"Yifei, do you happen to know where Meijia has vanished to over the past couple of days?"
Adrian Li, who hadn't stepped foot into the downstairs bar of the iPartment complex for several days, strolled over to the leather booth and casually addressed Hu Yifei, who was sitting on the sofa staring blankly into space.
"Ah!"
Yifei immediately gasped loudly and jumped up off the leather cushion, her violent reaction attracting the curious gazes of several surrounding patrons.
"What on earth is wrong?" Adrian asked, raising an amused eyebrow.
"It's nothing! It's absolutely nothing!" Yifei stammered incoherently, her hands waving frantically in the air. "Meijia... Meijia has just been terribly sick these past few days! Yes! She's sick in bed!"
Zeng Xiaoxian, who was sitting across from her, squinted in confusion. "Wait a second, when did Meijia fall sick? And speaking of missing people, what about Ziqiao? I haven't seen that guy's face in days either!"
"Drink your damn beer and stop blabbering nonsense!" Yifei aggressively grabbed the open beer bottle off the table and shoved the glass neck directly against Zeng Xiaoxian's lips, forcibly forcing him to swallow back whatever he was about to say.
"Feifei, who is this gentleman?"
The young couple sitting next to Yifei didn't show any shock at her aggressive behavior, likely because they had already grown entirely accustomed to her volatile, violent personality.
The speaker was a stunning young woman with a sweet, radiant smile, wearing large, fashionable statement earrings and boasting long, flowing hair.
"Wanyu, this is our Landlord, Adrian Li," Yifei quickly pivoted, changing the subject as she introduced the couple to Adrian. "Landlord, this is my younger brother, Lu Zhanbo, and his girlfriend, Lin Wanyu!"
"Hello," Adrian sat down smoothly beside them, acting as naturally as an old friend. "Please, feel free to just call me Adrian."
He immediately struck up a smooth, pleasant conversation with Lu Zhanbo and Lin Wanyu, who had both just recently returned to Shanghai from their extended travels abroad.
"Wanyu, Zhanbo, why don't you share some of those fascinating travel stories and tips you were telling us about yesterday with the Landlord?" Yifei instructed them hastily.
"Oh, this trip abroad was genuinely incredible!" Lin Wanyu smiled, her big eyes lighting up. "We saw so many breathtaking landscapes. For example—"
As Lin Wanyu and Zhanbo eagerly began recounting their international adventures to Adrian, Yifei seized the distraction. She grabbed Zeng Xiaoxian by his collar and dragged the radio host into a quiet, shadowed corner of the bar.
"Yifei, what the hell are you doing?!" Zeng Xiaoxian whined, adjusting his jacket with a disgruntled frown. "I was just about to ask the Landlord about his private training facility again! I only found out during my last visit that the Häagen-Dazs ice cream in his VIP lounge is completely free and unlimited. I was planning to mooch another meal off him!"
"Stop scrambling your damn feet and listen to me!" Yifei slapped Zeng Xiaoxian across the back of his head, her face pale with suppressed panic. "Don't you realize we are currently sitting on top of a massive, catastrophic crisis?!"
"A crisis?" Zeng Xiaoxian blinked, rubbing the back of his head. "What kind of crisis?"
"You know how Meijia has been helping the Landlord collect rent from his local commercial tenants, right?"
"Of course I know! We were the ones who recommended her for the job in the first place!" Zeng Xiaoxian replied proudly.
"Well, thank you so much to your whole damn family for that!" Yifei gritted her teeth dejectedly. "It was you who pushed for it—I'm taking zero credit for this mess!"
"What actually happened? Spit it out!" Seeing her solemn, panicky expression, Zeng Xiaoxian finally realized something was seriously wrong and urged her to explain.
"The day before yesterday, Meijia collected a massive lump-sum rent payment of 800,000 yuan in pure, liquid cash," Yifei whispered, leaning in close so no one could overhear. "I explicitly ordered her to march straight to the bank and deposit every single cent into the Landlord's account. But in the blink of an eye, she completely vanished with all the money! I have been frantically searching for her for three straight days, and I can't find a single trace!"
"What?!" Zeng Xiaoxian's hands instantly flew up in front of his face like trembling chicken claws, his expression one of pure terror. "Meijia is missing?! And she was carrying 800,000 yuan in cash?! Could she... could she have been kidnapped by organized crime?!"
"I honestly wish she had just been kidnapped!" Yifei frowned bitterly, her tone laced with exasperation. "I had Zhanbo run a quiet check through his tech channels, and it turns out that both Meijia's and Ziqiao's official ID cards were used to book two one-way plane tickets—flying directly to Vietnam!"
"Are you saying... Meijia and Ziqiao actively conspired together to embezzle the Landlord's cash, and then fled the country overnight?!" Zeng Xiaoxian's jaw dropped in absolute disbelief.
Ziqiao and Meijia were his close friends; he genuinely didn't want to believe they would commit such a stupid, irreversible crime for money.
"I don't know the exact details either!" Yifei groaned, rubbing her temples in frustration. "I've been calling both of their mobile phones around the clock, but both of their devices have been completely switched off!"
Yifei was deeply depressed. She had never anticipated that a mere 800,000 yuan would drive her two close friends to pull an international heist and become fugitives.
"Then why the hell haven't you called the police yet?!" Zeng Xiaoxian urged frantically.
"Call the police to his face?!" Yifei swatted Zeng Xiaoxian's forehead in exasperation. "Use your brain for once! If they somehow come back and manage to return the funds, this can still be brushed off as a stupid, chaotic joke between friends. But if we file an official police report right now, it immediately turns into a severe, high-tier criminal fraud case involving an astronomical sum of money! They will go to prison for a decade!"
Zeng Xiaoxian froze, digesting her words. "Admittedly... what you're saying makes sense. But you can't possibly expect to keep a missing 800,000 yuan hidden from him forever!"
"Stop talking nonsense!" Yifei shot him a fierce, lethal glare, warning him to keep his mouth shut. "The best we can do right now is stall for as much time as possible. The Landlord possesses astronomical wealth; a tiny amount of cash like this shouldn't be a big deal to a man of his standing!"
Zeng Xiaoxian thought it over and reluctantly agreed that Yifei's logic held up.
Five months ago, when he had accidentally won five million yuan in the lottery, hadn't he casually written a check for 500,000 yuan to Lu Ziqiao without a second thought? Although the Landlord's relationship with Ziqiao and Meijia was certainly not as close as theirs, the Landlord's net worth was something a mere five-million-yuan lottery winner couldn't even begin to comprehend!
Based solely on his visible assets, the Landlord was worth at least several hundred million. To a titan like him, a few hundred thousand yuan was literally a drop in the ocean.
While Zeng Xiaoxian and Hu Yifei were frantically huddling in the corner stressing over the runaway pair, Adrian Li was enjoying an exceptionally smooth, pleasant conversation with Lin Wanyu.
Admittedly, when watching the original canonical storyline of iPartment, most audience members viewed Lu Zhanbo and Lin Wanyu as the most innocent, perfect romantic pairing in the narrative. But in the brutal, unforgiving reality of high society, there was absolutely zero chance those two could ever remain together in the long run.
Lin Wanyu was the sole, protected heiress of the chairman of Lin's Bank.
Lin's Bank was not some mid-tier, localized corporate entity like the Ye, Gu, or Qu families. It was a massive, multinational financial institution commanding private branches across the globe and holding liquid assets exceeding hundreds of billions of yuan. It was entirely accurate to state that Lin Wanyu operated in a completely different biological and social dimension than standard, superficial "rich heiresses."
She had merely staged a dramatic run from her family's mansion in New York to escape an orchestrated, high-society political marriage. By pure chance, she had encountered the naive Lu Zhanbo on a bus in Shanghai, sparking a temporary romance that resembled a classic fairytale of a wealthy princess and a poor scholar.
In truth, Lin Wanyu was simply indulging in a playful, temporary adventure. She had never once seriously entertained the thought of marrying Lu Zhanbo, nor had she ever contemplated building a permanent future with him.
The chasm separating them was not merely a matter of economic class, but a vast, unbridgeable ideological divide:
Lu Zhanbo sought traditional, domestic, and permanent love.
Lin Wanyu merely sought short-term novelty, transient excitement, and absolute personal freedom.
Their fundamental life goals were moving in completely opposite directions.
'I don't even need to lift a single finger or orchestrate a scheme,' Adrian calculated silently as he smiled and took a sip of his drink, his dark eyes casually appraising Lin Wanyu's delicate face. 'Their fragile, fairytale romance will naturally fracture and collapse entirely on its own.'
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Give me powerstones.
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