The following week went like this.

Xu Ye spent his days at the company slacking off and killing time, and his evenings back at the hotel on video calls with Chen Qingqing until all hours. Now and then Zhao Ming dragged him out to dinner. That was how the end of August arrived, in a blur.

When Lü Cheng and the others got back, they told Xu Ye how things stood at Yingke Live. Some of it was good and some of it wasn't.

The good part was that the company's three founders had all worked at a major firm before, and they understood the technology and understood the market.

The bad part was that the company was very small — the same as Qingye Investment, only a dozen or so people all told — and the whole operation was holed up in a two-story house.

Xu Ye talked it over with Lü Cheng for more than an hour, then called Zhao Ming and told him he had decided to invest. Zhao Ming didn't hesitate for a second and said straight out that he was coming in too, five million from each side.

With that settled, each side assigned people to negotiate the details of the investment with Yingke.

And once that was taken care of, Xu Ye got on a high-speed train to Jiangzhou.

Driving would have taken too long, and that many hours at the wheel would have been exhausting. By high-speed rail he could get there, have lunch, and take the train back — ten hours round trip, and if everything went smoothly he would be back by seven or eight that evening.

Chen Qingqing had known since the night before that Xu Ye was coming back to Jiangzhou that day. She had only just woken up when she started packing; she couldn't wait. Her mood was a great deal better than it had been the past few days.

Jiang Meilin saw it and said nothing.

And when Chen Hansong learned his daughter was leaving for Shanghai that day, he came over to the house early. Seeing…