The temperature had dropped.
And yet Chen Qingqing felt like she was sweating all over.
She killed the video call in a hurry, burrowed straight under her blanket, and lay there with her right hand pressed to her heaving chest, doing her best to calm down.
Meanwhile, over in the boys’ dorm.
Yang Fei was lying on his bed furiously typing, transcribing everything Xu Ye had just done into his notes app, word for word.
He gave the note a title: The Romance Bible.
Tuesday morning, Xu Ye slept through both of his lectures. When the subject matter involved math, there was simply nothing to be done — the textbook read like scripture, and the professor delivered it in the same tone, more effective as a sleep aid than any comedy routine.
He’d barely arrived at the cafeteria for lunch when Xu Wanying called.
“Hey~”
“Xu Ye, there’s someone here asking for you.”
“Who is it?”
“I don’t know him. Some middle-aged guy.”
“Middle-aged guy?”
He had no idea who that could be. “Tell him to wait a bit — I’ll head over once I finish eating.”
“Got it.”
She hung up and turned to Jiang Chao with a polite smile. “He’s having lunch at the cafeteria right now, might be a little while.”
Jiang Chao nodded pleasantly. “That’s fine, I’ll wait here.”
She didn’t press further, just brought out a chair and got him settled in the shop.
Twenty minutes later, Xu Ye arrived. He walked in and spotted Jiang Chao immediately, frowning as he approached. “Sir, were you looking for me?”
The man was dressed in formal clothing, with hair that had gone half-white and a pair of thick glasses, wearing the bone-deep fatigue that came with serious work. He had the unmistakable air of a university professor.
Jiang Chao looked Xu Ye over.
Jiang Ping had already told him everything worth knowing about this kid, so he didn’t bother with a roundabout approach — he extended his hand with a warm smile and introduced himself directly. “Hello. I’m Jiang Wei’s father.”
Jiang Wei’s father. The one who—
“Jiang — Uncle, what can I do for you?”
Jiang Chao was perfectly amiable. “Nothing in particular, really. I just wanted to have a brief chat, if you have a moment.”
“Of course.”
Xu Ye gestured toward the door. “Why don’t we step outside? The shop gets busy around now, and Jiang Wei might come by.”
Jiang Chao agreed readily, and within minutes he’d led Xu Ye out of the fruit shop and into his Volkswagen Phideon, [TL: 辉昂, a flagship full-size sedan in Volkswagen’s Chinese lineup — positioned as a premium domestic model, typically associated with officials and senior professionals] pulling out of campus before either of them had said much else.
Everything Xu Ye knew about Jiang Chao had come from Jiang Wei, and in his mind the picture had been of a fairly straightforward deadbeat — a man who’d walked out on his wife and daughter. But in those first two exchanges, something about the actual person in front of him didn’t quite match the image he’d built.
“Has Xiao Wei ever mentioned me to you?”
“She has.”
“What did she say?”
“Not a lot.” Xu Ye gave an honest answer. “But I’d say she probably hates you.”
Jiang Chao smiled a tired, rueful smile. He didn’t try to explain himself to an outsider — just said, with the measured weight of someone who’d rehearsed the thought many times: “I have let her down. But I’ve always loved her and her mother. There’s a very large misunderstanding between us.”
Every family had its own complicated story, and Xu Ye had no interest in inserting himself into this one. He cut to the point. “Uncle Jiang, I imagine you came here with something specific in mind. Go ahead and say it directly — no need to talk around it.”
Jiang Chao gave a small nod of appreciation. “How much money has Xiao Wei actually put into this vending machine business?”
“One hundred thousand.”
“As far as I know, she has three hundred thousand total.”
“The other two hundred is with me as well,” Xu Ye said. “She asked me to invest it in the stock market on her behalf. I agreed to pay her interest and a share of any returns.”
“The stock market?”
“Yes. If it’s a concern, I can return the money to her at any time.”
“That won’t be necessary for now.” Jiang Chao shook his head. “And please don’t tell her I came to see you today.”
“Understood.”
“How is the vending machine business doing?”
“Well. Net daily profit is around three thousand yuan. We’re heading into winter, so volume may dip a little, but it’ll stay profitable.”
“What are the next steps?”
“Scale up — get machines into more universities.”
“Do you have a plan?”
“With Director Jiang’s help, Songjiang campus should be sorted within the next two weeks. I’m also heading to Shanghai Institute of Technology tonight — same reason.”
Jiang Chao paused, then said with quiet authority: “Vending machines are the direction things are heading. Other players will notice this market soon. You’re going to face serious competition before long — which means you need to expand faster than you think.”
“I know. But we don’t have the right connections, so—”
Jiang Chao understood perfectly well what that meant — without the right doors opening, a few university students had no realistic path to scaling up. That was, in fact, exactly why he’d come today.
“My name is Jiang Chao,” he said. “I’m the associate dean of Fudan University’s School of Economics — you should be able to verify that on Fudan’s official website. The associate dean who oversees administration is a colleague of mine. Leave me your contact information, and once I’ve spoken with the university, I’ll have someone from their logistics department reach out to you directly.”
He pulled out his phone, then added: “Also, the vice-president of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics is a university classmate of mine — we both studied at the Toulouse School of Economics. [TL: TSE, one of France’s leading economics graduate institutions and a globally recognized research center — regularly attended by Chinese scholars and government-affiliated economists] He should be able to do me this favor as well. If that works out, you can expand there at the same time.”
“Thank you, Uncle Jiang.” Xu Ye felt his heart lurch into a full sprint, his hands and feet going slightly unsteady.
He’d assumed this man was a university professor. He had not expected Jiang Wei’s father to be the associate dean of Fudan University’s School of Economics.
For most university students, a professor was about as high up the social ladder as they could imagine reaching — and the associate dean of Fudan’s economics faculty was the kind of figure most people only ever encountered in lectures or on financial news programs.
Xu Ye had assumed Director Jiang Ping was the main connection Jiang Wei had brought to the table. He’d had no idea her father was an associate dean at Fudan. If he’d known that from the start, he probably would’ve recruited her even sooner.
In the world of campus business, personal connections mattered more than anything else. What took you weeks of grinding effort to engineer, the right person could accomplish with a single offhand word.
They exchanged contact details, and Jiang Chao said, “Everything I’ve done today, I’ve done for my daughter. So if Xiao Wei ever runs into trouble going forward, I hope you’ll tell me the first moment it happens.”
“I will.”
“You can get out here and walk back. And today — keep this between the two of us.”
“Understood.”
Xu Ye pushed open the door and watched the Volkswagen pull away until it disappeared.
“That was lucky. That was really lucky. That might be the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me.”
He was practically floating as he made his way back, barely keeping his feet on the ground.
By the time he got back to the shop and saw Jiang Wei sitting at the computer reviewing the morning’s sales data, he forced the excitement back down below the surface.
He placed a container of sliced watermelon in front of her, his expression the picture of flattery. “Campus belle of all campus belles, please honor us with your consumption of this watermelon.”
Jiang Wei looked up from the screen, genuinely puzzled, and stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Why are you being so generous today? Did the sun rise in the west?”
“Come on, I’m always generous.”
“Sure you are.” She’d already finished reviewing the data — she gave him a withering look, picked up the watermelon, and stood up to leave.
As she neared her dormitory, a video call notification came through — her grandmother.
She answered immediately.
“Grandma, have you eaten yet?”
A kind, gentle-looking elderly woman appeared on the screen, smiling. “I have, I have! Have you?”
“Of course! Look, Grandma — this is watermelon a friend gave me, it’s really sweet.”
“Sis, I want some too.”
A chubby little boy’s face squeezed into frame — twelve or thirteen, round and rosy-cheeked, with an inherently comic look about him.
His name was Zheng Heng, the son of Jiang Wei’s maternal aunt, and just like Jiang Wei, he’d grown up in their grandmother’s house from an early age. Technically cousins, the two of them were closer than most biological siblings.
Jiang Wei dangled the container toward the camera. “Here you go — help yourself.”
Zheng Heng rolled his eyes dramatically, turned, and stomped away in mock outrage.
Jiang Wei burst out laughing.
Seeing her granddaughter smile like that, the old woman’s face softened into a gentle, warm glow of her own.
(End of Chapter 110)