Chapter 26: The So-Called Psychological Game Is Entrusting Your Life to You

Gu Chen huddled under the blanket, only his pair of faintly glowing peach blossom eyes visible. 

He lazily rolled over.

“President Qin, with that frustrated and unsatisfied look on your face, you look exactly like a female bandit who just suffered a crushing defeat.”

“Defeat?” 

Qin Hongyi laughed angrily, kneeling on the edge of the bed with one knee. 

“Gu Mingzhe is dead, the fake seal is shattered. That old fox Qin Mu is probably throwing a helpless tantrum at the entrance of the black vault right now. This round, we clearly won big time.”

“Win my ass.”

Gu Chen reached out and grabbed at the air a couple of times, as if trying to seize some nonexistent intelligence.

“If we can’t find the real seal, that hundred billion in funds we hold is nothing but dead money. 

All Qin Mu has to do is lock down the Gu family’s firewall, and we’ll be turtles trapped in a jar—a complete dead end.”

“So what?” Qin Hongyi raised an eyebrow. 

Her fingertips lifted a strand of Gu Chen’s damp hair and toyed with it. 

“Since Young Master Gu managed to strategize so masterfully at Night Color, you must have a backup plan, right? Don’t tell me you swallowed the real seal like a snack.”

Gu Chen slapped her hand away and sat up straight.

The blanket slipped down, revealing the kiss mark on his collarbone. 

It was the one Qin Hongyi had left when she fed him her blood earlier. 

The red mark was strikingly vivid.

“Qin Hongyi.” 

Gu Chen suddenly dropped his smile and called her by her full name. 

“Do you still remember five years ago, the first time I shorted the Qin Corporation?”

Qin Hongyi’s face darkened.

“Obviously. 

That day, the Qin Corporation’s market value evaporated by thirty billion. 

You bastard even specially sent me a ‘celebratory’ gift to mark my grand commercial Waterloo as President Qin.”

Mentioning that gift made Qin Hongyi’s fists harden.

It was a pure gold turtle, so ugly it could shock the heavens and move the earth to tears.

A massive golden bastard.

When that thing arrived at Qin Hongyi’s office, every face in the boardroom turned green.

Gu Chen had even left an extremely punchable message on the card: 

“Hongyi, walk slowly. 

The road is slippery—don’t fall. 

Keep this golden turtle to calm your nerves.”

“Where is that thing now?” 

Gu Chen asked.

“Threw it away,” 

Qin Hongyi replied irritably.

Gu Chen’s smile froze instantly. 

“You threw it away?”

“What else was I supposed to do? 

Keep it to stew soup for the New Year?” 

Qin Hongyi got off the bed and walked to the wine cabinet to pour a drink. 

Her back view looked particularly cold and ruthless. 

“That same day, I had someone toss it into the gold smelting furnace and melt it down. 

They turned it into a hundred gold rings the size of fingernails and gave them all to the cleaning ladies.”

Gu Chen: “…”

The air fell silent for three seconds.

“Qin Hongyi, you son of a bitch.”

Gu Chen pressed on his throbbing temple, his voice collapsing. 

“That thing had lead inside with only gold plating on the outside. 

It was worth maybe twenty thousand yuan at most. 

You melted it? 

Were you afraid the Qin Corporation’s smelting furnace wasn’t clogged enough?”

Qin Hongyi turned around. 

Her eyes flickered slightly. 

“None of your business. 

Once it’s in my hands, it’s mine. 

If I want to melt it, I will. 

Rich people can afford to be willful.”

Gu Chen stared straight into her eyes.

Thanks to the Eden Project’s enhancements, his vision allowed him to precisely catch the momentary change in Qin Hongyi’s pupils and the guilty tension in her neck muscles.

This woman was lying.

“You’re lying.”

Gu Chen declared confidently. 

He threw off the blanket and stepped barefoot onto the floor, advancing toward her step by step.

“Qin Hongyi, you’re someone who clings to the past. 

Even more than that, you’re a perverted grudge-holder. 

The humiliation I gave you, you would engrave into your bones and look at every single day to remind yourself to kill me.”

He reached Qin Hongyi. 

Their breaths intertwined.

“You didn’t throw that turtle away at all,” 

Gu Chen said in a low voice. 

“Tell me. 

Where is it?”

Her thoughts exposed, Qin Hongyi’s earlobes grew inexplicably hot. 

Yet she stubbornly kept her expression from collapsing.

It was true.

That grotesquely ugly golden turtle—she hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw it away or melt it.

It was the first item Gu Chen had sent her while truly recognizing her as his opponent.

Over the past five years, whenever she felt like giving up, a single glance at that hideous golden turtle and the memory of Gu Chen’s face would instantly refill her energy, reigniting her will to fight this damned world to the bitter end.

“It’s in the car.” 

Qin Hongyi turned her head away. 

Her voice dropped significantly. 

“In the trunk’s storage compartment, being used as a jack.”

“…”

Gu Chen took a deep breath, suppressing the urge to strangle her. 

“Have someone bring it up. 

Right now. 

Immediately.”

Ten minutes later.

Buddha entered the room carrying the heavy object with an expression that screamed he didn’t understand but was utterly shocked.

“President Qin, here’s the… uh… postmodern art piece you requested.”

Under the lights, a golden turtle the size of a basketball appeared. 

Its design was extremely exaggerated, and its expression was incredibly punchable as it held its head high, seemingly mocking all living beings.

Gu Chen looked at the object and fell silent for a moment.

His straight-male aesthetic from back then had indeed been quite ahead of its time.

“What do you want with this piece of junk?” 

Qin Hongyi crossed her arms, her face full of disgust. 

“Has Young Master Gu gone crazy from poverty? 

Planning to scrape off the gold plating and sell it for cash?”

“Sell it for money?”

Gu Chen let out a cold laugh and casually picked up the pure silver cigar cutter from the coffee table.

“This piece of trash could buy ten Qin Corporations with money to spare.”

Before the words even faded, a flash of cold light appeared!

The scissors in his hand did not strike the turtle shell. 

Instead, they precisely inserted into the turtle’s wide-open mouth, pressing against an unremarkable protrusion on the upper palate.

Click.

A crisp mechanical sound rang out.

Gu Chen twisted his wrist and pressed down hard.

The originally seamless golden turtle’s shell split open layer by layer like a blooming lotus, revealing the dark inner chamber.

Qin Hongyi was stunned. 

“This is a mechanism?”

“It’s a variant of the Luban lock.” 

Gu Chen tossed the scissors aside and reached into the dusty cavity. 

His fingertips touched a cool, smooth surface.

He slowly pulled his hand back.

A seal entirely blood-red like crimson jade, carved with a qilin gazing at the moon totem, rested in his fair palm.

Even in the warmly heated room, the seal emitted a bone-piercing chill—the kind of eternal frost that had lingered at the bottom of Changbai Mountain’s Heavenly Pool for ten thousand years.

The real seal.

The only physical key to the SSS-level black vault.

Qin Hongyi’s eyes sharpened. 

She stared fixedly at the seal, then at the cracked-open ugly golden turtle beside it.

“You…” 

Qin Hongyi’s voice was dry. 

“You hid something this important inside the junk you gave me?”

“The most dangerous place is the safest place. 

Do you understand what top-tier psychological warfare means?”

Gu Chen played with the seal in his hand. 

“Who would have thought that the lifeblood of the dignified heir to the Gu family would spend five years serving as a jack in his archenemy’s trunk?”

“Gu Chen!” 

Qin Hongyi sounded somewhat furious. 

It was the shame and anger of being intellectually dominated, mixed with an indescribable shock.

This damn man had calculated this far five years ago?

Or perhaps…

“Don’t flatter yourself.”

Gu Chen saw through her thoughts and said indifferently, 

“Five years ago, Qin Mu had already begun laying his plans. 

My surroundings were filled with spies. 

The only thing I could be sure of was that you, Qin Hongyi, hated me to the core. 

You would never give my belongings to anyone else, nor would you let those old geezers from the Gu family touch anything of yours.”

“So, you were the only safe vault.”

As he spoke, Gu Chen casually tossed the seal to Qin Hongyi.

Qin Hongyi caught it instinctively.

It was ice-cold to the bone.

“Take it.” 

Gu Chen turned and walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, looking out at the pitch-black rainy night. 

“Since it was already with you five years ago, it’s time to return it to its rightful owner. 

The black vault password is your birthday.”

“My birthday?” 

Qin Hongyi’s hand holding the seal trembled.

“Don’t misunderstand.” 

Gu Chen didn’t turn his head. 

“It was simply the easiest number to remember so I wouldn’t forget it. 

Besides, using my archenemy’s birthday as the password means that if anyone enters it wrong, I can conveniently frame you. 

Two birds with one stone.”

This reasoning was very Gu Chen.

Qin Hongyi stared at his back. 

His long black hair cascaded like a waterfall, and his figure was graceful and slender. 

Yet that soul was as hard as stone.

She suddenly felt the seal in her hand turn scorching hot, as if she were holding Gu Chen’s heart—one that could never be warmed, yet he had entrusted his life to her.

“Stop talking nonsense.” 

Qin Hongyi took a deep breath and pocketed the seal. 

“With this, tomorrow I can make Qin Mu kneel and call me Daddy. 

However…”

She walked up behind Gu Chen, her brows slightly furrowed. 

“The bottom of this seal feels wrong.”

In that earlier moment, she had sensed some extremely fine patterns on the base of the seal besides the name.

Gu Chen turned around.

“President Qin’s hands are quite sensitive.”

He pulled out a high-magnification loupe from under the coffee table and turned on his phone’s flashlight, shining the light from the side.

“This isn’t just the key to the black vault.” 

Gu Chen’s voice deepened, carrying a murderous intent. 

“It’s also the final life-saving charm left by my deceased old man.”

The light beam pierced through the blood jade.

It projected an enlarged red shadow onto the wall.

It wasn’t an ordinary seal-script name.

Hidden within the brushstrokes of the characters for “Gu Chen” was an incredibly complex micro-engraved map.

Mountain ranges, rivers, latitude and longitude coordinates…

And at the very center of the map was a strange symbol.

A snake biting its own tail.