"Push it in deeper... no good, it's too tight, it won't go in!"
"Stop wiggling, hold it steady! I'm about to burst over here!"
"Ow, ow, ow... gently! Not so fast—my lower back really can't take it!"
"Grit your teeth and bear it. I'll count to three, and we both pull like our lives depend on it!"
"Ah! It's out! Whew... one long, dripping hunk of it. The line finally runs clear..."
Outside Room 404 of Huaqing University's No. 3 women's dormitory, a few freshmen carrying plastic washbasins froze dead in the hallway, their toiletries nearly crashing down on their own feet.
The girls flushed scarlet, trading looks of horrified thrill, their minds already fast-forwarding through eight hundred words' worth of unprintable midnight drama.
College students these days... get up to THIS much in their dorm rooms?!
The next second—bam! The metal security door of Room 404 was yanked open from the inside.
Jiang Muyao stepped over the threshold with a head of wild, tangled hair, clutching an extra-long stainless-steel toilet plunger crusted with limescale and black hair, her other hand grinding into her aching lower back.
Under the bunk ladder inside, a short-haired girl lay collapsed, drenched in sweat, white-knuckling a cracked section of plastic hose and wheezing like a bellows.
"What are you staring at? Never seen anyone plunge a toilet after a drain backflow?"
Jiang Muyao wiped the cold sweat off her forehead and rolled her eyes, the last shreds of her patience burned to ash.
Heaven only knew what she'd been through.
She was the fake heiress about to be tossed out on her ear by the real one. On her first day after being reborn, she hadn't woken up in a five-star suite or whiled away the hours on a luxury yacht. No—she was hunkered down in this ramshackle women's dorm the whole campus jokingly called "ground zero of the biohazard outbreak," locked in two full hours of hand-to-hand combat with an ancient toilet!
Just thinking about it made Jiang Muyao want to travel back in time and slap her past-life self twice across the face.
In her last life, at roughly this same juncture, the stern, razor-tongued Old Master of the Jiang chaebol had gotten a sudden whim and staged a city-shaking heir-selection contest.
The old man had dug out all seven of the group's chronically money-losing, half-dead disaster zones and dealt one to each of the seven young grandchildren of the family.
The evaluation would run one year, weighed on three crushing metrics: financial loss reduction, stakeholder satisfaction and public reputation, and strategic innovation.
After that year, whoever scored highest overall would take over the Jiang family's entire hundred-billion commercial empire.
But if you drove your project into outright bankruptcy within the year and kicked up a PR storm no one could contain, you'd be stripped of all inheritance rights, handed a ten-million cash severance, thrown out of the Jiang family bag and baggage, and barred from ever touching its core businesses again.
In her last life, Jiang Muyao's head had been full of nothing but proving herself to the family. Desperate to please that pair of cold adoptive parents, she had gritted her teeth and picked the chain-supermarket division—the quickest place to show results.
That year she practically slept in the office, drinking coffee like water, and through sheer reckless ferocity revived a dying supermarket chain into the city's retail champion, taking first place by an absolute landslide.
And the result?
On the very night of the victory banquet, the real Jiang heiress made her graceful entrance, clutching an ironclad DNA test.
The Jiangs flipped on her faster than a page turns. They stripped her of every scrap of credit and authority on the spot, then—working hand in glove with the real heiress and their legal team—pinned a charge of embezzling family assets on her and froze her personal accounts to the last cent.
Riddled with chronic illness and penniless, she died, wretched and alone, in a dank basement.
As she lay dying, the little TV on the wall was still broadcasting the business news: the Jiang family, blinded by reckless expansion, had been pushed into bankruptcy proceedings by its new heir.
To hell with rich-family power games. To hell with winning their love!
The second she opened her eyes after her rebirth, Jiang Muyao saw everything with perfect clarity.
Working for vampires is self-harm; filial piety for cold-blooded adoptive parents is a lobotomy.
This life, her goal couldn't be clearer:
Tank the project, fast!
Max out the losses!
Make the reputation as foul as possible!
Get herself thrown out by the board within three months, legitimately pocket the ten-million severance, buy a little seaside villa on some island, order boy-toy service at the club every day, and retire into blissful, horizontal luxury!
So at yesterday's family meeting, while her scheming cousins were still squabbling red-faced over the juicy logistics park and the department-store tower, kicking each other under the table, Jiang Muyao raised her hand without a second's hesitation:
"Grandpa! I want to take over the Huaqing University women's dormitory district and residential-services base that our family sponsors!"
The entire conference room froze, staring at her as if she'd suddenly gone rabid.
The Huaqing women's dorm district was, by universal agreement, the worst money pit under the Jiang umbrella.
Aging buildings and massive annual subsidies aside, its service disputes were a bottomless grab bag.
Worst of all, the place concentrated the campus's most hopeless troublemakers, its most grievance-filing students, and a dorm-supervisor team famous for being brutal.
In her last life, the second cousin who took over this mess held out three months before a flood of joint complaints gave him a nervous breakdown, and he ended up doused in red paint at the school gate—a year-long punchline in high-society circles.
And now Jiang Muyao was fighting to jump into this fire pit?
The Old Master approved on the spot, even allowing himself a rare flicker of satisfaction.
To demolish this project at light speed, Jiang Muyao had packed her bags that very morning and moved straight into Room 404—the dorm with the foulest reputation and thickest cluster of conflicts in the whole district!
[Ding! The Jiang Family Contest Public-Sentiment Monitoring System is now active.]
[Current project: Huaqing University women's dormitory district.]
[Current finances: monthly loss of 800,000; satisfaction score: 12/100 (abysmal); strategic innovation: 0.]
[Friendly reminder: this week's evaluation task has been issued—all heirs must submit their first cost-optimization proposal within seven days. Last place in total points will enter red-card warning and a countdown to shutdown.]
Her phone buzzed in her pocket; two messages popped up in the family management group chat.
Eldest cousin Jiang Tianming posted a triumph: "Day-one results: successfully cut 30% of the department store's cleaning and sales staff. Projected labor savings this month: 450,000!"
Right behind him, third cousin Jiang Yurou: "Logistics park fully slashing warehouse lighting and air-conditioning hours. Cost-cutting and efficiency—mission locked in!"
Watching these cost-cutting grinders duke it out in the group chat, Jiang Muyao leaned on the balcony's cold iron railing, the corners of her mouth nearly splitting her face.
Cost-cutting and efficiency?
What a slog!
If you want to be eliminated at light speed, there's exactly one shortcut: spend like a maniac and step on every landmine in sight!
She tossed the filthy plunger into the bucket, pulled out her phone, and smoothly dialed the head of the district's facilities and HR.
Supervisor Liu of HR came on the line, careful and timid: "Hello... Miss Jiang? You're really living in 404 now? We were about to find a plumber for that drain..."
"Drain's already cleared. Now listen, this is business."
Jiang Muyao put on her most unreasonable rich-brat swagger and started issuing orders:
"First: post a hiring notice online immediately. Replace every last old-man security guard and auntie dorm supervisor in the district!"
Supervisor Liu was floored: "Replace them? Replace them with... what, exactly?"
"Men: 185 centimeters barefoot minimum, eight-pack abs, must have that double-door refrigerator build. Anyone who couldn't debut in a boy band—don't even accept his resume!"
"Women: over 170 centimeters, the gentle, healing, fresh-air beauty type. Education totally irrelevant—illiterates welcome—but the face and figure must be absolutely top-tier!"
Supervisor Liu's voice began to wobble: "Miss... Miss Jiang... how high would that budget have to be? Our facilities funds ran dry ages ago..."
Jiang Muyao gave a cold laugh, her tone extravagant to the point of arson:
"Base salary starts at twenty thousand a month! An extra centimeter of height is an extra thousand! Canteen servers, corridor patrols, gate duty—everybody hired to that standard. Get me fifty to start!"
"And notify every canteen stall: starting tomorrow morning, all pre-made dishes and chemical additives come off the menu. Meat will be Australian wagyu and free-range black pork only; seafood only if it flew in fresh before dawn today. Meal prices will not rise by a single cent—the district's facilities department eats the difference!"
"Screw this up, and you can hand in your resignation tomorrow!"
On the other end of the line, Supervisor Liu went completely mute, reduced to a series of strangled, horrified intakes of breath.
Jiang Muyao hung up crisply and let out a long breath; every cell in her body was singing.
Just this payroll and the top-shelf ingredients would burn through several million a month, minimum.
Even better—stuff a gated district full of female college students with male-model security guards who all have eight-packs, and those stiff school administrators and cub-mothering parents will stuff the Jiang board's inbox with complaint letters in no time!
A financial black hole plus a PR explosion—a two-pronged attack. The evaluation committee would sentence her project to death in round one!
That ten-million severance was as good as hers already.
Feeling magnificently satisfied, Jiang Muyao turned around and pushed open the dorm-room door, planning to go enjoy the fan for a while.
But the door had barely swung halfway before she froze solid.
Her hot-tempered short-haired roommate—the one who'd just been up to her elbows in toilet sludge with her, the famously hotheaded combat-club president Gu Qing—was now gripping her phone, eye rims scarlet, chest heaving with agitation.
"Muyao..."
Gu Qing shot to her feet and lunged over, seizing Jiang Muyao's wrist, her voice hoarse and trembling, thick with congestion:
"You... everything you said on that phone call—is it true? You really spent all your hidden-away pocket money subsidizing the dorms... for us?!"
Jiang Muyao: "?"
Hold on. Girl, why are your eyes suddenly blazing with this extremely wrong kind of heat?!