Given Qiu Yihe's arrogance, Jiang Cheng didn't want to leave any room for mercy this time.
He began the regular teaching mode.
Soon, Qiu Yihe discovered the problem.
Jiang Cheng was right; he really had been holding back before.
And what about the cooldown time mentioned online?
If she had known, she wouldn't have provoked Jiang Cheng. Now, wasn't she the one suffering?
Unlike Qiu Yihe's ordeal, Jiang Cheng truly felt this Girl was exceptionally gifted.
She was almost comparable to Girls like Zhou Ying and Jiang Churan who studied dance.
Actions like a direct back kick to hook her leg over Jiang Cheng's shoulder were done with ease.
It was just that this Girl's personality was a bit wild.
Occasionally, when she was defiant, she would even kick toward his nose.
Fortunately, Jiang Cheng had professional fighting skills.
Instead, he directly pulled her leg over.
Not only did the Girl miss her mark, but her guard was also breached.
She was beaten until she cried out in pain.
After being taught a harsh lesson by Jiang Cheng, she finally started to behave and cooperate obediently.
After ten in the morning, Jiang Cheng and Qiu Yihe finally came out of the bedroom and moved to the outer room for breakfast.
Xia Li had already prepared the exquisite meal and stood quietly to the side.
By now, she had already adjusted her state.
No extra emotion could be seen on her cold face.
Only a nearly imperceptible trace of fatigue deep in her eyes betrayed the fact that she hadn't slept well last night.
It wasn't the first time Xia Li had seen Qiu Yihe. From the moment she came out, she noticed the strangeness in Qiu Yihe's gait.
After watching for a few seconds, her eyelids twitched slightly.
The momentary tightening of leg muscles when stepping, the subconscious slowing down when sitting.
The slight adjustment of her center of gravity, and the lingering faint exhaustion on her brow, a mix of laziness and excessive consumption.
To Xia Li, who was rigorously trained and exceptionally sensitive to human limits and state changes, these subtle signs were no different from a clear "after-action report."
Although the building's soundproofing was good, she was, after all, a personal Bodyguard and housekeeper.
Therefore, she had a high level of movement authority.
Last night, she had listened at the door for a long time.
After eavesdropping for an hour last night, she finally ran back to her room in a bit of a disarray.
Even a cold shower couldn't completely extinguish those unfamiliar flames.
In the end, in the darkness and silence, she had to rely on her own steady and powerful fingers, accustomed to holding a gun, to perform a silent and clumsy "bomb disposal operation."
However, after the "operation" was completed, the empty helplessness and deeper heat did not disappear; instead, they lurked, easily triggered at this moment.
Seeing Xia Li busy for Jiang Cheng, Qiu Yihe couldn't help but speak up halfway through the meal.
"Young Master Jiang, even a simple thing like having breakfast has such a full sense of ritual..."
Jiang Cheng understood what she meant. He glanced at Xia Li and said, "Xia Li is one of us. You can speak your mind directly."
After saying that, he focused on his phone.
Qiu Yihe naturally saw that Xia Li was no ordinary maid.
Xia Li had occupational habits, and so did she.
From the way she arranged the plates just now, it was clear that Xia Li's skills were quite good.
However, even if she was one of them, Qiu Yihe was too embarrassed to talk about her affairs with Jiang Cheng in front of Xia Li... Just as Jiang Cheng thought, the few people in the small group had only just woken up.
Shen An was the first to pop up, directly sending two photos.
One was of a messy large bed, with faint traces that didn't belong to just one person.
The other was in front of the hotel's floor-to-ceiling window, showing two slender silhouettes in bathrobes, with the morning traffic of Kyoto outside.
Shen An: "Brother Cheng, sorry, sorry, I woke up late! Last night... hehe, we had an in-depth discussion about life ideals and slept a bit heavily. Do you think the results of this 'morning exercise' are okay?"
Wang Zheng: "Shen An, those photos... watch out for kidney deficiency."
Qin Fen: "Whoa, Brother Cheng, you didn't stay up all night, did you?"
Shen An: "All night? Impossible. My Brother Cheng looks like a self-disciplined good man."
Wang Zheng: "What do you guys know? Brother Cheng's love for Sister-in-law is true love..."
Wang Congcong: "You bunch of posers. A good man should be like me—go straight home after drinking."
Seeing them hint that he was alone last night, Jiang Cheng chuckled.
He casually took a photo of Qiu Yihe's lower body and sent it.
Then he immediately withdrew it.
"I'm only having breakfast now..."
Qin Fen: "I'm salty. That hair wasn't the Sister-in-law from last night, was it?"
Wang Zheng: "Exactly how many sisters-in-law do I have?"
Shen An: "Brother Cheng is awesome!"
Wang Congcong: "Multiplayer sports?"
Jiang Cheng: "Get out of here!"
Shen An: "@Everyone, let's have lunch together and discuss what Brother Cheng mentioned last night?"
Wang Zheng: "Sounds good to me."
Qin Fen: "No problem." Wang Congcong: "Send the address..."
After sending that, Wang Congcong walked toward his father's study... Wang Jianlin was standing by the study window as usual, looking at the scenery outside the courtyard.
His silhouette appeared exceptionally calm, even somewhat solemn, in the halo of light. The ai-
-r was filled with the honeyed fragrance of top-tier Jin Jun Mei tea, yet it seemed unable to suppress a trace of invisible heaviness.
Wang Congcong knocked and entered. His face lacked its usual laziness, and there were clear bloodshot streaks in his eyes.
He had clearly spent the night thinking seriously, but his spirit was somewhat excited. "Dad, morning. There's something urgent I need to talk to you about."
Wang Jianlin turned around and pointed to the sofa opposite him. "Sit. Looking at you, it doesn't seem like a small matter. Tell me about it."
Wang Congcong sat down and didn't beat around the bush, getting straight to the point. "Last night I met with Jiang Cheng, Qin Fen, Wang Zheng, and Shen An. Jiang Cheng proposed a plan regarding... the Company."
Hearing the word "Company," Wang Jianlin's brow furrowed imperceptibly. His gaze suddenly became focused, signaling his son to continue.
Wang Congcong sat down, organized his thoughts, and recounted the "Vulture Plan" Jiang Cheng proposed last night, which targeted the high-quality assets of the Daheng Group for "precision strikes and quick entry/exit."
Initially, Wang Jianlin just listened calmly, his fingers unconsciously stroking the warm Zisha teacup.
But as Wang Congcong described how to exploit the Company's debt crisis and how to coordinate with creditors to drive down prices...
...and how to precisely strip away those core land parcels and high-quality properties, an extremely complex light flashed deep in Wang Jianlin's eyes.
His fingers unconsciously tapped the smooth tabletop, but his gaze seemed to pierce through the walls, looking toward a place both distant and near.
There was scrutiny and evaluation of the business tactics themselves, but deeper down, a trace of... cold ripples surfaced.
The Company, Xu Jiayin.
Once upon a time, he was a figure like himself, who had fought his way through the tides of the era to reach the peak.
The Company's scale, its momentum at its peak, and even some of its aggressive tactics had once made the industry take notice.
Having experienced storms himself, he knew that the larger an enterprise, the more it was like walking on thin ice in the face of era shifts and policy adjustments.
His own Company had also experienced growing pains, and it was only by cutting off limbs to survive that it had reached today's relatively stable state.
Now, listening to his son describe, in a clear and even somewhat eager tone, how to feast on the massive, not-yet-fully-submerged carcass of the Company like dissecting a whale fall... Wang Jianlin's heart sank for no reason.
"I watched him build the vermilion tower, I watched him feast his guests, and I watched his tower collapse..."
This ancient saying quietly crossed his mind.
It wasn't sympathy for the Xu Family; the business world was like a battlefield, and the rule of "the winner takes all" was inherently cruel.
Rather, it was a sense of desolation from seeing one's own kind suffer, and a solemn awe for the industry cycles and the fickleness of fate.
Such a vast empire—how rapid was its expansion, and how many people would be swallowed by the tremors and tsunamis triggered when it fell? Would the next one be...?"
He picked up his teacup, using the dense steam to hide the momentary daze in his eyes.
In the real estate business, everyone flocked to it when it was surging ahead, but once it turned, the wind became bone-chilling.
The Company's current situation certainly had reasons like its own excessive expansion and high leverage, but wasn't it also a microcosm of the changes in the macro environment?
As a peer, even a rival, seeing a peer of such scale about to end in such a "dismembered" fashion, his mood was inevitably complex.