The two sisters chatted for a while and gradually began to feel drowsy.
"Sis, you go upstairs and rest first. You still need to come with me to the office tomorrow."
"Mm, you should get to bed early too. Don’t stay up too late."
Gao Min didn’t say anything more. She turned and went upstairs to wash up.
Liu Yutong walked over to the sofa and had just picked up her phone to check her messages when the doorbell rang.
It had to be Yun Cheng.
After she opened the door, he walked in.
"Miss, I have the confessions from those thugs, plus the verified information. It’s all sorted out."
Liu Yutong pointed to the sofa across from her. "Have a seat. Tell me, what’s the situation?"
Yun Cheng sat down and started reporting directly.
"The ringleader is called Liu San. He’s likely a pawn sent by Hu Ge, who works under Wu Kun, Jiang Yuan’s white glove. This bunch basically took money for the job. They have no clue their real boss is Jiang Yuan. They only know it was Hu Ge who paid them and sent them to Mingzhu City to find out two things. First, the whereabouts of Zhao Weixiang and to confirm if he’s dead. Second, whether there’s anything unusual on your side.
Oh, by the way, this Hu Ge is a building materials merchant from the south."
"Go on."
"Hu Ge also set them rules: don’t expose your identity, quietly relay any info back to Gangcheng, don’t do anything else, and especially don’t stir up trouble locally. Too bad Liu San and his guys completely forgot that. When they saw Lin Feng lurking near the alley, they thought he’d overheard their conversation, so they impulsively chased after him. Little did they know they’d land right in our hands, like fish trapped in a net."
"..."
After hearing the report, Liu Yutong fell into thought.
Jiang Yuan was indeed cautious. Having to go through so many layers just to gather information clearly showed he still doubted Zhao Weixiang’s death and was wary of the evidence she might hold.
An old fox like him—any slight disturbance would make him retreat into his shell.
"Did they mention if Wu Kun has any other plans?"
"No. Liu San and his crew are just low-level runners. They don’t have access to core information. However, I relayed the situation here to Hua Muying, and he told me Wu Kun has been frequently contacting several major families in Gangcheng lately, apparently preparing some capital operations. The exact purpose is still unclear."
Contacting major families in Gangcheng, huh? That really is a bit unusual. Could he be planning to sell off assets and make a run for it?
Does he have to be this cautious?
A plan began to form in Liu Yutong’s mind. "Since Jiang Yuan is so cautious, let’s feed him some good news and get him to let his guard down."
"What kind of news?"
"First, have Liu San’s people send a message that Zhao Weixiang is indeed dead, killed cleanly, but there’s no confirmation on whether he left anything behind. Let them guess for themselves."
"Second, send word that everything is normal in Mingzhu City. But let it slip that the Wanlong Society is up to something—like hint that, through bribed employees, we’ve learned the society’s Weibo platform has plans to go public in Gangcheng."
"Will that work? Can an old fox like Jiang Yuan buy it?"
"Whether he believes it or not isn’t the point. The key is to give him a reason to believe. And Weibo’s IPO plan is that reason."
"That’ll need some coordination. Later, have Yu Xin contact Mrs. Ji and Mr. Chu from Qixing Capital and AEG Capital. Tell them we have plans for Weibo to go public next year, so they can start preparing their funds."
Weibo had never raised funds before—first, because Liu Yutong wanted to maximize profits, and second, because she genuinely wasn’t short on cash.
But thinking it over, she decided to throw those two a bone.
Because the Wanhui Premium Selection, which they’d been eagerly looking forward to, she planned to postpone its IPO.
Her original plan was to take it public next year, but she now intended to delay it—or even scrap the idea altogether.
After careful deliberation, she realized that while Wanhui Premium Selection had great potential to become a corporation worth hundreds of billions, its business chain was too singular. Its profit model relied heavily on commissions and similar streams, making it vulnerable to capital attacks. If any capital wanted to mess with her, they could simply pour money into taking over her market share.
So instead, it might be better to use it as bargaining chips to swap interests with a certain Chairman Ma.
Timing was key—pretty soon, he’d need to push through a delisting plan and relist. If before that, she used Wanhui Premium Selection, along with a hefty chunk of cash, to help him speed up the delisting, wouldn’t that carve out a place for her in the future of e-commerce?
That would be far easier than building an e-commerce platform from scratch.
But before that, she had to either crush or cripple all the emerging competitors out there. Only then would her hand be worth more, and the chips on the negotiation table heavy enough.
Of course, this was just a rough idea. Whether it actually worked remained to be seen.
Yun Cheng’s eyes lit up as he instantly grasped the Miss’s intention.
"You mean, by using Weibo’s Gangcheng IPO as a pretext, make Jiang Yuan think our focus is on business expansion, so we have no time to bother with his shady dealings?"
Liu Yutong nodded. "Right. When Liu San and his crew go back to report, they can let slip this irrelevant news: that I’m busy with chips and busy with IPOs, so why would I have the energy to care about Zhao Weixiang? That will make it seem perfectly reasonable to Jiang Yuan.
After all, with the massive business empire I run, focusing on making money and expanding is only logical. If I were glued to the death of a dead man like Zhao Weixiang, that would look strange—and put him on alert."
"And, we can throw in a rumor: that I was so money-hungry I had my father in the countryside thrown into jail, utterly devoid of family loyalty."
After hearing this, Yun Cheng couldn’t help but nod. The reasoning seemed quite feasible.
Jiang Yuan, that old fox, was always paranoid. The Miss’s approach was a good one.
After all, the Miss’s lack of family loyalty was a "fact." With a little embellishment—like how she’d even jailed the head of a rival company competing for stock—she’d look like someone who only cares about money, a true capitalist.
And would a capitalist still care about how her biological father died back in the day?
At any rate, the Miss was wealthy, busy, and focused on IPOs and cashing out. She had no time to obsess over Zhao Weixiang.
"Miss, I’ll take care of it."
Liu Yutong: "Good. But handle Liu San personally. Don’t leave any clues."
"Understood," Yun Cheng said.
As Yun Cheng was about to leave, he seemed to think of something and hesitated before speaking. "Miss, there’s something I’m not sure if I should ask."
Liu Yutong looked at him, signaling him to go ahead.
Yun Cheng: "It’s about Miss Gao’s family reunion matter. Are you really going to let her go through with it?"
As the one who had been with Liu Yutong the longest and had always been her personal bodyguard, he couldn’t have missed Liu Yutong’s attitude toward this.
Liu Yutong showed no surprise at his question. Apparently, she’d already considered it long ago.
"I’m not going to decide for her. I’ll let her make her own choice. But before that, I’ll test Jiang Lu to see if she has ever truly searched for her eldest daughter all these years."
"She never came looking for me, and maybe I could understand her a little—after all, she might have been afraid or had her reasons, or perhaps she thought that since I had grandparents who loved me, she could rest easy."
"But there's no excuse for her not to go looking for Big Sister. Even if she didn't know she was kept in the dark, I refuse to believe that, given her status after marrying into the Lin family, with the Lin family's resources and her own, she wouldn't have searched. If she didn't, then I can only conclude that she's been lying all along—or worse, that she never really cared about Big Sister."
"Coming to claim kinship now is either a sudden attack of conscience or she has some other agenda.
And when that happens, I think Big Sister will know whether or not to acknowledge her, won't she?"
Yuncheng nodded upon hearing this. "I understand."
Of course, he had no idea that there was more to Liu Yutong's considerations.
To be precise, the reason she even wanted Gao Min to acknowledge the kinship was to pave a path for her—a path that could reach the heavens.
If everything went smoothly, the two sisters would truly be a formidable alliance: one ruling a commercial empire, the other wielding political power.
A true pair of dual prodigies from the same family!
