Chapter 066: The Legend of Donghai’s Number-One Beauty

Chapter 066: The Legend of Donghai’s Number-One Beauty

Another bet.

The word alone made Li Ruobing’s eyelid jump. She’d only just lost to him once—lost badly, for not believing in what he could do. At this very moment, only a few minutes had passed since she’d honored that wager and knelt down to apologize.

They’d only been trading barbs, and now here he was, actually proposing another one.

By now, Li Ruobing was genuinely convinced of Wu Chen’s ability and his reach.

But this—this had nothing to do with connections at all.

She’d only just learned the Su family had someone investigating Wu Chen, which meant one thing for certain: the Su family didn’t know him.

Even if they did know him, it wasn’t a close acquaintance. Otherwise they’d never have mobilized this much power just to dig into his background—enough that even Li Ruotai, whose information network was among the densest in Donghai, had caught wind of it.

Forget whether they knew each other at all. Even granting that they did—even granting the wildest assumption, that Wu Chen and Su Qingying had grown up together, childhood friends the whole way through—Li Ruobing still would have called this nonsense.

This time it wasn’t a matter of trusting Wu Chen or not. It was that she trusted Su Qingying. She trusted the Su family.

In this city, Su Qingying was a name everyone knew. The title of Donghai’s number-one beauty hadn’t been handed to her for nothing.

Li Ruobing, the Li family, even Li Ruotai—none of them had much to do with the Su family of Jinfu. Partly because Jinfu was in the gold and jewelry trade, and partly because the Su family was so small it could barely be called a clan at all. Between that and the difference in industries, the two sides had never had much occasion to cross paths.

It wasn’t that they were total strangers. There simply weren’t many ties of interest or connection binding them together.

But Li Ruobing knew Su Qingying’s story well. She’d heard it told so many times over the years it practically rang in her ears.

Su Qingying’s father, Su Ruiwen, Donghai’s richest man, had started out dirt poor.

At seventeen or eighteen he’d already gone out into the world to make his own way, drifting from place to place, trying his hand at business after business—most of them failures—until he’d built up a wealth of hard-won experience. In the end, he got his start with a tiny jade shop.

Su Ruiwen seemed born for business—tenacious to the bone, the kind of man who came back stronger the harder life knocked him down. In Jinfu Company’s early years, he’d even personally led a group to the jade mines in Myanmar.

The region had been lawless back then. Going there at all meant risking his life, but he’d done it anyway, all to secure first-hand, high-quality stock at the lowest possible price.

Maybe because he’d been too consumed with business, Su Ruiwen married late.

By the time his daughter was born, he was already a man of real wealth in the region, and Jinfu Company had grown into the largest chain jewelry business in East China.

Su Qingying had been born, then, already wearing a halo—the center of gravity for what felt like a thousand doting hearts.

His wife, Su Qingying’s mother, was the child of a high-ranking cadre, raised in an intellectual family. At the time she married Su Ruiwen, she’d been a university lecturer.

Under the influence of her family’s wealth and her mother’s education, Su Qingying had stood apart from ordinary children since she was small.

Obedient, sensible, an excellent student, impeccably polite—the Su family’s discipline was strict, and it showed. Su Qingying had carried herself like someone exceptionally well-bred from the time she was tiny.

She was that kind of girl—top of her class since elementary school, first place on every exam, shut indoors studying through every summer vacation instead of playing outside with other children. Outstanding enough to draw envy from everyone around her. And in the process, she…