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In her view, the answer did not even need to be asked.
This cruise was a Sheng Tang charter. The people present were either her employees or her clients. From the moment they boarded, she had been the person at the top of the pyramid.
“No need to choose.” Su Qingxue stepped forward, her voice regaining the hardness of a final decision in a meeting room. “Most of the people here are Sheng Tang employees. I am the legal employer. For me to take unified command is only natural.”
She glanced at Chen Jian. This man was too clear-headed.
Chen Jian immediately rebutted, “Ms. Su, no offense intended, but an employment relationship has a premise: that they are still inside the company’s system.”
He spread his hands and looked around.
“Where is this? An island without even a name. No labor law, no contract, no human resources department. Your title at Sheng Tang, apart from that ship sunk on the seabed, is just a few words.”
“What do you mean?” Su Qingxue’s chin tightened slightly.
“The meaning is simple. Whoever can keep everyone alive becomes the lead sheep. It is not whoever has the prettiest business card who automatically gets promoted.”
The words were not heavy, but falling on Su Qingxue’s ears, they were no different from a slap to the face.
A naked challenge.
Rustling discussion rose in the crowd. “Wang Lan’s husband makes sense… Ms. Su is the boss at the company, but this is not the company…”
“That said, what can Wang Lan’s husband actually do?”
“Then what can Ms. Su do? She can’t even make a fire…”
“At the end of the day, right now she is just a vase…”
Su Qingxue heard every sentence.
Each one felt like it was scraping her bones.
She had lived for twenty-six years, and no one had ever dared to question her leadership to her face.
At Sheng Tang, one glance from her could silence an entire floor.
But now, standing among these disheveled, hungry, freezing survivors, she felt a powerlessness she had never felt before.
Her power base — money, position, the company system — on this island, was all reduced to zero.
“Who the hell is gossiping?!”
At this critical moment, a violent shout exploded from behind the crowd.
When Wang Qiang rushed out from behind the reef, the viciousness on his face was unmistakable.
The fear and cowardice he had spent hours hiding behind the reef instantly turned into aggression the moment he saw Su Qingxue being challenged.
Because he understood better than anyone present: if Su Qingxue fell, he would be nothing.
“Have you all rebelled?!” Wang Qiang grabbed the collar of Xiao Zhou from administration, who had been discussing the loudest.
Xiao Zhou was stunned with fright, his lips trembling. “Brother Qiang… Brother Qiang, I didn’t…”
“Didn’t? Are my ears deaf or blind?!”
“Smack!”
A slap landed on Xiao Zhou’s face.
It was as crisp as a firecracker going off.
Xiao Zhou’s head jerked to one side. Half his face swelled instantly, and blood seeped from the corner of his mouth.
Wang Qiang shook his hand. His five fingers still carried the hot sting of the slap, and he felt considerably more comfortable all over.
The pleasure of bullying the weak, once tasted, was hard to stop.
“Listen well!” He turned around, pointed at everyone present, his eyeballs almost bulging out.
“Who is Ms. Su? The helmsman of Sheng Tang Group! Worth tens of billions! Her knowledge, her resources, her judgment — all of you trash put together are not worthy of carrying her shoes!”
“Whoever dares to disrespect Ms. Su again, I will knock his teeth out one by one!”
His gaze finally locked on Chen Jian.
“And you,” Wang Qiang strode up to Chen Jian and glared down at him. “Chen Jian, right? What is your annual salary? One hundred fifty thousand or two hundred thousand?”
He did not wait for Chen Jian to answer. The corner of his mouth twisted into a harsh sneer.
“Just you? A man living off his wife, and you think you belong here giving orders? Have you ever managed people? Have you ever led a team? You can’t even write a year-end report properly, and you want to manage the life and death of dozens of people?”
“What are you, exactly?”
Chen Jian did not move.
He only pushed up his glasses. “Are you finished?”
That reaction made Wang Qiang even angrier.
At the company, what he hated most was this kind of person who responded neither to softness nor to hardness.
If you tried to intimidate him, he was not afraid. If you tried to reason with him, he had an argument for everything. A person like that was born to disgust him.
“Whether I am finished or not, is that for you to ask?!”
Wang Qiang lifted his foot. “Bang!”
A kick landed on Chen Jian’s calf.
It was not a light kick. It was violence carrying one hundred percent malice, meant to kick a man to his knees.
The toe of the shoe struck squarely against the shin bone, and the pain exploded upward.
Chen Jian grunted and dropped to one knee.
“Husband!”
Wang Lan screamed and rushed over, crouching beside Chen Jian, hurriedly trying to help him up.
Chen Jian gritted his teeth, one hand braced on the sand. He raised his head, looked at Wang Qiang, anger surging in his eyes.
But he forcibly held it back.
Because he understood better than anyone: fighting Wang Qiang now, apart from both sides getting hurt, would solve no problem at all.
The instant Wang Qiang saw Chen Jian kneel, his whole spirit returned.
That was right! This was normal!
At the company or on a desert island, the strong were supposed to climb upward by stepping on the heads of the weak. That was the way of the world.
“Listen to me clearly,” Wang Qiang stepped up to Chen Jian, lowered his head, his voice dropping to a frequency cold to the marrow.
“You have a fire-making skill. Good. Ms. Su can use you, so you can still stand here and talk right now.”
“But if you dare to steal Ms. Su’s spotlight again, if you dare to show off in front of these people again…”
He lifted his foot, placed the sole on Chen Jian’s shoulder, and slowly pressed down.
“I wouldn’t mind letting you keep company with the five who are already dead.”
Wang Lan clutched Chen Jian’s arm tightly, her whole body shaking like a sieve.
She wanted to curse, but her throat felt as if someone had it gripped, and not a single word could be squeezed out, because life on this desert island was temporary, and after returning she would still have to rely on Su Qingxue. This story is hosted at g.com.
The surrounding survivors watched this scene in complete silence.
No one stood up to speak for Chen Jian.
Fear is the best sealant.
When you watch with your own eyes as a person is kicked down in public for saying something he should not have said, your mouth will automatically make the safest choice for you: shut.
Su Qingxue stood a few steps away, watching all of this.
Her expression was very complex.
Wang Qiang’s methods were too crude, so crude that they gave her, a CEO with an elite education, a feeling of physical discomfort.
But she did not speak up to stop him.
Because she had discovered a cruel fact: Wang Qiang’s fist worked better than her rhetoric.
Just now she had talked earnestly for ten minutes, and these people were only half convinced.
But after one slap from Wang Qiang, every questioning voice vanished instantly.
Violence, here, was the most efficient management tool.
In her heart she knew this was wrong, but at this moment she needed Wang Qiang. She needed this unreasonable mad dog who recognized only his master.
So she chose silence.
Wang Qiang withdrew his foot.
He turned around, faced Su Qingxue, and bowed to ninety degrees. The vicious look on his face instantly switched to an extremely fawning smile.
The speed of that switch made everyone who saw it feel a chill down their backs.
“Ms. Su! These people don’t know what’s good for them, and they’ve made you suffer! With me here, whoever dares to disrespect you, I, Wang Qiang, will be the first to refuse!”
Su Qingxue nodded slightly and said no more.
She needed to pull the situation back to her own rhythm as quickly as possible.
“Chen Jian.” Su Qingxue walked up to Chen Jian, her tone regaining its cold hardness from the negotiating table.
Chen Jian, helped up by Wang Lan, bent down to retrieve his glasses from the sand and put them back on his nose.
One lens had a crack running through it.
He did not look at Wang Qiang.
He only looked quietly at Su Qingxue, waiting for her to speak.
“The survival skills you mentioned are indeed important.”
“But management ability is equally indispensable.”
She looked around the circle.
“Even if you found water, how would you divide it?”
Chen Jian’s movement paused for an instant.
“Who drinks first? Who drinks more? Do the injured get priority? What if someone refuses your allocation? What if someone steals water? What if someone hides water?”
A series of questions came crashing down, each one striking precisely at Chen Jian’s weak point.
Chen Jian’s brow furrowed.
“These problems do not require survival skills. They require the ability to make rules, enforce rules, and crush violations with an iron hand.” Su Qingxue’s presence surged back up in that moment.
She stepped forward and stood face to face with Chen Jian.
“You may be a wilderness survival expert. You can find water, make fire, and identify poisonous plants. But when it comes to managing people…”
Scan note: I checked the English text above for source-script characters. No Chinese-script characters appear in it. Names are rendered in pinyin only, and no source-script terms were preserved.