Glaring fiercely at Xia Zeyu, Shen Congjin roared, “Why are you here? Why do you always show up at the exact same inconvenient times?!”
Ignoring him for a moment, Xia Zeyu first hauled Chi Feng to his feet before responding with unhurried composure, “I just noticed they have suturing instruments over in the treatment room. If the three of you keep up this screaming match, I’ll happily sew your mouths shut.”
Fu Dongyan strolled over as well, looking thoroughly irritated truth be told, he had zero desire to insert himself into this messy spectacle.
“All of you, back into your respective wards right now,” Fu Dongyan barked with a stern, authoritative reprimand. “What kind of disgraceful scene are you making in a hospital corridor? Do other patients not need to sleep?”
The moment those words left his mouth, Xia Zeyu swept his gaze across the trio, instantly striking a deep chord of primal terror into the three men, leaving them no choice but to obey Fu Dongyan and shuffle back inside the ward.
After all, every single one of them had personally tasted Xia Zeyu’s fists, leaving a lingering, subconscious dread deeply etched into their nerves.
Stepping straight into the room, Xia Zeyu pulled up a chair and seated himself, reaching instinctively to pour a glass of water only to discover the water carafe smashed in pieces across the floor.
“Do you people possess zero civic decency? This is hospital property having money doesn’t give you the right to smash things at random,” Xia Zeyu scolded with visible disapproval.
“You still haven’t answered my question, you…” Shen Congjin shot a sidelong glare at Fu Dongyan. “Why are you two even here?”
“Because Chi Feng was knocked unconscious by me,” Xia Zeyu stated casually.
“Because Chi Feng was knocked unconscious on my premises,” Fu Dongyan chimed in.
“Why did you go fight Feng-ge?” Tang Tang asked with anxious caution.
“He needed money, so he came to the underground fighting arena to try his hand. Unfortunately, his combat skills fell short of mine, and he didn’t even make it past his opening match. Unlike me, who managed to clear ninety million in half a month.”
Chi Feng’s face cycled through shades of green and white, itching to fire back a retort yet lacking the courage to open his mouth.
Shen Congjin wore an equally dark expression, reading loud and clear between the lines that Xia Zeyu was taking a deliberate jab at him.
“Tang Tang, you tell them,” Xia Zeyu directed. “You and Chi Feng never crossed any boundaries, correct?”
“Yes,” Tang Tang nodded frantically. “Feng-ge and I are completely innocent, strictly good friends, and we’ve never harbored any improper thoughts toward one another.”
Chi Feng’s complexion drained to an even starker white.
Turning his gaze back toward Chi Feng, Xia Zeyu pressed on, “And over these past two years, he never pulled any inappropriate stunts or overstepped boundaries with you, right?”
“Never…” Chi Feng whispered weakly.
Finally shifting his focus onto Shen Congjin, Xia Zeyu’s tone hardened into frost. “In truth, you were well aware that Tang Tang never betrayed you; your boiling rage stemmed entirely from resentment toward Chi Feng for spiriting him away for two years, and you simply manufactured an excuse to pick a fight, didn’t you?”
Shen Congjin sat in dead silence.
Rolling his eyes in mounting impatience, Xia Zeyu snapped, “Just because of this petty, pathetic tantrum, you deliberately kneecapped Chi Feng’s family business with malicious corporate sabotage. Do you have the faintest clue what kind of catastrophic aftermath your stunt triggers? He owns three factories employing hundreds of workers who now face the threat of unemployment entirely because of your petty vindictiveness. You’re turning hundreds of innocent people into collateral damage for your petty jealousy aren’t you terrified of the karmic retribution?”
Though Shen Congjin’s features twisted with stubborn defiance, he didn’t dare voice a single rebuttal, as the spot where Xia Zeyu had just kicked him moments ago still throbbed with a dull, persistent ache.
Shifting back to look squarely at Chi Feng, Xia Zeyu spoke with solemn earnestness: “I know precisely who colluded with Shen Congjin to betray you, and I can help you secure the concrete evidence. As long as you acknowledge me as your boss and dedicate yourself to working under my command, I will personally pull your family’s factory back from the dead.”
“Y-You… actually know?” Chi Feng stared at him in stunned disbelief.
“Liu Qing, the production department director at Factory Number Three, right? Am I wrong, Shen Congjin?”
A flicker of raw panic flashed across Shen Congjin’s eyes, though he stubbornly put up a front. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
“You genuinely believe I lack the means to crack his mouth open? Furthermore, we live in the era of big data; the moment you or your subordinates established contact with him, digital footprints were permanently carved into the system. Or perhaps you operate under the delusion that your corporate influence grants you absolute authority over the judiciary and public security organs? Even if it did, we reside in the golden age of internet connectivity I can easily lend Chi Feng a public platform to broadcast your malicious conduct for the entire world to witness.”
A heavy, suffocating silence descended over the ward.
Never in his wildest dreams had Shen Congjin anticipated that Xia Zeyu would be the one to rip the lid off his vile misconduct.
Chi Feng never imagined that Uncle Liu, who had literally built the enterprise up from scratch alongside his father, would turn around and stab them in the back.
Tang Tang never suspected that Shen Congjin would resort to such despicable, underhanded tactics behind his back to crush Chi Feng.
In the original plot, this specific arc involved Shen Congjin ruthlessly sabotaging Chi Feng in the shadows, driving Chi Feng to host drinks as a male model in high-end clubs to service his debts. Convinced he was no longer worthy of standing beside Tang Tang, Chi Feng silently slipped away into the shadows. Meanwhile, Tang Tang completely oblivious to the truth found himself swallowed by grief over Chi Feng’s sudden, cold alienation, prompting Shen Congjin to step in with gentle comfort and shoulder-rubbing consolation that left Tang Tang deeply, emotionally indebted to him.
Now that Xia Zeyu had violently blown the lid off the entire conspiracy right in front of their eyes, what trajectory would the triad’s relationship ultimately take?
Lifting himself up from his chair with zero desire to linger any longer after all, he wasn’t a community dispute mediator, and having delivered his message, he preferred leaving them to digest the fallout on their own.
Barely had he taken two steps past the threshold when fresh shouting erupted from inside the ward behind him.
“Shen-ge, how could you possibly sink this low?!”
“I simply refuse to let him remain entangled with you! Your actions leave me utterly devoid of any sense of security!”
“I’ve told you a thousand times that Tang Tang and I are completely innocent, and you refused to believe a single word!”
With a weary, profound sigh, Xia Zeyu shook his head. Argue away, then who on earth could ever out-argue the sheer chaos of your script?
“Why did you choose to help Chi Feng?” Fu Dongyan asked.
“I wasn’t helping him out of charity; I simply refused to stand by and watch those factories go under. Don’t you think weaponizing corporate destruction purely because of jealous petty tantrums is fundamentally absurd?”
Remaining silent for a few beats, Fu Dongyan finally gave a slow, measured nod. “Yes. It is entirely absurd.”
“What right does he possess to rewrite the trajectories of so many innocent lives purely on a whim?” Xia Zeyu muttered with lingering annoyance.
Coming to an abrupt halt, Fu Dongyan froze in his tracks. When Xia Zeyu glanced back to check on him, he caught a flash of raw, acute sorrow rippling across Fu Dongyan’s features.
“What’s wrong with you?” Xia Zeyu asked.
“Nothing. Let’s move.”
The following noon, right as Xia Zeyu sat debating between ordering sweet-and-sour pork strips or salt-and-pepper prawns, Chi Feng arrived.
Stepping directly across the threshold of his office, Chi Feng wore the classic expression of someone preparing to endure ultimate humiliation. “Alright, spit it out. What exactly do you want me to do?”
“…Huh?” Xia Zeyu stared at him, momentarily speechless. “What’s with that expression? Did you honestly think I was about to solicit you for sex?”
Crimson heat instantly flooded Chi Feng’s cheeks; he genuinely hadn’t anticipated Xia Zeyu articulating his dark suspicions with such unfiltered bluntness.
Heaving a patient sigh, Xia Zeyu adopted a calm, businesslike register. “I happen to have a vacancy for an assistant down at the fighting arena. I want you to fill that role. Your day-to-day responsibilities will consist of fetching water, running errands, cleaning and laundering towels and gear, sorting and replying to business correspondence, and screening out stalkers and nuisances who come sniffing around me. Essentially: wherever I go, you go, on 24/7 standby. Payment will be calculated on a weekly basis, and I’ll allocate five percent of my total earnings to you as a commission. My weekly earnings consistently clear six million minimum, meaning five percent nets you thirty thousand minimum. Isn’t that significantly more lucrative and infinitely less degrading than pouring drinks as a host?”
“This…” Chi Feng’s eyes widened to the size of saucers. “Why are you offering me terms this generous?”
“Generous? I’ve been putting out headhunting feelers for ages, and nobody wants to step into that cesspool. The atmosphere there is toxic, the clientele is aggressively hostile, and sticking around too long risks inducing severe clinical depression.”
“I’m practically living in a state of clinical depression right now. As long as this keeps my head above water, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Splendid. I’ll have HR draw up an employment contract for you shortly. Go grab some lunch.”
Just as Xia Zeyu prepared to stand, his assistant knocked softly before pushing open the door, carrying two exquisite fabric take-out bags housing meal containers.
“Director Xia, these Japanese bento meals were specially delivered for you by President Fu.”
Xia Zeyu blinked in momentary surprise, a faint sense of incongruity washing over him as comprehension dawned.
“Why on earth is he ordering food for me? He didn’t even give me a heads-up.”
“I couldn’t say for sure, sir. His personal assistant dropped them off personally and specifically instructed us to make sure you eat properly.”
“Very well. Just set them down on the desk.”
At the very least, Fu Dongyan wasn’t trying to poison him, and it conveniently saved him the trouble of ordering.
“Director Xia…” Chi Feng chimed in timidly.
“Call me Boss. Since you’re stepping into the arena circuit, you need to adopt an aura of fierce intimidation; otherwise, people will walk all over you. Understand?”
“Understood, Boss,” Chi Feng asked cautiously. “I… I have one small favor to ask. Is there any way we can… keep Tang Tang from finding out I’m working under you?”
“Granted.” Xia Zeyu agreed without missing a beat.
“And… are you and President Fu… actually in a relationship?”
Cracking open his set of chopsticks, Xia Zeyu offered an ambiguous, noncommittal shrug: “What do you think?”
“You’ve genuinely completely moved on from Shen Congjin? You’re not going to start tearing things down or going feral over Tang Tang anymore?”
“You’d better start worrying whether you are about to get your ass handed to you in the ring.”
“Oh…”
“Dismissed. Go grab your lunch.”
“Right away, Boss.”
Plucking a piece of tuna sushi from the bento box and popping it whole into his mouth, Xia Zeyu felt the accumulated physical exhaustion of the morning evaporate entirely.
Yet a lingering question nagged at the back of his mind: Why had Fu Dongyan dispatched lunch without prior notice? What if he happened to be out of the office?
Wait a second… didn’t I still have Fu Dongyan locked firmly inside my blocklist?
Jolting to his realization, Xia Zeyu hurriedly grabbed his phone, navigated into his settings, hauled Fu Dongyan out of the digital dungeon, and snapped a quick photograph of the sushi bento to ping him directly.
[Delicious. Thank you.]
Fu Dongyan’s reply arrived almost instantly.
[So you finally decided to fish me out of your blocklist.]
[I expect you to treat me to dinner next time.]
[You actually expect a ‘next time’ with me?]
[I’d prefer not to, but circumstances force my hand.]
A soft, involuntary chuckle escaped Fu Dongyan’s lips. In his mind, Xia Zeyu’s current behavioral patterns bore zero resemblance to anyone shaped by this modern societal fabric perhaps he genuinely hailed from a hyper-advanced dimension, endowing him with a detached, sovereign contempt for the rules governing this fragile world.
[Host, this is fundamentally an ordinary toxic-trash CEO romance novel universe. Extraterrestrial lifeforms do not exist within our operational parameters.]
“Then how do you explain the supernatural abilities I manifested the moment I woke up in this body?”
[Uh… regarding that… the system is currently running deep-level diagnostic evaluations to isolate the root anomaly.]
“Spare me the runaround. You’ve been ‘running diagnostics’ ever since I was sixteen up until my current age of twenty-seven eleven solid years, and you still haven’t found a single shred of data.”
[Very well…]
Resting his elbows on the windowsill, Fu Dongyan gazed down through the soaring glass panels of the massive corporate tower overlooking Shengjan’s bustling commercial plaza. Towering directly above the square, the colossal 3D digital billboard was cycling continuously through Chi Wei’s blockbuster promotional advertisements for Xia Jewelry.
Ever since Chi Wei’s explosive breakout, Xia Zeyu had capitalized on the momentum by dropping subsequent ad campaigns, heavily intensifying their promotional footprint. At this stage, catching sight of Chi Wei’s face across virtually every corner of City A had become an inescapable norm.
At this exact chronological timestamp in his past life, Shen Congjin had been the one reaping the astronomical financial dividends of Chi Wei’s meteoric rise. Leveraging that momentum, Shen Congjin rapidly accelerated his campaign to monopolize regional market shares, ruthlessly crushing mid-to-small enterprises in the shadows with Fu Dongyan’s family business serving as one of the direct casualties.
The original text glossed over those dark chapters in a mere brace of paragraphs:
Holding an imported cigar between his fingers, Shen Congjin watched smoke curl like a delicate veil across his features, masking his expression while failing to conceal the absolute, predatory certainty burning deep within his eyes.
Snatching up an expensive fountain pen, he executed a sweeping, effortless signature across the contract documents before speaking with casual, icy indifference to his secretary:
“While these insignificant ants pose zero genuine threat to our dominance, their buzzing is mildly irritating. Eradicate them as swiftly as possible.”
With that solitary directive, the business partners Fu Dongyan had spent days drinking himself into a stupor to secure suddenly backed out of their agreements overnight. The Shen Corporation swept in to acquire his family’s manufacturing plants, slamming the door shut on all supply chains. Their delivery deadlines were forcefully delayed, triggering a relentless avalanche of client refund demands and chargebacks. Plunged into astronomical corporate debt, their enterprise cratered into bankruptcy in less than a month, leaving behind over two million yuan in accumulated credit card liabilities.
For someone like Fu Dongyan hailing from a working-class, single-parent household this devastating blow hit with the crushing force of an avalanche. Yet he refused to surrender to despair, working three distinct jobs simultaneously without taking a single day off across entire months, driving himself to the bone simply to service the debts and resurrect his family’s livelihood.
Yet Shen Congjin refused to show mercy. The prime plot of land left behind as their late father’s sole inheritance was abruptly targeted by the Shen Corporation for forced acquisition, backed by a pathetically meager, insulting compensation package. Naturally, his family rejected the predatory buyout offer, prompting Shen Congjin’s camp to deploy heavy-handed intimidation tactics dispatching a squad of hulking brutes to smash their home to splinters while Fu Dongyan was away at work, forcibly seizing his mother’s hands to stamp her fingerprints onto the transfer deeds by sheer physical coercion. His mother suffered an acute cardiac episode under the terror and collapsed unconscious, while the thugs simply snatched the signed documents and slammed the door behind them without a backward glance.
By the time his younger sister returned home from school, their mother had already drawn her final breath, felled by a massive acute cerebral hemorrhage.
Fu Dongyan dropped every single responsibility on his plate. Alongside his sister, they petitioned every government office, filed endless petitions, and knocked on every legal door available—only to watch their written appeals vanish into a bottomless bureaucratic void without a flicker of acknowledgment. The public pleas uploaded across internet forums languished with a pitiful handful of page views. With every passing day, the icy grip of absolute despair tightened further around their throats.
Late one midnight, as he and his sister stepped out of a legal consultation office and paused at a pedestrian intersection awaiting the crossing signal, a speeding cargo truck executed a violent, sudden swerve, barreling straight toward them without slowing down.
Blood pooled across the crosswalk, staining the pavement crimson. His sister expired instantly on impact, while Fu Dongyan clung to his final thread of consciousness, his fingers desperately fumbling to clasp his sister’s cooling hand, utterly powerless to force a single sound past his lips.
To vividly validate the trope that the protagonist possessed boundless authority and omnipotent power to bend the world to his whims, his entire family was ground into dust as collateral damage, paying with their lives for a tragic, disposable subplot.
He refused to accept it. From childhood through adulthood, he had never committed a single malicious act by what divine mandate was he forced to endure such a horrific end?
At the absolute threshold of death, a blinding flash of white tore across his fading vision, transforming his entire universe into an empty, bleached void. Amidst that infinite expanse of nothingness stood a black spatial tear, deep within which he caught sight of a swirling, incandescent vortex of blue flames suspended in the abyss.
[New narrative entity currently integrating into the universe. Timeline architecture undergoing realignment. 10, 9, 8, 7…]
When the countdown struck zero, Fu Dongyan felt a violent constriction seize his heart, instantly followed by the terrifying, weightless sensation of plummeting down an endless cliff. He jerked awake with a violent gasp greeting his eyes was the familiar, comforting ceiling of his childhood bedroom.
“Big brother, stop spacing out! Hurry up and come eat breakfast! You’re going to be late for school!”
On that exact morning, he had blinked his eyes open to discover he had been granted a second chance, successfully rewinding his timeline all the way back to the age of sixteen.