Chapter 549: Then Guess What Else I’ve Done

Chapter 549: Then Guess What Else I’ve Done

Wu Chen brought up the clock app on his phone—the detailed display that tracked time down to the second—and watched the numbers tick past.

During his thousand years in the time loop, once he discovered the “right way to settle it all in a single day,” he had taken Li Ruobing to bed hundreds of times. Yet before landing on that precise method, he had done far more than merely unearth every detail of her past. He had subjected her to all manner of fascinating experiments.

Even after mastering the right approach, his trials had continued.

Tolerance tests, for instance.

And that tolerance was tested from every conceivable angle.

Across the staggering expanse of 365,000 days, Wu Chen had interacted with countless souls. He had come to realize that the vast majority of human temperaments were remarkably similar, easily sorted into broad archetypes.

Only an infinitesimal few possessed genuinely singular personalities.

Su Qingying did not qualify as someone with a singular personality; she merely harbored an unusual predilection. In terms of character, she was hardly unconventional. Groomed from childhood by Madam Su as a model of refined propriety, it was nearly impossible for her to cultivate a truly eccentric nature.

Yet from a certain vantage point, Su Qingying was “perfect.” She fulfilled every fantasy a man could harbor of a woman: disposition, pedigree, beauty, wealth, and even… that peculiar, private indulgence. All of it was part and parcel of her perfection.

She could navigate corporate warfare with effortless mastery as a formidable businesswoman, or stand beside her man as a gentle, radiant, and enchanting companion. And in the dead of night, she could turn his wildest dreams into reality when he woke in the middle of the night.

By contrast…

While Li Ruobing and Su Qingying shared certain traits, the profound chasm between their temperaments made them two fundamentally different creatures.

Li Ruobing possessed that vanishingly rare, genuinely singular personality Wu Chen so prized.

She was not the sort to posture as an aloof, solitary ice queen. Some who affected such airs were merely socially anxious, turning utterly ordinary once the barrier fell.

Li Ruobing was nothing like that.

She truly was unique. In the eyes of many, her eccentricity crossed the line into outright madness. Compared to Su Qingying, she was “imperfect”—and it was precisely that glorious imperfection that captivated Wu Chen.

Only an intensely domineering, wildly unhinged beauty commanding formidable resources could inject enough unpredictability into his existence to make life truly exhilarating.

She presented a challenge no other soul could offer.

A thousand years of cyclical repetition had exposed Wu Chen to far too many iterations of the same weary human script. The more secrets he uncovered, the more he found that the virtuous were virtuous in identical ways, and the vile were vile in identical fashions. His unflinching, placid detachment had been forged in the crucible of that crushing monotony.

Thus, when he first discovered Li Ruobing within the loop, it had felt like stumbling upon an incomparable treasure.

The deeper their interactions went, the more he noticed that under specific circumstances, Li Ruobing would react in ways violently divergent from any normal person—and at other times, she would behave just like everyone else. She was uncertain. And that very uncertainty made her intoxicating.

Wu Chen had conducted tolerance tests on every uniquely dispositioned person he crossed paths with. Li Ruobing had been his very first subject.

To be imprisoned in a single day was a waking nightmare. Time looping without end, life stretching out with no horizon, relationships, passions, ambitions, and grievances that could never carry over into tomorrow… It was an agonizing torment.

It was a cage.

Yet confinement within that solitary day offered one staggering advantage: unlimited trial and error, running tests until he extracted the exact answer he desired.

From Li Ruobing, Wu Chen had extracted an extraordinary multitude of answers.

And so… weighing everything that had transpired today, the current state of his bond with Li Ruobing, her dynamic with An Menglan, the distance between Donghai and Modu, and even the time he had departed Donghai…

Wu Chen settled on a single probability.

It was now 10:13 p.m. Gauging the outer threshold of Li Ruobing’s patience while waiting for his call, Wu Chen concluded that she would either refrain from calling entirely, or dial his number at precisely 10:15. He favored the latter.

Seconds bled away.

At 10:14:50, Wu Chen dialed Li Ruobing’s number. Pressing the phone to his ear, he slipped his free hand into his trouser pocket and gazed out the corridor window.

This call was, in truth, something of a gamble.

Yet pitting himself against Li Ruobing’s volatile unpredictability was one of his greatest indulgences. Calling it right brought immense satisfaction.

Donghai. Huancai Fashion.

Li Ruobing picked up her phone, glanced at the screen without expression, rose, and walked over to the floor-to-ceiling windows. As a high-powered executive accustomed to an unrelenting pace, her internal clock was razor-sharp.

Everyone harbored arbitrary temporal thresholds in their minds.

I’ll watch for just a bit longer and go to sleep by such-and-such hour, or If the stock doesn’t rally by this time, I’m definitely selling, or I’ll watch for half an hour, then go do my homework.

Unlike most, however, Li Ruobing possessed not only an acute sense of time, but an unyielding iron discipline to execute upon it.

“What on earth are you busy with… Are you with that little tramp? Even those other women of yours know enough to check on me, yet you…”

Li Ruobing loathed the thought of calling Wu Chen first. Yet she had no desire to pick a fight with him over this either.

This incident would only stoke her fury toward An Menglan.

Not toward Wu Chen.

Perhaps due to the bizarre alchemy of their affection, Li Ruobing had taken the rare initiative to yield ground. This was hardly the first time she had conceded to Wu Chen; she simply never let him realize it was a concession.

Staring down at her phone in silence, Li Ruobing rehearsed a barrage of caustic, cutting questions in her head.

She was just about to tap the screen and dial.

Ring, ring…

Her phone rang!

Caller ID: Darling!

A smile bloomed across Li Ruobing’s lips—the triumphant smirk of a victor, her mouth curving with quiet relish. When an icy woman smiled, her beauty was peerless; yet Li Ruobing allowed that radiance to linger for barely a second before snapping her mask of winter frost back into place.

She answered, her tone biting and aloof. “It’s so late. If you aren’t keeping that little tramp who confessed her love to you company, why are you calling me?”

“If you had waited a few more seconds to pick up, I might have actually believed you weren’t on the verge of calling me yourself,” Wu Chen teased with an easy chuckle. “You answered far too quickly. There’s no point acting tough, is there?”

“Hah!” Li Ruobing let out a cold sneer. “You called me first. There’s no need to rationalize your own guilt.”

Even as the words left her mouth, she spun around in her office, her eyes widening as she scanned every corner of the room, a sudden flicker of shock flitting through her gaze.

She genuinely suspected Wu Chen had planted hidden cameras in her office.

“Drop the act,” Wu Chen laughed softly. “I know you better than you think. Do you dare swear you weren’t about to dial my number? If I’m wrong, I’ll grant any single request you make.”

Li Ruobing fell silent for a heartbeat.

She did not dare take the bait.

She could never bring herself to feed Wu Chen a brazen lie like that.

“My dearest Mr. Wu, you truly are a master of divine calculation, aren’t you?” Li Ruobing mocked, before shifting tack. “Then why don’t you guess what else I’ve done?”

“Is there a reward if I get it right?” Wu Chen countered.

“Tch! You’re actually going to try?” Li Ruobing was already itching to ridicule him. Verbal sparring of this caliber was a pastime they both thoroughly relished.

“Answer my question first: do I get a reward if I’m right?” Wu Chen pressed again.