Su Qianqian walked to the side door of the banquet hall and found Fang Qing, who had been waiting outside.
"It's a bit chilly out here. Please fetch my coat for me."
Fang Qing quickly brought over a small black blazer.
Su Qianqian took it and draped it over her shoulders, making her slender figure appear even more delicate and graceful.
"I'd like to be alone for a while. I'll wait for Yu to pick me up. You can wait for me in the car," she said to Fang Qing.
Fang Qing nodded and walked towards the exit.
Su Qianqian walked alone towards the small garden at the back of the hotel.
She found a swing under a flower trellis, lifted her skirt, sat down, and began to sway gently.
Her slender high heels dangled precariously from the tips of her toes, swaying lightly with the motion of the swing.
[007,] she called softly in her mind. [Retrieve the key experiences of Shen Que and the Shen family for me.]
[Understood, Host,] the system's voice responded immediately.
Twenty-eight years ago.
The electoral system had just been established for two years. The first leader came from Madam Gu's family; he was her half-brother.
Back then, the Four Great Families were united, and their young patriarchs were close friends.
However, the newly seated leader was not content with most of the power being divided among these aristocratic families.
Coincidentally, the young Father Shen, defying all opposition, married the commoner woman he loved and vowed to lead the Shen family to greater heights.
Thus, eager to prove himself, Father Shen, under the leader's deliberate provocation, persuaded the somewhat wavering Zhou and Qin families to challenge the Gu family.
Their original intention was not annexation, but they felt the Gu family should not monopolize core military technology.
Otherwise, if the Gu family ever harbored ambitions of dominance, S Country might see another regime change.
The Gu family naturally refused firmly.
So that year, while S Country appeared calm on the surface, there was actually an internal conflict lasting three months behind the scenes.
After three months, both sides realized they were at a stalemate, suffering losses for no gain. With their past friendship still lingering, thoughts of reconciliation emerged.
The leader panicked.
He feared that once the great families united again, the dirty deeds he had secretly committed—the framing and profiteering in troubled waters—would be exposed.
Therefore, he took a desperate gamble. He sent his trusted aides to impersonate a foreign force and kidnapped two children.
One was the precocious three-year-old Zhou Yu'an.
The other was the five-year-old eldest son of the Shen family.
...
Reading this, Su Qianqian's swinging slowed down.
The Zhou couple were internationally renowned doctors. The leader dared not offend them mortally, as everyone falls ill eventually.
So, back then, Zhou Yu'an was merely locked in a pitch-black basement, tormented by constant noise to prevent him from sleeping.
But the Shen family's five-year-old child was injected with drugs designed to damage nerves and impair intelligence...
The leader framed the Gu family for all of this, attempting to incite the fury of the Shen and Zhou families.
However, due to basic trust remaining, and because the patriarchs' acuity far exceeded his imagination,
he was quickly exposed.
The Gu family, on one hand, dealt with the leader and his family with swift and severe measures.
On the other hand, Gu Zhenting's own younger brother, that equally brilliant second son of the Gu family, quickly led a team and found the two imprisoned children.
The final rescue operation went surprisingly smoothly.
But just as they were withdrawing, a subordinate let their guard down. A sniper hidden in the shadows took the young life of the Gu family's younger uncle.
...
The swing came to a complete stop. Su Qianqian stopped swaying.
She kicked off her shoes, curled her legs up, hugged her knees, and rested her chin on her skirt.
The information and images on the screen continued.
After being rescued, Zhou Yu'an was left with severe neurasthenia and insomnia.
Although the Shen family's eldest son received timely treatment and did not become intellectually disabled, his intelligence was ultimately impaired. He went from a heir placed with great hopes to merely an above-average ordinary person.
S Country had a population of several billion at the time; geniuses, one in ten thousand, were countless.
A slightly above-average ordinary person was almost equivalent to a cripple in the top echelons teeming with geniuses...
The outcome of that internal conflict, imperceptible to ordinary people, was silently tragic.
The leader's family, once jokingly called the Fifth Great Family, completely vanished.
After that, Madam Gu was just Madam Gu.
Leaders began to change every four years, becoming mere figureheads completely controlled by the Four Great Families.
Although the Gu family emerged victorious, they also paid a price and lost a beloved family member.
Grandpa Gu was deeply moved. He felt that to protect their wealth, they needed sufficiently powerful heirs.
The sparse number of descendants gave him no hope.
Furthermore, back then, the marriage law was newly established, and people's views were still conservative. It was not uncommon for important figures to have multiple concubines, which wasn't even legally wrong.
Grandpa Gu made a cold-hearted decision.
He himself, and his son Gu Zhenting, began to widely take in women of good background and excellent genes, housing them separately in a villa, solely for the purpose of producing enough heirs to select the most outstanding one.
Even Gu Chengyu himself later couldn't distinguish which of these illegitimate children were his uncles and which were his brothers.
The Shen family ultimately ceded all their real estate holdings to the Gu family, allowing the Gu family to dominate the real estate industry later on.
The Shen family nearly fell out of the ranks of the Four Great Families because of this.
And Father Shen, heartbroken over losing his heir, ultimately couldn't withstand the family's pressure. One night, dead drunk, he agreed to let the family present a woman to him, his only requirement being secrecy.
It was on that night that the daughter of his capable subordinate, his secretary at the time, shared his bed, and Shen Que was conceived.
