Chapter 115 — No Philandering Allowed

"All right, I'll head over right away..." Qiu Lingshan's heart sank. Finding the ringleader of the suspects ought to have been a cause for celebration, but at this moment she could not summon the slightest joy—because what they had found was not a living man, but a corpse.

Which meant there was more to this case than met the eye. Someone had likely silenced the bald man for good.

If that were so, the case would only grow more tangled, and tracking down the true mastermind behind it all would be next to impossible... Yet for all her throbbing headache, Qiu Lingshan still hurried her people to the scene at once...

……………………

"Yaoyao, what's wrong with you?" Shen Yushu had noticed too that Gu Mengyao's mood seemed less than bright, her face pale the whole way. At first she had assumed it was Uncle Chu's presence making her play the good girl, but after a while Shen Yushu realized that could not be it.

"Nothing..." Gu Mengyao shook her head. She was a little irritated at Wei Zhao's lecherous behavior, but surely she could not be jealous of her own best friend?

"Oh. I thought yesterday's fried mushrooms were better than today's dishes. What do you think?" Shen Yushu nodded, then asked out of the blue.

"..." Gu Mengyao was speechless, but Shen Yushu managed to coax a laugh out of her: "Xiaoshu, you're fated to eat at roadside stalls your whole life... When you get married, your husband will have to pinch every penny..."

"Hehe, when I get married, won't you be married too? And besides, that saves money for you as well..." Shen Yushu said with a teasing look at Gu Mengyao, all smiles.

"For me... huh?" Gu Mengyao's face suddenly flushed as she grasped what Shen Yushu was getting at, and she raised a hand to swat her: "That was when we were little—why do you still bring it up?"

"Hehe, it was when we were little, but we did pinky-swear on it." At this Shen Yushu's cheeks flushed a little too, and she stole a glance at Wei Zhao from the corner of her eye. Surely Uncle Chu could not really be entertaining such an idea—taking Wei Zhao as a son-in-law?

"I'm not talking to you anymore." Gu Mengyao's expression turned awkward, and she turned her head away...

What Shen Yushu had brought up was a little secret the two of them had shared as children, one they had never told anyone else—though even after they grew up, they still occasionally joked about it.

Six or seven years ago, back in middle school, the two of them had watched a soap opera about a pair of best friends who had been close since childhood and, so that they could stay together every day forever, wound up marrying the same man...

And so Shen Yushu had foolishly said, Yaoyao, when you get married, I'll marry over with you, and that way we'll never be apart...

Gu Mengyao thought that sounded like a fine idea and nodded in agreement, and so the two of them hooked pinkies and swore a hundred years without change... As they grew older they came to realize how absurd the whole thing was, yet they still joked about it...

Especially after Shen Yushu grew up and no longer wanted to call Gu Mengyao "big sister"—after all, they were classmates in the same class, and calling her sister felt a bit like pretending to be younger than she was... But Gu Mengyao held it over her head: once we're married I'll be the senior wife and you'll be the junior wife, so of course you have to call me sister—and if you don't, I'll tell everyone about it...

With no way out, Shen Yushu had no choice but to keep calling Gu Mengyao "big sister" all these years. But after calling her that for so long it came naturally, and since her birthday fell a few months after Gu Mengyao's, calling her sister was no great loss anyway.

Of course, apart from Gu Mengyao and Shen Yushu themselves, no one else knew about any of this.

Wei Zhao listened with some bafflement as the two girls spoke in veiled, cryptic terms. He shook his head and did not ask, because he knew that even if he did, he would get no answer.

Wei Zhao sat to one side and closed his eyes slightly. He looked as though he were resting, but in truth he was doing something else entirely.

"Elder Jiao, earlier the jade pendant gave a warning—did you..." Wei Zhao did not know whether the pendant's warning had anything to do with Elder Jiao. Back in the pendant's space, he had never thought to ask about it.

"A warning?" Jiao Yazi was clearly taken aback. "What warning? I felt nothing."

"You felt nothing?" Wei Zhao was startled in turn. "Just now, the very instant the chandelier was about to fall, I sensed the jade pendant passing me a signal of danger—a signal that warns me every time I'm about to come to harm..."

"Honestly, I felt nothing." Jiao Yazi thought it over. Nothing particularly unusual had happened before...

"Then... that is the jade pendant's own power?" Wei Zhao knew Jiao Lao could not be lying. If he said he had felt nothing, then he had certainly felt nothing.

"It's possible. As I said, this pendant was left behind by my martial granduncle. I do not know what other powers it holds—you will have to discover them yourself. Or you could open the stone door of the cave, and new discoveries will be waiting behind it..." Jiao Yazi explained.

"All right," Wei Zhao said helplessly. It seemed Jiao Lao did not know the pendant's marvels either; the cultivation space was perhaps only one of its functions.

The car stopped at the villa gate. After letting Wei Zhao, Gu Mengyao, and Shen Yushu out, it drove away—clearly Gu Pengzhan still had to go back and deal with the matter of the chandelier.

"Wei Zhao!" Gu Mengyao suddenly came back to herself and looked at Wei Zhao.

"Hm?" Wei Zhao regarded the young miss with puzzlement.

"While you are on the job, you are not allowed to go around philandering outside!" Gu Mengyao had mustered her courage. She had been thinking about this the whole way in the car, and the moment she got out she had summoned all her nerve to make this clear to Wei Zhao in one breath.

"Hm? I haven't!" Wei Zhao was taken aback. Was the young miss displeased that he had been chasing women during work hours?

"If you have done it, correct it; if not, redouble your efforts," Gu Mengyao snorted. Naturally, she could hardly bring up the matter of Qiu Lingshan and that tall girl.

"Oh... all right." Wei Zhao nodded. "Then when I'm not working, it's fine, right?"

"My daddy hired you at a high price to be my shield twenty-four hours a day and to accept my orders. You have no time when you are not working." With that, Gu Mengyao turned and pulled Shen Yushu away.

"Uh... what the hell." Wei Zhao gave a bitter smile. "Even the slave owners of the old society didn't play it like this, did they? Am I some kind of indentured laborer? This girl..."

"Yao Yao, you were so cool just now... when you blew up at him!" Shen Yushu looked at Gu Mengyao excitedly.

"If I don't teach him a lesson, he won't know his place. He mustn't think that just because Daddy values him he can do whatever he pleases and run around with women—how is he supposed to fool Zhong Yongliang then?" Gu Mengyao herself did not know what she was actually trying to explain.

"But Yao Yao, Zhong Yongliang still doesn't seem to know that Shield Bro is your boyfriend. You don't even talk to Shield Bro at school, and you let Zhong Yongliang teach Shield Bro a lesson..." Shen Yushu looked at Gu Mengyao with a half-smile. "Hehe, how about tomorrow at school I go tell Little Liangzi that Shield Bro is your boyfriend? And that you two are even living together... That'll save him from bothering you again. He seems pretty afraid of Shield Bro now—I bet once he hears this, he'll be scared out of his wits..."