Chapter 527: His Daughter Was Hiding Something from Him

Chapter 527: His Daughter Was Hiding Something from Him

Once Wu Chen confirmed that Bai Nawei had hooked up the external drive via the data cable, he used the laptop on the teahouse table to establish remote control over Guan Hongrun’s computer. Bai Nawei needed to do nothing more than ensure the machine stayed powered on.

Behind Wu Chen, Shang Yunlu and Peng Wei stood side by side, watching in silence.

Wu Chen operated the laptop with practiced ease. He first typed in the decryption key for the external drive’s encrypted partition, bundled the files into several compressed archives, and transferred them across the connection.

To ensure the contents on the drive were intact and matched what he previously knew, he clicked open a few files and skimmed through them.

Naturally, Shang Yunlu and Peng Wei could not fathom his intent; they assumed he was merely browsing out of curiosity. They could never have imagined that Wu Chen was already intimately familiar with every single document stored on that drive.

Once the transfer was complete, Wu Chen initiated a full format on the external drive.

Following that, he repeatedly wrote streams of meaningless junk data to flood the drive’s storage space.

Only then could the data truly be wiped.

Short of physical destruction, this was the most thorough method available.

A simple format never truly erased data; the underlying information remained intact, merely rendered invisible to conventional file systems. Only by repeatedly overwriting the disk with new data could the original tracks be thoroughly eradicated.

In truth, Wu Chen had weighed the option of physical destruction.

Having Bai Nawei smash the drive to pieces and toss it out was an entirely viable route. Once matters blew up, Guan Hongrun was no fool—he would know someone had moved against him regardless.

Yet discarding the drive and wiping it clean produced completely different psychological impacts.

Wu Chen wagered that when Guan Hongrun rushed home, found the drive intact, raced breathlessly back to his company with it, and discovered in front of everyone that it had been completely scrubbed clean—that was when his dread and despair would peak.

Pressing the Enter key one final time, the external drive was formatted once more.

“You can put the drive back now. Be sure to wipe away all your fingerprints, including those on the safe. People can suspect you, or even know full well it was your doing—if you want the satisfaction of revenge, I won’t stop you. But you must not leave behind any concrete, actionable evidence…” Wu Chen spoke toward the phone on the table.

Yet even as he spoke, he did not sever the remote connection.

Instead, his fingers continued to dance across the keys.

The laptop screen in the teahouse now displayed the desktop of Guan Hongrun’s study computer. Both Shang Yunlu and Peng Wei watched as Wu Chen deftly pulled up “This PC,” navigated to the H: drive, picked one out of hundreds of folders, and clicked through several more subdirectories in what appeared to be a casual, random sequence.

Ultimately, with seasoned familiarity, he brought up a file buried deep within the directory tree.

The file was password-protected.

Wu Chen typed in the code and unlocked it on his very first try.

He clicked inside.

There were over a dozen video files.

Wu Chen casually opened one.

As the media player launched, chaotic, muffled sounds spilled from the laptop’s speakers. The video showed five or six middle-aged men and a lone woman engaged in a lewd group act.

Shang Yunlu was utterly dumbfounded by the sight.

He recognized every single man on screen, including Guan Hongrun himself and several other top-level executives from Hezhong Media. He recognized the woman as well: Zhou Manrui, a rising young starlet whom Hezhong Media had been pushing aggressively in recent years.

It was just…

What stunned Shang Yunlu was not that Zhou Manrui had been coerced by the casting couch.

It was the sheer, depraved scale of the act.

And the fact that they had recorded every single second of it.

Shang Yunlu immediately weighed the destructive potential of such footage, only to furrow his brow. On second thought, it seemed rather useless. Zhou Manrui’s commercial value was modest at best; the tape could ruin her career, but it could never bring down Hezhong’s executive suite. Distributing illicit material was a crime in itself; if it were leaked online, Hezhong would find it all the easier to pull strings and have the content scrubbed from the internet entirely.

Wu Chen watched for merely a couple of seconds before closing the window.

Then, he casually opened several more.

The second clip was another “ordinary” recording of similar debauchery.

The third was fundamentally different.

The woman in that footage appeared to be heavily incapacitated by alcohol, and the man involved was not Guan Hongrun, but another senior vice president of Hezhong Media.

Something was off.

These videos did not look like personal mementos Guan Hongrun kept for his own amusement; they resembled collateral held in reserve—leverage or ammunition to be weaponized at a critical juncture.

The reason Wu Chen had bothered to inspect them was simply that there was one more video than he remembered from his previous knowledge. It seemed an additional recording had been logged over the past month.

So he had taken a cursory look.

Whether he found the newly added one or not hardly mattered.

Wu Chen compressed the videos and transferred it to his laptop.

For the next ten minutes or so, he maintained the remote session, pulling across a large number of commercial plans, confidential digital documents, bizarre photographs, and even screenshots of Guan Hongrun’s private chats with various figures.

It was purely something he could do while he was there.

In truth, whether he possessed these materials or not would not alter the course of his plan. But since he was handling the machine personally and knew which files might prove useful, he might as well take them.

Before logging off, Wu Chen took care to erase all traces of his remote activity from Guan Hongrun’s computer.

The connection was terminated.

“What now?” Bai Nawei’s voice came through the phone.

“Do you want Guan Hongrun to know that you were behind all this?” Wu Chen asked in return.

“What do you mean…?” Bai Nawei did not quite catch his drift.

“I mean, if you want the thrill of revenge—letting Guan Hongrun know you had a hand in everything, while ensuring he can’t lay a finger on you and has no hard evidence to tie you down—is that what you want?” Wu Chen clarified.

“Yes!” Bai Nawei replied without hesitation, asking in a rush, “What should I do?”

“Book a flight to Xiangjiang right this moment…”

“Then, step outside and tell the domestic staff to thoroughly clean the study. Remind them that you’ll be inspecting their work personally!” Wu Chen said.

“That’s it?” Bai Nawei asked.

“That’s it,” Wu Chen replied.

“All right. I’ll get to it…” Bai Nawei paused, hesitating slightly.

“Good. Let’s leave it at that for now; hang up.” Wu Chen smiled. “I’ll brief President Shang on the next steps, and you can get the details from him later. Oh, and one more thing: you’ll receive a call from a contact in Xiangjiang this afternoon. When you head over there to lay low, they will do everything in their power to protect your safety.”

The call ended.

Shang Yunlu took back his phone, the casing warm from the lengthy voice session. He hesitated for a long while before finally finding his voice: “Mr. Wu, what comes next…?”

“At noon today, I need you to accompany me to meet someone.” Wu Chen smiled warmly at Shang Yunlu.

Then, he unveiled his astonishing, terrifying grand design.

He did not delve into the minutiae of the operation or explain every single tactical move; those were beyond Shang Yunlu’s role, and Shang Yunlu had no need to know them. Wu Chen merely laid out what he required from the man.

And the ultimate objective!

—To swallow Hezhong Media whole!

It was a scheme of sheer, unadulterated madness. To accomplish it in a short span would require orchestrating forces on a colossal scale.

Shang Yunlu was thrown into utter bewilderment once more.

He even began to wonder if Wu Chen was a complete lunatic.

How could anyone possibly pull off such a feat?

Though fresh doubts surged in his mind, Shang Yunlu understood that he had crossed the point of no return. If he did not see this through to the end, he had no idea what fate awaited Wu Chen, but he himself would certainly be destroyed first.

A little after eleven that morning, inside the spacious, sunlit president’s office of Menghua Music.

An older man of average build sat on the sofa, quietly sipping tea.

He wore a well-tailored gray suit. His hair was jet-black, and though pronounced wrinkles lined his face, at first glance he appeared barely in his forties—robust, spirited, and seemingly in the prime of his life. In reality, he had already crossed his sixtieth year.

From his features alone, it was difficult to tell he was a man of staggering wealth. He was neither unsightly nor exceptionally handsome; at best, his face could be described as dignified and regular. Yet his eyes held a natural, unforced authority that demanded no conscious posturing—the unmistakable aura of a man who had reigned at the apex of power for decades.

He was An Huaiguo, chairman of Xiangjiang’s Huaxing Group, one of the ten great financial magnates of Xiangjiang. He held sway over hundreds of billions in corporate capital, backed by a family fortune that ran well into the hundreds of billions of yuan!

Xiangjiang’s unique geopolitical standing had granted An Huaiguo an equally extraordinary status.

For Xiangjiang possessed a complex, layered history.

Clack.

An Huaiguo set his porcelain cup onto the coffee table and raised his gaze toward his daughter, An Menglan. “Lanlan, what on earth is going on? Why did you transfer your shares to another woman? Who is that little girl?”

This was not what An Huaiguo had originally flown in to discuss.

Before boarding his flight, he had his staff send over the latest dossier on his daughter’s company, Menghua Music, only to uncover a recent shakeup in equity. A woman named Zhuang Xiaodie had acquired a fifty percent stake in Menghua Music.

Clearly, something monumental had taken place.

An Huaiguo had already realized that his daughter was keeping a great deal hidden from him.