying to her messages.
In the end, she was ready to give up. She casually took a picture of herself holding a cup of coffee, posted it, and was about to delete him as a friend.
Then, suddenly, a red notification dot appeared.
She had finally received a like.
Only then did things begin to progress, and her plan finally get back on track.
Putting everything else aside, this man was genuinely generous.
He gave her 200,000 yuan in living expenses every month, along with occasional gifts and money transfers. After several months together, she had received a total of more than six million yuan.
She didn’t want to waste any more time thinking about Zheng Ze.
She exited the account balance screen.
By the time Cheng Jinwei went out that evening, her phone still hadn’t made a sound. The verification message section on her alternate account remained completely empty. The furious accusations and insults she had imagined Zheng Ze sending never came.
It was as if nothing had happened at all.
Strangely enough, the unusual silence made her feel increasingly uneasy.
Every so often, she glanced at her screen.
She was the kind of person who wouldn’t even dare arrive late to class. Now that she had finally committed a little misdeed, she found herself caught between two conflicting fears.
On one hand, she was afraid of receiving aggressive messages and felt anxious at the thought of being attacked.
On the other hand, she was also afraid of receiving nothing at all, because that would mean she wouldn’t get to witness the other person’s furious reaction.
Still, Z’s personality in real life was completely different from his personality online.
Perhaps rich second-generation heirs who cared too much about their pride were simply strange like that.
Cheng Jinwei tried to reassure herself and told herself not to overthink it.
…
But as it turned out, she had underestimated the situation.
Inside a private club, the air was filled with the intoxicating fragrance of expensive perfumes, carrying the unmistakable scent of extravagance and indulgence. Judging by the price of the place, she suspected that even taking a single breath might cost her ten yuan.
Cheng Jinwei sat on the sofa, nearly spilling the fruit juice in her hand. She could hardly believe her ears.
She struggled to speak.
“What did you say?”
The girl sitting beside her hadn’t noticed anything unusual about her reaction and innocently repeated her question.
“Did you manage to add Zheng Ze later?”
The girl’s name was Jiang Shuyao, the eldest daughter of the Jiang family.
Cheng Jinwei had lived with her grandparents since childhood. When she was nearly thirteen and about to start junior high school, her mother, who worked for the Jiang family, brought her from a small county in southern China to live with her. That was how the two girls met.
The lights overhead swayed back and forth, making the chandelier seem as though it might come crashing down at any moment.
Then Cheng Jinwei heard Jiang Shuyao say,
“I was looking for something in my chat history today, and that’s when I realized I made a mistake the last time you asked me for someone’s contact information. I accidentally gave you Brother Zongyan’s instead.”
It felt as though the chandelier had crashed down with those words.
The warm yellow light fell across Cheng Jinwei’s suddenly pale face.
Her body remained frozen in place, but her soul had already left it, drifting dazedly somewhere in midair.
What did she mean?
Accidentally gave you Brother Zongyan’s contact information?
Who…?
Brother Zongyan?
Liang Zongyan?!
Cheng Jinwei wasn’t close to Liang Zongyan. All she knew was that he was a friend of Jiang Shuyao’s cousin and one of the most prominent young heirs in their social circle.
He had taken over the family business at a very young age, and his background was anything but ordinary.
A face blessed with exceptional looks, paired with a truly vicious personality.
Her impression of him was still rooted in an incident she had witnessed during one summer vacation.
Apparently, one of his subordinates had deceived and betrayed him. The man had been forced to kneel beside him while Liang Zongyan, holding a lit cigarette between his long, slender fingers, casually raised his hand and pressed the burning cigarette butt into the man’s mouth to extinguish it.
Cheng Jinwei desperately wished she were still asleep and that everything was merely a hallucination.
This had to be fake.
How could this possibly be real?
Yet at that moment, every strange detail finally fell into place.
No wonder.
No wonder she had felt an inexplicable, eerie sense of wrongness ever since adding him.
No wonder, over the past six months, “Zheng Ze” had seemed like two completely different people online and offline.
It turned out she had added the wrong person from the very beginning.
And it was someone she absolutely could not afford to offend.
So, to sum up her current predicament, she had not only committed online romance fraud against Liang Zongyan but had also blocked and deleted him in an incredibly brazen manner.
Had she been a murderer or an arsonist in her previous life?
Why was heaven so unfair to her?
Why could people who committed evil deeds continue getting away with them, while she had spent more than twenty years being honest and keeping her head down, only to suffer such terrible consequences the one time she dared to rebel?
And another thing his surname was clearly Liang, so why on earth had he chosen to use the letter Z as his username?!
Jiang Shuyao, sitting beside her, was also puzzled.
That night, she had been completely focused on playing a game. She was in the middle of a crucial moment when Cheng Jinwei’s message suddenly arrived.
Her teammates were screaming through her headphones, and she was busy fighting in the game. After glancing at the message, she didn’t have time to ask any questions. She quickly switched to her contacts, scrolled down to the entries beginning with Z, clicked on a profile without looking carefully, and forwarded it straight to Cheng Jinwei.
How could she have known that one contact was saved as “Zheng Ze” and the other as “Brother Zongyan”? Their names began with the same letter, and the two entries were right next to each other.
Thus, the misunderstanding had occurred.
But why had Cheng Jinwei never mentioned it?
“Hello?” Jiang Shuyao waved a hand in front of her face and asked with concern, “Did you manage to get his WeChat from someone else afterward?”
Cheng Jinwei stiffened.
Coming back to her senses, she struggled to control her expression and forced a smile.
“Mm, yes.”
“Oh, good. That’s a relief.” Jiang Shuyao finally relaxed.
Actually, things were not good at all.
Cheng Jinwei’s scalp prickled with numbness.
She held her phone with all ten fingers stiff, her mind racing frantically as she tried to figure out what to do.
It’s fine. It’s fine.
Cheng Jinwei desperately tried to reassure herself, even as a thin layer of cold sweat gathered on her palms.
Liang Zongyan hadn’t returned to the country for several years. He was far away, beyond her reach. There was still time to fix this.
But when it rains, it pours. Misfortune never comes alone.
“Mr. Liang.”
At the entrance, a server bowed slightly.
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Fate was like a line of dominoes. All it took was the gentle flutter of a butterfly’s wings for every last one to come tumbling down.