"Sister Fan, please don't let that venomous bitch get to you. What does a spoiled brat like her actually know about real life or real feelings?"
Inside the sprawling luxury of Room 2303, Qiu Yingying was frantically trying to soothe Fan Shengmei's raw nerves.
"I can't be bothered to degrade myself to her pathetic level! I've dealt with countless arrogant, loud-mouthed rich girls in my ten years of HR; there is absolutely zero chance I'm going to let a golden-spoon brat ruin my mood!"
Although her chest was violently heaving with suppressed rage from Qu Xiaoxiao's verbal assault, Fan Shengmei was a battle-hardened veteran of the corporate ladder. She wasn't about to completely lose her mask over a few cheap insults.
Of course, claiming she felt absolutely nothing after being publicly pointed at and labeled a high-end kept whore in front of her roommates would be a complete lie. The humiliation burned deep in her throat, but the sheer physical weight of the luxury apartment key in her purse kept her anchored.
"Ah... if only I could live in a beautiful, massive place like this! I would literally never complain about anything again!"
Returning from her tour of the master suite, Qiu Yingying collapsed onto the plush velvet sofa in the living room, letting out a long, deeply envious sigh.
The layout of Building 22 in the Ode to Joy complex was highly stratified:
* The Flanking Suites: Two spacious, premium apartments measuring 130 to 140 square meters.
* The Middle Unit: A cramped, partition-heavy apartment measuring barely 80 square meters.
Seeing Fan Shengmei suddenly occupying one of the massive flanking suites entirely by herself—while she, Guan Juer, and some future unknown roommate were doomed to cram into a shared flat with a functional living space of less than sixty square meters—Qiu Yingying suddenly felt that selling yourself to a wealthy billionaire was an incredibly comfortable trade-off.
"Yingying, if we do end up signing a new roommate to replace Sister Fan, do you think she'll be as easygoing and reliable?" Guan Juer asked, raising an incredibly practical, stressful question.
The total monthly rent for Room 2202 was a steep 8,000 yuan.
* Fan Shengmei's partitioned dining room: 2,000 yuan.
* Guan Juer's master bedroom: 3,500 yuan.
* Qiu Yingying's secondary bedroom: 2,500 yuan.
With Fan Shengmei officially vacating her spot to move upstairs into Adrian Li's private unit, the remaining duo was in a state of financial panic. If they didn't locate a third tenant to assume the lease immediately, their individual monthly rent would instantly skyrocket by an extra thousand yuan!
A thousand yuan was an absolute death sentence for their budgets.
* Qiu Yingying's monthly salary: Barely over 4,000 yuan.
* Guan Juer's monthly salary: Just over 5,000 yuan.
Forcing their monthly rent to consume nearly two-thirds of their net income was a level of financial delusion that left them with almost nothing for daily survival.
Of course, Guan Juer didn't technically need to starve. Her family was considered highly influential in their hometown of Wuxi; her father was a bank branch manager and her mother was a powerful economic section chief. While they might seem like minor municipal bureaucrats on paper, anyone with even a sliver of real-world experience understood the terrifying level of hidden, liquid wealth families of that tier accumulated under the table.
Although she couldn't match the obscene, untouchable wealth of elite heiresses like Qu Xiaoxiao or He Andi, purchasing a premium high-rise in the heart of Shanghai was entirely within her family's financial reach. The only reason Guan Juer was currently enduring a cramped, stressful roommate lifestyle was due to her naive, stubborn desire to prove to her parents that she could survive independently.
Qiu Yingying, on the other hand, was operating on pure, unadulterated ignorance.
She hailed from a working-class, single-parent household. Her father was a weary, grease-stained car mechanic who had sacrificed his entire life's savings and health to drag her through a mediocre university. His supreme, lifelong dream was for his daughter to secure a white-collar job and officially transition into a sophisticated, big-city dweller.
In truth, with her pathetic 4,000-yuan salary, she had absolutely no business living in a mid-to-high-end complex like Ode to Joy. In the original timeline, even her manipulative, white-collar supervisor, Bai Zha Nan—who earned more than double her salary—could only afford to live in a cheap, rundown suburban shared house!
Qiu Yingying was simply the physical embodiment of a complete lack of financial self-awareness.
Strictly speaking, Chen Meijia from the adjacent building and Qiu Yingying shared the exact same brand of naive, airheaded stupidity. But Meijia possessed the sheer, cosmic luck to be surrounded by the tight-knit, protective weirdos of the Love Apartment; if a girl with Qiu Yingying's low intellect were thrown into the raw, unforgiving concrete jungle of Shanghai without a protective shield, her ultimate fate would be tragic.
"Oh! I seriously wish Adrian were my boyfriend! If I had a man like him, I would never have to stress about my rent or my future ever again!" Qiu Yingying wailed, gripping her head in distress as she contemplated the impending thousand-yuan rent hike.
"This... actually..."
Guan Juer hesitated, opening her mouth to speak, but after a second of heavy contemplation, she swallowed her words.
She felt it. Deep down, her sharp, quiet intuition told her that Fan Shengmei and the terrifying CEO, Adrian Li, were absolutely not operating in a normal, healthy relationship. It was exactly as Qu Xiaoxiao had crudely spat in the elevator: Sister Fan was merely a high-class, kept object.
But while a chaotic rich girl like Qu Xiaoxiao could scream such ugly truths without a filter, Guan Juer—as a loyal roommate who had shared meals and secrets with Fan Shengmei for a year—could never bring herself to shatter her friend's fragile illusion of dignity.
While the girls of Floor 22 were lost in their respective delusions, Qu Xiaoxiao had sprinted back to her family's primary estate. Armed with the devastating financial dirt on her older brother, she was currently putting on a masterclass of filial devotion, gently massaging her father Qu Liancheng's shoulders.
Although she had acquired absolutely zero academic knowledge during her years of expensive study abroad, she had perfectly inherited her mother's biological talent for shameless manipulation, brown-nosed flattery, and opportunistic plotting. She knew exactly which buttons to press to keep her father pleased.
Sure enough, just as Qu Liancheng was laughing heartily at his daughter's sweet-talking, his private smartphone suddenly thundered with an urgent call from his chief corporate attorney.
"What?! Lianjie has been placed under arrest?!"
The second the words left his mouth, Qu Liancheng's cheerful expression instantly collapsed into a dark, furious scowl.
As a thoroughly spoiled, incompetent second-generation heir, Qu Lianjie's actual vices were relatively mundane. When he was bored, he spent his father's money racing supercars with fellow rich kids or throwing cash at high-end club girls. Because he lacked the supreme, untouchable political connections of a true aristocrat like Yao Bin, he didn't even possess the courage to force women or run illegal rackets—truly acting as a disappointingly mid-tier playboy.
The details of the arrest were brutal but simple: Qu Lianjie had been speeding down the highway in his newly imported, multi-million-yuan supercar, desperate to show off for the model riding in his passenger seat. He lost control of the vehicle at high speed, violently slamming head-on into an oncoming sedan.
Because his supercar was engineered with a carbon-fiber safety cage, he walked away from the wreckage with nothing but a few minor scrapes. However, the oncoming vehicle was a cheap, fragile sedan. Under the violent kinetic impact of the supercar, the car was completely, horribly crushed into a ball of flat, twisted scrap metal—resulting in the instant, gory death of the driver and the critical hospitalization of the passenger.
"That absolute, brainless little bastard!"
Qu Liancheng slammed his phone down onto the mahogany desk, his face twisting in raw, unbridled fury as he began to curse.
"Daddy... what is wrong with my brother?" Qu Xiaoxiao asked, her voice dripping with artificial innocence as she played the role of the sweet, worried little sister.
"That goddamn idiot was out street racing again and caused a catastrophic head-on crash!" Qu Liancheng spat, his chest heaving with rage.
"Oh my god! Is he alright? Is he severely injured?" Qu Xiaoxiao gasped, her eyes wide with fake panic while her heart sang with pure, ecstatic joy.
Finally! The idiot has handed me his head on a silver platter!
"Your useless brother didn't sustain a single scratch! But the victims in the other car are in critical condition, and one is already dead. The municipal accident investigation unit has already thrown him into a holding cell."
"Oh, Daddy, this is terrible! You have to find a way to save him! What if they actually throw my brother in prison?" Qu Xiaoxiao begged, clutching her father's arm while delivering her highly insincere plea.
"Let the police lock the bastard up for a few days! It will teach him a bloody lesson about consequences!" Qu Liancheng gritted his teeth, his voice laced with exasperation.
He decided to use this opportunity to let his son rot in a holding cell for a week, hoping the concrete floor would finally beat some discipline into the boy.
As for the actual fatal car accident?
To a ruthless, multi-billion-yuan real estate tycoon who had built his empire on concrete and corruption, killing a couple of ordinary, working-class citizens was absolutely not a life-altering crisis. At worst, he would simply have to throw a few million yuan in hush money at the victims' families, bribe the local traffic adjusters, and hire the best defense team in the province to completely make the charges vanish. In his world, there was absolutely no problem that couldn't be thoroughly solved with a massive stack of capital.
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Give me powerstones.
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