Chapter 3

After Shen Siyan taught her how to use the water heater, Wei Xiaolu was practically drowning in shame, with half a tank of embarrassment left over. After sincerely thanking CEO Shen for the lesson, she shut herself back in her room in a gloomy mood.

She couldn’t say she’d been spoiled since childhood. Wei Zongqing and Tang Xiaofen ran a noodle shop, so her living conditions were nowhere near “wealthy”; at most, they could be called “adequate.”

But self-sufficiency didn’t seem to have much to do with the size of your wallet.

Still, at the very least, a person should have one or the other, right...? Leaning against the door, Wei Xiaolu slid down to the floor dejectedly, thinking about how she had managed to end up with neither dignity nor substance.

She had thought the water heater was broken and hadn’t wanted to spend money calling a repairman. Out of kindness, she had hurried over to remind Shen Siyan, only to discover in the end that she was the one who didn’t know how to use it.

She might as well die of embarrassment.

Wei Xiaolu wanted to call Tang Xiaofen. She wanted to vent to her mother about this absurd experience and get a little emotional comfort, but after picking up and putting down her phone three times, she finally gave up. Not only was she worried about walls having ears, she also felt that her habit of immediately calling home whenever she ran into a little trouble was really inelegant, immature, and a bit out of step with her “rising star in the workplace” image.

To drive away that faint sense of shame, Wei Xiaolu quickly opened her favorites and found a stimulating late-night novel. She turned off the lights, hugged her phone excitedly, and burrowed into bed.

She kept reading.

She read until two in the morning.

There were still more than thirty chapters left, but if she had work the next day, Wei Xiaolu absolutely couldn’t keep going. Fortunately, she had just reached the point where the two female leads got together; the most important part of the flirtation was over, so she could sleep in peace.

But that peace had been far too complete. She didn’t even hear her alarm in the morning. When she opened her eyes, it was already past eight, and her brain practically burst into petals.

Wei Xiaolu grabbed whatever clothes she could find and threw them on, decisively choosing to take a taxi. The driver accepted the order quickly enough, but by the time the car arrived, she was already doomed to be late.

“Oh no, oh no.”

When heaven wants to bring disaster down on someone, it first makes her lose face, shortens her sleep, ruins her alarm—and then, just as she mutters that she’s finished and rushes out of her bedroom, has her unexpectedly lock eyes with Shen Siyan, who is standing at the door fully dressed and ready to go.

“Ha... good morning, CEO Shen.” Wei Xiaolu felt like she was already halfway to the grave.

Shen Siyan gave a casual “Morning,” then lifted her wrist to check the time.

“Go wash your face,” she said, tilting her chin toward the bathroom.

“I’ll be done right away!” Wei Xiaolu forced herself to ignore the embarrassment and ran to the sink, not forgetting to add, “I stayed up a little late last night working out that product optimization plan.”

When she didn’t hear any response from Shen Siyan, Wei Xiaolu assumed she had been caught in the lie. After washing up and hastily rubbing on some cream, she was about to honestly apologize to her boss when Shen Siyan appeared at the bathroom door and handed her a meal replacement with a calm expression.

“The company cafeteria should be closed by now,” Shen Siyan said, glancing over her face. “Take it. Eat on the way.”

“Wow, thank you, beautiful lady.” For a moment, Wei Xiaolu didn’t feel quite so panicked anymore. She took it and tucked the breakfast substitute into her bag. “You really saved me in a pinch. Not only am I filling my stomach, I also get CEO Shen’s care first thing in the morning. I’ll definitely have plenty of energy to work after that.”

Shen Siyan didn’t say anything else. With an easy smile, she leaned against the doorframe and watched Wei Xiaolu put on her shoes before getting up to open the door. “Let’s go. I’ll take you to the company.”

Wei Xiaolu froze.

Fortunately, her brain was quick on the draw; from stunned to responding took only a split second. “CEO Shen, you’re being way too good to me. My heart’s so warm...”

“Tell me about the new idea you came up with last night on the way,” Shen Siyan said abruptly.

Wei Xiaolu instantly went mute.

People, please don’t lie casually.

With an awkward, forced smile, Wei Xiaolu accepted her fate. Worst case, she’d improvise on the spot and bluff her way through Shen Siyan. After all, the boss had only just arrived and didn’t understand anything yet.

“Okay, CEO Shen.” Wei Xiaolu did her best to look calm and composed.

Nervously, she got into the front passenger seat of Shen Siyan’s car. While she was worrying about how to carve a new idea out of her empty brain, a lifesaving call came in.

Shen Siyan was driving. She raised a hand and tapped the earbud lightly. “Ai Jin, what is it?”

The name sounded vaguely familiar. After a moment’s thought, Wei Xiaolu remembered that this was their department’s product manager.

During the call, Shen Siyan didn’t say much, driving steadily and occasionally answering with a simple “Mm.”

Wei Xiaolu clasped her hands together in her mind and prayed the call would last longer.

But soon enough, Shen Siyan ended it with one sentence: “Gather all the core members from technical, product, and operations in the conference room. Meeting in twenty minutes. I’ll be there shortly.”

After hanging up, Shen Siyan glanced at Wei Xiaolu and told her not to be so tense; she could eat in the car however she liked.

“Okay.”

Wei Xiaolu also knew she was sitting far too straight and careful, but this was her first time riding with a boss, so she had no experience.

Should her legs be tucked up or stretched out?

Would leaning against the seatback seem too casual?

The sound of eating was so loud; if she accidentally dropped some bread crumbs on her skirt, should she pick them up and eat them, or secretly brush them into the crack between the seats?

Since she really couldn’t tell, Wei Xiaolu quietly cut her eyes sideways to check Shen Siyan’s reaction.

Today CEO Shen was wearing a blue fitted shirt with white wide-leg pants. On the hand resting on the steering wheel, she wore a jade-green bangle; her left hand controlled the wheel, while the fingertips of her right hand tapped rhythmically on top of it, one beat at a time.

Yesterday at noon, when Wei Xiaolu had reported the product optimization outline, she had noticed that when Shen Siyan listened with her arms folded, her index finger would tap those two faint, almost absent-minded beats.

It felt like an unconscious motion when she was thinking.

That discovery made Wei Xiaolu feel a little more at ease. It looked like Ai Jin had come to report bad news; something urgent must have happened, and she should properly thank the beautiful Ai for successfully drawing away Shen Siyan’s full attention.

For the rest of the ride, Wei Xiaolu didn’t dare speak rashly, afraid that one careless word would remind Shen Siyan about the new idea.

She did her best to make herself disappear.

Still, just before they reached the company, she was thrown off by a phone call that suddenly rang.

Wei Xiaolu looked at the screen. It was the ride-hailing driver.

Damn. She had forgotten to cancel the booking.

Even though all she needed to do was answer and explain it to the driver, it felt especially humiliating for it to happen in front of her boss. Worse, it strangely carried a hint of implication, as if Shen Siyan had somehow replaced the driver’s position.

After finishing the call with the driver, Wei Xiaolu clutched the paper wrapper from her meal replacement and said weakly, “CEO Shen, sorry about that, I...”

“It’s fine.” Shen Siyan jerked the steering wheel hard, then drifted the car into the parking lot downstairs. “Go upstairs first. Wait in the conference room.”

“Am I attending too?” Wei Xiaolu asked, then immediately regretted opening her mouth. The boss had told her what to do; all she needed to do was answer crisply and be done with it.

Shen Siyan hummed and gave her a look. “Yesterday I had you review the intelligent finance and tax software. It’s now had a P0-level online incident. If you have any new ideas, you can bring them up in the meeting later.”

Wei Xiaolu: “..."

Was there any way she could skip this?

Unfortunately, Wei Xiaolu was the kind of weak little human who only dared to protest in her heart. In the end, she still dragged her empty brain through the chaotic office and into the meeting room, where arguments were already flying.

“I thought she was some kind of parachuted connection all along,” sighed the employee sitting next to Wei Xiaolu.

“I told you from the start it wasn’t, and you didn’t believe me,” another person said.

“But she graduated from T University’s integrated bachelor-master program and went straight into headquarters. In just two years, she became our department head. Could that really happen without some connection?”

“Is it really that smooth?” Ai Jin said, staring at the data on her computer and sighing. “The intelligent finance and tax project is a total mess now, and she still has to come in and clean it up.”

The technical team’s Wang Chen suddenly said, “Oh! No wonder General Manager Chen suddenly resigned. Had he already known this project was going to collapse, so he grabbed the money and ran first? And now CEO Shen came over just to take the blame for him?”

The meeting room suddenly fell silent.

Wei Xiaolu had thought Shen Siyan had arrived. Only after straightening her back did she realize belatedly that Wang Chen’s words seemed too sensitive; no one dared respond.

At the same time, even Wang Chen looked a little uncomfortable. The muscles at the corners of his eyes twitched, his expression looking as though he had swallowed two taels of dog shit—wanting to vomit but unable to.

Wei Xiaolu’s phone screen lit up.

[Shen Siyan: I’m in the elevator. Tell everyone I’ll be there soon.]

After replying with an acknowledgment, Wei Xiaolu cleared her throat. “CEO Shen is almost here, everyone get ready.”

As soon as she said it, the already dead-silent meeting room somehow felt even deader...

But luckily, Shen Siyan really did appear a minute later, and under a dozen pairs of anxious or appraising eyes, she sat down in the only seat left at the head of the table.

“Do you all understand the situation?”

Shen Siyan’s calm voice rang out in the conference room, making Wei Xiaolu want to shiver. Right now, the boss’s aura was completely different from the one at home; they were like two different people.

Without waiting for an answer, Shen Siyan continued, “From this moment on, everyone listen to my instructions. Our only goal is to get the server running first and minimize the losses caused by the product incident.”

Then Shen Siyan opened her laptop. “Ai Jin, start. Each team will briefly explain the problems they’re currently facing in turn.”

“Okay, CEO Shen.”

Over the next ten minutes, Wei Xiaolu witnessed the most efficient meeting of her twenty-two-year life. The speed of communication and the decisiveness of the decisions were so astonishing they could hardly be described as anything less.

After Ai Jin finished explaining the difficulties in product management, Shen Siyan gave the order directly: “Unify our external messaging. Issue an urgent system maintenance notice immediately; acknowledge the problem and promise compensation. Show it to me before it goes out.”

After Wang Chen described the complexity of technical maintenance, Shen Siyan decisively changed course: “Abandon maintenance. Roll back the version immediately and use the previous stable release.”

When the product optimization team listed the pressure from customer complaints and media promotion, Shen Siyan directly sent over a draft: “There are response plans for every kind of complaint in here. If there’s anything you still can’t handle, transfer it directly to me; I’ll deal with it personally.”

For every team’s problem, Shen Siyan could give a pinpoint-accurate response on the spot, and not a single thing was out of place. She was so calm and composed it was as if she were eating an ordinary home-cooked meal.

By the time she had heard enough, Wei Xiaolu, in addition to being shocked, felt more than once a chill of fear over her earlier assumption that Shen Siyan didn’t understand anything.

Thankfully, lucky as she was, she still hadn’t made up any “new ideas” in front of Shen Siyan.

Otherwise, she really would have been embarrassed all the way to Antarctica.

“If there’s anything else I haven’t made clear, come find me directly,” Shen Siyan said as she typed. “If there are no problems, go execute immediately. Meeting adjourned.”

The meeting was so crisp and efficient there wasn’t even a trace of unnecessary fat on it.

Wei Xiaolu hadn’t even had time to sweat into the leather chair before everyone around her had already filed out of the room.

The regular employees all had their own duties; the intern who had nothing in particular to do looked especially out of place.

She glanced at Shen Siyan, who was still typing away on the computer, and after weighing whether to step forward and help or quietly disappear, she chose the latter without hesitation.

She was just an intern.

At one hundred yuan a day, you wanted her to earn side-dish money while doing dumpling-making work? Impossible.

Give her a penny’s worth of work for a penny’s worth of pay. Of course, doing nothing would be best; being paid to slack off was the highest self-cultivation of a modern salted fish.

“Xiaolu, stay a moment.”

Just as one foot was about to step out of the conference room, the voice of a devil rang out behind her.

Wei Xiaolu shut her eyes and took a deep breath.

Then she turned around and smiled brightly. “CEO Shen, what do you need?”

“No need to be nervous,” Shen Siyan said, the corners of her lips lifting slightly. “I’m just curious. What’s your new idea?”

A fatal blow.

Wei Xiaolu really wanted to slap a layer of cement over her own mouth from this morning and seal shut this mouth that did nothing but run off at the lips.

Forcing out a smile that wasn’t quite a smile, she decided to go all in. “It’s like this, CEO Shen. Through organizing user feedback, I found that there are too many bugs in this version of the product, so it’s better to just give up..."

What she meant was that it’d be better to give up looking at user feedback altogether; out of sight, out of mind.

But she remembered in time that she couldn’t joke around with her boss at a time like this. Saying something like that in an emergency was basically the same as asking to be executed, so in the end Wei Xiaolu decided to come clean. “Actually, CEO Shen, my idea isn’t important..."

“Give up,” Shen Siyan said suddenly. “That matches what I was thinking.”

What were you thinking? How does that match?

Wei Xiaolu was so confused she was almost ready to meditate on it, and only heard Shen Siyan continue her explanation: “Abandon maintenance on this version; rewrite it directly.”

“Oh.” Wei Xiaolu blinked, then hurriedly agreed. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what I was thinking too, CEO Shen. Just remake the product.”

“Right, start over from scratch.” As she spoke, a new message came in on her computer. Shen Siyan immediately shifted back into work mode, but still casually tossed Wei Xiaolu one more line: “We’re really in sync, little sister.”

Seeing Shen Siyan use such polished sweet talk to brush her off, Wei Xiaolu decided to imitate her right back. “That’s because good company makes good people, right? Living with CEO Shen has made me smarter too.”