Chapter 81 – Extra: Shen Ning × Lu Fengge
Lu Fengge called the housekeeper to ask what Shen Ning liked to eat.
The housekeeper said Shen Ning preferred Chinese food—soy milk in the morning, and rice with stir-fried dishes at noon.
Lu Fengge felt a pang of regret. No wonder Shen Ning had been so resistant when he’d given him milk and bread for breakfast.
He put rice on to cook and opened the fridge. His cooking skills weren’t great—he’d nearly burned an egg that morning—so at best he could only manage a simple dish of shredded pork with green peppers for Shen Ning.
At the same time, he also ordered a full lunch set by phone. Cooking was meant as an apology; there was no guarantee Shen Ning would want to eat it.
Food made by other chefs would serve as backup—he couldn’t let his wife go hungry again.
Once both the delivery and the dishes he’d cooked himself were ready, Lu Fengge found a small trolley, arranged seven or eight plates on it, and wheeled it into the bedroom.
“ Ningning, time to eat.”
Shen Ning had already calmed down. Seeing Lu Fengge speaking gently, he sat up in bed. At a glance through the colorful, fragrant spread, he spotted the plain-looking plate of shredded pork with green peppers.
“Did the chef mess this one up?”
Lu Fengge said, “I made that dish.”
Shen Ning picked up his small bowl of rice. His chopsticks hovered over the braised pork, shrimp balls, mixed vegetables, and other dishes—then, giving face, he first took a bite of the green pepper pork.
It looked like it would be hard to swallow. If he ate the delicacies first and then tried Lu Fengge’s cooking, the contrast would only make it taste worse.
So he might as well eat Lu Fengge’s dish first.
Lu Fengge had completely regained his composure and finally understood that he’d been jealous of “men of letters,” which was why Shen Ning had so easily stirred his anger. Now that he’d identified the root of the problem, his mindset was as steady as it was in the business world. So what if they were cultured? Who wasn’t cultured, anyway?
“I’m sorry. I never meant for you to repay me. I didn’t sleep with you for the sake of a child.”
Shen Ning’s rosy lips held the tip of the chopsticks as he scrutinized Lu Fengge. “Why did we argue in the first place?”
Lu Fengge replied, “Because you mentioned other literary men, and I got jealous.”
Shen Ning shook his head. “No. It was because you restricted my freedom to go out without any explanation. That made me angry.”
Even now, Lu Fengge still felt it was perfectly reasonable and had no intention of changing. “I had sufficient reason to require you to bring bodyguards.”
Shen Ning said, “Then did you explain it to me?”
Lu Fengge paused, then said, “No.”
Shen Ning asked, “Am I the kind of person who throws tantrums without reason?”
Lu Fengge answered firmly, “No.”
Shen Ning raised an eyebrow, swallowed a mouthful of rice, and said, “Honestly—then all that effort was for nothing.”
Lu Fengge fell silent. He didn’t quite understand how Shen Ning had arrived at the conclusion of “for nothing.”
“It wasn’t for nothing,” he said. “It was just ahead of time.”
Shen Ning’s black-and-white eyes snapped toward him in shock. “Ahead of time?”
Lu Fengge said, “I like you. I want to pursue you.”
Shen Ning asked, “You think you’re guaranteed to succeed?”
Lu Fengge didn’t answer. Even if he failed, there were other methods.
Shen Ning said, “You didn’t come home for a year, and the moment you do, you tell me you like me?”
Lu Fengge was momentarily at a loss for words. Not knowing how to explain, he picked up a shrimp ball and held it near Shen Ning’s chopsticks. “Stop eating the green peppers.”
When Shen Ning married him in alliance, he’d just graduated from university—barely in his early twenties, young and beautiful. Lu Fengge hadn’t dared come home often, afraid Shen Ning would feel uncomfortable. Entering marriage too early, living day in and day out with a partner chosen through alliance, could easily breed resistance.
Lu Fengge felt they needed a buffer period. Later, when Shen Ning wrote poems to tease him, he thought the distance could be shortened—but in truth, he’d been indulging his own wishful thinking.
Shen Ning picked up a shrimp ball and then put it back down. “The Chinese language is vast and profound. There are many things whose context I still can’t grasp.”
Just like how he couldn’t tell whether Lu Fengge’s actions were born of concern-induced panic or old-fashioned authoritarianism.
“If you don’t explain clearly, how am I supposed to know? You think handing me a shrimp ball means I’ll understand?” Shen Ning said.
Left with no choice, Lu Fengge began from the very beginning—from the moment he’d received Shen Ning’s letters home.
Shen Ning held his bowl, eating rice with the stir-fried pork, listening with keen interest as if he were hearing a storyteller.
Those scraps of paper he’d sent out, which he himself had considered worthless, had been treated by Lu Fengge like exam papers for reading comprehension. Shen Ning felt a small, secret sense of pride.
Lu Fengge had treated him as the question-setter, carefully inferring his intentions—didn’t that prove his Chinese was excellent?
“How do I know you didn’t make all this up to fool me?” Shen Ning asked.
Lu Fengge took Shen Ning’s letters out of the safe.
Shen Ning grew even more pleased, the corners of his mouth lifting high. Things he’d tossed into the wastebasket had gone unnoticed; things he’d mailed to Lu Fengge had been appreciated line by line.
That happiness vanished the moment he saw the misspelled characters circled in pen.
“Take them away!” Shen Ning snapped.
When Lu Fengge tried to put them back in the safe, Shen Ning said coldly, “Burn them.”
Lu Fengge ignored him and locked the safe.
Shen Ning frowned. He intended to become a great literary master one day, yet his dark history was in Lu Fengge’s hands. Was he supposed to burn the safe too?
The safe was built into the wardrobe. Destroying it would mean setting the bedroom on fire—and getting arrested.
“You write calligraphy better than I do. Were you laughing at me inside?” Shen Ning asked.
Lu Fengge said, “No. You’ve improved a lot. Every letter shows clear progress.”
“The first few times we met, you hardly spoke. I thought you’d entered the marriage at your parents’ command and were in a bad mood.”
Shen Ning said, “No—it was because my spoken Chinese wasn’t very good back then.” It had been a grand gathering of business elites, all speaking in refined, flowery language. Shen Ning didn’t want to speak a foreign language, nor did he want to embarrass himself.
He knew how to hide his shortcomings. In any case, he didn’t need to speak much—Lu Fengge was perfectly adept at polite conversation, navigating the scene as effortlessly as the business world.
That day, Shen Ning had thought him nothing more than a merchant reeking of money.
But in truth, his husband was a… great talent?
“All right. You do have some culture. I’ll allow you to cultivate feelings with me,” Shen Ning declared generously after finishing his meal and setting down his bowl.
“Thank you,” Lu Fengge said. Seeing Shen Ning had eaten his fill, he added in a prim, righteous tone, “Lift the covers—I want to take a look.”
Shen Ning asked, “Look at what?”
Lu Fengge said, “Everything.”
Shen Ning saw the ointment Lu Fengge had somehow produced. He rejected Lu Fengge’s overly nimble fingers and refused the medication. “I want to sleep for a while.”
Lu Fengge couldn’t persuade him and could only put the ointment into the bedside drawer. “Would you be willing to attend an evening banquet with me tonight?”
“It’s an internet industry exchange meeting. Not many people. No reporters.”
Shen Ning thought about it under the covers. “All right.” Since Lu Fengge needed him to accompany him for socializing, of course he should appear in full dress.
This was his first time appearing publicly with Lu Fengge. After lying down for three hours, Shen Ning got up to choose clothes—first his own, then a matching tie for Lu Fengge.
Lu Fengge had only tied his tie halfway when he saw the one Shen Ning brought over. With a flick of his fingers, he untied it immediately and put on the new one.
With the resilient body of a flower god, Shen Ning recovered quickly. He sat energetically on the sofa, waiting for Lu Fengge.
“You’re so slow.”
Unhurried, Lu Fengge took one suit and one casual outfit of Shen Ning’s from the wardrobe. “From now on, you should keep two sets of clothes in my car as well.”
Shen Ning said, “Sure, but it’s unnecessary.”
Lu Fengge replied, “There will be times when it’s needed.”
Lu Fengge planned to invest in certain internet industries and sought Shen Ning’s opinion—Shen Ning had more exposure to these things abroad.
After some brief greetings upon entering, the organizer took the stage and delivered the opening speech.
His tone was impassioned and stirring, working hard to persuade traditional industry leaders to invest in mobile internet, hoping domestic capital could seize discourse power in the field.
Shen Ning sat in the front row beside Lu Fengge, gazing at the speaker with admiration. Wow—parallel sentences made of idioms. No wonder the momentum was overwhelming; listening to it made one want to invest immediately.
“He’s very eloquent,” Shen Ning whispered to Lu Fengge. “He used twenty-six idioms.”
Lu Fengge said honestly, “The script was probably written by a secretary.”
Shen Ning said, “That’s malicious speculation.”
Lu Fengge replied, “If you like wordplay and classical allusions, I can try my hand too.”
Shen Ning tilted his ear. “Wait—hold on. I didn’t quite catch that. Did you deliberately use idioms so I wouldn’t understand?”
Lu Fengge took a deep breath. “Shen Ning, isn’t that a bit of a double standard?”
When others used idioms, it was erudition; when he used them, it was pretension?
Shen Ning asked, “What’s a double standard?”
Lu Fengge said, “Treating people differently.”
Shen Ning looked at him in confusion. “Because when others speak, I don’t need to understand the meaning of every word—they just have to sound beautiful. But your words—I need to understand them clearly.”
Lu Fengge felt his heart struck hard. Did Shen Ning realize how direct that was? “Sorry. I was being narrow-minded.”
Shen Ning said, “You are narrow-minded. From now on, you’re not allowed to use idioms.”
After saying that, he gazed at the speaker onstage again with sparkling eyes. “He really is very eloquent.”
Lu Fengge protested, “Obscure and convoluted.”
Shen Ning shot him a glare—don’t you dare keep talking.
Lu Fengge felt both pleased and stifled. Full of talent yet unable to show it, he could only speak in plain terms to Shen Ning. Would Shen Ning still look up to him that way?
After the speaker stepped down, he came straight over and asked Lu Fengge, “President Lu, would you like to say a few words onstage?”
Lu Fengge replied, “No.”
He’d brought Shen Ning today to spend money—to invest in internet ventures. Every yuan spent would yield equity, half of which belonged to Shen Ning.
This was far beyond the cliché of a domineering CEO taking a naïve lover shopping—several zeros more, with billions as the starting unit.
Gradually, people realized that the one making investment decisions was Young Master Shen. They all gathered around Shen Ning to introduce themselves.
Lu Fengge merely stood guard like a bodyguard.
Who said the alliance between the Lu and Shen families was on shaky ground? Their relationship was clearly excellent. If not for Shen Ning’s highly professional conversation, people might have suspected Lu Fengge had lost his mind, letting Shen Ning make all the calls.
That night, neither of them knew how much money they spent—only that the number was numbing.
Lu Fengge’s year of hard work in Hong Kong was invested away by Shen Ning without a blink.
Shen Ning spoke a great deal. On the way home, he felt that the actual work of cooperating with these companies should still be handled by Lu Fengge.
“I’m going to sleep,” Shen Ning said, rolling himself into the blankets. “You’re not allowed to hold me tonight.”
Especially not with two hands and three legs.
Lu Fengge agreed on the surface. But late at night, once Shen Ning was fast asleep, he secretly checked him over.
Things were fine—not like what he’d learned online.
Over the next few days, Lu Fengge devoted himself wholeheartedly to pursuing Shen Ning.
Shen Ning deliberately pretended not to understand, forcing him to rephrase a sentence in three different ways.
Lu Fengge didn’t find it troublesome at all. Whenever he unconsciously used an idiom or allusion, he’d stop like a talking dictionary and give a definition.
Shen Ning’s Chinese improved at lightning speed. Whenever he had time, he’d read through idiom collections.
In fact, he could already understand quite a lot.
Shen Ning wasn’t stupid. As his Chinese improved, the limitations imposed by the language system on his intellect were lifted. The first thing he discovered after that mental unshackling was that his pregnancy was fake.
At that time, Shen Ning’s father happened to come to Nan Cheng to visit him at the Lu residence.
“If you’re not used to it here, you can come home and stay for a while,” Father Shen said again.
Lu Fengge said, “I’ll take good care of Ningning.”
Shen Ning said, “…Dad—ugh—” Smelling the creamy scent of the food, he reflexively covered his mouth.
Father Shen reacted even faster than Lu Fengge. Shocked, he thought: Lu Fengge had only been back for twenty days—already?! Wasn’t this blatantly taking advantage of kindness to demand repayment?
