"My first reaction was-he wanted something from me."
Ye Qingqing set down her teacup. Her voice was calm, but Song Guoan could hear the turmoil simmering beneath it.
"But I thought about it all night and still couldn't figure out what he was after."
"Qiu Ya's Autumn Forest Group is certainly valuable now, with a valuation of a trillion. But to people at the Ye Family's level, money matters far less than power."
"The same goes for your mining assets. They're nowhere near large enough to make the Ye Family bow its head."
"Besides, Ye Zhentian isn't a greedy man!"
As Song Guoan listened, his expression shifted again and again.
He had thought the extraordinary things that had happened to him lately were strange enough.
Now it seemed the changes on his wife's side were even harder to explain.
Ye Qingqing stood and slowly paced the living room.
Her mind raced.
More than a decade of upbringing in a powerful political family had instilled in her an almost obsessive vigilance toward anything that didn't add up.
"Let's go through it."
She raised her fingers, counting the points off one by one.
"First, the paperwork for those projects your company had been waiting on for half a year was all approved the day after Secretary Qi Tongwei took office. The vice president handling them hadn't even submitted the documents yet, and they were already stamped and sent back."
Song Guoan nodded, looking troubled.
"Second, the chairmen of the country's top ten jewelry giants personally led delegations to your door, one after another, asking to cooperate. You didn't set the terms. They voluntarily offered you a twenty-percent concession."
Song Guoan nodded again.
"Third, the Provincial Party Committee personally issued a document naming Changtian Group a 'Star Industry Leader,' along with a ten-year