“Jiang You, give up! There is no way I am ever marrying you!”
Sitting across from her was her former fiancée, Qin Mingyue, a notoriously spoiled young socialite of the high-society circle. At that moment, she aggressively shoved the annulment agreement across the table, tapping her nail against the surface with a sharp snap that sounded like a slap to the face.
“A subpar Alpha whose pheromones taste like plain water, you expect this young lady to live like a widow in a marriage with you? In your dreams!”
Jiang You picked up her coffee cup and took a small sip, struggling to keep her expression from looking too much like she was smiling.
A piece of absolutely fantastic news: she finally did not have to marry her.
Putting down her coffee cup, she forced out a regretful expression, her voice carrying just the right amount of disappointment: “Fine, I will sign it.”
Qin Mingyue froze for a second, likely not expecting her to be so agreeable. After all, in the socialite’s expectations, Jiang You should have been weeping bitterly, clinging shamelessly, and begging her not to call off the engagement, just like the rest of the Jiang family had begged her.
“Aren’t you going to try to keep me?”
“Keep you for what?” Jiang You had already pulled out a pen, scribbling down her full name, and thoughtfully flipped the document to the last page for the other woman. “Sign it, and let us get this over with early. You can go find your true-love Alpha, and I can head back to work overtime.”
Qin Mingyue’s expression flickered between pale and flushed, as if she had a stomach full of things she wanted to say yet did not know which insult to hurl first.
“Jiang You, is something wrong with your brain?” Qin Mingyue took a deep breath, putting back on her haughty socialite demeanor. “I am calling off our engagement and humiliating you like this, and this is your reaction?”
“Then what kind of reaction do you want from me?” Jiang You tilted her head, asking for sincere guidance.
Qin Mingyue was left speechless.
She had envisioned many different scenarios: Jiang You weeping and begging her not to cancel the engagement, angrily slamming the table and calling her a snob, or humbly saying, “I will work harder, please don’t abandon me.” Never once had she imagined this scenario. Jiang You was just sitting there upright and proper, her expression completely calm, as if calling off the engagement meant nothing to her at all.
“You, don’t you want to get married at all?” Qin Mingyue narrowed her eyes.
Jiang You almost lost her composure.
She lowered her head, pretending to rub her eyes out of sadness, though it was actually to hide the corners of her mouth curling upward.
“Miss Qin is joking.” She smiled, saying with extreme humility: “Given the Jiang family’s current situation, being able to marry into the Qin family is my blessing. How could I not want to get married?”
Qin Mingyue stared at her for three seconds.
“Liar,” she blurted out. “The corners of your mouth are twitching. Are you trying to hold in a laugh?”
Jiang You immediately pressed her lips tight, looking entirely innocent. “No, I am not.”
“You are!”
“I really am not.”
“Jiang You!”
Jiang You finally could not hold it back, the corners of her mouth curving up just a fraction.
Just for a split second.
Yet Qin Mingyue still caught it.
Then, the young socialite’s face shifted from white to red, and from red to purple, before finally slamming a hand onto the table and standing up to point right at Jiang You’s nose.
“Fine, Jiang You, remember this! It was this young lady who dumped you, not you dumping me!”
“Of course, of course,” Jiang You nodded hurriedly, her attitude earnest. “It is Miss Qin who thinks little of me. I am the one who isn’t worthy of marrying up.”
“Shut up!”
Qin Mingyue was so furious her hands were shaking. She snatched the annulment agreement off the table, checked to make sure both parties had signed, and shoved it viciously into her bag.
She hoisted her bag up and turned on her ten-centimeter heels, pivoting to storm off.
After taking two steps, she spun back around.
“And another thing,” she pulled a card out of her bag and slammed it onto the table. “Here is fifty thousand. Go see a doctor. For your pheromone issue, find a good specialist, maybe it can still be cured. Do not say this young lady treated you unfairly.”
Jiang You looked at the card and blinked.
Fifty thousand.
Was she so terrified that Jiang You would keep pestering her that she even prepared an engagement-annulment severance fee?
She picked up the card and smiled sincerely, “Thank you, Miss Qin.”
“I told you, sucking up to me will not work.”
Qin Mingyue glared at her fiercely. “The engagement is canceled, and this money is charity. Do not get any ideas that I have changed my mind.”
“I know,” Jiang You pocketed the card safely. “Miss Qin has a kind heart, and I appreciate it.”
“You!”
Qin Mingyue stomped her foot in rage, spun around, and marched off, her high heels clicking loudly against the floor.
This time, she was truly gone.
Jiang You watched her go, and once her figure vanished out the café doors, she finally let the corners of her mouth stretch all the way up to her ears.
She looked down at the coffee stain on the table, then down at the fifty-thousand-dollar card in her hand.
Yay.
She was single.
And she had casually picked up fifty thousand.
She fished her phone out of her bag and sent a message to her best friend, Zhou Xiaoyu: “Engagement annulled successfully!”
Zhou Xiaoyu replied in a split second: “You didn’t you say your family was begging them not to call it off? How did this happen?”
“She brought it up herself,” Jiang You typed rapidly. “Said my pheromones were as faint as plain water and that she would be living like a widow.”
“Is this person mental? She dumps you and still has to humiliate you?”
“Who knows? She even gave me fifty thousand as a breakup fee.”
“You actually get paid for getting dumped?”
“She said it was money for me to see a doctor.”
“Hahaha, does this rich girl have a screw loose in her head?”
“Whether she has a screw loose or not, she certainly spends big,” Jiang You thought for a moment, then added, “She just has a bit of a massive temper.”
Zhou Xiaoyu sent a string of laughing stickers, followed by: “Alright then, let’s celebrate tonight! My treat!”
“Your treat? Didn’t you just buy a bag last month?”
“An engagement cancellation is such a huge joyous occasion, I am treating! You watch your pennies, you still have a whole family to support.”
Looking at that message, the smile on Jiang You’s face slowly faded.
Supporting a whole family.
Ah, right.
Three months ago, she was just an ordinary working stiff in a rented apartment, pulling all-nighters to revise project proposals.
Then fate suddenly played a trick on her.
No, not a trick, but the kind of absurd plotline that only ever happens in eight o’clock soap operas.
Her biological parents tracked her down, DNA matching confirmed it, and she was verified as the youngest Jiang daughter who had gone missing eighteen years ago.
The Jiang family, that high-society conglomerate she had only ever seen on the news.
Turns out she hadn’t been abandoned; she had accidentally wandered off during a family trip back home to pay respects to their ancestors. What did a six-year-old girl know about finding her way? Crying all the while, she was eventually brought to a police station by a kind stranger and later adopted by her foster parents.
Her biological parents had searched for her for eighteen years and finally found her.
On the day she was officially recognized and brought back, the entire Jiang family broke down in tears together. Her mother held her and would not let go, her father’s eyes were red the entire day, and her older sister, Jiang Tang, pressed against her shoulder and cried like a three-year-old child, saying, “My poor little sister, I have finally found you.”
Everyone was saying: “As long as you are back, with us here from now on, you will never have to suffer again.”
The fanfare was so grand that Jiang You didn’t even know where to put her hands.
She moved into the Jiang family’s villa, stepping into a bedroom reportedly kept pristine for eighteen years just for her. The wardrobe was packed with the newest seasonal clothing, and the vanity table held skincare products from her favorite brand, all pre-researched and prepared by her older sister, Jiang Tang.
Every day, her mother had the housekeeper whip up creative gourmet dishes for her, her father transferred five million to her saying to use it as pocket money first, and her sister dragged her out shopping day after day to buy, buy, buy, eager to make up for eighteen lost years of missing out.
Jiang You felt like she could finally shake off the bitter, exhausting life of a corporate slave and start enjoying life from then on.
Who would have guessed that three months later, the Jiang family would go bankrupt?
Not the slow, declining kind of bankruptcy, but a sudden, cliff-edge plummet.
Capital chains snapped, stock prices crashed, creditors came knocking, and banks pulled their loans.
Her father was running around outside every day trying to pull in investments, completely impossible to catch. Her mother sold off all her jewelry, luxury bags, and accessories, while her older sister, Jiang Tang, a wealthy young lady raised so naively that she didn’t even know how to pay an electric bill, looked at Jiang You with reddened eyes and said, “I’m sorry, little sister. We didn’t even get the chance to treat you right before we became a burden to you.”
What had Jiang You said back then?
It was probably something like: “It’s fine, I’ll figure something out.”
And then she genuinely started figuring it out.
The whole Jiang family needed to be fed. Though the villa was sold to pay off a portion of the debt, her mother had lived her whole life as a wealthy corporate wife, she couldn’t possibly go out and get a job, could she? Her sister had been pampered since childhood and knew how to do nothing, she couldn’t exactly go washing dishes in a restaurant, right?
Jiang You didn’t really feel bitter about it; she just occasionally found it a bit ironic.
Recognized and brought back to high society for three months, she didn’t even get to enjoy any luxury before inheriting the livelihood of an entire household.
As for that so-called arranged marriage, it was an old childhood bet made years ago between the Jiang and Qin families. After she went missing, the engagement was left hanging in limbo, and once she was found, the Qin side never brought up canceling it, treating it merely as a formality.
Who could have guessed that Qin Mingyue would get some strange notion in her head, insisting on personally coming to call off the engagement and humiliating her face-to-face?
“Sigh.” Jiang You tapped her phone screen awake and sent another text to Zhou Xiaoyu: “As for the family side, I will figure out how to break it to them later. Anyway, the engagement is canceled, and I won’t have to bother trying to suck up to the Qin family anymore.”
Zhou Xiaoyu: “True. Where are you right now? Should I come meet you?”
“No need, I’m heading home first.”
Jiang You paid the bill and walked out of the café. Sunlight landed on her shoulders, pleasantly warm.
She walked down the street where the air was thick with a mixture of various pheromones, and neon billboards advertising calming agents flashed everywhere.
The world was simply like this.
Alphas and Omegas needed pheromone soothing; otherwise, they would grow irritable, anxious, depressed, or even lose control entirely. This gave birth to a massive industry, ranging from oral suppressants and patch-type soothing devices to bionic pheromone sprays and smart wristbands capable of mimicking a partner’s body temperature, all kinds of calming products were readily available.
And Jiang You happened to work in this exact field, she was a pheromone designer.
The ironic contrast was that her own pheromone rating was subpar, faint enough to be as odorless as plain air.
Yet precisely because her pheromones were weak, she was able to make a name for herself in this industry as an Alpha. Other designers, when creating calming products, were more or less hindered by their own instincts. Alpha designers tended to overemphasize a sense of conquest, while Omega designers leaned toward appeasement-style formulas.
In contrast, she was able to step outside the instinctive limitations of Alphas and Omegas, designing products from a much purer, rational perspective.
Jiang You pulled back her thoughts, just about to flag down a taxi home, when she suddenly received a death warrant from her direct boss.
[Jiang You, return to the company immediately. President Wen is calling for you by name.]
President Wen? Wen Shaonian?
Her ice-berg boss, what on earth could he want with her at a time like this?