Su Niannian’s face on the screen was crying with pear blossoms and rain, every word carrying a meticulously crafted accusation.
A-Wang was sweating bullets, his hand holding the phone trembling. “Sister Jiang, this is over! People online eat this stuff up. The trending searches are all cursing you now, saying you’re abusing a foreigner!”
Jiang Yu’s gaze shifted from that crying face to the silver-haired man in the room who was currently studying the faucet with a serious expression.
Illegal imprisonment? Foreign model?
A flicker of absurdity crossed her mind, but her face remained calm as she reached out and pressed A-Wang’s phone down.
“Noisy.”
The calmer she was, the more A-Wang’s heart pounded.
Just then, Jiang Yu’s old phone buzzed incessantly. The caller ID showed Liu Qinghe.
Jiang Yu answered and put it on speaker.
Liu Qinghe’s frantic voice came through immediately: “Miss Jiang, you finally picked up! Su Niannian is clearly slandering you. Don’t do anything rash! Our legal team is preparing a letter, but the most critical thing right now is… that gentleman beside you—who exactly is he? We need a story that can shut people up!”
Everyone’s gaze landed on Jiang Yu in unison.
She hung up, ignoring Liu Qinghe’s continued “Hello? Hello?” and walked straight over to Cang Ming.
“We need to give you an identity.”
Cang Ming’s golden pupils reflected her figure, devoid of emotion.
Jiang Yu was concise: “From today on, you’re my beach-combing assistant, named A-Ming. I found you by the shore. You hit your head, lost your memory, and you’re working with me for now. Most importantly—” She paused, emphasizing, “Don’t say anything weird.”
Cang Ming looked at her, silent for a moment. His lips moved slightly—the word “this” that represented divine authority was on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it back down.
“…You’re commanding me.”
“Yes.”
Jiang Yu met his gaze. “Got a problem?”
Cang Ming’s eyes lingered on her face for a long time. Finally, he shook his head.
“No.”
Done. Jiang Yu breathed a silent sigh of relief.
Aunt Lin finally snapped out of her daze from staring at Cang Ming’s overly striking face, slapping her thigh.
“Aiyo! This kid looks so pitiful! Losing his memory like that! Come on, don’t just stand around—I’ll go cook. The boy needs a good meal!”
Aunt Lin bustled into the kitchen, and before long, a whole table of seafood was laid out.
Steamed grouper, blanched shrimp, garlic scallops—the aroma was mouthwatering.
At the table, Aunt Lin kept piling food onto Cang Ming’s plate, her enthusiasm cracking even his perpetually cold expression.
“Come on, dear, eat more! Look how skinny you are!”
Cang Ming looked at the mountain of food in his bowl, expressionlessly picked up a piece of fish, and brought it to his mouth.
He chewed a few times with extreme elegance, then suddenly stopped. His gaze fell back on the fish on the plate.
Jiang Yu noticed something was off. “Not good?”
Cang Ming set down his chopsticks, his tone carrying a pure, earnest seriousness.
“In life, it was my subject.”
“Pfft—cough, cough!”
A-Wang sprayed out a mouthful of porridge, and Aunt Lin’s chopsticks froze mid-air.
But Jiang Yu acted as if she hadn’t heard, picking up a piece of the fatty belly meat and eating it herself before slowly looking at him.
“It’s steamed now.”
She lifted her chin. “Eat or not?”
Cang Ming silently looked at her, then at the fish, and finally picked up his chopsticks again.
“…Eat.”
In the afternoon, to completely quell the online uproar, Jiang Yu decided to go live.
She brought Cang Ming to a new stretch of sea, where reefs clustered and the terrain was complex.
“You said you can sense things at the bottom of the sea?”
She asked him, “Where’s the good stuff?”
Cang Ming closed his eyes, as if resonating with the ocean itself.
A few seconds later, he opened them and pointed toward a seemingly unremarkable stretch of water in the distance.
“There. Three zhang below the surface, there’s a coral cluster. Lots of shellfish inside. There are pearls.”
Jiang Yu followed his direction.
In her providential luck vision, deep in that water, there were indeed several clusters of abnormally bright golden light—far stronger than anything she could sense on her own.
His perception range far exceeded hers.
Jiang Yu now had a solid foundation.
She started the livestream with a blunt title: 【Clarification, and a beach-combing session while we’re at it】.
The moment it went live, viewer count shot past fifty thousand.
The barrage comments scrolled like crazy, nearly covering the entire screen.
【Here we go! The streamer’s finally confronting this head-on!】
【I knew there’d be a twist! Not a single word from that green tea Su Niannian can be trusted!】
【Where’s the silver-haired hunk! Let us see if he’s really being imprisoned!】
Jiang Yu turned the camera to her side.
Cang Ming was wearing A-Wang’s old T-shirt and board shorts, his silver hair slightly lifted by the sea breeze, standing coldly on a reef, gazing at the ocean.
“My beach-combing assistant, A-Ming.”
Jiang Yu introduced him to the camera. “He doesn’t talk much. Let’s begin.”
The barrage exploded.
[Whoa! This guy’s looks as an assistant? Sis, you got any floor-sweeping positions open?! Like, with a college degree?!]
[Why is he so expressionless the whole time? I love a cool guy! But isn’t that T-shirt a bit small…]
[Wait, the way he’s looking at Sister Jiang… that’s way too focused! My radar is going off!]
With Cang Ming as a living radar, the efficiency of this livestream was absurdly high.
“Under the rock on the left.”
Jiang Yu flipped it over and found a wild abalone bigger than her face.
“In the mud puddle ahead.”
Jiang Yu probed with her oyster knife and pulled out three plump sea cucumbers.
He pointed, she collected. Every single hit.
The livestream audience went from initial frenzy to gradually numbed.
[I’m used to it. Sit down, standard procedure.]
[I legit suspect Ah Ming is the real golden finger here!]
[These two are running a full-map x-ray hack, right? Suggest an investigation!]
When Jiang Yu used her tongs to pull a pale golden conch from a crevice in the rocks, the silent Cang Ming suddenly spoke.
His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried clearly into the livestream.
“That belongs to this god.”
Jiang Yu didn’t even look up, tossing the conch into the bucket with practiced ease.
“Oh.”
Cang Ming: “…”
He looked at the conch in the bucket, then at Jiang Yu’s focused back. In the end, he pressed his lips together and chose to stay quiet.
The livestream was in hysterics.
[This god, hahaha! Is chuunibyou the exclusive cute point of handsome guys?!]
[Sister Jiang’s one “oh” contained all the emotions: got it, next.]
[This pair is too addictive! One deadpan with a sharp tongue, one socially anxious and blunt—a perfect match!]
As the livestream continued, sharp-eyed viewers noticed more details.
A wave came crashing in. Before Jiang Yu could react, Cang Ming had already shifted a step without a sound, using his back to block most of the spray for her.
When she slipped on wet moss, a hand shot out like lightning to steady her elbow.
When her finger got pricked by a sea urchin spine, his brow furrowed almost imperceptibly. He tore off his own clean T-shirt sleeve and bandaged it for her with somewhat clumsy movements.
These actions were quick and natural, as if carved into his very bones.
[I’m shipping this! He’s protecting her on instinct!]
[That damn protective instinct! Even with amnesia, he can’t forget to pamper her?!]
[Wuwuwu I don’t care, the Cang-Yu CP is locked in! I swallowed the key!]
Two hours later, the livestream ended.
Zhou Dafu drove up in his small truck to collect the goods. When he saw the premium catches in the bucket, his eyes nearly popped out.
When he picked up the golden conch, he sucked in a sharp breath.
“A golden-mouth conch? Alive?! Oh my god!”
His hands were shaking. “You can’t buy these even with money! I know an old collector—for this one alone, he’d pay at least fifty thousand!”
Adding in the rest of the seafood, the livestream’s total earnings broke sixty thousand.
Jiang Yu turned to look at Cang Ming.
He kept his face cold, turning his head the other way—a sulky look of “you sold my stuff but I won’t say anything about it.”
That night, in the stone house.
Jiang Yu sat under the lamp, counting today’s earnings bill by bill.
Cang Ming sat in the corner, quietly watching the sea outside the window.
“That thing you said was yours,” Jiang Yu suddenly spoke up. “What did you mean exactly? Were you… a Dragon King before?”
Cang Ming turned his head. His golden vertical pupils gleamed startlingly bright in the darkness.
“Dragon King?”
He seemed to ponder the word. “No. But the sea—it’s mine.”
“The entire sea?”
“The entire sea.”
Jiang Yu stared at him for three seconds, then continued counting money with a deadpan expression.
“…Then you’re pretty rich.”
Cang Ming: “?”
Just then, Jiang Yu’s phone buzzed.
A text from an unknown number, very short.
“Jiang Yu, where are you? Something’s happened at home. Come back immediately.—Uncle.”
The sender was the one from her memory who had been the first to approve the family announcement that the jinx should have been driven out long ago.
Jiang Yu gripped her phone tightly.
Cang Ming had somehow appeared behind her. He glanced down at the screen and said something cryptic.
“There’s something filthy clinging to these words.”
Jiang Yu looked up at him. “How do you know?”
Cang Ming’s gaze rested on the phone screen, a flicker of divine instinctual disgust passing through his golden pupils.
“I can smell it… malice.”
He paused, then added, “The kind that’s very familiar.”