Over this stretch, every company tied to Qingye Investment was in the thick of it.

First was miHoYo, the earliest investment of all. Honkai Impact 3 was about to go into its first round of closed beta, and the whole team was getting ready for it. More often than not the office was still lit up at one or two in the morning.

Youwei was preparing for the summer's online swimwear runway show, and the factory was stocking up fast.

Yingke didn't have the name the other livestreaming platforms had, but the numbers showed registered users climbing steadily.

ofo had taken twenty million in its second round and was burning money every day now to seize the market as early as it could. At that rate the twenty million would be gone by summer, and the third round would have to come in above fifty million. The good news was that plenty of investment firms had their eye on ofo, and several of the big ones were reaching out to Dai Wei on their own.

Xu Ye didn't know much about how things stood at Tastien. Li Tongwen had been running it all along, so Xu Ye hadn't bothered with it. The way he saw it, if the project did well the credit would all be Li Tongwen's, and when the time came to make him head of Investment Department Two, nobody would have anything to say about it.

Thursday was a full day at the company, and Wang Manning spent all of it as his tagalong. She didn't dare interrupt while he was working, though, and just sat quietly beside him.

The next afternoon Xu Ye drove out by himself to pick Chen Qingqing up from Xuhui, and the moment she arrived she bought every employee in the company a glass of cold, sharp lemon water.

With somebody to talk to, Wang Manning turned chatty again. Coming out after dinner that evening she had her arm through Chen Qingqing's, full of righteous purpose. "Don't you worry, cousin-in-law. As long as I'm around, no fox spirit is getting near my…