Chapter 51: The General's Soft Spot

The hospital corridor's lighting was cold and glaring, painting the walls a bleak, sickly white.

The sweet, milky fragrance lingering in the air mixed strangely with the scent of disinfectant, having just sparked a faint yet warm flame between Xu Yuan and Jiang Yi.

However, Wen Ran's text message arrived like a basin of ice water poured straight over their heads, instantly extinguishing that pitiful warmth, along with the fragile flame, completely.

Only a biting chill and choking, acrid smoke remained.

"...You have successfully made me interested in your project lead as well."

Jiang Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.

The world seemed to have been pressed onto the mute button. Everything around him rapidly faded and peeled away: the hurried footsteps of a nurse, the distant coughs from a hospital ward, and even the sound of Xu Yuan's anxious breathing all vanished.

In his entire world, there was only that single line of cold text on the phone screen, radiating a pale, freezing light.

Every single character was like a poison-laced steel nail, fiercely hammered into the depths of his eyes, piercing straight into the heart that had just been warmed ever so slightly by a White Rabbit creamy candy.

Ten years ago, members of the Wen family had used this exact effortless, elegant posture to destroy his father and shatter his home.

Ten years later, Wen Ran—the son who had inherited all of his father's hypocrisy and ruthlessness—was attempting to use the exact same method to destroy the last ray of light left in his life.

No.

He couldn't let that happen.

A chilling current, even colder than the lights in the corridor and mixed with raging fury and terror, surged wildly through Jiang Yi's limbs and bones, instantly freezing the blood throughout his entire body. His knuckles turned white from gripping the phone with excessive force, and the poor device let out a groan of unbearable strain in his palm.

He wanted to kill someone.

This thought screamed fiercely and clearly in his mind.

For the first time in ten years, he felt such a distinct, self-destructive impulse.

"Jiang Yi."

A cool hand gently covered the back of his burning hand.

Xu Yuan's voice was very soft, yet it acted like a precise anchor, plunging instantly into the stormy, turbulent sea of his heart.

She did not ask what had happened; instead, she gently and with undeniable tenderness pulled the phone away from his stiff fingers.

She saw the text message.

Jiang Yi stared at her fixedly, terrified that he might see even a trace of fear on her face. If she were afraid, he had no idea what he might do.

However, Xu Yuan...

There was no fear on Xu Yuan's face.

In her eyes, which had just been crying and were still somewhat red and swollen, there was now only a breathtaking, chilling calm. After reading the message, she even let out a very faint, deeply disdainful scoff.

Then, she raised her head, meeting Jiang Yi's storm-swept eyes, and spoke in a tone so calmly rational it bordered on terrifying, as if stating a simple fact:

"He's panicking."

For a fraction of a second, Jiang Yi's mind went completely blank.

Panicking?

Someone like Wen Ran, panicking?

"He went to his father hoping to find reinforcement, only to get severely disciplined by him instead. Right now, he's like a mad dog scolded by its master, no longer daring to bark at you, so he has to turn his guns around and bark at me." Xu Yuan's analysis cut like a sharp scalpel, precisely slicing open Wen Ran's seemingly unfathomable threat to reveal its most fragile core. "This isn't a declaration from the strong; it's the frenzied roar of the weak."

"This isn't a game," Jiang Yi's Adam's apple bobbed with difficulty, his voice as hoarse as if it had been scraped by sandpaper.

He knew Xu Yuan was comforting him, trying to pull him back from the edge of losing control with her formidable logic and calmness.

Yet he could not control himself.

The sense of helplessness of watching the most precious thing in his life being swallowed by an abyss acted like an inescapable net, tightly choking his heart and making it almost impossible to breathe.

He could not go through this again.

Absolutely not.

Half an hour later, a 24-hour café near the university.

The first emergency strategy meeting of "Deep Sea Echo" was held in an atmosphere that was so oppressive it felt nearly frozen solid.

After listening to the sequence of events, Lin Fei'fei slammed her palm onto the table in fury, looking like a lit firecracker.

"That bastard! How dare he! I'm calling my brother right now! No, I'll call my dad directly! I'll have him freeze all bank loans to the Wen Group tomorrow morning! I want to see whether Wen Zhenghua cares more about his precious son's 'interests' or their company's cash flow!"

Lin Fei'fei was genuinely enraged, her usually bright and flamboyant face now filled with a chilling murderous intent. Xu Yuan was her bottom line; whoever touched her would die.

"It's no use, Fei'fei." Xu Yuan calmly shook her head, reaching out to press down on the hand Lin Fei'fei was about to use to make the call. "If you do that right now, you'll fall right into Wen Ran's trap. He's dying for us to retaliate in the most aggressive, reckless way possible. That way, Wen Zhenghua will have the most justified excuse to stand on the moral high ground and use the entire Wen Group's resources to crush us to dust."

"Then what should we do? Are we just going to let this go?!" Lin Fei'fei asked anxiously.

"Of course we're not going to let this go."

The voice belonged to Lu Xingyu.

His face was pale and his lips were pressed into a tight line, but the eyes hidden behind his gold-rimmed glasses were burning with a stubborn flame belonging to a tech geek. His fingers flew across his laptop keyboard at a frantic speed, producing a dense clatter of rapid clicking.

"I've already started," he said without looking up, his voice trembling slightly with tension and concentration. "Using my highest clearance, I'm stripping all of the junior's personal information from the university's database and establishing a complete physical isolation. At the same time, I'm building a brand-new, military-grade encrypted firewall for her. I've also written a small program to monitor abnormal activities on Wen Ran and all his known social media accounts 24/7. If he tries to find even a single flaw belonging to her online, he has no chance in hell!"

This was Lu Xingyu's way of fighting.

No grand speeches, just rows of cold, sturdy code building an impregnable digital fortress for the person he wished to protect.

Watching these two friends who had instantly switched into battle mode for her sake, the cold lake inside Xu Yuan's heart, stirred up by Wen Ran's threat, gradually warmed with an undercurrent of deep emotion.

She turned her gaze to Jiang Yi, who had remained silent since they sat down.

He merely sat quietly, his tall frame sinking into the café's soft sofa, yet radiating a keep-out-of-reach chill akin to a polar glacier. His silence carried more weight than Lin Fei'fei's fury and the clatter of Lu Xingyu's keyboard combined.

He was like a beast whose reverse scale had been touched, plunged into dead silence as it silently accumulated the strength to destroy everything.

Xu Yuan's heart tightened inexplicably.

She knew him too well. The more silent he was, the more violent the storm raging inside him.

She had to pull him back before he completely lost control.

"Wen Ran's target is me, so this battle must be led by me." Xu Yuan spoke, her voice not loud, yet instantly capturing everyone's attention.

Looking at Jiang Yi, she said word by word:

"My plan is: no response, no retaliation, and acting as if none of this ever happened."