Jiang You lay in bed, staring at the ceiling, tossing and turning and completely unable to fall asleep.
Ever since she was eighteen, her pheromone medical report had been judged as extremely low activity, close to none. Yet tonight, when Wen Shaonian got close, there was undeniably a reaction. But her sugar mommy married her precisely because she was a useless Alpha with zero threat. What would happen if she found out the truth?
She flipped over, buried her face in her pillow, let out a sigh, and closed her eyes, feeling her mind as tangled as a bowl of porridge.
She finally drifted off to sleep after a long while, and then she dreamed.
A dream so daring it was bizarre.
In the dream, she was in the office, not her workstation, but that massive CEO office on the thirty-sixth floor with the floor-to-ceiling windows.
Her icy supervisor, Wen Shaonian, sat behind the executive desk wearing a black turtleneck sweater, her hair pinned into a meticulous bun, holding Jiang You’s proposal with her brows slightly furrowed as she delivered a cold opening line: “Team Leader Jiang, is a garbage proposal like this treating the users like fools, or are you treating me like a fool?”
Jiang You stood before the desk, clutching a tiny silver packaging pouch in her palm.
Inside was Blaze, an unreleased new product designed by the design department, an Omega pheromone soothing patch that had been rejected by the CEO countless times. Two days ago while modifying the design, Jiang You had fished it out from her drawer, glanced at it, and shoved it right back in. Right now, it was resting solidly in her palm, its packaging edges crumpled from her tight grip.
At that moment, she still couldn’t quite tell reality from the dream.
And Wen Shaonian was still lecturing her: “You’ve set the sensor sensitivity threshold so conservative. Are you trying to make a good product, or are you trying to make a product that is safe from errors but completely worthless? How many times do I have to say it? We must boldly innovate.”
“President Wen.” Jiang You heard herself speak, her voice unnaturally calm, as if possessed by something. “Listen to me.”
Wen Shaonian paused, raising her eyes to look at her with a hint of surprise. She probably hadn’t expected Team Leader Jiang, who usually didn’t even dare breathe loudly during all-hands meetings, to actually have the audacity to interrupt her speech today.
Taking advantage of that one-second pause, Jiang You had already rounded the desk and stood right opposite Wen Shaonian.
By the time Wen Shaonian realized something was wrong, it was already too late. Jiang You boldly pressed one hand against the back of the executive chair, while her other hand darted out like lightning, fingertips clutching that silver patch and precisely pressing it against the back of Wen Shaonian’s neck.
The location of the gland.
Warm and soft, with the absolute core sensory organ of an Omega’s life lying just beneath the skin.
Wen Shaonian shuddered all over, her pupils contracting sharply. She abruptly raised her hand to push Jiang You away, her voice carrying a rare, startled fury: “Jiang You! Have you lost your mind? What are you doing?”
But it was already too late; the patch was firmly in place.
The core ingredient of Blaze was a mild catalytic enzyme capable of penetrating deep into glandular tissue within thirty seconds, activating the dormant pheromone active factors inside the Omega’s body. During the product’s design phase, thousands of simulation tests had been run; the effect was gentle yet irreversible. Once applied, it took at least two hours for the pharmacological effect to completely fade.
In her dream, Jiang You remembered these parameters with crystal clarity.
It took less than twenty seconds for Wen Shaonian’s face to shift from pale to a soft flush.
“What on earth are you doing?” Her voice began to tremble, every word sounding forced out from the back of her throat. It was no longer the flat, commanding tone, but laden with obvious, undeniable gasps.
Her pheromones began to overflow.
Cold plum blossom fragrance, but no longer the faint scent suppressed to near-imperceptibility by strong inhibitors; this was a dense, surging, violently sweet aroma. The entire office filled with the scent within seconds, cold to the marrow, yet burning a fire deep inside the bone joints.
Jiang You’s breathing grew ragged.
“President Wen,” she heard herself say, her voice daringly unlike her own. “I modified the data model. I raised the sensor threshold by three notches, switched to a flexible substrate material, and reduced the foreign body sensation by forty percent.” She paused, looking down imperiously at the trembling figure in the chair. “Now I just want to ask you one question.”
Wen Shaonian leaned back against the chair, her head tilted slightly upward. The corners of her eyes were tinged with a reddish flush, her lips bitten red and damp by her own teeth as she spoke in broken, disjointed gasps: “What?”
“Did you check the proposal?” Jiang You leaned maliciously close to her ear, deliberately exhaling hot breath as she lowered her voice to ask.
Wen Shaonian probably hadn’t expected Jiang You to ask such a question at a time like this, or rather, she hadn’t expected her employee to pull off something so audacious. Caught completely off guard, her estral instincts were pushing her to the absolute limit.
“You.” Wen Shaonian’s hand gripped Jiang You’s shirt collar so tightly her knuckles turned white, but the force was limp and soft, less of a push and more of a desperate grab for support. “You have some nerve.”
“Hmm?” Jiang You leaned in a fraction closer. “What did President Wen say? I didn’t catch that.”
Wen Shaonian’s eye sockets reddened. Those eyes that were usually forged in ice, capable of freezing anyone solid with a single glance, were now swimming with moisture, her eyelashes clumped together with dampness. She looked as frail and vulnerable as a plum blossom beaten by frost.
“Enough. I said the data is fine.” She bit her lip as she spoke, a sob hiding in her voice. “Your proposal. I’ll pass it.”
The rush of satisfaction in Jiang You’s chest surged all the way from the soles of her feet straight to the top of her head.
The feeling was more exhilarating than getting a promotion and a raise. She looked at the haughty, icy CEO before her, now limp in the office chair with her collar slightly damp from sweat, her face mapped with the bewilderment and vulnerability of being driven to her absolute limit.
She finally couldn’t help laughing out loud: “Then I will.”
Before she could finish the sentence, Jiang You snapped her eyes open, staring up at the ceiling as her consciousness dragged itself back from the edge of the dream inch by inch.
She probably lay there frozen for a full thirty seconds.
Then she flipped over, buried her face straight into her pillow, and let out a muffled wail: “Ugh.”
The pillow absorbed most of the volume, but the sense of shame remained. It swarmed up densely, crawling all the way from her toes to the strands of her hair, every pore screaming: You’re done for, you are completely done for. How on earth could you dream of something like this? You actually pinned your boss to an office chair and forced her to cry while admitting your proposal passed.
Jiang You bolted upright, using both hands to smack her cheeks hard.
“Wake up! Wake up! Are you out of your mind, Jiang You? You don’t even dare make eye contact with her for more than three seconds! You shook like a patient with Parkinson’s just from zipping her dress when it got stuck! How did you even dare have a dream like this?”
Yet in her mind, the image of Wen Shaonian in the dream, head tilted back, reddish eye corners, trembling voice, refused to fade.
It was far too vivid.
Vivid enough that every single frame felt captured by an HD camera. She could even recall the shape of the damp patch from sweat on Wen Shaonian’s shirt collar, and the tooth mark left on her lower lip.
Jiang You buried her face in her hands, letting out a long, agonizing sigh through her fingers.
“Am I a pervert?”
No, no, no. She was just way too stressed out, which was why she was letting off steam in her dreams.
Right, that had to be it.
Jiang You took a deep breath, got out of bed, walked into the bathroom, turned on the faucet, cupped a handful of cold water, and splashed it onto her face. As water droplets trickled down her chin, she looked up at herself in the mirror.
Her face was flushed, her eyes panicked, and her expression completely defeated.
After washing up and changing clothes, Jiang You sluggishly stepped out of her bedroom.
The hallway was quiet. Wen Shaonian’s bedroom door was closed. Whether she was still sleeping or had already left, she couldn’t tell. Letting out a sigh of relief, she walked down the stairs while pondering what to have for breakfast.
Just as she rounded the hallway corner, she froze dead in her tracks.
Wen Shaonian sat at the dining table, the top button of her white shirt fastened all the way up, her hair pinned into a neat low bun. In front of her sat a cup of black coffee and an open tablet displaying dense charts and text. Sitting up straight with her spine as rigid as a ruler, she looked in the morning light like a cold, meticulously carved traditional ink painting.
Flashback to the dream instantly flooded Jiang You’s mind.
Wen Shaonian leaning back in the executive chair, head tilted up, reddish eye corners, voice soft and hoarse as she muttered, “The data is fine.”
Jiang You viciously pinched her own thigh to snap herself back to reality!
“Morning.” She forced her voice to sound normal.
“Morning. Breakfast is in the kitchen, help yourself.” Without looking up from her tablet, Wen Shaonian spoke.
Jiang You opened her mouth, wanting to say, “Never mind, I’m really in a rush,” but lost her nerve. Her gaze involuntarily drifted toward the back of Wen Shaonian’s neck, which was covered tightly by the shirt collar, revealing nothing at all.
Yet Jiang You knew what lay beneath it: the gland, the exact spot where she had pressed the patch in her dream. That patch of skin had grown feverish, flushed, and beaded with a thin layer of sweat in the dream, her pheromones spinning so wildly out of control that even inhibitors couldn’t suppress them, filling the office with cold plum blossom mixed with humid heat. Snapping out of it, she gave a frightened start.
“Right.”
She hurried to the kitchen, grabbed her portion of breakfast, and sat down at the absolute furthest end of the dining table, diagonally across, as far away as possible.
Throughout the entire meal, she didn’t dare look up even once.
Yet her brain refused to obey, acting like an uncontrolled looping program that kept cutting back to Wen Shaonian blushing in the dream, biting her lip, reddened eye sockets, voice shifting from a scold to a tremble.
Jiang You lifted her head, stealing a quick, furtive glance toward Wen Shaonian like a thief.
She was looking at the back of her neck.
She looked for barely half a second, not even a full second.
Just as Wen Shaonian happened to lift her head, their eyes locked.
Jiang You’s blood ran backward, her heart stopped dead, and she froze from head to toe into an ice sculpture.
Wen Shaonian’s gaze landed squarely on her, precisely locking onto the destination of her lingering stare, the back of her neck. The motion of her holding her coffee cup paused for a second before she slowly set the cup down, the bottom tapping against the tabletop with a crisp clack.
Jiang You wished she could die right then and there.
“You seem very afraid of me.”
Wen Shaonian spoke calmly, the faint curve of her mouth clearly a smile, yet radiating absolute oppression.
Jiang You opened her mouth, her mind completely blank.
What could she possibly say? Should she say, “I’m not scared of you, I’m just feeling guilty because in my dream I pinned you to an office chair, slapped a Blaze patch on you, made you melt and cry, and forced you to pass my proposal”?
“No.” Jiang You heard her own voice, barely audible above a whisper. “I’m just not quite used to this yet.”
Wen Shaonian picked up her coffee cup, took a sip, and set it back down, her gaze never leaving her.
Those eyes lingered on her face for three seconds before finally shifting away, acting as if nothing had happened as she lowered her head back to her tablet.
“Good.”
A single, breezy word.
Clueless as to what she meant, Jiang You nervously lowered her head to take a bite of her sandwich, chewing mindlessly while a single thought dominated her mind.
For the rest of her life, she must never, ever let Wen Shaonian find out what kind of dream she had just had.