Chapter 384: The Strongest Unofficial Intelligence Organization

Chapter 384: The Strongest Unofficial Intelligence Organization

Peng Wei stared rigidly at Wu Chen, his eyes glazed.

Wu Chen actually wanted his entire fortune?

What kind of grudge was that?!

He was driving a man to his death!

For a split second, anger flared inside Peng Wei.

But it lasted only an instant before it died, and helplessness took its place.

There was no way out.

He couldn’t fight Wu Chen.

Li Ruobing had already made it clear she would “handle” him.

There was no point thinking any further about that.

If he couldn’t fight, he couldn’t fight.

If they wanted him dead, they could make it happen.

So…

his money or his life?

Money could be earned again.

Lose your life, and you lost everything.

“Mr. Wu… I… I don’t have that much cash.” It took Peng Wei a long while to get the words out.

He wanted to haggle.

And by saying that, he had effectively chosen to pay.

“I didn’t ask how much cash you have.” Wu Chen smiled at him. “I’m asking about your assets. Five hundred million. Do you have it?”

“I-I do.” Beads of sweat as big as soybeans stood out on Peng Wei’s forehead. He added quickly, “But most of it’s property and equity, plus some investments. I can’t free it up in the short term…”

The pressure was crushing.

Peng Wei was so tense he felt almost dazed.

He hadn’t felt pressure like this in years.

It was worse even than his nerves the very first time he’d tailed a celebrity for secret photos.

Wu Chen picked up his teacup again and took a sip.

He set it down and smiled.

“You’ve been in this business close to fifteen years now, haven’t you?”

“Y-yes. Nearly…” Peng Wei answered.

He had no idea why Wu Chen was asking, so all he could do was answer.

“Fifteen years. Five hundred million,” Wu Chen murmured with a smile, looking straight at him.

Every hair on Peng Wei’s body stood on end.

He even felt Wu Chen had a sadistic streak.

Did he mean to take fifteen years of Peng Wei’s work away in a single sweep?

Peng Wei felt he had arrived at a crossroads in his life.

“Your line of work pays pretty well,” Wu Chen said, smiling at him again.

Peng Wei couldn’t manage a smile at all.

The pressure was so intense he felt he was about to lose his mind.

Then Wu Chen went on. “Still, it doesn’t pay as well as I imagined. You make it to number one in your field, put in more than ten years, and all you’ve got is a few hundred million…”

Peng Wei’s head buzzed.

He still wasn’t satisfied?!

He thought it was too little?!

Then Wu Chen abruptly changed tack.

“How about this, Boss Peng. I’ve been thinking about doing some business in the entertainment industry lately. We could work together. Would you be interested?”

Peng Wei froze.

He stared.

His mind went completely blank again.

He thought he must have misheard.

That the pressure had been too much and he was hallucinating.

That fear had driven him into some kind of delirium.

What was Wu Chen even saying?

“Yes! Yes, yes, I’m interested! Very interested, Mr. Wu! I’m interested!” Peng Wei suddenly cried out, almost like a patient in a frenzy.

He shot to his feet, shouting with excitement, and with a trembling hand picked up the teapot to pour for Wu Chen.

As crushing as the pressure had been a moment ago, his excitement now was just as great.

From hell to heaven.

Wu Chen didn’t want his money.

He even wanted to work with him.

The money had been his all along, yet right now he had the illusion that he’d just picked up five hundred million yuan for free.

In reality, Wu Chen had never once asked Peng Wei for money.

He had never said anything remotely like it.

Peng Wei was the one who had offered money.

Wu Chen had only asked how much he had.

From start to finish, Wu Chen had never intended to do anything to him.

If he had wanted to deal with Peng Wei, Peng Wei would have died yesterday.

The truth was, Wu Chen admired the man.

And he valued even more what Peng Wei now possessed:

his intelligence-gathering ability.

That mattered most of all.

During the thousand-year loop, when his investigations eventually led him to Peng Wei, Wu Chen had been surprised to find that Peng Wei’s intelligence capabilities, his patience, his caution, and his boldness all far exceeded the rumors about him.

They were beyond imagining.

Peng Wei had a habit: he cultivated informants.

His groundwork in the entertainment industry stretched back more than a decade, all of it in service of his paparazzi work.

He had informants everywhere in the industry.

Qu Xiaoying’s affair had been extremely well hidden.

It had only been going on for a few months, and not even United Media knew.

She had offended Peng Wei, but she was still one of their own, so at first he hadn’t thought to look into her.

After all, there hadn’t been so much as a whisper.

There might be nothing there, and digging would only waste time.

Yet Peng Wei had still learned of the affair “passively.”

Later, after their repeated clashes, he used that initial lead to launch a proper investigation.

And how had he gotten that lead in the first place? How had he known she was having an affair?

An informant.

Peng Wei was unusually willing to pay for informants’ tips.

Even if a tip turned out to be useless, even if he never meant to use it, he still paid.

As a result, the informants he had spread across the industry were all happy to bring him things unprompted.

Someone’s assistant.

Someone’s secretary.

A staffer in some department of some entertainment company.

So many people had fed him information at one time or another.

Every one of them had been cultivated, one payment after another.

Every well-known paparazzi studio had informants.

But the sheer number of informants under Peng Wei was downright frightening.

His work phone held several thousand numbers.

Put plainly,

Peng Wei had an informal intelligence organization at his command.

Wu Chen wouldn’t go so far as to call it the strongest unofficial intelligence organization in the country.

But…

at the unofficial level, he had never found anyone whose intelligence-gathering ability surpassed Peng Wei’s.

“Unofficial,” of course, didn’t include Wu Chen himself.

And though Peng Wei’s capabilities centered on the entertainment industry, the entertainment industry was an extremely broad concept.

Every kind of commercial activity touched it somehow.

Products needed celebrity endorsers.

Advertising meant title sponsorships for variety shows, films, and TV dramas.

In a way, Peng Wei was a lot like Wu Chen.

Wu Chen had once called himself an “information broker” to Li Ruobing.

That had been a lie.

Peng Wei, on the other hand, was an information broker in the truest sense.

Like Wu Chen, he knew a great many things that others couldn’t afford to have exposed.

The difference was this:

Wu Chen dared to play the game.

And he knew how.

He knew how to talk, how to borrow other people’s strength, how to forge alliances and play rival forces against each other.

He could play on an enormous scale.

Peng Wei couldn’t.

He didn’t dare.

He had no background, and no means of manufacturing one for himself.

If he played and lost, he would die.

So all he dared do was break scandals and earn a paparazzo’s money in the entertainment world.

That couldn’t really be called wrong.

He was a paparazzo, after all.

But in Wu Chen’s view, Peng Wei was making poor use of his intelligence capabilities.

Nowhere near what they could do.

Not that it was really his fault.

He didn’t have Wu Chen’s thousand years of experience.

And his information was fragmented, which made it hard for him to envision an entire grand “production” in advance and then carry it out step by step.

“Mr. Wu, have some tea, have some tea!”

Peng Wei’s hand shook as he poured for Wu Chen, and he spilled a little, but no one cared about details like that right now.

Then he poured himself a cup as well.

He set the pot down, sat, picked up his cup, and gulped from it.

His emotions had swung up and down so violently that he felt wrung out.

He needed a moment.

Having downed the tea in one go, he wiped his mouth, set the cup down, and said, “Cooperation! Cooperation’s great! Hahahaha! Mr. Wu, I guess you could say we had to cross swords to become friends! Hahaha…”

Wu Chen had given him an opening.

So Peng Wei simply and plainly…

started cozying up to him.

“I’m planning to set up a company…” Wu Chen said. “Before that, I need you to do two things.”

The groundwork was finally laid.

Now Wu Chen was getting down to business.

“Just say the word, Mr. Wu! Forget two things. Make it twenty and I’ll get every one of them done for you!” Peng Wei agreed in a rush.

As long as Wu Chen didn’t take his fortune or drive him to ruin, he would agree to anything right now.

“Just two.” Wu Chen raised a hand and held up two fingers. “First, you apologize to Miss An. How you compensate her is up to you.”

“No problem, no problem! I’ll apologize to Miss An!” Peng Wei agreed at once.

“Second.” Wu Chen looked at him. “I’ll give you the material on Zhou Shenglong cheating with Wang Yaoyao. You break the story.”

“Huh?” Peng Wei froze again.

Zhou Shenglong cheating with Wang Yaoyao?

Since when?

How did he not know about it?

But that wasn’t the point.

The point was that Zhou Shenglong was a superstar actor of enormous standing in the entertainment industry, United Media’s top male star, and even a minority shareholder in the company.

Breaking a story on him would mean turning on United Media.

A complete break.