Chapter 88 The Love-Brain Female Lead Awakens 31

Old Sang’s tone was still gentle, just a little stiff.

“Mm, you must be hungry. Let’s eat first.”

Old Sang stood up, and Sang Ruo edged over and grabbed his sleeve.

Old Sang didn’t pull his hand away, and that made her feel a little better.

She didn’t know what Yi Chen’an had said to Old Sang, but the three of them were able to eat together, and Old Sang even accepted it when Yi Chen’an poured him tea and served him food.

So the problem probably wasn’t that serious.

Still, throughout the meal, Sang Ruo couldn’t taste a thing.

She was hypersensitive to every tiny shift in the atmosphere.

During the meal, Old Sang finally brought up why he’d come in the first place. “I had someone look up a few properties, and I made an appointment with an agent for tomorrow. Go take a look and see which one you like.”

“Oh, okay.” Sang Ruo was perfectly obedient.

That strange atmosphere lasted all the way until the afternoon, when they saw Old Sang back to the hotel he’d booked to rest.

Sang Ruo thought, whether she stretched her neck out or shrank it back, the blade would still fall. She couldn’t keep trembling like this forever.

So when they were about to part, she threw caution to the wind and blurted out, “Dad, I was the one who chased Yi Chen’an first, and we haven’t been together that long. When I went back to Qingyan last time, he went too. He was originally planning to visit our house, but I stopped him, because I was afraid you and Mom wouldn’t like him. Anyway, I’ll say this much right here, no matter what you think, I really, really like him, and I’m only ever marrying him. If you’re going to blame someone, blame me.”

She rattled it all off in one breath, then waited for the death sentence.

Instead, Old Sang’s expression turned extremely odd.

He looked a little indignant, and a little sour too.

“Done talking?”

Sang Ruo answered woodenly, “Done.”

Then Old Sang smacked her on the head.

“Marry, marry, marry… you’re a girl, can’t you be a little more reserved? Is Yi Chen’an mute, or was he born without a mouth? Doesn’t he know how to propose himself? Why are you in such a hurry to say you’re going to marry him?”

Old Sang had really put some force into that smack.

It hurt like crazy, but Sang Ruo’s mind had never been clearer.

Going by what Old Sang was implying…

“Dad, you’re not against it?”

“Would it make any difference if I were? You’ve already defended him at the top of your lungs.”

Sang Ruo lowered her voice a little. “I was not that loud.” Then, full of hope, she confirmed, “So you’re not against us being together, and you’re not against me marrying him?”

Old Sang huffed through his nose.

“I already told you, stop going on about whether you’ll marry him or not. He should be the one proposing!”

As he said that, he shot Yi Chen’an, who was smiling at the side, a resentful glare.

Yi Chen’an walked over, pulled Sang Ruo away from where she was acting spoiled with her father, took her hand, and replied, “I understand, Uncle Sang.”

Then he looked at Sang Ruo.

For some reason, that single look made Sang Ruo blush.

After seeing Old Sang off, she asked Yi Chen’an, “How did you convince my dad?”

“He loves you very much and wants you to be happy. There was nothing for me to convince him of.”

Sang Ruo kept waiting, but after that, he said nothing more.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.”

“…”

No matter how much she asked, he wouldn’t say another word.

That dog of a man was pulling that act again.

The next day, they went to look at apartments, and all the options Old Sang had lined up were pretty good.

In the end, they picked a large flat near the school, around a commercial center.

It was fully renovated and move-in ready, the kind they could live in as soon as the payment went through.

When Old Sang was leaving, he looked at the two of them and said, “Come home together for a meal on New Year’s Day.”

Sang Ruo’s eyes curved into crescents.

Yi Chen’an agreed at once. “I’ll definitely come visit. Before that, though, I’d like to bring Bubu to meet my parents first.”

Old Sang gave a low mm and didn’t say anything else. He actually looked quite at ease.

Sang Ruo had assumed that when Yi Chen’an said she’d meet his parents, it meant the two of them would find time to go visit them.

After his parents divorced, they had both remarried and now lived in different cities. She had still been wondering how they were going to coordinate the time.

Not long after, she heard him say he’d invited both of his parents to Qingyang instead.

You could do that?

As it turned out, you could.

Meeting strangers in a place she knew well had one advantage: she wasn’t nearly as nervous.

Both his parents were quite kind, and each of them gave Sang Ruo a red envelope and a gift.

When his mother heard that Sang Ruo was livestreaming, she even asked for her account so she could support her.

After running it for two months, the livestream wasn’t exactly booming, but the traffic was pretty steady.

There were usually around a thousand viewers online on average.

And she’d gained plenty of repeat customers too.

The products that sold best in the livestream were stud earrings, dangling earrings, and sweater chains.

She had already earned back all of her initial costs. Even though the small accessories didn’t sell for much individually, the volume was high and the costs were low, so it was practically pure profit.

Sang Ruo tried adding proper embroidery pieces to the livestream offerings as well, but they were mostly small items. Truly handmade embroidered pieces were still expensive.

They sold fairly well too, and with the embroidered pieces there as a price comparison, her little accessories sold even better.

What no one expected was that one big client quietly bought one of the large display pieces from the livestream.

It was worth over a hundred thousand. Sang Ruo was afraid the buyer had clicked by mistake, so she even had customer service contact them.

But the buyer said she really did want it, and even asked Sang Ruo to display more large pieces during the livestream, because she wanted to use them as hanging art and folding screens in her new house.

That big client also brought in other big clients, and for a time the livestream became incredibly busy.

At this rate, that warehouse full of discarded embroidery pieces wouldn’t last much longer. She’d probably really have to do what she’d boasted about and cut up proper embroidered pieces to make small accessories.

Yi Chen’an asked how she felt about this period of time.

Sang Ruo said, “Doing business actually feels pretty good. Maybe going home and taking over the family business wouldn’t be such a bad choice after all.” She had always resisted the idea of taking Old Sang’s place before.

Yi Chen’an said, “You’ve fought this round beautifully.”

But then Sang Ruo thought of a problem. The project she’d done this time, dealing with the discarded embroidery pieces, was only a small-scale affair, and it had Old Sang’s approval behind it. Internally, everything had been greenlit without exception, and she’d even been allowed to livestream from another city.

If she really did take over the family business, she’d definitely have to stay in Qingyan long-term.

But the center of Yi Chen’an’s company was in Qingyang.

Wouldn’t that make them a long-distance couple?

Qingyang and Qingyan weren’t exactly far apart, but they weren’t all that close either.

Even the high-speed rail took over an hour.

She hadn’t graduated yet, so she still had a two-year buffer.

Once she graduated, this issue and her choice would be right in front of her.

But her career was only just starting to show results, with signs of a small breakout. Asking her to give up her foundation in Qingyan and go all in on love was something she couldn’t quite bear to do. In that nightmare, she’d already paid too high a price for blindly becoming a Love Brain and turning into Zhou Yan’s housewife. She absolutely could not repeat that mistake.

But asking her to give up Yi Chen’an was even more impossible.

Yi Chen’an said, “You’ve been sighing all the time lately. What exactly is going on?”

Sang Ruo said, “I realized something.”

“Go on.”

“Old Sang is only fifty. He’s still young. He can still work.”

“So?”

Sang Ruo clenched her fist. “So the inheritance transition for the Embroidery House isn’t the key issue right now, so I’m planning to start a business.”

She was fired up, brimming with enthusiasm.

Yi Chen’an didn’t seem surprised at all.

“Tell me.”

“Over this period of working on the Embroidery pieces, I got a lot of user feedback, and I realized the Chinese-style market is actually bigger than I imagined. But the products are really hit or miss. Some people just add a bit of embroidery and a pattern that looks vaguely classical, and they dare call it Chinese style. Since I have Qingyan’s resources behind me, I might as well do it myself.” The more she talked, the more excited she became. “I’m planning to create a light Chinese-style¹ fashion brand, mainly accessories and clothing.”

Most importantly, she could base the company in Qingyang, so she wouldn’t have to be in a long-distance relationship with that damn man.

Of course, Yi Chen’an supported anything she wanted to do, and he even helped her sort through her ideas.

With a living example of a successful entrepreneur right by her side, there was no way she would let that resource go to waste.

But starting a business wasn’t something that could succeed just because she had a sudden idea.

Anyway, graduation was still a long way off.

After discussing it with Yi Chen’an, she decided to focus her sales channels online. In that case, she could spend a few months first running a traditional culture account related to her main business scope and draw in her core audience. By then, even if she didn’t launch products yet, people would still be urging her to.

Qingyan was, after all, a place where traditional culture had been preserved quite well.

Sang Ruo wouldn’t even need to go anywhere else. Just the available filming subjects there were enough to keep her busy endlessly.

Not to mention anything else, with just her own family’s business, she could film the entire clothing-making process, from mulberry planting, silkworm raising, spinning thread, brocade weaving, cloth dyeing, embroidery, and cutting, and that wasn’t even counting other things.

Once she made up her mind, she acted. In the early stage, she wasn’t planning to hire anyone. She would handle it herself first.

That meant she would have to do the filming and editing herself. Sang Ruo could manage an everyday vlog, but when it came to professional work, she was still lacking.

So she specifically went to audit classes in the media department to learn the technical side. But there really weren’t many classes, so with no other choice, Sang Ruo spent her own money to hire a senior student who had previously won awards to teach her one-on-one.

Once she had a goal, she suddenly felt like there were an incredible number of things she needed to do.

She took her major courses while working on her little business at the same time. She even streamed less often, and romance got pushed even further down the list.

Before New Year’s Day had even arrived, Sang Ruo, now feeling she’d learned a fair bit, brought the senior student back to Qingyan with her and filmed the past and present life of an embroidered work inside her family’s Embroidery House.

When Old Sang heard that she wanted to start her own business, he said generously, “I’ll invest all the net profit from the discarded Embroidery pieces project into you.”

For a startup, that was no small sum. It was more than enough as seed money.

Sang Ruo caught the implication immediately. “Invest?”

“Yeah. That’s money from the Embroidery House accounts, so of course I can’t just hand it to you for nothing and let you waste it. I’ll invest in you, but I want a certain amount of equity.”

Good grief, he really was her biological father.

Since Old Sang had put on this clear-cut, father-and-daughter-settle-accounts-openly stance, Sang Ruo also stood firm and laid everything out clearly as she negotiated business with him.

Then she signed the agreement and got the investment.

Even though at that point, she still hadn’t even filmed her first video.

But Sang Ruo had already swiftly registered the company and gotten the business license.

The company was called “Yunxiang,” taken from the line “Clouds think of robes, flowers think of beauty².”

Her video account had the same name.

When she got home, her mother looked like she wanted to say something but held back. In the end, she still came to her room and reminded her that if she was dating, she needed to protect herself and not get pregnant while still in school.

Sang Ruo blushed red as a cooked shrimp.

“Don’t worry in the slightest. We’re both busy right now. Even finding time to eat together takes planning, let alone getting pregnant. Really, there isn’t even a chance!”

Sang Ruo used the time to practice and polish her filming and editing skills.

Before final exams, she stockpiled several videos and uploaded the first one on New Year’s Day.

She bought a bit of traffic, and the new account gained some followers, but overall, the response to the first video was pretty average. Sang Ruo wasn’t discouraged. This was the kind of thing that built up little by little before finally breaking out.

At least it wasn’t stuck at zero views, and there was even some meaningful interaction in the comments, so she was already quite satisfied.

On New Year’s Day, Sang Ruo brought Yi Chen’an home.

Most of the relatives came, all to take a look at the new son-in-law.

Then Sang Ruo realized that compared to her finding Yi Chen’an as a boyfriend, Old Sang had brought her an even greater shock.

Because on this trip home, Sang Ruo learned that her mother was pregnant. Her parents wanted to keep the baby, and they asked for Sang Ruo’s opinion.

Her mother was several years younger than Old Sang and was only forty-four now. She was definitely considered an older mother, but after the third-child policy³ was opened up, women this age had become fairly common in obstetrics.

If the two of them wanted to have the child, Sang Ruo really had no standing to say much. She could only respect their decision.

It just felt strangely surreal. A few weeks ago, her mother had been having a heart-to-heart with her, telling her to be careful not to get pregnant. And now her mother had gotten pregnant first.

Translator’s Notes