Chapter 114
Handed Over
Da Chang's expression gave Curly Hair a cold premonition. She turned to him. "What exactly did you two do just now?"
Da Chang looked at Ah Peng. His look said: you tell her.
Ah Peng gave his account of events, and in describing how frightening the vineyard had been, was particularly thorough.
"You're saying you stood in a vineyard shouting — and what you were shouting was—" The more she heard, the colder her spine got. She felt the sky falling on her.
No wonder Xiao Chao had looked so strange when she'd arrived.
She could barely imagine what it had felt like to be Xiao Chao in that moment.
"You should count yourselves lucky that Xiao Chao has a patient temper. Anyone a little less tolerant and you'd be on the ground right now." She closed her eyes briefly. "Come on. Back home."
"We didn't have a choice." Ah Peng said quietly. "You said his boyfriend was incredibly powerful, but also romantically sentimental — so we thought if we did that, maybe he'd take pity and help us get out..."
"Did you stop to think what that would look like to other people?" She was caught between exasperation and laughter. "I told you — this is the real world."
The words stopped both Da Chang and Ah Peng cold. They had been so long in the habit of instance-world thinking. Even without any intent to harm NPCs, somewhere in their minds, NPCs were not really people.
The instances had shaped them too deeply. They had long forgotten how to live like ordinary human beings.
"So from Xiao Chao's perspective, we looked like people who'd lost their minds?" Da Chang was silent for a few seconds as a delayed wave of mortification hit. "What do we do now?"
"Stay out of Xiao Chao's way as much as possible." She walked them back. "And you've also misunderstood what I said. Yes, his boyfriend is romantically sentimental — but his attention doesn't extend to anyone else. It wouldn't matter what you said. He wouldn't do anything to help you."
"But we got out of the vineyard safely." Ah Peng's voice had dropped further.
"If I had to guess—" She smiled. "The one who got you out was Xiao Chao."
In Xiao Chao, she saw the purest goodwill toward life.
*
Xu Chenzhu walked Chao Musheng back to his room and stopped outside the door.
"Not coming in?" Chao Musheng saw him looking without blinking and waved him inside.
"You need rest more." He reached out and touched the faint shadows under his eyes. "Goodnight."
"All right." Seeing how much care was in his eyes, Chao Musheng took his hand and rubbed his cheek against the palm. "It's only a few late nights. I worked much harder in my third year of high school than this — don't worry."
Xu Chenzhu sighed softly. "How could I not."
Chao Musheng cupped his face and kissed the corner of his mouth lightly. "I promise I'll take care of myself. Goodnight."
"Goodnight." He stood touching his own mouth. "Was that a... goodnight kiss?"
"That was a reward for a good boyfriend."
"Then—" He stepped forward and bent to press his lips to Chao Musheng's forehead. "Goodnight."
"Go to sleep." He brushed his fingertips twice across Chao Musheng's cheek, and stepped back of his own accord.
Every desire he had, every longing — none of it was worth more than the deepest thing he wanted.
Only for Zhaozhao to be well.
"Okay." Hand on the door, about to close it, he remembered something. "When this project wraps up, we'll all be heading back to school together. My friends want me to take them to dinner — will you come with me?"
Xu Chenzhu smiled before he spoke. "Yes."
Zhaozhao was introducing him to his friends.
Zhaozhao must really like him.
*
In the days that followed, Chao Musheng stayed busy with work — but still carved out time each day to walk with Xu Chenzhu and have supper together.
"Love and its absence are both very legible." Secretary Liu, watching the boss compose a reply to a message from Xiao Chao on his phone, turned to Assistant Yang beside him. "Even at lunch, with barely any time, Xiao Chao still steps away from the work site to send the boss a message. A man who claims to be busy while doing nothing — that kind of man definitely has problems."
Yang looked at the smile surfacing on the boss's face and nearly choked on his chicken.
Why are we flattering him again — he can't hear us.
"Right — Consultant Chao is this busy, and still makes time for the boss." He swallowed. "That shows the boss is in his heart."
He wasn't flattering anyone. He meant every word.
"Are the documents for tomorrow's factory anniversary meeting ready?" Xu Chenzhu put down his phone, his expression still carrying the faint warmth of his smile.
"Ready." Secretary Liu said. "Boss — I spoke with the chief engineer on the project team today. The progress on Xiao Chao's portion is going very smoothly. It looks likely to finish about a week ahead of schedule."
Four weeks of planned work done in roughly three. Exactly what you'd expect from a team under Professor Zhang.
They'd been in Hanyue for just over a week. Tomorrow, after the factory anniversary, the return to the capital could no longer be delayed.
"I see." Xu Chenzhu looked at him. "Thank you for all your work, Secretary Liu."
Watching this exchange, Yang had something click into place. He notices even those small things — no wonder Liu is the most trusted person in the secretarial team.
He still had a lot to learn.
*
"Seven hundred and fifty in total — count it." The foreman handed the money to Da Chang. "You coming back tomorrow?"
He'd never had day laborers this useful and this cheap. Strong, diligent, ate whatever was put in front of them, never complained about the food.
"Yes." Da Chang pocketed the cash. "Thank you, boss."
"Of course, of course." He produced five bottles of iced tea. "Seven AM tomorrow, same spot."
"Got it." Da Chang distributed the bottles. He took a long drink.
It had been a long time since days had felt like this. No co-worker about to suddenly turn violent. No foreman suddenly transforming into something monstrous and chasing them down with a blade.
Food was normal. Water was normal. Even the air felt clean and safe.
Days like this — indistinguishable from a dream.
"What's their story, boss?" A worker came over curiously. "They're strong as anything. That delicate-looking woman — she was moving rebar over two hundred jin by herself!"
That fragile, that strong.
"Who knows." The foreman shook his head.
Workhorses. Useful. That's all that matters.
*
Sipping his iced tea as they left the site, Ah Peng looked again at that vineyard.
The one that had swallowed them. In daylight it looked small — he could see straight across it. Not large at all.
Every time he'd passed it these last few days, he'd failed to understand how something so ordinary could have generated that much of whatever that was.
"Stop looking." Seeing the vineyard always brought back the memory of that night's humiliation.
At least they hadn't run into the golden thigh these past few days...
"What a coincidence." A car stopped beside them. The window went down, revealing Chao Musheng's face.
Da Chang: ...
He truly hated his own brain sometimes.
"Good evening, Xiao Chao." He adjusted his expression rapidly and made his smile as genuine as possible. "You're done for the day?"
"Yes." Chao Musheng looked them over. Dirty clothes, dust from head to foot.
Coming from the construction site?
Ah Peng stood behind Da Chang grinning uselessly, absolutely refusing to speak first.
The golden thigh's mysterious boyfriend was also in the car. He was not going to say a word.
"Get some rest." Chao Musheng nodded briefly and closed the window.
"You don't like these people?" Xu Chenzhu asked.
"Nothing like that." He shook his head. "I just find them a bit strange."
He had initially thought they might be undercover operatives — people on work they couldn't discuss openly. But their behavior didn't quite fit that.
So who exactly were they?
"You don't need to spend more thought on them." He said. "They're unimportant."
Chao Musheng gave a quiet laugh. "Understood."
*
The next morning, Da Chang's group arrived at the site on time. The regular workers were having breakfast — no meals provided for day laborers.
They joined the other temporary workers without needing to be told, most of them weathered men in their forties and fifties, skin bronzed dark from the sun.
"Why is no one wearing a helmet again?" The foreman came over, clearly annoyed at two workers without theirs. "Next time anyone shows up without a helmet, don't bother coming back."
"We have leadership coming with an inspection team today." He looked over at Da Chang's group. "You five — front row. Young people look good, show some energy."
"Who's coming, boss?"
"An expert group from the city. They want to observe the site in person."
No one understood much about expert groups — only that people from above were not to be offended. They put their helmets on.
Before eight, they were called to assemble. The expert group had arrived; they were to line up and applaud in welcome.
Professor Zhang arrived with two students and found every worker lined up at the site entrance clapping. His brow tightened.
"Professor, the site can be uneven — let me help you—" An attendant reached for his arm.
"I'm not in my seventies. I don't need to be steadied." He looked at the sweat on the workers' faces and could no longer hold himself back. "These workers are busy — let them get back to what they're doing. Stop this sort of formalism."
The attendant smiled awkwardly. "Professor — they genuinely wanted to welcome you."
His brow tightened further.
"We're very grateful for the warm welcome." Chao Musheng, seeing the professor's expression, moved to smooth things over. "But the professor is also concerned about disrupting the work schedule — everyone should go back to their tasks. If one person can walk us around, that's more than enough."
The professor was admirable in every way except that he had no tolerance for pretense and said exactly what he meant.
"Of course, of course." The attendant quickly summoned a guide.
"The leaders who came today are a good sort — no airs at all." One of the day laborers remarked. "Last year on a different site, some leader came and talked for an hour, had us all presenting flowers to him — we didn't make the day's progress and ended up working past midnight."
The day laborers swapped stories of every strange person and stranger situation they'd encountered on other sites. Only the five players were watching Chao Musheng's back in silent absorption.
They'd heard his position here was significant. They hadn't expected it to be this significant.
*
The steel scaffolding was everywhere across the site. Chao Musheng looked up and noticed a frame shuddering.
"Watch out!" He caught the professor's arm. "That frame ahead looks unstable."
"Experts, please be assured — safety in production is our first priority, whether in material storage or construction waste handling, we—"
CRASH.
The scaffolding collapsed. A wall of dust hit the attendant directly in the face.
It... it fell?
She stared in disbelief. Spiral steel, welded safety frame — how had it come down that easily?
"There's been an accident!"
Da Chang's group was moving sandbags when the shout went up. They dropped everything and ran out to find scaffolding scattered across the ground, and Chao Musheng standing beside it looking unusually tense.
Hua Ba looked around carefully. She had the distinct sense of a system force — but apart from their own group, no other players were present.
"Professor — are you all right?" He steadied him and stepped back several paces.
"I'm fine." He cleaned the dust off his glasses. "As long as no one was hurt."
The attendant stood looking at what appeared to be a frame cut cleanly in half, cold sweat soaking her back.
If Consultant Chao hadn't stopped in time—
*
"Cough—cough—cough!"
Across the campus of Jinghua University, a boy in the middle of a class suddenly clutched his chest and coughed up blood.
"Someone's coughing up blood!"
"Who?!"
"It's Lin Sheng!"
"What — from heartbreak over the relationship announcement?"
A day later, a rumor circulated through Jinghua: a first-year had coughed up blood in class out of anguish over Chao Musheng's public relationship announcement.
By the time it reached Chao Musheng's class, it had escalated — some obsessive admirer willing to die for him.
When love and death became entangled, romance always acquired a certain doomed glamour, and some people began to feel sorry for the boy's devotion.
"Absurd." Third heard the rumors and couldn't believe it. "Knowing he has a partner now and still putting on this weeping-and-bleeding performance — what kind of love is that? It's just harassment."
"Isn't the strangest part the people calling it deep feeling? " First had a sense that something about this entire situation was wrong. Jinghua students weren't romantics — why would a single coughing incident suddenly have people praising devotion, and even calling Chao Musheng heartless? "Like seeing ghosts."
He opened the class chat. At least their own classmates were sensible — nobody influenced by any of the external noise.
"Something feels off about that Lin Sheng." Second said. "I heard just two days ago he was asking our classmates to buy him used items that once belonged to Fourth."
"What?" Third was sure his hearing had broken. "Is he deranged?"
"Who knows." He rubbed his arm. "Maybe I'm seeing things wrong — but that Lin Sheng has seemed strange to me from the start."
"Fourth doesn't even know about any of this, does he?"
"He's too busy working, too busy in a relationship. He doesn't have the bandwidth for school gossip." First's tone lightened. "And knowing him, even if he heard about it, he wouldn't pay it any mind."
"So Fourth doesn't even know who Lin Sheng is — and Lin Sheng has been performing this entire drama entirely alone?" Third frowned. "First, Second — is this genuinely someone with feelings, or someone using his name as a target?"
Who would want love like that?
"It'll sort itself out. First-years who've never met Fourth in person are easily misled by something strange for a while." Second said. "Once he's back, they'll see for themselves."
*
"Lin Sheng — are you any better?" His roommate brought dinner back to the room, taking in his pallor. "You really won't go to the hospital?"
"I went already. The doctor said I'm fine." He took the food. "Did you find out anything?"
"The third and fourth-years all say Xiao Chao's project is confidential — I couldn't get anything useful." The roommate cleaned the desk before setting the food down, then stopped, bewildered, and rubbed his own head.
He was only Lin Sheng's roommate. Not his servant. Why was he being so obliging?
"Hand me chopsticks."
"Here." He bent reflexively and passed them across, freshly washed.
Too slow.
Lin Sheng scrolled the campus forum, his face entirely blank.
The consciousness of Jinghua's students was evidently unusually strong. All this effort — and he'd only barely managed to nudge the first-years toward him.
Still not enough.
The beloved can only lose the capacity to love when betrayed by those closest to them.
He found the thread from a few days ago.
[Is it just me, or is this so-called Chao What's-His-Name not quite as wonderful as people say? I heard his partner is a rich man — do you think he's only in it for the money?]
[What's it to you? Even if he was dating a roadside monkey, it wouldn't be your turn.]
[For a wealthy man to earn Chao's affection — that's his good fortune.]
[Clearly you just don't have money. Step down.]
Useless. Completely useless.
He closed the forum. He stood and looked out at the campus. If school opinion couldn't be shifted — what about online?
He closed his eyes. When they opened, the irises held flickering static, and across countless platforms, negative stories about Chao Musheng began flooding in.
"Jinghua student shuns poverty for wealth — sells himself to rich businessman, abandons dying grandfather?"
*
Wan You scrolled to this push notification with a puzzled frown. Who was this about?
The further she read, the less right it felt. Computer science. Good-looking. Popular...
And that blurred photo — barely blurred at all — a side profile that was unmistakably Chao Musheng's.
What was happening?
A business rival's smear campaign?
The posts spread across every platform simultaneously, catching the attention of online observers everywhere.
[Very coordinated push. Based on my years of following these things: whoever this Chao person is, they must have offended someone powerful.]
[For the love of — even with only that one barely-blurred side profile, I can identify my favourite ordinary person instantly.]
[The mastermind behind this honestly thought we internet users were brainless NPCs who'd believe whatever we were told?]
[Disgusting corporate warfare. This is probably payback from some shady business that got called out in that interview a while back — they're sending paid commenters to retaliate.]
Kunlun's public affairs department monitored the online response and reported immediately to Secretary Liu.
"No need to worry — the boss won't believe any of this." He checked the sentiment trends. Very few people were being swayed.
[I tracked the timestamps of these smear posts — almost all of them appeared after one PM, accurate down to the second.]
[Spending all that money on an attack this clumsy. Useless waste of resources.]
Pfft.
Having exhausted enormous energy seizing control of every platform and injecting his messaging across them all, Lin Sheng's vision went dark and he collapsed to the floor.
Impossible. This was impossible.
This was negative sentiment data he'd collected across countless worlds. Why wasn't it working here?
*
After a full day of work, Chao Musheng finally opened his phone and discovered that the internet was sympathizing with him. Something about vengeful businesses. Something about his bravery in standing up for his mother.
Entirely bewildered, he searched for context and pieced together what had happened. Who had borrowed entertainment industry smear tactics and aimed them at him?
The people defending him online were abundant — friends, neighbors, his kindergarten classmates' parents. Even the second-generation rich from the Wangyue yacht had stepped in, explaining the history with his grandfather's family on his behalf.
Against all that genuine goodwill, the smears amounted to very little.
"Zhaozhao." Xu Chenzhu came to him. "The online situation — give it to Kunlun's public affairs department. Don't let it affect your mood."
"It's fine. I'm just curious who's behind it." He put the phone down and took his hand. "Tonight is the factory anniversary — we shouldn't let something trivial like this get to us."
"Kunlun's product sales spiked this afternoon." He had watched how little the online noise actually troubled him. "Does the company owe you a bonus?"
"I'm earning money for my own boyfriend. I don't need a bonus." He walked to the elevator. Secretary Liu was waiting outside when it arrived.
"Xiao Chao — are you all right?"
"I'm fine." He shook his head. "Everyone online was defending me, and it drove the company's sales up. I came out ahead."
There had been some unhinged comments alongside the supportive ones — but those weren't what mattered. What he'd seen was the people around him going to bat for him by name.
"Good." Secretary Liu smirked. "I'd love to know which competitor is so clumsy they can't even orchestrate a public opinion shift."
"Wealthy boyfriend." Chao Musheng shook Xu Chenzhu's arm. "Come help me choose what to wear tonight."
"Of course."
Xu Chenzhu chose an outfit, waited for Chao Musheng to change and come back out — then held out a card.
"What's this?"
"You helped me earn money — so I'm handing over the income." He looked at him steadily. "I only brought this one card on this trip. I read online that a good partner should voluntarily hand over their income."
"Oh?" Chao Musheng took the card. Then he transferred 5,200 yuan back. "That's your pocket money. Tell me when it runs out."
"Thank you." He accepted the transfer. Then took a screenshot.
The first time Zhaozhao had given him pocket money.
Ten minutes later, business associates across the city scrolled to a new post from Xu Chenzhu's social feed.
[Pocket money from my boyfriend. (image)]
The business world: What?!
They understood boyfriend. They understood pocket money.
But surely the Kunlun CEO did not need pocket money from his boyfriend?
The Kunlun R&D team leader, scrolling to this post, let out a peal of delighted laughter.
The bright future of the R&D department had arrived.
[He gave you THAT MUCH pocket money — boss, your boyfriend loves you so much!]