"Did your friend make you purposely annoy me with the intent to get my intention, before making me fall for you? So after that, you can dump me or do something damaging to me or my reputation?"With her arms crossed and her eyes narrowed, Selena threw a suspicious glance at the man.
Jiang Li was quite baffled. Her question was so out of this world for him so it took him some time to realize what she meant. "I am treated like a b.a.s.t.a.r.d and a spy? Of that kid Wen? Does she know that man never dared order me around?"
"… Her imagination…" He thought blankly. His statement was not finished, as he was having mixed feelings about what descriptions he should use.
At the same time though, he knew where she was coming from.
He was friends with Wen Hui, somebody courting Selena Tang"s fake sister Tang Yu Yan.
But Tang Yu Yan"s relations.h.i.+p with the real princess of the Tangs should not that be good. After all, the other had taken her place in her real family. Selena had openly shown repugnance towards the offspring of the people that had treated her horribly for several years.
There was also the fact that the fake repeatedly tried to paint her black to others, be it to the Tangs or the people outside. Everything was most likely Tang Yu Yan"s attempt to make her appear more valuable to the Tang family. The message she wanted to imply was that even if she was not biologically theirs, as a young lady educated since young, she should appear more elite than Selena.
Unfortunately, Tang Yu Yan did not know that Selena was quite the schemer, or at least, somebody who knew the ways of the world. She was not brought down. Instead, she appeared s.h.i.+ning more, although the people around thought it was something she had gotten from her bloodline instead of her own wits and experiences in the commoner"s world.
Jiang Li gave the woman before her a good look and fell into a daze for a couple of moments. "She would have suffered from extreme inferiority complex if not for having a strong personality… It"s not always absolute that blood is thicker than water. Time can also play a huge factor in a complex family relations.h.i.+p."
In the Tang family, the one Wen Hui was courting had been with the Tangs since birth so the affection and soft spot allotted to her by the parents should not be something easy to dismiss. As said, even a dog would be somebody"s dear one given enough time, much less a human. The warm memories the fake spent together with her adoptive parents should be countless already, so it would not be a surprise if they were reluctant to let her go.
"I heard her parents are quite eccentrics and would have shared a part of her inheritance and birthright to the fake if not for the old Mr.Tang."
"Since the fake is quite ambitious, she must not have wanted to settle things like that. She grew up believing it would be her inheriting a portion of the wealth of the Tangs, especially the hotels and the food businesses. I would not be surprised if she"s reluctant to let go of those."
Instantly, the image of the girl his friend was chasing became a bit worse than it already was.
"Thankfully, Selena is quite bright, it is Tang Yu Yan who felt inferior to her, and insecure of her position in the Tang family."
"However, it is still a fact that woman must have done some things to make my wife extremely doubtful of people. All of it must be to make her reputation suffer or appear not that worthy of getting an inheritance. Like introducing her to people, friends, subordinates, or potential lovers, who would make her too attached to them only for them to backstab her or lead her astray at a later time. Aware of the danger, of course, she could only be very careful."
The man shook his head. A moment later, his train of thoughts went to his current predicament. Then after thinking about it for some time, he just found himself bursting into merry laughter.
How should he prove that he was only doing the first half of her prediction and not the latter half?
Jiang Li only pondered for a moment before deciding on a simple solution.
This time, without her permission, although quite gentle and not that forceful, he pulled her out of the hospital and drove her car away from there.
…
At the same time. Beijing, China.
In a three-bedroom bungalow house located at a village subdivision where most middle-cla.s.s people lived, five youths gathered in the living room. All were young men around the same age. Two were wearing a blue-black checkered school uniform paired with black pants. The others were in casual clothes… no, one of them was not even half-naked which invited laughter and jokes from the other young men a while ago.
Most of the guys were sitting on the floor or occupying the couches surrounding a large rectangular wooden table. Scattered on top were pencils, pens, books, and several pieces of paper. There were also two laptops on the floor. Each of them was busy correcting answers on the paper while glancing on their reference materials from time to time. Three appeared suffering based on their expressions.
A minute later, one of them, the one hanging a s.h.i.+rt on his bare shoulder, laid his back simply on the two-seater sofa that he claimed for himself. A sigh escaped out of his lips as he rubbed his forehead. "d.a.m.n!!!!! I can"t do this anymore… No moreeee. I just want to play basketball!"
The complaint of the half-naked young man elicited a brief stare from everyone else.
However, they all went back to work after.
One of them, the most handsome but serious-looking guy answered in a flat tone, "We only have two more days to prepare our materials and practice. In an hour, we must finish tallying the survey questionnaires. After that, we have to sort these by group and a.n.a.lyze them according to the statistical treatment we chose in chapter 3. The computation and tabulation should take about an hour too, if and only if none of us will slack off. If we can finish early. We can take a few minutes of rest, or have some snacks. But we must return immediately to working."
Most of the boys were not really into what they were doing so for a brief moment, they let grief and depression showed on their faces. Why were they doing this to themselves?
The clock hanging on the wall to their left showed it was already nine pm. It was not a time for normally bad students and youths like them to sleep. However, they just felt like it should be a time where instead of papers and books, what should be in front of them were their phones or Nintendos...