Chapter 176: You Care This Much About a Daughter Born by Surrogacy?

Chapter 176: You Care This Much About a Daughter Born by Surrogacy?

Senlan Building, headquarters of Donghai’s Senlan Fashion Group.

Set beside the headquarters of other companies of comparable size, Senlan Fashion’s building was not particularly imposing. That had a great deal to do with the industry. Apparel was a traditional business.

Senlan Fashion currently had more than fifteen hundred stores nationwide and six factories around the country. In the industrial zone on Donghai’s outskirts it had even built an entire Senlan Fashion industrial park.

Measured against Senlan Group’s current market capitalization, the estimated value of its fixed assets was in fact higher.

That was not uncommon among large listed companies. Share prices were driven by profit and overall operating performance; the volume of fixed assets a company held was secondary.

Plenty of asset-light investment companies held almost no fixed assets at all and still carried enormous valuations. The principle was the same.

Wu Chen went into Senlan Building with several bodyguards following him the whole way.

They looked almost like his own bodyguards.

They were not.

They were watching him, in case he suddenly bolted. And naturally Senlan Group’s staff recognized the men following him as the vice chairwoman’s people, so nobody tried to stop them.

Into the elevator. Wu Chen turned around and simply stood there.

A bodyguard swiped a card and pressed the button for the sixteenth floor.

The other floors needed no card. This was not an office tower let out to unrelated tenants; everyone in the building worked for the same company.

Only the sixteenth and seventeenth floors required a card.

They were special.

The elevator rose.

Soon it reached the sixteenth floor.

The moment they stepped out, it was plain the floor was unusual.

The décor bore no resemblance to the ground floor.

By any normal standard, a major corporate headquarters kept one design language throughout the building. This one did not.

Even the corridors on the sixteenth floor had been finished with an artistic sensibility.

Wu Chen needed no one to show him the way.

He already knew which direction to walk.

The bodyguards behind him kept giving him strange looks.

Only when they had nearly reached the door of the CEO’s office did several of them quicken their pace and block him for a moment. One reached the door first and knocked.

“Boss, he’s here,” the bodyguard called into the office.

“Come in.”

A woman’s gentle voice from inside.

The bodyguard pushed the door open, stepped aside, and said, “Mr. Wu, please.”

Wu Chen went in.

The bodyguard pulled the door shut behind him.

Just inside, Wu Chen stopped and took in the vast office.

At least a hundred square meters, and decorated with exceptional taste—because the owner of this office was a woman of exceptional taste, and also a self-taught fashion designer of unconventional background and extraordinary natural gift.

The room divided broadly in two.

To the right, near the door, was the office proper, with everything one would expect.

To the left, mannequins in fashionable clothing stood along the wall, and a large worktable occupied the middle, covered with fabrics, scissors, rulers, and the rest of the tools.

An open design workroom folded directly into the office.

Two women were already there when Wu Chen entered.

One wore a black suit, her hair in a high ponytail. Tall and slender. Her face was not remarkably beautiful, but she had a striking, martial air about her, and a single glance told you how tall she was—over five foot nine, enough to model.

Her name was Chu Yan. Twenty-eight.

One of the rare women in China to have served in special operations, now retired, and once a member of a peacekeeping force.

At present, Wu Yurong’s personal bodyguard.

Behind the broad desk sat a woman in business dress, a diamond ring on her little finger, a fashion magazine held up in front of her face.

Only five seconds after Wu Chen came in did she lower it slowly, tilt her head a fraction, and smile at him.

“Mr. Wu. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

At first glance she looked no more than twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and her skin was exceptionally fair.

In fact she was already forty-two.

She was like one of those ageless actresses on screen. If she did not speak, she could even give off something girlish.

And when she spoke, her voice was extraordinarily soft.

Sweet, with a magnetic undertone.

Her manner of speaking above all left people feeling remarkably comfortable, almost indulged.

The voice of a warm, gentle older sister.

Donghai’s former number-one beauty.

Wu Yurong.

At the height of her beauty, Wu Chen would have given her a ten.

Back then she had genuinely been flawless from any angle. He had seen photographs from those years, and video of her coming-of-age celebration at eighteen.

But as Wu Chen had said before, aesthetics were subjective.

The ten he gave Wu Yurong was the top of his own scale, not some absolute summit of female beauty.

In Wu Chen’s view, once a woman reached Wu Yurong’s level it became extremely difficult to draw finer distinctions.

Every beauty had a beauty of her own.

So long as two women did not look exactly alike there were differences between them—but at that altitude, ranking those differences became almost meaningless, because taste varied.

Some men preferred deep-set eyes.

Some liked an oval face.

Others preferred a baby face.

Wu Yurong had been a ten then.

And now…

Li Ruobing had once asked Wu Chen what he would score Wu Yurong today.

He had not answered.

In truth it was not that he could not judge. He simply had not said it.

By his own standard, the present Wu Yurong was still a nine.

And that was after he had marked her down, because he disliked how deeply calculating she was and felt that some of her gentleness was false.

Which meant that, as Wu Chen saw it, a man who did not know Wu Yurong well and happened to like mature women could easily still give her a ten.

Wu Yurong at different ages simply radiated different kinds of charm.

“President Wu, inviting me here like this… isn’t very polite, is it?” Wu Chen asked, faintly smiling.

“Mr. Wu, although I don’t know what your real purpose is…” Wu Yurong smiled too, and nudged her gold-rimmed glasses up out of habit. “Aren’t you the impolite one here?”

“Am I? What impolite thing have I done?” Wu Chen asked, smiling, in the pure tone of a man playing dumb.

Wu Yurong kept smiling.

She leaned back in her executive chair and looked at him with those soft, womanly eyes.

Then she raised a hand toward Chu Yan, seated on a sofa to one side.

“Leave us.”

Chu Yan rose without a word and walked straight out.

When she had gone, Wu Yurong gestured to Wu Chen and said softly, smiling, “Mr. Wu, sit.”

Her manner remained impeccably pleasant.

That was the most frightening thing about her.

After fate had finished toying with this woman, something in her seemed to have simply come awake.

Set against Li Ruobing—

Li Ruobing was direct. When she was angry, she was angry, and it showed plainly in her face.

Wu Yurong was not like that. She could speak to anyone without a trace of heat, then turn around and destroy their entire family.

Wu Chen understood her.

So he knew very well that on first meeting Wu Yurong, you should not believe a word she said.

Nor her manner.

Nor her smile.

The prettier the woman, the better she was at deceiving people.

Wu Yurong was the classic case.

Wu Chen crossed to the sofa and sat down.

He crossed one leg over the other and turned his head to look at her.

“Go on, then.” Wu Yurong smiled and gestured lightly toward him. “Mr. Wu… you approached my daughter deliberately. What is your purpose? Surely it isn’t that you’re short of money? Does Miss Li Ruobing know about this?”

“President Wu,” Wu Chen asked, smiling, “you care this much about a daughter born by surrogacy?”