Lin Zhe wanted to finish his manuscript and s the email before midnight. Lin Xi, feeling the food was about to go cold, simply did as she always had—picked up the lunch box and started feeding Lin Zhe.
Lin Xi didn’t think anything of it. Lin Zhe was busy typing away and, out of habit, opened his mouth whenever food came. But a few Lidu staff members who came to the coffee shop for a midday break saw them and started pointing and whispering about the siblings.
Lin Zhe heard the commotion and asked casually, “Sis, what’s up with those people?”
Lin Xi brought the spoon to Lin Zhe’s mouth and said disdainfully, “Ignore them. Just a bunch of green-eyed rabbits jealous of us.”
“Jealous? Did your licensing royalties come through?”
“Not yet! But those fashions you designed have been showing well at Mocheng Fashion Week these past few days, so those people have started doing the math for me. My rough estimate is around this much.”
Lin Xi spread open her palm, her slender fingers fanning out, as if afraid Lin Zhe couldn’t count.
“Five million? That much?”
“What are you thinking? Are you robbing a bank? I’d be happy with five hundred thousand. I’ll save the money for you—it’s all yours.”
“You think I’d care about that pocket change? That’s just your allowance. And why ‘yours’ and ‘mine’? What’s mine is yours. Just sp it.”
“You can’t talk like that. If you keep this up, you’ll never find a wife.”
“Tch, of course I won’t go looking for a wife. A wife will come looking for me.”
Lin Zhe sped up his typing, finished the last few paragraphs, sent the file, closed his laptop, and took the lunch box from Lin Xi to eat by himself.
He had read Lin Xi’s licensing contract with Lidu Studio. Guo Yumin had been fairly reasonable, offering Lin Xi industry-standard licensing terms without exploiting her just because she was a new intern.
Besides, Daweichao’s protection of intellectual property was extremely strict. As long as you had proper registration, no one dared to plagiarize your ideas. The complete design set Lin Xi submitted would generate licensing fees for a long time.
By Lin Zhe’s estimate, a wave of generous divids would come after Fashion Week—at least over a million for sure. The processing fees from the Sucheng garment factory, on the other hand, had little profit in them.
In the clothing industry, the upper channels take most of the profits, leaving only scraps for the processing companies.
But Lin Zhe kept the Sucheng garment factory not for the scraps—he had other plans.
Lin Zhe quickly finished his weight-gain meal, handed the box to Lin Xi to clean up, and opened his laptop to continue writing.
He had already submitted the opening of The Sentimental Swordsman, Ruthless Sword to several publishers. He needed to hurry and finish it so he could earn his first bucket of gold.
Lin Xi came back after washing the lunch box, pulled up a stool, and sat behind Lin Zhe, staring at the freshly written novel chapter.
But Lin Zhe said, “Sis, there’s no Li Xunhuan plot today. It’s basically all about A-Fei.”
“A-Fei? Actually, I quite like A-Fei too, but he’s just too stubborn. He seems a bit dumb, honestly.”
“A-Fei? Dumb?”
Lin Zhe shook his head. “Actually, A-Fei isn’t dumb at all. He just loved her to the extreme, so he willingly let a woman play him.”
“Played by a woman?” Lin Xi perked up immediately. “A-Fei gets played by a woman? Played by whom?”
Lin Zhe hadn’t yet written the part where A-Fei becomes completely infatuated with Lin Xian’er, so Lin Xi naturally had no idea how detestable a super green tea could be, nor how pitiful an innocent young man could be.
Seeing that her sister had the potential to turn into a gossip, Lin Zhe said flatly, “Reading a novel is supposed to have suspense. If you’re this impatient, I might as well just give you an outline so you can finish it in two hours.”
“Am I really that vulgar?”
Lin Xi snapped back at her brother disdainfully, then suppressed her curiosity, sat composedly behind Lin Zhe, and slowly watched A-Fei’s character gradually take shape.
Then she suddenly asked, “Zhe, why do I feel like this A-Fei… is a narcissistic self-portrait of you?”
“……..”
Lin Zhe froze for a moment, then immediately defed himself, “Who are you calling a narcissist?”
Lin Xi blinked and said, “Don’t a lot of writers like to project themselves onto their characters?”
“Look, the A-Fei you wrote is stubborn, does everything in unexpected ways, impressively mysterious, and effortlessly cool without even trying—that completely matches how you’ve been acting these past few days…”
Lin Xi rattled off a whole string of reasons, leaving Lin Zhe somewhat stunned. He hadn’t realized how remarkable the costume design sketches and the novel he’d casually produced were.
But Lin Xi had been in a state of constant shock these past few days, only keeping it off her face to preserve her dignity and standing as the “big sister in charge.”
Lin Xi’s experiences over the past six months could be described as twists and turns leading to light at the of the tunnel.
When their parents passed away and her brother was paralyzed, she had been driven to exhaustion, helpless and unable to sleep day or night, nearly on the verge of collapse.
But ever since winning the lottery, Lin Xi felt her fate had suddenly turned around.
In a very short time, Lin Xi no longer needed to feel anxious and panicked about money, no longer needed to humbly bow her head against her own conscience—she now had enough capital in Mocheng for the two siblings to survive.
Now Director Guo at the studio had shown her great goodwill, indicating that Lin Xi could officially join after graduating in a few months, at a salary far higher than that of new hires—making many of the other newcomers she worked with green with envy.
What was mere drizzle to Lin Zhe, a transmigrator, was in Lin Xi’s eyes absolutely something to brag about.
Now, looking at A-Fei’s arrogance and domineering spirit in Sentimental Swordsman, Ruthless Sword, it was practically her brother’s own confession—if you added being deceived by a girl…
Lin Xi sighed inwardly and gently consoled him, “Little brother, you’re talented, so don’t fixate on any one girl, and definitely don’t think you were played by anyone. She’s not worth it.”
“Sis, you’ve really got it wrong,” Lin Zhe said, half amused and half exasperated. “There’s no way a girl could play your little brother. It’d be more accurate the other way around.”
“……..”
“You… how can you talk such nonsense?”
Once Lin Xi registered what he meant, she clenched her fists and started pummeling her brother, clearly genuinely annoyed.
But what she didn’t know was that in his previous life, during Lin Zhe’s wildest days, he really had done some bad things.
Lin Zhe’s body still hadn’t fully recovered—he didn’t even have the strength to block, let alone fight back. But he suddenly pointed at the café entrance and said, “Hey, hey, stop hitting me, sis—look, who’s that over there?”
At the entrance of the café, a group of people walked in, and the one bringing up the rear with his head lowered was none other than the popular doctor, Pu Ruosong.
Lin Xi stopped what she was doing and said in surprise, “What’s Dr. Pu doing here? A blind date?”
Lin Zhe narrowed his eyes and said coldly, “Must be. That scumbag.”
“……”
The café where Lin Zhe was sitting was close to the matchmaking park and was a well-known blind date café in the area.
Pu Ruosong had come in following two middle-aged women—clearly elders—and accompanying them was a young woman. They were all polite and courteous with one another, maintaining an appropriate distance, making it obvious they were there for a blind date.
Lin Xi said, “Why are you calling him a scumbag? Dr. Pu must be twenty-six or twenty-seven already! It’s perfectly normal for him to come here for blind dates!”
But as Lin Zhe watched Pu Ruosong take a seat not far ahead, he said darkly, “A scumbag in spirit is still a scumbag.”