When Will My Childhood Sweetheart Marry Me?-Chapter 253: Xinyuan President

The little episode during the job interview was dismissed by Jiang Xubai as nothing more than a joke, and he spent the following weekend bunkered down in his dormitory, tweaking his résumé.

Looking over the thick stack of project experience in front of him, and recalling all the scenes from recent times, he realized that virtually none of the interviewers had been patient enough to go through his personal information in full.

Everyone says practice is more important than theory, but no matter how rich the experience, in the end it still frustratingly lost out to a diploma.

Feeling deflated, Jiang Xubai had lazed around in his dorm for two days.

Until the third morning, when he received a second-round interview notification from a company, Xinyuan Technology.

It was the very same gaming company to which he’d arrogantly demanded a salary of ten thousand.

And the person who interviewed him that day turned out to be the CEO of Xinyuan Technology, Lu Chen.

Jiang Xubai’s impression of Lu Chen was still stuck on the programming competition in the Capital three years ago.

Back then, the buzz during the competition was all about the sale of the Ligong University team’s product patent.

But for some reason, in the end, the project leader Lu Chen had publicly terminated the purchase and sale agreement with the sponsoring company in front of everybody.

Unexpectedly, after three years, while he was still scrambling for a job as a fresh graduate, the other person had become a company president with absolute authority.

The outcome was beyond what he expected.

On the afternoon when the second-round interview concluded, Xinyuan’s HR department sent a congratulatory message saying he had been formally hired, and the salary was as he had wished, no, even higher than he had expected.

After hanging up the phone, Jiang Xubai felt as if he were submerged in a dream, both real and surreal, as if just moments earlier he was navigating perilous mountains and then suddenly plummeted into the vast expanse of an open plain.

Everything felt so unreal.

Yet it had unmistakably happened.

At this moment, in the President’s Office of Xinyuan, just after the HR manager had left, the door to the lounge opened, and a mixed-race man came out with two glasses of red wine, signaling Lu Chen, "Sit down and have a drink."

Lu Chen frowned slightly, "When did you come in?"

Yuan Chong pretended to think hard for a moment: "About half an hour ago, you were probably still... on a date with your girlfriend."

"Xie Anyu and I broke up two months ago; she’s not my girlfriend anymore," Lu Chen sat down on the sofa and reminded the other person in a measured tone, "We’re just business partners now. Next time you come to Xinyuan, you better put on some face and make an appointment with my secretary. Don’t just walk into my office."

"Business partners?"

Yuan Chong pondered over the phrase.

Then he chuckled, "There’s an old Chinese saying, ’Don’t forget the well-digger when you drink from the well.’ There’s also another saying, ’Cross the river and tear down the bridge’ or ’Kill the donkey after grinding the mill.’

"Of course, comparing myself to a donkey doesn’t sound too smart, but President Lu, don’t forget, I was the one who put you in the position of CEO of Xinyuan two years ago, and in two more years, I can also leave you with nothing but the clothes on your back."

In the office, the man sat with his legs crossed on the sofa, the liquid in his glass shimmering a bloody red in the reflection of the light.

Those words—spoken in perfect Mandarin—were undoubtedly hitting Lu Chen’s sore spot.

Two years ago, Yuan Chong invested five million to help him start the company. The condition for this exchange was that he had to do everything within two years to make Xinyuan a leading IT enterprise in the Southwest Region.

With enough funds and connections, this goal was not difficult to achieve. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

Lu Chen couldn’t understand why a profit-driven person like Yuan Chong would invest heavily in him just to fulfill his ambition.

Ha, he wouldn’t believe it for a second.

Even if he suspected the other’s motives were impure, two years ago, Lu Chen, who was poor and had nothing, was so blinded by greed that his ambition easily overwhelmed all his rationality.

The temptation Yuan Chong threw out was simply too great, so great that he was willing to risk everything.

In just half a year, Xinyuan had smoothly gotten on track and rapidly became the new nobility in the gaming industry of Rong City.

Xinyuan continued to grow robustly, and with the sustained high-quality output of its blockbuster products, by the end of last year, the company’s annual financial report had surpassed three billion yuan.

Meanwhile, as the company’s top decision-maker, Lu Chen had also received considerable attention from industry media over the past two years.

But he hardly ever accepted interviews.

Because Lu Chen knew that all he had attained was not commendable.

Yuan Chong had used Xinyuan to, over the course of two years, forcefully suppress various small enterprises in the surrounding industry through all kinds of channels and methods.

He had made Lu Chen rebrand the competitors’ products, rename and relabel them with the Xinyuan tag, and pour large sums into advertising, claiming for himself the results that originally belonged to others ahead of time.

In the past two years, Xinyuan’s legal department had received enough infringement legal notices to pile higher than a person, yet all these cases fizzled out in the end.

Xinyuan was not short of funds, and behind them, Yuan Chong had a powerful network of connections to provide support.

For those small companies to think about regaining their patent rights through lawsuits was utterly unrealistic.

However, this year, Yuan Chong had become even more unscrupulous.

Recently, HT had set their sights on a new target, a local software development company in Rong City, Yunteng Technology.

Yunteng had been established for seven years now and was known not just for its products, but also for its excellent reputation. The fields it covered were extensive, including sectors crucial to public welfare like healthcare, wellness, and elder care.

Unlike the past outsourcing companies, most of the projects Yunteng was involved in were more or less linked to the higher-ups, which is to say, they had the support and supervision of the government.

Now, for some inexplicable reason, Yuan Chong decided to take action against Yunteng.

Such a risky move, akin to barefoot tightrope walking, was naturally met with Lu Chen’s unreserved refusal.

Because of this matter, he and Yuan Chong had ended several remote video meetings on sour notes.

But once a viper has its eye on its prey, it’s not easily deterred.

Any of the past misdeeds committed by Xinyuan, if exposed, would be enough to ruin Lu Chen’s reputation and bring him to his knees.

Yuan Chong tightly gripped Lu Chen’s lifeblood, and with a casual threat like what just occurred, Lu Chen didn’t even have the courage to retort.

This invisible standoff came to an end with the knock of the secretary.

"President Lu, President Wang from Hengke is here."

"Ask him to wait, please."

After the secretary left, Lu Chen turned his gaze back to the man on the sofa: "I have business to attend to, and I need to consider Yunteng’s matter for two more days. Mr. Yuan, please return for now."

Yuan Chong raised an eyebrow, put down his wine glass, stood up from the sofa, and walked toward Lu Chen.

"I don’t have that much patience," the man said, his smile turning cold, "I’ll give you one day to decide. I’ll be waiting for your answer at the hotel."

"President Lu is a smart man. There are many things I do not need to spell out for you; you should know what choices to make."

The door behind opened and then closed.

The departure of the mixed-blood man finally restored the silence in the air.

Lu Chen stood before the floor-to-ceiling windows, gazing at the high-rise buildings that rose and fell in the distance, and once again, that suffocating sense of emptiness enveloped him entirely.

Was all of this truly what he desired?

Lu Chen laughed mockingly to himself.

Perhaps that’s how people are, the more they have, the more they fear losing it.

He was tired of having nothing before, so the moment he chose to collaborate with Yuan Chong, he was destined to walk a path of no return.