Chapter 9

On Monday morning, the mystery of Shen Siyan’s sudden appearance the night before was finally solved.

She had parked in the garage.

Wei Xiaolu clutched her skirt and climbed into the front passenger seat. Only after buckling her seatbelt did she dare ask, “CEO Shen, can anyone just park in this garage?”

The car pulled away. Shen Siyan glanced at the rearview mirror and said, “It was assigned to me.”

“Wow,” Wei Xiaolu said, impressed. “So you’ve achieved parking freedom.”

Shen Siyan drove out and pressed the remote. The garage door slowly closed.

“One of the people in Unit Three moved out, so his parking space opened up.”

Unit Three?

Wasn’t that where the senior staff lived, in single rooms?

Wei Xiaolu watched the tassel on the car charm flutter in the air-conditioning, and the corners of her mouth seemed to loosen too.

“Then didn’t his apartment become vacant too?” she asked.

“Mm.” Shen Siyan answered very lightly.

Wei Xiaolu’s mind went blank. She sat dazed for several seconds before remembering and turning to ask, “You’re moving to a single room?”

Shen Siyan shot her a quick glance, then looked ahead again.

“I’m not even used to living here yet,” Shen Siyan said with a smile. “And you think I’d move?”

“Haaah—” Wei Xiaolu let out a breath that was half real, half fake, making a show of her reluctance. “You scared me to death. I haven’t even lived with a beauty long enough yet; you can’t leave.”

“I’m not leaving,” Shen Siyan said. “I heard the finance department head’s family of four is living in one single room, so I gave him the empty apartment. They don’t need the garage, though, so that stays with me.”

“CEO Shen is righteous,” Wei Xiaolu said, clasping her fists in praise.

Shen Siyan reached over with her right hand and lightly pressed down on Wei Xiaolu’s clasped hands. “You flatter me, little sister.”

After the polite exchange, she drew her hand back. Wei Xiaolu caught a faint whiff of a floral-woody fragrance drifting from the back of her hand.

That scent carried Wei Xiaolu, for a moment, away from the music playing in the car.

She seemed to have vaguely known before that Shen Siyan wore perfume; she must have smelled it long ago, but she had never thought about it in detail. She certainly had never, like now, wanted to know what the scent was called, whether it lasted, or how long it would linger on her hand.

Suddenly, the world around her became fascinating.

She noticed many things she had seen all along but never really looked at closely.

For example: what kind of car Shen Siyan drove, what brand of phone she used, whether her hair was so smooth because of hair oil, whether the brown leather bag on her shoulder was from a luxury brand...

Tsk tsk.

Wei Xiaolu drew in a breath in admiration.

Clearly, her ideological awareness still wasn’t high enough. How had she only just realized there were so many things about her leader that she knew nothing about?

She’d have to keep learning about her.

Observe more. Pay more attention. This woman, her likes and dislikes, her odd habits, what she wanted from her post as minister, what her goals were...

After the Monday morning meeting ended, Wei Xiaolu relied on her solid investigative skills to gather more information: Shen Siyan’s computer screensaver was a white puppy mid-leap.

All right, her skills weren’t exactly solid; everyone had seen it, since the projector had been connected to Shen Siyan’s laptop.

The photo looked a little AI-generated, not very real. Did Shen Siyan usually use AI image generation?

And did she like cute little puppies?

The overall vibe of the image was pretty sunny; Shen Siyan should be a person who loved life, right?

While she was idly piecing this together, the very person she’d been studying with complete focus suddenly appeared in front of her.

“Ah!” Wei Xiaolu straightened at once. “CEO Shen, what is it?”

“You were spacing out.” Shen Siyan tapped the spot between her brows with a knuckle. “I’m going out on a field visit today. Stay in the office and keep an eye on things for me.”

“Okay, okay.” Wei Xiaolu rubbed her brow and answered at once. Then she suddenly came back to herself. “Uh, keep an eye on what?”

“See what difficulties the technical team runs into after maintenance is restored. Gather and summarize everyone’s problems, and hand them to me when I’m back this afternoon.”

Wei Xiaolu nodded. “Got it, CEO Shen.”

Work had come in. Work had come in.

Time to get up and work.

After CEO Shen left, Wei Xiaolu started carrying out her mission, going to the technical team for field research and chatting one by one with her coworkers to understand their progress and difficulties.

She actually quite liked this kind of work; she could chat and also get Shen Siyan’s assignment done. It didn’t take much effort or worry. Very nice.

Until she ran into Wang Chen.

And it wasn’t even because she had gone over to ask him anything; Wang Chen had come up to her on his own to talk. “Why didn’t you reply this weekend?”

“Oh, I don’t look at my phone on weekends. Sorry, Engineer Wang. I block all messages for the whole weekend.” Wei Xiaolu said with a fake smile that wasn’t a smile.

“Well, only an intern like you could do that,” Wang Chen said, sitting down on the desk beside her and continuing without any sense of propriety. “Us full-timers have to work overtime on weekends. If we don’t look at our phones, we’re done for.”

The conversation was already dead. Wei Xiaolu didn’t know what to say, so she tossed out two random words: “So tragic.”

As it turned out, Wang Chen was also kind of deranged; he apparently took her words for sympathy and started venting about how hard and unpleasant the work was.

“Honestly, our technical team already has too much to do, and because I’m good at coding, they pile it all on me. I don’t get any personal time at all. I’m still coding after work, but no matter how much I do, they won’t raise my salary.”

Wei Xiaolu suppressed her discomfort and dragged the conversation back on track. “How’s the maintenance for the smart tax and finance system going?”

“That system is already broken beyond saving; what maintenance? I don’t even want to look at it,” Wang Chen said. “Everyone’s got other things on hand right now. No one wants to touch that thing. It’s a hot potato, you know?”

“...” That was a really ugly way to put it, but it was also very useful. The earlier people she’d asked had all given her evasive nonsense and said nothing practical.

“I get it,” Wei Xiaolu said. “So basically, it’s been decided to keep maintaining it, but you guys aren’t actually maintaining it?”

“Of course. Ask anyone you want; everyone’s busy. Nobody’s going to take it on.”

“So right now,” Wei Xiaolu paused, “it’s just sitting there?”

“Let it sit for now. When management starts pushing, we’ll think of something. It’s not like the old version can’t be used,” Wang Chen said.

Wei Xiaolu hadn’t wanted to complain, but facing Wang Chen, she couldn’t hold it back anymore. “Dragging this out isn’t a solution, is it? Are you guys just not capable enough?”

“How are we not capable enough?” Wang Chen snapped. “With my technical skills, how many people in this company can really compare?”

Wei Xiaolu nearly dropped the act and argued with him on the spot, but in the end she still held back her temper and demanded, “Then how come you can build the product, but maintaining it is such a hassle?”

“The latest version of this product wasn’t even developed by us, all right?” Wang Chen grew more and more agitated. “Back then, President Chen assembled a temporary team to do it. They left the whole thing in a mess for us. And just to hit the deadline, they bundled in a bunch of third-party libraries directly. Now the source code is incomplete, there’s no documentation, and we can’t even understand the underlying logic. How are we supposed to maintain it?”

Wei Xiaolu fell silent. The situation was a little complicated, and she couldn’t really make sense of it.

But she didn’t want to understand all those troublesome things anyway. She had one purpose now, and that was also Shen Siyan’s purpose: fix the latest version and get it back online.

Then she remembered that Zeng Cui had once mentioned that if the technical team really couldn’t handle it, outsourcing was an option.

Wei Xiaolu kept swallowing her anger and listened to Wang Chen rant for a few more minutes before seizing a good opening to ask, “Then if you guys can’t do it, why not just outsource it?”

“Go outsource it, then!” Wang Chen became a little worked up. “Let management find it themselves. The previous outsourcing work was all found by President Chen personally; it has nothing to do with us.”

“Fine,” Wei Xiaolu cut him off. “I get it.”

“You get it now, right?” Wang Chen said, suddenly calming down too.

“Thanks, Engineer Wang.” Wei Xiaolu prepared to leave.

“What’s there to thank me for, Xiaolu?” Wang Chen tilted his chin at her. “Let’s go eat barbecue together some other day and I’ll explain it to you properly.”

“Heh, heh, heh. Another day.” Wei Xiaolu fled without looking back.

That information was basically enough to report to Shen Siyan. In the afternoon, Wei Xiaolu found time to organize it into a document, printed it out, and placed it on Shen Siyan’s desk.

But then Shen Siyan sent her a message saying she wouldn’t be back that afternoon after all, and told her to go home and report directly at the apartment.

[Wei Xiaolu: Do I need to bring dinner too, beauty?]

[Shen Siyan: No need. I already ate.]

Without Shen Siyan, Wei Xiaolu was once again thrown back into her old life of cramming onto buses and commuting while broke.

When she got back to the apartment, she saw that Shen Siyan’s room door was open, so she walked over.

Just as she was about to raise a hand to knock on the doorframe, Wei Xiaolu suddenly shuddered all over.

Standing by the bed with her back to her, Shen Siyan was wearing a purple crystal lace gown that was different from what she’d worn in the morning.

This was the first time Wei Xiaolu had ever seen her in anything other than work clothes.

Her long hair, falling to her waist, was like soft black seaweed, as if it might sway gently with the waves at any moment.

If it had only been a beautiful woman wearing pretty clothes, Wei Xiaolu wouldn’t have frozen for so long. The main reason was that the beauty was currently arranging a bouquet of orange-yellow roses on the desk by the window.

“CEO Shen.”

At the sound, Shen Siyan turned around and took off her Bluetooth earpiece at the same time. “You’re back.”

Wei Xiaolu said nothing. Her gaze drifted to the desk.

Of course, Shen Siyan noticed her looking. She smiled openly and told her, “I went on a blind date.”

It was a very light sentence, but in response, Wei Xiaolu felt the report in her hand grow heavy.

She looked at Shen Siyan and slowly lowered the hand holding the report.

Blind date.

A word that would never have appeared in Wei Xiaolu’s range of consideration suddenly came out of Shen Siyan’s mouth. It felt so unfamiliar.

But then again, was a blind date really that strange? Weren’t a lot of people’s parents introduced through blind dates?

Or was it that Shen Siyan, the one saying the words blind date, had become unfamiliar?

“Didn’t you say...” Wei Xiaolu swallowed. “You were going out on a field visit?”

“I went after the visit,” Shen Siyan said. “I went to another company for a learning exchange today, and I ran into President Chen too.”

“President Chen?” Wei Xiaolu’s mind went blank for a moment, and she couldn’t remember which President Chen she meant.

“Chen Dongqi,” Shen Siyan said, seeming to find Wei Xiaolu’s dazed expression amusing; she smiled with her lips half covered. “The person who used to sit in my position.”