Ruan Tian laughed for quite a while before continuing, “Your third brother thinks Huo Mian is so pitiful, so he keeps urging her to go out and find a job. He says that once she starts working, she won’t have time to dwell on things that don’t exist.”
“Huo Mian says she wants to stay by her mother’s side and fulfill her duty as a filial daughter. She doesn’t want to go out and work—she just wants to stay at the nursing center as a caregiver.”
As far as Yu Xiaxing knew, Huo Mian’s overseas degree was practically worthless.
In her previous life, Huo Mian hadn’t worked either. In the end, because her third brother had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, the two of them never got married.
But Huo Mian publicly declared that she would wait for her fiancé to recover, no matter how many years it took. Her devotion moved countless netizens.
She was beautiful, too, so it was only a matter of time before she became wildly popular and started cashing in on her traffic.
Yu Xiaxing asked again, “Did my third brother agree to let her stay and work as a caregiver?”
Ruan Tian replied, “Your third brother said that without a caregiver’s certificate, there was no way he could hire her. He absolutely wouldn’t abuse his position as the director to play favorites. He told Huo Mian to get a caregiver’s certificate, then submit her résumé to the nursing center and attend an interview.”
Yu Xiaxing: “…”
That was so Yu Zhining.
Which was why Yu Xiaxing couldn’t understand it. Someone with such strong defenses should have had a mind that was extremely difficult to break.
So how exactly had he ended up losing his sanity?
Ruan Tian continued, “I also found out what your third brother has been up to lately. His contract-renewal assignment ran into trouble.”
“There are several wealthy elderly residents there, all from excellent families, but they keep dragging their feet on renewing their contracts.”
“They’ve even made plans to travel together. Once they leave, who knows when they’ll come back to renew their contracts with him.”
At this point, Yu Xiaxing tried hard to recall the hazy fragments from her previous life.
In her previous life, she had sworn that she would never speak to Yu Zhining again.
And she was the sort of person who always kept her word. She truly ignored him completely.
Later, her uncle had written in the family group chat: “A-Ning was hit very hard by his last assignment. Ever since he came back from out of town, he hasn’t been in a good state. I suspect the pressure was too much for him. For the sake of his health, he should probably withdraw from the competition.”
When she saw that message, her first reaction had been to sneer.
He was always so calm, so correct—how could there ever be a day when he couldn’t hold on?
It had to be another one of his schemes!
Once everyone let down their guard around him, he would suddenly make an incredible comeback!
But she had waited until the day she died, and he still hadn’t left the hospital.
Only then did she learn that he really had encountered an obstacle he couldn’t overcome.
As for exactly what had happened and how it had unfolded, she genuinely had no idea.
But this contract-renewal assignment seemed to have been the beginning of his sudden downfall… Something unknown had dragged him into the abyss, and from then on, he had never managed to climb back out.
“Ever since he came back from out of town…”
Yu Xiaxing recalled that key phrase from her uncle’s message.
Could it have been because those elderly residents were planning to travel? Perhaps he had been anxious about the contract-renewal assignment, followed them out of town, and encountered something there?
Maybe she should send him a message to warn him.
Just a reminder not to go out of town.
After all, at the moment, he was the person with the smallest point gap between them on the leaderboard.
If he hadn’t encountered that obstacle, he would have had a very good chance of getting her eliminated.
But someone as suspicious and complicated as him would definitely overthink things if she went out of her way to send him such a message.
Yu Xiaxing tossed and turned in bed for more than ten minutes, agonizing over it.
In the end, she decided to send Yu Zhining a message.
But when she picked up her phone and scrolled through her contacts, she couldn’t find him anywhere.
Then she remembered…
One New Year, she had decided that she needed to appear friendly in front of the elders and had taken the initiative to add him.
He had never accepted her request!
Even though she and her eldest brother weren’t close at all, they were still lying dormant on each other’s contact lists.
Yu Zhining, on the other hand, hadn’t even approved her friend request!
Perfect!
Yu Xiaxing no longer had to struggle with the decision. She tossed her phone aside and went to sleep.
—
The next day, when Yu Xiaxing arrived at St. De’s, the final list for Wisdom in Practice Day had already been confirmed.
She took it from Lu Yanzhao and glanced through it, only to spot Jiang Tinglan’s name.
“Jiang Tinglan is going too?”
Lu Yanzhao nodded. “Yes. Jiang is a student with an uneven academic profile. Her chemistry grades are excellent, but her overall grades are poor, so she meets the requirements Director Yu specified.”
Yu Xiaxing still had no intention of revealing her identity in front of the students. She would continue pretending to be a student and blend in with them during the trip. At a critical moment, she could even stir things up.
But Jiang Tinglan was going too…
The two of them wouldn’t get into a fight, would they? After all, she had abandoned Jiang Tinglan that day when they got into an argument with those passersby.
Then again, a fight might be just what they needed. The more chaotic things became, the better.
Yu Xiaxing first instructed Lu Yanzhao, “I’ll disguise myself as a student and blend in when the time comes. Whatever you do, don’t call me Director Yu.”
“Understood. I’ll make the arrangements.”
Yu Xiaxing nodded. After all, he was taking students on an outing, so the vehicle, various insurance policies, and countless other details had to be arranged in advance. There were plenty of tedious tasks for him to handle.
That evening, Lu Yanzhao came by again.
“Director Yu, everything for the outing has been arranged. As for the Cocoon case, our legal team has been following up with the authorities, and there’s new progress now.”
Yu Xiaxing hadn’t expected it to happen so quickly. “Already?”
Lu Yanzhao nodded. “Yes. The materials we provided before were very detailed, so the police were able to investigate quickly. The thirty thousand yuan Jiang transferred was among the first batch of funds recovered, because the account was frozen immediately.”
Yu Xiaxing nodded. “Who was behind Cocoon?”
“It was being run by a team. The person at the helm used to work in what’s known as the ‘black five’ industries.”
Yu Xiaxing looked puzzled. “Tell me what ‘black five’ means in the most straightforward, no-nonsense way possible.”
Lu Yanzhao considered his wording for a moment before coming up with an easy-to-understand explanation.
“They’re all kinds of products designed to exploit people’s anxieties and make them pay an intelligence tax. Common examples include brain-boosting supplements sold to children, beauty pills sold to women, sexual-enhancement drugs sold to men, health supplements sold to the elderly, and weight-loss products sold to everyone. They all count. The profit margins can usually reach three thousand percent.”
Yu Xiaxing clicked her tongue. People without a conscience or a bottom line really did make money faster!
Lu Yanzhao continued, “People who sell these products are experts at targeting other people’s pain points. But as the crackdown on those industries became stricter and stricter, they began changing careers.”
“They still use the same advertising tactics, poking at the deepest anxieties of different groups of people. But now they don’t even have a product. They simply sell courses.”
“There aren’t many core members on this team, but they hire countless people to attract potential customers for them.”
Yu Xiaxing asked, “What does ‘attract potential customers’ mean?”
Lu Yanzhao once again came up with a simple explanation.
“They post all kinds of negative and anxiety-inducing content online, then tell people to join a group or message them privately to receive free assessment materials. They have people take self-assessment tests they created themselves, and after the test, ninety-nine percent of them supposedly have some kind of problem.”
“Then, under the pretense of helping them solve those problems, they lead them to places where they have to pay.”
“That’s what it means to ‘turn people into followers’… They’re paid according to how many people they manage to recruit.”
How awful…
These people were truly vile!
Everyone experienced negative emotions. With proper guidance, they would usually pass after a while.
In the end, they went to the scammers to get the questionnaires for self-assessment. Every single one of them tested positive for depression. The moment they thought about having depression, they felt even more wronged—and the more wronged they felt, the more depressed they became!
And they were genuinely clever. They knew exactly where each type of person was hurting, and that was precisely where they struck.
Yu Xiaxing said, “Compile all these scams as well… Oh, right. Mr. Yang’s mini-program has already been started, hasn’t it? Once it’s ready, upload all this content onto it. I want every student at Shengde to become someone scammers can’t target!”
Lu Yanzhao replied, “Understood. I’ll take care of it right away.”
The door closed softly.
The office fell silent once more.
Yu Xiaxing flipped through several more pages of information about Breaking Cocoon, finding it more and more absurd the further she read.
The account Breaking Cocoon used to collect money belonged to a properly registered psychological counseling organization, and its leading scammer even had a master’s degree in psychology from a prestigious university… With such a high level of education, there were so many respectable things he could have done. Why choose to deceive people?
As for Breaking Cocoon itself, it was merely a persona jointly maintained by a group of people.
So it really had nothing to do with Huo Mian after all?
