Yan Jinyue arched an eyebrow. "You have an objection?"
Jiang Yuzhuo hurriedly shook his head. "No, no, no."
"So, Brother Yan, what compensation would you like?"
Yan Jinyue said, "Whatever I ask for?"
Jiang Yuzhuo looked pained, but he still nodded. Without Yan Jinyue's help, how could his grandfather possibly have handed Grand Prosperity over to him?
Yan Jinyue stopped teasing him and turned serious. "I'll handle the drugging at this banquet."
This matter involved Ji Hanxing. Yan Jinyue had a little agenda of his own and did not want anyone else investigating it.
Jiang Yuzhuo was overjoyed, his eyes going perfectly round. "Really!"
"Brother Yan, you're practically my own brother!"
He had actually investigated it himself, but he simply could not uncover anything. People from all sorts of factions had attended the business networking conference, a mixed crowd of good and bad. How could a rookie like him possibly get to the bottom of it?
Even Yan Jinyue had fallen victim, after all.
"But," Yan Jinyue changed tack, "Ji Hanxing was hit out of nowhere. You'll handle that yourself."
"If he lets it slide, all well and good."
"But if he pursues it and blows this up..."
Jiang Yuzhuo said, "I understand, I understand."
He quickly glanced at Yan Jinyue and ventured in a quiet voice, "Brother Yan, since you and President Ji already did that, couldn't you put in a good word for me?"
Yan Jinyue gave him a sidelong look. "What relationship do I have with him?"
Jiang Yuzhuo had just opened his mouth. He had guessed what had happened between them when he watched the surveillance footage, but before he could say anything, he caught the warning in Yan Jinyue's eyes. He instantly shut his mouth and hurriedly shook his head.
"Brother Yan, should I give you the master copy of the surveillance footage from outside room 5108?"
Yan Jinyue considered it for a moment. "Keep it for now. If Ji Hanxing asks you for it, give it to him."
He had a feeling Ji Hanxing would ask Jiang Yuzhuo for that footage. Yan Jinyue wanted to see just what Ji Hanxing intended to do.
Yan Jinyue said, "Also, remove all those chains from the suite."
He looked at Jiang Yuzhuo with distaste. When had even Jiang Yuzhuo's taste deteriorated?
Putting chains in a presidential suite, of all places.
Jiang Yuzhuo gave him a teasing look. "Brother Yan, that's a good thing. Didn't you use it that day?"
"You have no idea how pleased some VIP guests are with these things I prepared..."
Yan Jinyue's gaze hardened, and Jiang Yuzhuo jolted. "I'll have someone remove them right away!"
Meanwhile, Ji Hanxing underwent the examinations Director Xu had arranged. All the results showed that his body had returned to normal and he could be discharged.
Xue Hui handled Ji Hanxing's discharge paperwork. As soon as Ji Hanxing left the hospital, Director Xu called Fu Fangxi to inform him of Ji Hanxing's discharge.
Sitting in the back of the car, Ji Hanxing savored the comfort of the luxury vehicle, his body relaxing against the seat like a puddle of mud.
[Ding! Host, please maintain the commanding, domineering presence of a bossy CEO while in public!]
Ji Hanxing fought the urge to roll his eyes. "I just got out of the hospital. This is perfectly in character."
[Host, having just left the hospital, you can cultivate an air of fragility, rather than being like this.]
Ji Hanxing said, "Like what? Don't I look fragile enough?"
The original owner looked exactly like him, and he was very confident in his own face!
Who wouldn't be dazzled by this face?
He had just left the hospital. How did he not look fragile?
The system fell silent.
It could not refute him. Ji Hanxing wore a white shirt today, with wispy bangs over his forehead and thin, faintly pink lips. Sunlight streamed through the car window onto his face, and his thick, long, curled lashes cast shadows across it. He did indeed have an air of fragility.
But why did it feel as though something was off?
Strange.
That atmosphere left even his assistant Xue Hui, who had turned to look back from the front passenger seat, momentarily stunned. His professionalism quickly brought him back to his senses, however, and he hastily looked away, handing Ji Hanxing the documents he held.
"President Ji, please take a look."
Ji Hanxing took them. "What's this?"
Xue Hui said, "President Ji, these are the materials concerning your accident at the Grand Prosperity Hotel, where you were struck by an object, along with the materials compiled by our Ji Group Legal Department."
"We were just waiting for you to recover and make a decision."
Ji Hanxing flipped through a few pages. When he saw the passage that read, "struck by an unidentified object, which subsequently vanished without a trace," he felt a twinge of guilt.
He had already asked the system why it had used that method. The system said it had expended too much energy bringing his soul into this world and could not conceal its physical form.
Fine. Although Ji Hanxing did not want to be controlled by the system, he was grateful that it had given him a chance to live. He only hoped they could work well together from now on.
Seeing Ji Hanxing's gaze linger on that line, Xue Hui said, "President Ji, based on this, we can reasonably suspect Grand Prosperity of withholding physical evidence."
Ji Hanxing's lips twitched. That unidentified object was currently inside his head. Where could anyone find it?
Grand Prosperity really was being wrongfully accused.
No, Grand Prosperity was not entirely innocent. The original owner had been drugged while attending the business networking conference at the Grand Prosperity Hotel. There was no getting around that.
Ji Hanxing glanced at Xue Hui, who sat diagonally ahead of him. He probably did not know about this.
Apart from the two of them, probably only those who had seen the hotel's surveillance footage knew about what had happened between him and Yan Jinyue.
Even from the footage, they should only know that the two of them had slept in the same suite that night.
Still, for the sake of his own life, he had to keep this tightly under wraps.
Ji Hanxing continued leafing through the documents in his hands. "Has anyone from Grand Prosperity contacted you over the past few days?"
Xue Hui said, "No."
Ji Hanxing nodded and asked no more questions. As he read the documents, he drew on the original owner's memories to sort through City A's current established and wealthy families, along with their respective spheres of influence and fields of business.
If City A's powers were divided into tiers, the Ji Family to which Ji Hanxing belonged could only be considered mid-level. It had risen with his grandfather Ji Qingyuan's generation and had once enjoyed glory, but unfortunately, the original owner's father, Ji Changhe, was a spendthrift fool who could not think straight.
Ji Changhe's marriage to the original owner's mother, Ms. Luo Feiluo, had been a business alliance to begin with, with little affection between them. Ji Changhe had been a playboy in his youth and frequently cheated even after marrying. Ms. Luo knew about all of it and collected the evidence.
After Ms. Luo gave birth to Ji Hanxing, she presented the evidence of Ji Changhe's affairs to the heads of both the Ji and Luo families. Old Master Ji found it humiliating and asked Ms. Luo how she wanted to handle it.
Who could have imagined that Ms. Luo would make a decision no one expected? She left behind the original owner, who was barely a year old, and chose divorce.
Taking the assets allocated to her by the Ji Family and her own dowry, she went abroad.
Naturally, the original owner was left in Old Master Ji's care. Ji Changhe spent his days drinking and womanizing, so how could he have any energy to manage the Ji Group? Rats had gotten into the Ji Group's granary. By the time Old Master Ji discovered them, more than half the Ji Group had been hollowed out, and its holdings had shrunk drastically.
Only when Old Master Ji investigated further did he discover that the source of the company's infestation was actually Ji Changhe's mistress, his new favorite.
Even more unexpectedly, this woman had turned Ji Changhe from a dissolute playboy into a devoted lover. He insisted on protecting her no matter what, so Old Master Ji threw Ji Changhe out of the house. The next day, he learned that Ji Changhe had gone abroad with his young mistress.
Remembering this tangled mess of the original owner's family affairs gave Ji Hanxing a headache.
"Isn't the original owner the male lead? Why is his life so miserable?"
The system's tone suggested it was only natural. [A bossy CEO wounded by his family of origin like this is simply waiting for the innocent, delicate female lead to heal and save him!]