Breathing heavily, Shen Congjin rushed over. Hearing the sounds of men crying out from behind the door panels, his eyes flared red with fury as he reared back and slammed his foot hard against the door, kicking it wide open.
“Tang Tang!!”
Before he had even taken two steps into the room, he froze completely in his tracks.
Tang Tang was fast asleep in bed, tucked snugly beneath the quilt and looking entirely unharmed.
Standing beside the bed was a man, and kneeling in front of that man were three naked scumbags. The three men were locked in a repetitive cycle of kowtowing once and slapping themselves twice across the face, their cheeks swollen and distorted to the point where their original features were unrecognizable, yet none of them dared to stop.
Shen Congjin was intimately familiar with the silhouette of the standing man.
“Xia Zeyu? What are you doing here?”
Slowly turning his head, Xia Zeyu flashed a triumphant smile.
“President Shen, you’re a bit late. The hero-saves-the-beauty routine has already been preempted by me.”
“Did you… did you do something to Tang Tang—”
“Stop throwing baseless accusations around,” Xia Zeyu interrupted, turning around to face him. “Your precious Tang Tang is perfectly fine.”
Refusing to believe it, Shen Congjin lunged forward, ripped back Tang Tang’s quilt, and thoroughly inspected him. Only after confirming Tang Tang was completely unscathed did he exhale a heavy sigh of relief.
Yet his hostile attitude toward Xia Zeyu remained entirely unchanged.
“How is it that he just happened to be rescued by you? Did you collude with these scumbags to stage this whole performance? Do you actually expect me to thank you for this?”
“I don’t need your gratitude. I simply refuse to stand by and watch this kind of filth happen right before my eyes,” Xia Zeyu rolled his eyes. “Even if it weren’t Tang Tang even if it were a complete stranger I’d never met before I still would have intervened.”
“Since when did you develop such a strong sense of justice? Your sudden appearance here tonight definitely reeks of fishiness!”
Before Xia Zeyu could fire back a retort, a pair of arms wrapped securely around his waist, and that familiar, subtle scent of gardenia drifted into his senses once more.
Fu Dongyan had somehow materialized behind him, closing the distance with zero hesitation.
Glowering coldly at Shen Congjin, Fu Dongyan injected a sharp edge of displeasure into his tone: “President Shen, Zeyu was my guest tonight. I was already wondering why he hadn’t arrived after all this time and failed to answer my messages turns out he got dragged into your messy domestic drama. If he hadn’t possessed formidable martial arts skills, he probably would have wound up dragged down into this disaster right alongside him.”
“You…” Shen Congjin choked, temporarily stripped of words.
Lowering his gaze to fixate on Xia Zeyu, Fu Dongyan instantly softened his register into a gentle hum: “Are you alright?”
“What could possibly happen to me?”
“Stop sticking your nose into every random trivial matter, otherwise you’ll end up exactly like this—not only receiving zero thanks, but getting slapped with false accusations instead.”
“Mad dogs are just built that way,” Xia Zeyu cast a sidelong glare at Shen Congjin. “Hand a mad dog a sausage, and it turns around and bites your hand.”
Unable to stomach the relentless passive-aggressive barbs from the pair, Shen Congjin roared, “Get out! Get the hell out of my sight!”
“Shen… Shen-ge…”
Awakened by the commotion after dozing for so long, Tang Tang blinked sleepily and instinctively reached out to fumble for Shen Congjin’s hand.
“Tang Tang! Are you alright?” Shen Congjin scrambled over instantly.
“It was Zeyu… he helped me…” Tang Tang murmured weakly. “I heard him say that if anyone ever dares hassle me again, he’ll hack them to pieces and feed them to the fish…”
“Ahem,” Xia Zeyu hastily faked a cough to cut him off. “Shen Congjin, why don’t you pour him a glass of water first? Can’t you see his throat is practically parched to dust?”
Jolting back to reality, Shen Congjin scrambled clumsily to pour a glass of water, hauling Tang Tang upright to help him drink.
Regaining a shred of color, Tang Tang looked over at Xia Zeyu and offered a solemn, earnest declaration: “I still don’t forgive you for what happened in the past, but… thank you for what you did tonight.”
“Mmm,” Xia Zeyu glanced pointedly at Shen Congjin. “Shen Congjin’s reckless run of enemies landed you in the crosshairs. You might want to have a serious conversation with him about that sort of issue, and start hitting the gym more often you can’t afford to keep waiting around for someone else to rescue you every single time.”
That single dropped hint was more than enough. Tang Tang’s established character profile endowed him with profound sensitivity and emotional delicacy; a solitary sentence was all it took to set his mind racing through a web of implications.
“Let’s move.” Xia Zeyu addressed Fu Dongyan.
The two stepped into the elevator. The exact millisecond the elevator doors slid shut, Xia Zeyu violently grabbed Fu Dongyan by his silk tie, yanking him downward to force eye contact.
“You’ve been watching the whole time, haven’t you?” Xia Zeyu accused.
“Take a guess.” Fu Dongyan’s expression remained completely unreadable.
“You knew my combat capacity, yet you deliberately stood back and left me to handle three grown men alone, while probably loitering outside the door eavesdropping on how I disciplined them?”
“Not eavesdropping,” Fu Dongyan offered a faint, gentle smile. “Listening openly and proudly.”
“Find this amusing, do you?”
“Extremely. Watching you chew them out was genuinely hilarious.”
Fu Dongyan raised a hand with the apparent intent of caressing Xia Zeyu’s cheek, but Xia Zeyu sidestepped the motion with lightning speed and delivered a resounding, dead-solid slap across Fu Dongyan’s face.
The impact whipped Fu Dongyan’s head sharply to the side, a crimson handprint instantly blooming across his skin as he drew in a sharp hiss of breath, seemingly struggling to swallow a surge of raw fury.
“My apologies, purely reflexive muscle memory,” Xia Zeyu remarked with chilling nonchalance.
“Don’t forget I am your boss,” Fu Dongyan ground out through clenched teeth.
“Oh? Losing your composure already? Pissed off?” Xia Zeyu deliberately dialed up the provocation. “President Fu, aren’t you constantly testing my bottom line, step by step? Tell me, do you have any idea that every single time you physically touch me, I experience a visceral urge to snap your fingers in half?”
“Do you actually have the guts to snap them?” Refusing to yield an inch, Fu Dongyan fired back with his own provocative challenge.
“Feel free to put me to the test.”
“If touching you warrants snapping my fingers in half, what about something far more extreme?”
“What kind of extreme?”
Twitching the corners of his lips into an ambiguous smirk, Fu Dongyan strode directly toward Xia Zeyu.
Every stride he took radiated a suffocating wave of heavy low-pressure atmospheric weight, his expression darkening into an intimidating scowl formidable enough to turn the knees of any ordinary individual to jelly.
Yet Xia Zeyu was no ordinary individual.
Right as Xia Zeyu calculated whether he was about to catch a fist or a kick, Fu Dongyan lunged forward, clamped a hand firmly into the hair at the nape of Xia Zeyu’s neck, forced his head upward, and brought his lips crashing down in a hard, direct kiss.
Xia Zeyu froze solid.
Genuinely, thoroughly paralyzed.
What kind of combat maneuver is this?!
Coming from a male-oriented web novel background, this development struck him as utterly abstract. He couldn’t even fault his own delayed reaction; traversing the entire library of male-frequency literature, virtually no author dared pen a sequence like this for fear of triggering an outright riot from the readership.
The elevator doors chimed with a crisp ding as they slid open to reveal a crowd of men and women waiting outside. Mid-laughter and chatter, the group instantly choked into dead silence at the unfolding spectacle inside the car, turning entirely mute under the sheer awkwardness of the scene.
Snapping violently out of his trance, Xia Zeyu delivered a ferocious palm strike straight to Fu Dongyan’s chest. The impact sent Fu Dongyan staggering backward, his spine slamming violently against the rear elevator wall with a bone-rattling thud.
Stumbling out of the car, Xia Zeyu discovered his limbs were momentarily failing to coordinate, his feet tripping over themselves in a disoriented stride.
“What the absolute hell are you out of your freaking mind…” Xia Zeyu couldn’t help unleashing a string of curses.
Stumbling out of the elevator car behind him, Fu Dongyan looked visibly rattled; that single palm strike from Xia Zeyu had come close to rearranging his internal organs.
[Host! Host, are you alright?! You’ve completely crossed the line this time!]
Fu Dongyan’s system shrieked frantically inside his head.
“I saw it,” Fu Dongyan muttered under his breath, dazed. “I just saw it blue, his aura flashed brilliant blue…”
Fu Dongyan had caught a crystal-clear glimpse just moments ago: a swirling vortex of deep blue flames flickering deep within Xia Zeyu’s eyes.
[Are you implying he wields supernatural abilities as well? And that his energetic composition matches yours?]
“I’d bet my life on it. That sensation… it’s intimately familiar.”
[Oh god! Then why couldn’t my scans pick up a single trace?]
Lifting his fingers to lightly brush against his own lips, Fu Dongyan couldn’t suppress a sudden, rising chuckle.
Xia Zeyu has finally slipped up and exposed a fatal crack in his armor.
Xia Zeyu fled all the way back to his apartment without consuming a single drop of alcohol, promptly locking every single contact channel with Fu Dongyan onto his blacklist.
Huddled deep beneath his heavy duvet, the residual tactile sensation of those lips still lingered in his mind, sparking a chaotic mixture of blazing irritation and profound speechlessness.
Although he lacked native emotional programming, he wasn’t an absolute idiot; he understood perfectly well what a kiss signified. Yet the kiss Fu Dongyan had just forced upon him felt entirely devoid of genuine affection stewing purely in provocation, mockery, and deliberate gamesmanship.
Is this the female-oriented protagonist’s method of picking a fight?
Zero physical trauma, absolute psychological devastation a truly alternative brand of sheer toxicity.
“Is that man completely out of his mind?! Ahhhhhhhh!”
The more he chewed on the frustration, the more incandescent his rage grew. Tearing the duvet aside, Xia Zeyu bolted upright into a sitting position, only to collapse flat onto his back two seconds later, overwhelmed by a suffocating sense of impotent rage with nowhere to vent.
Beating Fu Dongyan into a pulp was out of the question, and devising an equivalent psychological warfare tactic to retaliate felt entirely outside his wheelhouse.
Back in his original world, he would have instantly summoned ten successive lightning bolts to fry Fu Dongyan over and over again horizontally, vertically, and upside-down until not a single speck of carbon ash remained.
[Host, please maintain your composure. He’s merely a minor supporting character; you needn’t invest excessive emotional bandwidth into him.]
“A minor supporting character just planted himself right across my face you expect me to just ignore it?!”
[There is clearly a hidden variable at play here. We are actively running diagnostics to isolate the root cause.]
“Useless trash. Stop searching—if you had managed to figure this out earlier, would I be sitting here swallowing this kind of insult?”
Xia Zeyu’s fury had reached absolute saturation point. If Fu Dongyan materialized right in front of him at this very microsecond, he might genuinely commit homicide.
[Sob… please stop scolding me. I didn’t want this either.]
Though it remained a cold, synthetic mechanical chime, the electronic inflection carried an unmistakably aggrieved undertone.
“No, seriously, what is going through his head? Name me a single normal human being who resorts to kissing their rival as an act of psychological warfare? Huh?! Make it make sense!”
[He was likely utilizing extreme psychological provocation to test your bottom line and force your hand. The moment you lose your temper and drop your guard, you fall straight into his trap.]
“This world has lost its mind. This entire world has completely snapped!”
Sleep remained an absolute impossibility. At 4:00 AM, sporting two massive, bruised rings of dark exhaustion beneath his eyes, Xia Zeyu tossed and turned restlessly across his mattress, eventually reaching for his phone to mindlessly scroll through his social media feed. The very first post at the top of the refresh queue instantly plunged his vision into total darkness.
Shocking: President Fu makes his debut with a high-stakes, heavy-hitting move!
Attached to the headline was a crisp photographic still capturing the exact moment Fu Dongyan had pinned him against the elevator wall and kissed him.
From a detached third-person perspective, the framing made it look as though he had been utterly dominated and pinned down by Fu Dongyan, spiking his blood pressure straight through the roof.
Xia Zeyu: …… System, can I steal a nuclear warhead and blow this entire planet to smithereens?
[Negative. This is a completed novel universe; structural repair parameters do not accommodate planetary annihilation.]
“Heh. What a wonderfully delightful, godforsaken world. Heh.”
The following morning upon arriving at the corporate office, Xia Zeyu could immediately feel his subordinates casting exceptionally delicate, walking-on-eggshells glances in his direction.
No inquiries were necessary; the photographic evidence had already achieved viral saturation across every major gossip channel.
The classic romance-novel trope where a notoriously celibate, icy business tycoon—unapproachable by either men or women alike finally blossoms into sudden, explosive romance.
Naturally, it also carried an unexpected silver lining: Xia Zeyu was instantly purged of his long-standing public humiliation label as “Shen Congjin’s primary lapdog.” After all, once you’ve successfully latched onto someone of Fu Dongyan’s caliber, nobody in their right mind would ever downgrade to chasing after Shen Congjin again.
Barely had Xia Zeyu settled into his desk chair, before he even had a chance to slide his briefcase off his shoulder, an incoming call flashed across his screen from an unknown number.
Hesitating for a fraction of a second, he pressed accept.
“Director Xia, why did you abruptly flee the scene last night? The special custom cocktail I ordered for you was genuinely exquisite.”
Hearing Fu Dongyan’s voice instantly reignited every single dormant ember of rage in his chest.
“Get lost,” Xia Zeyu snapped coldly.
“Pinching my waist made you want to snap my fingers in half, yet kissing you on the lips didn’t trigger any physical retaliation whatsoever. Does that mean waist-touching is forbidden, while kissing is entirely acceptable?”
“Are you actively hunting for an early grave?”
“Your lips were rather soft, by the way. Oh, right allow me to kindly remind you that this happened to be my very first kiss. Care to confess if it was yours?”
“Do I look like an idiot who’s never kissed anyone at age twenty-seven, you naive single-brand virgin?” Taking a deep, shuddering inhalation of breath to forcefully tamp down a volcanic eruption of fury, Xia Zeyu barked, “If you have the spine, walk right through the front doors of Xia Jewelry and show your face to me right now.”
“Zero spine here. Not coming. I cherish my life too much.”
Without waiting for a counter-insult, Fu Dongyan swiftly terminated the call, leaving Xia Zeyu sitting at his desk alone, trembling with unadulterated rage.