Chapter 153: The Black Widow Legend

Chapter 153: The Black Widow Legend

The moment Wu Chen saw the change come over Li Ruobing’s face, he knew she had worked it out. Nothing else would have produced that reaction.

“The Wu family?” she asked, her tone almost cautious, as though afraid of guessing wrong.

“Mm-hm.” Wu Chen smiled and nodded.

“Wu Yurong’s daughter?” Her voice rose, and her eyes widened further.

“That’s right. Her.” He smiled and nodded again.

Li Ruobing sat bolt upright, brows drawn hard together, and there was real anger in her voice. “You’re going after Wu Yurong’s daughter? Playing games again? Can you stop doing things this dangerous?”

“Correction. I’m going to help her realize her musical dream. What do you mean, ‘going after’ her? That sounds appalling.” He sat up as he spoke, then added, “And what’s the problem? Are you jealous?”

“Jealous my foot!” Her voice climbed again. “Don’t play stupid! You know perfectly well that isn’t what I’m talking about. If you want to play around with women, then play around. Have as many as you like—have I ever stopped you? I’m talking about danger. Danger. Do I actually have to explain to you what sort of woman Wu Yurong is?”

She was reacting violently.

Not only because Wu Yurong was formidable, but because Li Ruobing revered her. To Li Ruobing, Wu Yurong had become something very close to an idol.

Among Donghai’s ten richest, even the one ranked tenth held assets above six billion yuan, and each of the top three was worth over ten billion. A single swing in share prices could reorder the top three, but short-term fluctuation did not touch the long-term standings.

Over the past five years the composition of Donghai’s ten richest had shifted somewhat, mainly at the lower end. The top three had never moved.

Number one: Su Ruiwen of Jinfu Group. Jewelry.

Number two: Lu Changxin of Qian’an Industries. Small household appliances.

Number three: Wu Weidong of Senlan Fashion. Apparel.

Wu Yurong was Wu Weidong’s eldest daughter. She was forty-one this year, and currently vice chairwoman of Senlan Fashion Group. She had a daughter of her own, Song Xuan, twenty years old.

In Donghai, Wu Yurong could fairly be called a businesswoman out of legend. The legend ran through every part of her life. The first half of it had been all sudden ascents and violent falls.

Twenty-one years ago, at twenty-one, freshly graduated from university, Wu Yurong married. Her father, Wu Weidong, arranged it—an arranged marriage, a business-family alliance. The man she married was Song Xiang, son of Song Hongguo, owner of Bailingniao Group in Zhongzhe Province.

Wu Weidong and Song Hongguo had been university classmates. Old friends.

Bailingniao Group was also in apparel, but its business differed from Senlan Fashion’s. Senlan did menswear, casual wear, and sportswear; Bailingniao specialized in women’s clothing. Far from being competitors, the two houses complemented one another.

Hence the marriage alliance.

But Wu Yurong had fought the marriage with everything in her.

After graduation she had planned to go abroad and continue her studies in vocal music. Marriage had never entered her plans. The whole thing came without warning. She had resisted with all her strength—and in the end, for reasons of several kinds, she submitted.

She married him after all.

She married him, and she even bore a daughter—and the moment the child was born, she separated from her husband.

Word later had it that Wu Yurong had finally consented because Senlan Fashion was in crisis at the time, and because father and daughter had struck a bargain: once she married into the Song family and produced a child, she could do whatever she liked afterward, and Wu Weidong would never interfere in her life again.

That, supposedly, was why she agreed.

It was also why nobody tried to stop her when she moved decisively to separate from her husband after the birth.

The marriage Wu Yurong had been forced into lasted only seven years.

Because the Wu and Song families fell out.

They became enemies.

The reasons were extraordinarily tangled, and outsiders had little hope of knowing the whole of it. All anyone knew was that the Song family first abandoned the clothing brand the two houses had jointly founded after the marriage, then launched a menswear brand of its own, walking straight into the Wu family’s territory to compete with them head-on.

Wu Yurong had been forced into the marriage to begin with. Once the two families broke with each other, her divorce naturally went very smoothly.

The only fight was over custody of their daughter.

Wu Yurong won.

She took Song Xuan, then only six years old, and returned to Donghai.

For the several years that followed, the Wu and Song families went to all-out war. Each pushed into the other’s territory: the same subcategories, the same price points, the same customers, even the same styles. They sabotaged each other and tripped each other, and fought a commercial battle of exceptional savagery.

At one point it truly became a matter of one side living and the other dying.

The war ran a full five years.

And the one who ended it was Wu Yurong.

The moment she returned to Donghai with her daughter after the divorce, she went into the family business and released an astonishing energy. A year later she personally founded Senlan Group’s women’s clothing brand, Senlan—the brand that now accounted for the largest share of the group’s revenue.

Perhaps Wu Yurong had simply been a commercial genius all along, and nobody had discovered it.

Four years after she established the Senlan trademark, the Song family’s Bailingniao Group collapsed.

Bankrupt.

The Wu family had won.

Or rather, Wu Yurong had won.

With her own hands she destroyed the family she had once married into.

She even—drove her former husband to his death.

A few months before Bailingniao went under, its market share squeezed, its revenue insufficient, its capital chain strained taut, the group already stood at the edge of the cliff.

To save his family and his company, Song Xiang came to Donghai on the Song family’s behalf and begged Wu Yurong to show mercy. He begged her for money to save Bailingniao. He asked her to think of their daughter, to do it for the child.

In the end he even knelt to her in public.

Wu Yurong did not so much as knit her brows.

She had him thrown out.

Three months later Bailingniao Group entered bankruptcy liquidation, and creditors came without number.

That same day, Song Xiang jumped from a building and died.

For a long while afterward, nearly everyone in Donghai’s business circles talked of nothing else. They all believed Wu Yurong had driven her ex-husband to his death. Some began calling her, quietly, the Black Widow.

From then on Wu Yurong occupied an extremely singular position in Donghai.

Nobody dared provoke her.

Unless there was truly no alternative, you did not cross Wu Yurong.

Because she was ruthless.

And not only on account of those events. Not one of the methods she had used in the years since could be called soft. Some of the tactics she employed to drive commercial rivals into a corner could practically be taught in university classrooms as case studies.

She really was ruthless.

Which was exactly what Li Ruobing admired most in her.

After coming to Donghai and hearing Wu Yurong’s story, Li Ruobing had conceived a deep reverence for the woman. Her own situation now was very like Wu Yurong’s then: pressed into marriage, bound by an agreement with her family.

There were differences. Li Ruobing’s agreement was a wager with a winner and a loser.

But if she lost, the result would be the same.

She would have to marry.

A woman in shackles who wanted independence, who wanted her life wholly in her own hands, had to be ruthless enough.

Wu Yurong had managed it.

Li Ruobing meant to manage it too.

Li Ruobing worshipped ability and respected capable people. In Donghai, Wu Yurong was the woman she admired most.

Without exception.

There was one other point worth mentioning.

One of the reasons Wu Yurong counted as legendary was another highly unusual quality—one that also made her very like Li Ruobing.

She was beautiful.

Her present nickname was the Black Widow.

But before that, she had held another dazzling title.

Donghai’s number-one beauty.

Su Qingying was Donghai’s number-one beauty now.

The previous holder of that title had been Wu Yurong.

That was one of the reasons Li Ruobing had been able to travel from the surname Song to Wu Yurong. “Student Song” was prettier than Li Ruobing herself—beautiful enough to stand at Su Qingying’s level. And as a rule, a girl that beautiful was very likely to have an extraordinarily beautiful mother.

“Wu Chen! I’m begging you—think this through! My dear Mr. Wu, could you please stop playing with fire?!” Li Ruobing had gone straight to warning him.