Throughout the ride, Fu Dongyan did not pull any peculiar stunts. Instead, he thoughtfully opened the car door for Xia Zeyu, adjusted the air conditioning temperature, and maintained a smooth, steady drive.
Though Xia Zeyu faced straight ahead, his peripheral vision kept tabs on Fu Dongyan in a stealthy observation.
He summoned the system in his mind: “Have you dug anything up?”
[Host, I’ve managed to pull up Fu Dongyan’s detailed profile, but it genuinely reeks of fishiness. He is not a primary plot character, and the name Fu Dongyan never even surfaced anywhere in the novel. Yet his financial muscle, appearance, and overall stature are in no way inferior to Shen Congjin, the male protagonist.]
“Are you certain he didn’t cross over from another world?”
[Certain, positive, and absolute, his informational data belongs natively to this world.]
“If you want to look at me, just look straight ahead,” Fu Dongyan spoke up abruptly. “Sneaking sideways glances at me makes me feel rather uncomfortable.”
“Staring at you directly feels a bit impolite.”
“Why keep looking at me?”
“Because you’re handsome.”
Fu Dongyan chuckled softly, inquiring, “Do you like men? Or are you only fixated on Shen Congjin?”
“I don’t like anyone,” Xia Zeyu replied flatly. “I don’t harbor romantic feelings for anyone at all.”
“Then why did you spend all that time chasing after Shen Congjin in the past?”
“For the money, obviously,” Xia Zeyu lied without batting an eye. “You’re well aware that our Xia family is struggling; our business investments and equity financing are an absolute mess, and Shen Congjin was the only major backer I could latch onto.”
“Then what made you decide to start fighting in the combat arena?”
“I stumbled upon the place by chance. Now that I can earn money through fighting matches and the Xia family’s crisis has been temporarily cushioned, there’s no need to keep hounding Shen Congjin anymore.”
“Is it really fine for you to spill all this directly to me? Aren’t you worried I’ll view you as a gold-digger and see my impression of you plummet?”
“Not at all. Your impression of me is completely worthless.”
Fu Dongyan merely chuckled, offering no further comment.
Xia Zeyu instructed Fu Dongyan to drop him off at the Xia estate, as he had zero intention of letting Fu Dongyan discover the location of his rented apartment.
Fu Dongyan stepped out of the vehicle first, walking around to the other side to open the car door for Xia Zeyu.
“There’s no need to go this far.” Xia Zeyu frowned.
“Just a few habits.”
The moment Xia Zeyu planted one foot outside the car, his father hurried over, his eyes lighting up the instant he laid eyes on Fu Dongyan.
“Oh my, if it isn’t President Fu! I am deeply honored by your sudden, gracious arrival!”
Fu Dongyan offered a polite nod, clearly lacking any desire to exchange pleasantries with him.
Shifting his gaze onto Xia Zeyu, the father asked with a suggestive, loaded tone, “Could President Fu possibly be… accompanying my younger son…”
“Just friends,” Fu Dongyan clarified.
“Ah, being friends is wonderful! President Fu, you’re roughly the same age as our Zeyu, so you must share plenty of common topics, right? This boy Zeyu used to be a complete slacker and only recently started waking up to reality. If you happen to…”
“Alright,” Fu Dongyan cut him off with a hint of impatience. “I’ve dropped him off, so I’ll be heading back now. Get some rest early.”
“Ah, right, of course.”
Reaching out to pat Xia Zeyu’s shoulder once more, Fu Dongyan turned around and slid back into the driver’s seat.
As soon as Fu Dongyan’s car rolled out of sight, his father launched straight into an interrogation: “Does President Fu carry romantic intentions toward you?”
Xia Zeyu shot him a sidelong glance and remained silent.
“I asked you a question,” his father snapped, landing a heavy, stinging slap onto Xia Zeyu’s arm. “If you manage to hook up with him, the Xia family won’t have to worry about our future for ten generations.”
“Go hook up with him yourself; who knows, maybe he has a fetish for older men.”
“Is that any way to speak?!”
Xia Zeyu stared at him with cold detachment: “You survive by living off women, and now you want me to do the same. If Xia Zexing possessed decent looks, you probably would have prostituted him onto someone else’s bed ages ago, wouldn’t you?”
“Nonsense! Your brother is different from you!”
“How is he different? We’re both your flesh and blood! Why does he get to inherit the family empire while I’m only good for marriage alliances and securing capital investments? You’re constantly chewing me out for being useless, but did you ever hire tutors to properly cultivate me? What about Xia Zexing? You mobilized every single educational resource at your disposal to groom him! Your favoritism is so blindingly biased, yet you still have the nerve to complain that I don’t measure up to him?!”
“Your mother ruined her constitution giving birth to you, and after years of medical treatments and injections, she finally collapsed and passed away! Zexing started going off the rails right around that time!” His father’s tone brimmed with bitter resentment. “I genuinely regret ever letting her give birth to you! If she were still around, our family never would have ended up like this!”
A sharp, stabbing pain spiked through Xia Zeyu’s chest an involuntary physiological reflex inherited from the original owner’s body.
His mother passed away from illness following childbirth; Xia Zexing lost his maternal love during a sensitive adolescent phase and strayed down a destructive path; and his father projected all that blame onto Xia Zeyu, neglecting his upbringing and letting him run wild, only to package him up as a commodity for a wealthy, powerful benefactor once he turned of age—serving the dual purpose of purging him from the household while extracting maximum profit.
It was hardly a wonder the original owner clung so desperately to Shen Congjin; growing up, Shen Congjin seemed to be the only person who had ever offered him a fleeting semblance of affection.
“You are truly absurd,” Xia Zeyu retorted with disdain. “So absurd that I can’t even be bothered to curse you out. You are entirely unworthy of being a father.”
Sidestepping his father, Xia Zeyu stormed into the house, marched straight to his bedroom, and slammed the door shut, locking it tight from the inside.
Collapsing directly onto the mattress, the soft cushioning relaxed his body immensely, and within moments, he drifted into a deep, peaceful slumber.
After living here for over a month, he had finally adapted to this world’s rest cycle sleeping straight through until dawn without needing to jolt awake every two hours. How wonderful; just that simple luxury filled him with a profound sense of contentment.
Perhaps human joys and sorrows truly failed to align. Xia Zeyu couldn’t fathom why the original owner drove himself to a tragic death in an era overflowing with resources and untouched by war. Yet if the original owner were still around, he probably wouldn’t understand why Xia Zeyu found such deep fulfillment in a simple fast-food meal and a solid night’s sleep.
Promptly at six o’clock the next morning, Xia Zeyu snapped awake, polished off breakfast, and headed out for a one-hour morning jog. Returning home, he dressed sharply in a tailored suit, scooped up his car keys, and walked out the door.
“What am I supposed to drive if you take off with my Land Rover?!”
Ignoring Xia Zexing’s furious roar trailing behind him, Xia Zeyu accelerated his pace and strode away.
Operating a vehicle in this era was remarkably straightforward merely pressing the brake and accelerator while the roads remained flat and devoid of any mutated monsters suddenly bursting from beneath the asphalt.
He switched on the car stereo, filling the cabin with Adagio di Molto. Fu Dongyan had cut the performance short midway yesterday, leaving him hanging with an unresolved itch of curiosity.
Before Xia Zeyu even stepped foot into his department, he caught a group of colleagues gossiping excitedly about Fu Dongyan.
“Did you guys catch President Fu’s public debut yesterday? Holy crap, he is drop-dead gorgeous!”
“It’s a miracle he managed to keep a low profile for so long. If I looked like that, I’d film selfies while taking a dump.”
“Not only is he handsome and towering, but he’s got absolute business genius. Sigh, I feel like my sole purpose in life is just serving as a background NPC.”
Pondering the situation for a moment, Xia Zeyu furrowed his brows.
Something was amiss.
According to the data provided by the system, the original plot point for this timeframe was Shen Congjin debuting alongside Tang Tang at the previous night’s gala, introducing Tang Tang to various high-society elites while brazenly showing off their affection prompting everyone to swoon over how genuine Shen Congjin’s devotion was and instantly shipping their romance.
Instead, the epicenter of discussion had shifted entirely to Fu Dongyan.
Would an author genuinely heap so many protagonist-overshadowing traits and plot significance onto an utterly trivial, disposable character?
Xia Zeyu still leaned heavily toward the hypothesis that Fu Dongyan’s situation mirrored his own. Even though the system stubbornly insisted Fu Dongyan belonged natively to this world, all circumstantial evidence pointed to Fu Dongyan being an anomaly—and sharing an identical objective: hacking away at Shen Congjin’s protagonist halo.
While the enemy of an enemy could be considered a friend, Xia Zeyu had zero desire to cozy up too closely to Fu Dongyan, given that the man reeked of trouble from head to toe.
If Fu Dongyan’s circumstances genuinely paralleled his own… both of them were essentially tackling an open-book exam, leaving victory to whoever proved more adept at sniffing out the core objectives.
Stepping into the department office, Xia Zeyu’s colleagues abruptly clamped their mouths shut and slinked back to their desks in silence.
His assistant, Manager Li, hurried over to his side and lowered her voice: “Good morning, Director Xia. How did yesterday’s networking gala go?”
“Not bad.”
“Regarding you and Shengjan’s President Fu…”
“We merely crossed paths; we aren’t close. He spoke that way purely to afford me face.”
“Lately, Shengjan’s jewelry subsidiary has been performing exceptionally well. At their current trajectory, I’m afraid our Xia enterprise’s market standing is going to slip another notch.”
“I’ve brainstormed a few counter-strategies. Prepare a notice for a departmental meeting in Conference Room Three tomorrow at 10:00 AM sharp.”
“Understood.”
Armed with foreknowledge of the original plot, Xia Zeyu possessed crystal-clear insight into upcoming aesthetic trends within this world. The immediate challenge lay in snatching the initiative before Shen Congjin could make his move.
Aside from fighting in the ring, he had been quietly attending to other matters over the past few days conducting field surveys across retail markets, inviting former business partners out for tea, and catching up with veteran artisans who had previously resigned from the company.
The core selling point of Xia Jewelry had always centered on hand-crafted artistry, ancient heritage techniques, and bespoke exclusivity. Their target demographic consisted of affluent clients willing to splurge on custom pieces a model where closing a single major commission could sustain operations for three years.
Yet that money-draining idiot Xia Zexing had stubbornly insisted on pivoting toward mass-market consumer goods. Fine, pivot if you must, but refusing to hire dedicated product designers while cutting corners to manufacture generic mold-injected pieces straight from outsourced wholesale factories left them entirely devoid of originality. Anything they produced could be replicated by competitors across the market. Worse still, while copying mass-production standards, he stubbornly refused to lower labor costs, trying to market factory-line goods under the guise of “hand-crafted art” ultimately dragging the brand’s reputation right through the mud.
Xia Zeyu had burned through massive amounts of mental energy these past few days, nearly forcing him to shelf his planned vacation. After all, if they failed to recapture market share immediately, dragging Shen Congjin down from his pedestal would remain an idle dream.
To salvage their brand reputation, securing a high-caliber celebrity spokesperson was an absolute prerequisite.
Take Chi (Chi Wei) for instance in the mid-stage plot, she started out as a minor fifth- or sixth-tier bit-part actress. Because she happened to share an old acquaintance connection with Tang Tang, Shen Congjin tossed her a promotional gig for the brand. Shortly thereafter, she skyrocketed to overnight stardom after landing a supporting role in a hit drama, whereupon she publicly thanked the Shen Corporation during a televised interview, crediting them with turning her fortunes around. That single public endorsement propelled the Shen Corporation’s brand prestige to unprecedented heights.
Xia Zeyu found her logic rather bizarre. Clearly, she was the one grinding through audition after audition and pouring her soul into acting to earn that break, while the Shen Corporation had done nothing beyond paying her a meager tens of thousands for a brief promotional stint. How on earth did that suddenly transform into an achievement belonging to the Shen Corporation?
It was yet another example of a plot where the entire universe revolved around Shen Congjin, sparking a faint twinge of envy in Xia Zeyu.
In his original world, Xia Zeyu was an orphan whose parents perished when he was three years old, subsequently raised by an old scavenger. When he turned sixteen, he watched the old man get devoured alive by monsters right before his eyes a traumatic shock that awakened his supernatural abilities, launching him onto a brutal path of evolution where constant bloodshed ultimately forged him into the universally revered God of War.
Had Shen Congjin ever endured a single ounce of genuine hardship across the entire book? Aside from getting caught in a bit of rain and running a fever during the chapters where he pursued Tang Tang, when had he ever suffered?
What about Tang Tang? He was a male protagonist as well why was his existence steeped in such relentless misery?
It wasn’t fair.
After lingering in his office just long enough to polish off two cups of tea, Xia Zeyu scooped up his car keys and revved off toward Starlight Entertainment.