Return of the Antagonistic Lady Boss

Chapter 864 - 838: The Vicissitudes of the Righteous Path

"You’re really that heartless? She missed you for so long, looked forward to you for so long, met you once and carved you straight into her heart~"

Xiaoqiang glanced at her, half amused, half helpless. "Are you singing a little ditty at me?"

The last few lines even rhymed!

"I was just objectively giving my opinion."

"Cut it out. If you were being objective, you wouldn’t say that. Back then, when I was on duty I’d do everything in my power to save people, but beyond that I didn’t need to put in any emotional investment at all. Especially with women—I absolutely couldn’t have any kind of relationship. Once the mission was over, we were strangers. That’s all."

He was different from Second Brother. Second Brother looked cold on the outside but was actually deeply attached. Second Brother always kept that little girl he had saved in mind, while Yu Minglang felt absolutely nothing toward the people he had rescued.

When it came to saving people, he would give it his all, but afterward he would never let any of that bleed into his own life. The past was the past.

"You handled that very well; that’s exactly how it should be. From a professional standpoint, there are some jobs that require you to empathize with the people you work with, but that empathy can’t go too far."

Once it goes too far, it easily rebounds and hits you instead.

Like psychiatrists with depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder—those are people who can’t find their way out.

Yu Minglang was obviously someone who could find his way out.

"Hmph, you woman, I don’t even want to say it." Yu Minglang snorted. He knew perfectly well she saw everything crystal clear, but she’d still deliberately said the opposite just to test him. If he’d really acted toward that fat girl the way Second Brother had treated Da Yi back then, his wife would probably have come up with eighteen different torture methods to deal with him.

All just tricks!

"I was just analyzing the problem objectively, okay? Looking at it this way, Second Brother and Da Yi have something in common. Birds of a feather flock together—Second Brother is devoted, and so is Da Yi. I’m currently working on training her to separate her feelings at work from those in life. She’s doing pretty well."

If a therapist’s empathy goes too far and they stay trapped in that emotion until the work is over, case after case piling up, the psychologist will eventually develop a heart-sickness that’s hard to cure.

"Speaking of Da Yi, I’m actually curious—what exactly are your rules for making friends? You’re a little too good to Da Yi and Shi Tou and the others."

Yu Minglang had always felt that his wife’s bottom line for making friends was a mystery.

Each friend she made had a completely different personality. There was a gourd like Da Yi, an energetic girl like Shi Tou, a career-elite like Water Fairy, and someone like Qiuqiu with gender identity issues.

It didn’t seem to have anything to do with their status or personalities, yet she was especially close to these people.

It was actually the ones who approached her with ulterior motives that Qian always treated with a lukewarm attitude.

"It’s fate between people, I guess. You can also think of it as a psychologist’s intuition. When I feel that someone absolutely won’t betray me, I place her inside my inner line of defense. If I sense that no matter how much I give, there will never be any return, I keep a respectful distance."

"Oh?"

"There’s a type of person in this world whose sense of self towers above everything else in their world. They love themselves more than anyone. Any goodwill they feel toward others is built on the precondition that those people are useful to them. For example, that fat girl just now, and my homeroom teacher in high school. She helped Chen Lin hide my admission notice."

"I remember. Her family is still thinking about how to get revenge on you." Yu Minglang had a deep impression of that incident.

The kleptomaniac kid had later been kidnapped; Yu Minglang and Qian had saved her, but she didn’t even say thank you. Instead she blamed Qian, and now she wanted to mess things up in the competition.

"In psychology, we call that a selfish mindset. Everyone is born with selfishness, but the degree of it differs. That fat girl just now, and my homeroom teacher’s family, they’ve both gone way overboard. Speaking of which, I have to complain a little—Mr. Qio actually mocked me for handling things in too ’saintly’ a way."

"Eh? The weirdo who keeps wanting to take you on as his disciple?"

"That’s him!" Qian got mad just thinking about Mr. Qio criticizing her way of handling things.

"I really ought to bite you a few times!"

Xiaoqiang blinked.

"He pissed you off, why are you biting me?" Innocent bystander?

"If I hadn’t met you, would I be this careful and cautious, constantly reminding myself that I have a certain identity and can’t do anything out of line? I do everything now within the rules. They should give me a Good Citizen Award!"

Xiaoqiang nodded with considerable pride.

"You’ve got to maintain that level of ideological awareness. Only those who walk straight and stand upright can make it to the end."

"Tch! Meeting you, I really admit defeat!" Qian flipped him the middle finger.

"If anyone’s getting an award, it shouldn’t be you, it should be me. Without my constant ideological work with you, how could my wife be this charming? Remember this, wife: the righteous path in the human world is rough and steep."

Yeah, the righteous path in the human world is rough and steep... Qian silently savored his words in her heart.

Some of her behavior really was different from her previous life. And not just her—Zheng Xu had changed a lot as well.

In her last life, Zheng Xu definitely wasn’t a good person, but in this life, all the businesses he ran were legal. All because Qian, this top-notch strategist, was giving him advice from behind the scenes. Thinking about it this way, her rebirth could be considered a blessing for quite a few people.

"I’ll go talk to them later and see if we can get you to give a professional lecture to our upper management at work, raise their ideological awareness. There are many ways to achieve a goal; since we have the ability to use aboveboard methods to achieve what we want, why resort to dirty tricks?"

Yu Minglang had always felt there was no sense of achievement in using the wrong methods to punish people who were in the wrong.

He came from a very strict family and had always known what he could and couldn’t do. From the moment Qian chose him, she had slowly drawn closer to him as well. Maybe that was fate.

With a few competition experiences under her belt, Qian couldn’t get nervous at all about this kind of domestic contest. The day before the competition, she ate and drank as usual. If she hadn’t been worried about oversleeping, she’d have wanted to roll around in bed with Xiaoqiang.

The written preliminary round was held in a studio. All the contestants answered questions on computers. The giant LCD screen behind them was provided by the sponsors and displayed the questions in sync for viewers in front of their TVs. The computers they used were still those big-headed ones, but for the country at the time, they were already advanced.

Qian was the first to press the buzzer, signaling that she had finished.

The camera gave Qian a close-up, enough to leave a deep impression on the audience.

Looks really do matter; they can make you stand out from the crowd. Especially that little mark on Qian’s forehead—it was unforgettable at a glance.

At this moment in their home in Q City, Jia Xiufang was sitting on the sofa watching her daughter’s competition intently. Once she heard that the kid would be on, she rallied the whole family to watch. Mr. Liao, although he didn’t really understand, still put on his glasses and sat with his wife to watch.

Fugui held a pen, answering the questions along with the show. When he finished, he let out a sigh.

"What is it, Fugui? Why are you sighing?"