My Queen, My Rules - 76
Dating
With that one "baby" from Cen Sen, Ji Mingshu was finally satisfied. She nestled obediently in his arms, sweet as if she'd just had a spoonful of honey, and stopped making trouble. The only thing she couldn't seem to control was the smile tugging relentlessly at the corners of her lips.
There were no more aftershocks in Xingcheng that night, and the two of them slept soundly and peacefully.
Early the next morning, Cen Sen held a three-way video conference with the head office and hotel managers in Xingcheng to get a firsthand understanding of the measures each hotel had taken in response to the earthquake.
The hotels under Junyi all followed a high-end positioning, and their anti-seismic building standards had been set exceptionally high from the very beginning of construction.
The hotels were also well prepared. Every quarter, they conducted training and drills for emergencies such as fires and earthquakes, so their staff were highly trained and well disciplined.
After the earthquake the previous night, inspections of the hotel buildings, as well as efforts to guide and reassure guests, had been carried out in an orderly manner from the very first moment.
Learning this, the headquarters executives were considerably reassured, and Cen Sen saw no reason to stay in Xingcheng any longer.
Everyone back in the capital had been worried sick and urged them to hurry home, so he rearranged his work schedule and took Ji Mingshu back to the capital that afternoon.
On the way home, Ji Mingshu kept reassuring the WeChat friends who had messaged her the day before to check if she was all right.
When she still hadn't looked up after more than half an hour, Cen Sen glanced over.
As luck would have it, his gaze landed on a familiar contact name: Li Che.
Li Che: [Mingshu, are you okay? I saw your post a couple of days ago, and it seemed like you were in Xingcheng?]
Ji Mingshu: [I'm fine. Thanks for checking in. /Cute]
Cen Sen: "You're close with Li Che?"
Ji Mingshu didn't even look up. "Not really."
Cen Sen considered this for a moment. "If you're not close, you shouldn't have used that emoji. The first one would have been more appropriate."
"The first one? The smiley?" Ji Mingshu looked up at him, genuinely puzzled. "You don't know what the smiley means?"
Cen Sen's expression remained perfectly calm, as though he were saying, A smile is a smile. What else could it mean?
Ji Mingshu paused. "You don't usually use WeChat for work, do you?"
"I don't need to. I only chat with you on WeChat."
"Good." Relieved, she lowered her head and went back to replying to her messages.
Cen Sen adjusted his tie, glancing at his tablet while stealing another look at her phone screen from the corner of his eye.
In that short span of time, she and Li Che had already exchanged another three or four messages.
Almost instinctively, he said in a low voice, "Mingshu, you're married now. You should maintain a distance from the opposite sex, especially male celebrities. Don't leave people room for imagination and cause unnecessary misunderstandings."
"...?"
What room for imagination? What misunderstandings? Wasn't it just basic human decency for someone to check in after seeing earthquake news?
Then she suddenly thought of something. With a gleam of amusement in her eyes, she leaned closer and asked, "Are you jealous?"
Cen Sen: "I'm just giving you well-meaning advice, lest you get too close to male celebrities, ending up on the trending searches again, and being subjected to another round of online abuse."
"Oh, is that so..." Ji Mingshu deliberately drew out the last syllable, nodding slowly.
Just then, Li Che sent another WeChat message.
Quick as a flash, Ji Mingshu covered her phone loosely against her lower abdomen, then deliberately angled herself away so Cen Sen wouldn't have a chance to sneak another glance.
Cen Sen: "..."
Whatever Li Che had sent, Ji Mingshu kept typing away on her phone, a broad smile playing on her face.
Cen Sen watched her for a while, but eventually couldn't resist. With an expressionless face, he reached over and plucked the phone from her hands.
Li Che's message read: [That's a relief. You should get some good rest once you're home.]
Ji Mingshu hadn't replied yet. Instead, her typed message was still sitting in the text box: [You! Are! Totally! Jealous!]
Cen Sen: "..."
Ji Mingshu tilted her head smugly and flashed him a victorious V sign.
He lowered his eyes calmly, deleted the message in the text box, and typed a new one.
[Thank you for your concern for my wife. I'll take good care of her.]
Send.
Ji Mingshu never imagined he'd pull something like this. She hurriedly snatched the phone back and recalled the message. "Are you insane? Now he'll think we're both lunatics!"
She was a little too late. Li Che had been waiting for her reply, and the sudden appearance of that message left him inexplicably uneasy.
Truthfully, he'd a bit of interest for Ji Mingshu before. But after learning that she was married, and that her husband was no ordinary man, he'd abandoned any thought of pursuing her. Instead, he'd thought he could become friends with Ji Mingshu and use that connection to get a little closer to Cen Sen. Apparently, he'd tried too hard and ended up completely backfiring.
He rubbed his forehead and began thinking of ways to salvage the situation.
Whether Li Che managed to salvage it or not, neither Ji Mingshu nor Cen Sen particularly cared. After replying to that message, the two of them launched into an in-depth in-depth study on the topic of maintaining distance from the opposite sex.
That study continued for a very long time after they returned to the capital.
Ji Mingshu gradually discovered that Cen Sen's possessiveness was also rather intense. Although he claimed he wouldn't stop her from keeping in touch with men as long as she maintained a reasonable distance, in reality, he probably wished she would delete every single male contact from her WeChat.
And he was such a hypocrite about it. He himself had several female assistants, but when it came to them, they were suddenly nothing more than purely professional relationships.
Ji Mingshu was deeply dissatisfied, but she couldn't win an argument with him on her own, so she turned to Gu Kaiyang for advice. From time to time, she would arm herself with Gu Kaiyang's theories about how women should have their own private space, how marriage shouldn't mean giving up one's own social circle, and how gender equality meant there could be no double standards, then argue her case with Cen Sen.
Cen Sen offered no opinion on this.
Aside from this particular study project, Ji Mingshu's main focus after returning to the capital was the guest-room design proposal for Junyi Yaji.
Determined to come up with a design she would be satisfied with, she barely left the house for half a month, spending every day shut away at home.
She also had a strong sense of fair competition. Although she was somewhat tempted to take a look at the guest-room designs the other contestants had prepared for Junyi Yaji, she felt that seeing them in advance would leave her with the guilty feeling of having cheated her way to victory.
After struggling with the temptation for quite some time, she still couldn't bring herself to ask Cen Sen for access. Instead, she quietly collected the designers' publicly available work and studied it, trying to figure out their approaches.
The more she studied, the more she felt that there were simply too many talented and imaginative people in the world. She, Ji Mingshu, was not nearly as unique and irreplaceable as she had once imagined.
But while learning just how outstanding her competitors were, she also developed an unprecedented interest and passion for this hotel design project.
Jiang Chun had never seen Ji Mingshu work seriously before. She had always assumed that whatever design Ji Mingshu did amounted to sketching some drawings on paper, then telling people to decorate and arrange things according to her ideas, and that was it.
So when Ji Mingshu refused to leave the house for nearly half a month this time, Jiang Chun became convinced that Ji Mingshu was secretly up to some major scheme behind her back.
Most suspiciously, Gu Kaiyang had also been refusing to go out recently. She worked like crazy during the day, and whenever Jiang Chun tried to make plans with her at night, she found all sort of excuses to turn her down.
Jiang Chun's imagination ran wild, and the more she thought about it, the more miserable she became.
Half a month later, she solemnly posted a "Notice of Little Earth Goose's Departure" in the group chat. The notice contained a few unfortunate typos, but it was still heartfelt enough to seem written in tears and blood.
She ended it with, "If you don't want to hang out with me anymore, you can just say so. I'll leave the group myself," then added a broken-heart emoji before silently exiting the chat.
Ji Mingshu, having just emerged from her self-imposed isolation, saw this and found it both baffling and hilarious, she immediately added Jiang Chun back.
Ji Mingshu: [...]
Ji Mingshu: [Putting on a tragic melodrama?]
Jiang Chun: [You guys all ignore me T_T!]
Ji Mingshu couldn't be bothered to argue with her and simply uploaded an yet-to-be-rendered conceptual model video to the group.
Ji Mingshu: [I've been working on this for half a month and barely got it to this stage. Who has time to ignore you?]
Jiang Chun clicked on it and was instantly stunned by the polished, high-end-looking video.
Jiang Chun: [You made all of this yourself?]
Ji Mingshu: [Who else? You?]
Jiang Chun was rendered speechless. All she could do was fill the screen with exclamation marks and ellipses to express her shock.
Just then, Gu Kaiyang suddenly appeared to explain herself.
Gu Kaiyang: [I've been filming a show recently. Signed an NDA.]
Jiang Chun: [...?]
Jiang Chun: [You're an editor. What kind of show are you filming?]
Jiang Chun: [With all that time, wouldn't it be better to find yourself a date?]
Gu Kaiyang: [...]
Gu Kaiyang: [It's a dating show.]
Gu Kaiyang said it as casually as if she were commenting on the weather, but Ji Mingshu and Jiang Chun simultaneously unleashed a string of question marks in shock. Our Gu Gu is actually dating someone!!!
Jiang Chun: [When did you go?]
Ji Mingshu: [What's the show called?]
Jiang Chun: [How exactly does the dating work?]
Ji Mingshu: [Is it real dating or fake dating?]
The two of them worked together with perfect coordination, zeroing in on the crucial issue and bombarding Gu Kaiyang with questions.
Gu Kaiyang: [...]
Gu Kaiyang: [It's hard to explain in just a few words.]
Ji Mingshu: [Then explain it in five words, four words, eight words, seven words!]
Jiang Chun: [Exactly! You've got a mouth, so why are you afraid you can't explain it? Is it really impossible to explain, or do you just not want to? Gu Kaiyang, this goose hereby solemnly warns you. There is something seriously wrong with your thinking!]
After being subjected to a full-scale interrogation from the two of them, Gu Kaiyang couldn't hold out any longer. In the end, she obediently confessed everything to the organization.
After the New Year, she had participated in a reality dating show produced by a video platform that had a business partnership with their magazine.
It had happened at a dinner. One of the video platform's executives had complimented her on how impressive it was that she'd become a deputy editor-in-chief at such a young age. Their editor-in-chief, May, being a big mouth, casually added, "Xiao Gu is young, beautiful, and capable. She puts all her energy into work and hasn't even found herself a boyfriend."
The executive's eyes immediately lit up. He insisted on introducing her to the show, and after going on and on about how high their standards were for the participants, how outstanding she was, and how perfectly suited she was for the program, she finally had no choice but to grit her teeth and agree, partly out of consideration for the business cooperation.
In fact, all the major television networks and video platforms had been producing similar shows one after another, and Gu Kaiyang had some understanding about them.
Even if she didn't actually fall in love, participating in the show would at least give her the chance to meet a few accomplished people. Besides, May had approved it, and it wouldn't interfere too much with her work. There was really no downside for her, so in the end, she actually went.
Lately, she continued working normally during the day. She only needed to return to the villa in the evenings to live with the other participants for recording. Once she got used to it, it was actually quite alright.
Jiang Chun asked the most important question of all: [Have you found anyone you like?]
Gu Kaiyang: [No.]
Gu Kaiyang: [But a familiar face just moved in as Male Contestant No. 4 today.]
Jiang Chun: [Who?]
Gu Kaiyang: [Zhou Jiaheng.]
Ji Mingshu: [????]
When Cen Sen came home that evening, Ji Mingshu attacked him with questions like a walking encyclopedia.
"Zhou Jiaheng went on a dating show. He's got quite a lot of free time, doesn't he?"
"This isn't something you arranged on purpose, is it? Did you know Gu Kaiyang was on that show?"
Cen Sen answered a different question entirely. "Gu Kaiyang? She really should worry more about her own love life instead of being single and constantly feeding married people bizarre theories she's never even put into practice herself, thereby interfering with other people's marital harmony.”
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