"I saw it all..." Gu Qing sniffled, shoving her glowing phone screen in Jiang Muyao's face.
Pinned at the top of Huaqing University's anonymous forum sat a red-hot thread, its views outpacing the number-two post by tens of thousands, its bold black headline an eyesore:
[WARNING! The new rich-girl school trustee has moved into the women's dorms. Storm clouds incoming for Room 404, campus troublemaking central.]
The main post was pure character assassination, painting Jiang Muyao as a tyrannical capitalist princess who'd never touched a grocery bill, certain she'd come to the dorms just to pad her resume—and vowing her first move would be water and power rationing plus a brutal housing-fee hike.
"The whole forum is tearing into you. They say you're rotten to the bone and came here purely to farm publicity off us."
Gu Qing bit her lower lip white, chest rising and falling with ragged breaths:
"But what do they know?! You waded through filthy water yesterday to clear my clogged, reeking drain without blinking! Then you pulled millions out of your own pocket to kick out the black-hearted canteen that skimped on our food—you're even replacing security with the best of the best!"
"Those old fossil guards used to sit in the gatehouse glued to their phones—girls got stalked by punks off campus at night and they wouldn't even lift an eyelid, cigarette butts all over the floor! The canteen cook's hands shook like he had the palsy. Someone bit into a deep-fried cockroach once and he swore up and down it was stir-fried black beans!"
Gu Qing stepped forward and gripped Jiang Muyao's arm, nails creasing her sleeve, eyes blazing with fanatic light. "Muyao, you're no black-hearted capitalist—you're a saving angel of mercy! Don't you worry: from now on, Room 404 is your city wall. Anyone who touches you answers to me first!"
Jiang Muyao's eyelids twitched wildly and the corner of her mouth spasmed out of her control.
No, hey, classmate—wake up!
I spent that money to burn through funds. I'm praying the whole thing implodes so the family kicks me out. Who gave you permission to canonize me unilaterally?
Before she'd even caught her breath, the dorm's green-painted wooden door was flung open.
Two figures squeezed in one after the other.
In front came Su Xiaoman, panda-eyed, thick glasses slid down to the tip of her nose, three overheated laptops stacked steadily in her arms;
behind her trotted Bai Feifei in ten-centimeter stilettos, ring light blazing her face ghost-white as she glossed her lips at her phone on the move.
"Muyao-jie!"
Shen Qingci—the girl who normally stammered just saying hi to the dorm supervisor—was red to the ears.
She dumped her laptop on the desk and her fingers clattered across a mechanical keyboard: "Just now... I hacked into the campus forum's root server! Traced every account spreading the rumors—the source IPs all belong to shills hired by the black-hearted contractor from the neighboring district!"
"My script's already deployed. Anyone posts another malicious thread, the server auto-locks their device and bans their account—and bonus round, their failed-course retake transcripts get mass-emailed to every advisor in their department!"
Shen Qingci pushed up her glasses with one bent finger; the lens flashed white. "Anyone who messes with Muyao-jie loses their internet cable first!"
Bai Feifei, mid-broadcast, spun around, extended her selfie stick to maximum and framed Jiang Muyao dead center, voice vaulting an octave:
"Fam, you seeing this?! This is our new boss in 404—the goddess trustee running our whole district! Everyone catch this morning's recruitment notice? Male-model security starting at 185 centimeters, Australian wagyu at every canteen window! THIS is what treating female college students like human beings looks like. This is vision!"
"Chat, spam 'protect our Muyao-jie' right now! Anyone tries to stir the pot on RedNote or Weibo, my eight hundred thousand followers will drown him in one spit each!"
The livestream danmaku blurred past faster than the eye could read—wall-to-wall "what kind of god-tier setup is this," "is it too late to retake my exams for Huaqing," "begging for a trustee of my own."
Jiang Muyao rubbed her throbbing temples; the back of her skull was going numb in waves.
Something is wrong here.
Shouldn't these troublemaker roommates be ganging up to ostracize her, reporting her to the school leadership to get her evicted?
How did one night of sleep turn one of them into her iron-fisted enforcer, another into her hacker gate-god, and the third into a publicity engine strapping her to the hottest trending rack on the entire internet?
If satisfaction gets farmed to full marks, how is this money pit supposed to lose money?
Jiang Muyao took a deep breath and forced the rage boiling up her throat back down.
Stay calm. It's fine. Probably.
No matter how hard the roommates fantasize, it's just noise. The fundamentals haven't moved.
Everything she'd signed was a money furnace; cash was gushing out by the second. When the month-end financials dropped and the hole had tripled, the board—that nitpicking pack of vultures—would never let her keep running wild.
...
At dawn the next day, the gates of the Huaqing women's dorm district were packed shoulder to shoulder, the intersection jammed solid.
The hiring notice dumped online the night before—bold type blazing "20,000 base salary," "height bonus," "full insurance, housing fund, and dorm provided"—had detonated through the local job market.
Honor-guard veterans and fighting-club coaches fought tooth and nail at the door. Even pretty young men from the neighboring film academy and a male-model agency showed up in crisply pressed suits to interview for the position of "dining-service steward."
At eight sharp, a whistle blew: the first batch of guards to pass fitness tests and background checks took their posts.
Matching navy tactical suits, tailored slim; average height 187 centimeters; broad shoulders, straight backs; sunglasses and radio earpieces. They lined up on either side of the gate barriers, standing like they'd been welded to the pavement.
Female students shuffling out to their 8 a.m. classes, breakfast buns between their teeth, looked up—and froze mid-step, roots sprouting from their soles.
"Good morning. Please tap your card to enter."
The handsome guard nearest the turnstile bowed slightly, voice low and clean, his large, well-knuckled hand gesturing with perfect steadiness toward the sensor.
Dozens of meters away at the parcel point, several young stewards with biceps straining their sleeves rolled up their cuffs, smiled, hoisted the dead-heavy twenty-eight-inch suitcases and huge cartons, and jogged them up five or six flights of stairs without so much as an extra puff of breath.
The main road of the district erupted, noise rising clean off the roof.
"Holy crap, is this really our school?! This beats an otome game by a mile!"
"The guy at the canteen window smiled at me just now and I nearly ascended. Wagyu piled to the brim, hand never trembled, and he leaned down to ask if I wanted more soup!"
"It's over. Anyone who orders from a sketchy off-campus takeout joint from today is a dog. Canteen for life!"
"I used to be scared out of my mind walking back to my dorm in the dark. Now look at that wall of muscle at the gate—sense of security: MAXED!"
Before noon, the trending topic "Huaqing's Goddess-Tier Steward Squad" had muscled its way into the city's top three searches.
Students from the two neighboring universities came in droves to take photos by the iron fence. Every landline in Huaqing's admissions office went busy—high school parents calling one after another about next year's liberal-arts quotas.
...
Meanwhile, top floor of the Jiang Group tower, evaluation monitoring room.
Lu Jingchen stood in a perfectly tailored gray bespoke suit, pushing up his gold-rimmed glasses with one hand, his face dark enough to wring water.
As the evaluation supervisor the Old Master had personally installed, he was famous for merciless nitpicking; anyone who touched a financial red line got no quarter.
"Special Assistant Lu, these are Miss Jiang's expense and online-sentiment reports for the past two days." An assistant gingerly handed over a folder with a red tab.
"Utterly absurd."
Lu Jingchen sneered, knuckles rapping dull thuds on the hardwood desk:
"Male models for security? Imported wagyu at a loss-making canteen? Two million plus in liquid funds burned in two days—does that look like routine maintenance? That's openly squandering the family fortune!"
"Put the satisfaction dashboard on screen." He rose and straightened his jacket hem. "The moment that number dips, or a wave of public backlash shows up online, I'm taking a divestment warning to the dorms myself this afternoon."
The technician at the desk didn't dare make a sound. Trembling, he hit Enter and cast the real-time line graph onto the white wall.
The cold sneer on Lu Jingchen's lips froze solid.
Dead center on the screen, the red line that had marked complaint warnings had surged upward in twenty-four hours at a near-right angle, punching clean through the alert threshold!
[Comprehensive satisfaction, women's dorm residents: 99.8 (No. 1 on the entire campus)]
[Positive sentiment rate across all related topics online: 98.5%]
[Total topic views have surpassed 300 million. Huaqing University has issued an official communiqué praising the Jiang Group's social responsibility—and proposing to grant, free of charge, a plot of teaching-research land on the east side of campus, valued at twenty million, in next quarter's school-enterprise joint development!]
"Clack."
Lu Jingchen's pen slipped from his fingers, its nib striking the desk with a crisp snap.
He stared, rigid, at the joint-land-use letter of intent stamped with Huaqing's official red seal, the gloom in his eyes torn to shreds by violent shock.
"Two million of absurd-looking facilities spending bought hundreds of millions in brand exposure—and extracted a twenty-million plot of development land from the university in the same breath?"
His chest heaved; behind the lenses his pupils contracted violently; the abacus in his head had completely capsized.
"I underestimated her... This isn't prodigality. This is precision-guided attention economics. She calculated exactly where young people's pain points are—and by the way, she's got the school by its enrollment soft spot!"
"That idle, do-nothing act of Jiang Muyao's was all camouflage for the outside world. THIS is the Jiang family's most terrifying trump card."
Lu Jingchen snatched the trench coat off the back of his chair and strode for the door:
"Get the car. I'm going to the Huaqing dorm district myself. I want to see, face to face, exactly how many more tricks this young lady is hiding!"