Chapter 547: A Father Elevated by His Daughter?

Chapter 547: A Father Elevated by His Daughter?

An Huaiguo’s expression did not change in the slightest. Quite literally—his expression remained unchanged! He was thoroughly, utterly paralyzed by shock. That very numbness kept him from losing his composure through an excess of expressions. He sat as if cast in stone, locking eyes with Wu Chen.

This negotiation in the private suite was a hundred times simpler than he had anticipated!

The vast majority of the core details had already been addressed before noon, during that volatile conversation with Wu Chen in the office—a conversation that had ended unpleasantly!

Wu Chen was arrogant! Extreme! Mad!

That had been An Huaiguo’s assessment.

In truth, he had recognized the feasibility of Wu Chen’s scheme even then; he knew the young man was a mad genius! Yet failing to resolve the formidable forces backing Hezhong Media rendered the entire blueprint meaningless. It was an act of suicidal recklessness!

Yet Wu Chen had radiated supreme confidence!

An Huaiguo could only conclude that Wu Chen was inexperienced, unfamiliar with how the upper echelons of society operated. Attempting to plunder assets through extra-commercial means was an act of war—one that would ultimately become a struggle for power!

For most of the day, Wu Chen had appeared utterly ridiculous in An Huaiguo’s eyes.

Until this very second!

Only now did An Huaiguo awaken to the chilling reality that he was the ridiculous one! For a fleeting moment, a grotesque idiom flashed through his mind: a dog looking down on people! To apply such a phrase to himself felt monstrously absurd!

Yet he had indeed underestimated Wu Chen by an astronomical margin.

And that was after he had already rated Wu Chen’s capabilities exceedingly high! He had never contested Wu Chen’s talent; he had merely assumed the boy lacked perspective and was cracked in the head…

Wrong! Every last bit of it was wrong!

The Tang family! The Gu family! And even the Li family!

Wu Chen could marshal them all into this fray?

Then what did Hezhong Media amount to? What did the Yin family backing it count for?

Yet how had Wu Chen brought these clans together? Or had there always existed some clandestine nexus between them?

It defied comprehension!

His mind growing numb, An Huaiguo found himself incapable of complex calculations. Nor did he have the luxury of time; no one was going to grant him hours to deliberate before giving an answer—they wouldn’t even grant him minutes!

An Huaiguo even found himself wondering: did devouring Hezhong Media truly require his participation at all?

In An Huaiguo’s eyes, Wu Chen’s figure seemed to blur into an enigma. He had transformed into a cipher whose identity, pedigree, network of connections, and even true name An Huaiguo could no longer verify! An Huaiguo was no longer even certain whether the young man was truly named Wu Chen!

Yet…

Whatever Wu Chen represented, whatever unfathomable depths he concealed…

Li Maoren, Tang Jingbin, and Gu Hongtu were figures whose identities, stations, influence, and reputations An Huaiguo knew with absolute clarity!

Do you have any more questions?

For An Huaiguo, uttering the words “No questions” right now would be excruciatingly humiliating! Wu Chen had played the arrogant hand to the very end—never bending, never yielding! It was An Huaiguo who had wavered and reversed himself. He had misjudged everything; he had mocked and sneered, only to turn around and bow to sheer self-interest!

Yet what of it?

The business world lived by an ancient maxim: there are no permanent enemies, only permanent interests!

Rivals who had been tearing at each other’s throats and scheming against each other days earlier could pivot on a dime and shake hands over aligned interests!

Besides, An Huaiguo and Wu Chen had never actually reached such an extreme…

Though An Huaiguo had planned to do certain things, he had not actually done them. And how profoundly relieved he was that he hadn’t!

Astronomical profits could bring any man to his knees!

Even if he knew that uttering “No questions” meant accepting terms he had previously found utterly intolerable.

Such as… his daughter serving as another man’s other woman.

Yet it seemed this might blossom into a happy ending for all involved!

His daughter had no objections, Wu Chen had no objections, and he himself—along with his clan and Huaxing Group, with assets worth hundreds of billions of yuan—would seize the golden ticket to make a full-fledged entry into the mainland market. They could not only halt their decline, but forge direct partnerships with several of the mainland’s premier dynasties.

A windfall of unimaginable scale lay right before him!

An Huaiguo was no fool. He recognized that marshaling such a terrifying lineup could never be for the sake of a trivial Hezhong Media! Impossible! Hezhong Media was merely an appetizer—no, not even an appetizer, a mere cold side dish! Only by agreeing and entering this inner circle could he uncover what they really intended to do!

“No questions,” An Huaiguo said, looking Wu Chen square in the eye.

“Then we may open the wine,” Wu Chen replied evenly, a faint smile gracing his lips.

“Hahahahaha! Quite right, quite right! Open the wine!” Tang Jingbin stood up, his booming laughter sweeping away the lingering tension in the air. “Someone! Bring out the wine!”

“Old Tang, today marks a momentous occasion—we’ve sealed a partnership and welcomed Boss An to town. You’d better break out a few bottles of your good wine,” Gu Hongtu remarked with a smile, well aware of what treasures Tang Jingbin hoarded.

“Rest easy. I’ve already had them brought over,” Tang Jingbin chuckled in return.

Within a few exchanges, the atmosphere in the private suite returned to seamless harmony, and the room dissolved into easy banter and hearty laughter! Wu Chen kept his smile, merely listening for the moment; he intended to wait until An Huaiguo’s composure had fully returned before speaking with him further.

Wu Chen had always been exceedingly generous toward his own people.

He also wanted to grant An Huaiguo a chance to show what he could do.

In his subsequent exchanges with Li Maoren, An Huaiguo could clearly sense that Wu Chen harbored no desire to make things difficult for him… Under these conditions, Wu Chen possessed every license to do so—he could have utterly humiliated him! A few pointed questions, a couple of double-edged jests, a few cutting jabs about their clash at noon, and An Huaiguo would have had to swallow every drop. He could not turn hostile before the heavyweights of multiple premier mainland clans; regardless of how formidable a Xiangjiang oligarch he was, he did not hold the cards here.

He craved this partnership; he was determined to seize this boundless opportunity. Even if he had to swallow his pride and grovel tonight, he would have done it!

Yet Wu Chen chose restraint.

That naturally prompted An Huaiguo to realize that Wu Chen’s mercy was certainly not born of personal affection—they shared no prior ties to speak of. For a man as unhinged as Wu Chen to orchestrate such a monstrous maneuver, only to settle into supreme, collected restraint at the end… Was it because he did not want his own daughter, An Menglan, caught awkwardly in the middle?

Wu Chen had even planned for An Menglan to hold the equity.

Was he doing all this for her?

Much remained murky, yet an extraordinarily bizarre phrase surfaced in An Huaiguo’s mind: a father gaining status through his daughter?

Could Wu Chen truly go to such lengths for a woman?

Yet… he wanted Menglan to be his mistress! Did he love her, or was his love lacking? Just what manner of confidence and sovereign power must a man possess to plan to have a mistress hold shares worth at least tens of billions of yuan without caring in the slightest?

Or did he simply hold money in total disregard?

Once the dishes arrived and the banquet officially commenced, the room was steeped in jovial warmth. Glasses clinked and wine flowed freely as they reviewed the situation surrounding Hezhong Media over drinks. For figures of their stature, destroying a corporation was trivial even without dirt, to say nothing of holding a mountain of evidence! Hezhong Media itself was worthy only of casual dinner chatter; the Yin family was the sole entity requiring serious handling.

Yet the Yin clan was barely mentioned over the meal.

Reaching an initial consensus was more than enough for tonight!

The atmosphere grew livelier, the wine flowed deeper, and the men grew increasingly restless in their seats. The table was simply too vast, making conversation and toasting awkward across the expanse. If someone wished to speak with another, he simply leaned over or switched chairs. Banquets always drifted in this direction: the room eventually splintered into localized pockets of conversation, chatting with neighbors and periodically raising their voices. Drunken men were fundamentally identical in that regard.

And these grand figures shared another common trait—they were all men in their fifties and sixties!

Scrape!

The chair beside Wu Chen was pulled out, and An Huaiguo settled into it.

“Mr. Wu.” An Huaiguo was visibly tipsy, his face flushed with a drunken smile as his eyes narrowed, angling his wineglass toward Wu Chen.

Wu Chen lifted his glass, yet halted just before the rims met. Turning to meet An Huaiguo’s gaze, he said mildly, “Menglan cried all afternoon. You frightened her.”

An Huaiguo thought for a moment.

“I will apologize to her when I return.”

Clink!

Wu Chen tapped his glass against An Huaiguo’s.

Both men drained their wine in a single draught.

Donghai. Huancai Fashion. The president’s office.

Standing before the floor-to-ceiling windows draped in night, Li Ruobing picked up her phone once more to inspect the screenshot of An Menglan’s Weibo post, her expression bone-chillingly cold.

Fucking bitch!

With that thought, Li Ruobing dialed a number.

For information about the resumption of updates to this novel and the recent releases, please see the separate announcement in the author’s notes.