CHAPTER 115: CHAPTER 115; FIRST STEP IN REVENGE (C)

"Good. Because we’ve only got one shot at this. There are no do-overs in live television."

As the team scattered to their various tasks, printing materials, coordinating with media outlets, preparing the press room, Lu Zeyan found himself standing at his office window, looking out at the city that either loved him or wanted to destroy him, depending on which way the wind blew in the next two hours.

Shuyin appeared beside him, silent as a ghost, her jade eyes reflecting the city lights.

"Nervous?" she asked softly.

"Terrified," he admitted. "Everything I’ve built is hanging by a thread. One wrong word, one suspicious expression, and it all falls apart."

"Then don’t say the wrong words," Shuyin suggested, her tone almost gentle. "Just tell them what they want to hear. People don’t want the truth, Zeyan. They want stories that make them feel good. Give them that story."

He looked at her, taking in her appearance thoroughly. "You’re very good at this. At manipulation. At knowing exactly what to say and when to say it."

"I learned from the best," she said, and he couldn’t tell if that was a compliment or an indictment. "You taught me, after all. How to identify what people want and sell it to them. How to craft narratives that make you the hero. How to survive in a world that values perception over truth."

"I created a monster," Lu Zeyan muttered.

"No," Shuyin corrected, her voice cold. "You created someone who learned how to fight back. There’s a difference."

Before he could respond, Wang Jing’s voice cut through the office like a knife.

She turned to Lu Zeyan with the clinical assessment of a surgeon preparing for a critical operation.

"You’ll need to look perfect. Get cleaned up. Fresh suit, hair fixed, makeup to hide how exhausted you look. You need to appear composed, remorseful but strong. Not desperate."

Her attention shifted to Shuyin, and her tone softened only marginally.

"You’ll need better clothes. Something modest but elegant. Nothing flashy, you’re a woman who’s suffered, not someone celebrating. We want people to see dignity, not defiance."

Feng Ting was already reaching for his phone, his fingers moving with practiced efficiency.

"I’ll arrange it," he said, his contacts list populated with personal shoppers who specialized in crisis situations exactly like this one.

Wang Jing glanced at her watch, her expression hardening into something that resembled a general preparing troops for battle.

"One hour and fifty-three minutes. Makeup and wardrobe have forty minutes. We rehearse for thirty. Then we walk out there and we sell this."

She looked around the room, making deliberate eye contact with everyone present, her gaze sharp enough to cut glass.

"This is it. This is where we turn a catastrophe into a comeback. Or where everything falls apart. So no mistakes. No improvising. We stick to the script, we stay on message, and we make people believe."

By the time Lu Zeyan found himself standing in his private bathroom at eleven-thirty, staring at his reflection while a makeup artist worked on his face with the concentration of a master painter, he barely recognized himself.

He looked like hell, with dark circles carved deep beneath his eyes, his skin pale and drawn tight across his face, and his bones, lines of stress around his mouth that he could have sworn hadn’t existed twenty-four hours ago.

The man in the mirror looked like he’d aged a decade over minutes.

The makeup artist muttered something under her breath as she dabbed concealer under his eyes with practiced precision.

"You need to sleep more. I can only do so much with this."

"I’ll sleep when I’m dead," Lu Zeyan replied, his voice flat and emotionless.

She paused in her work, meeting his eyes in the mirror with an expression that held more concern than judgment.

"At the rate you’re going, that’ll be soon. Deep breath. Hold still."

While her hands moved across his face with efficient grace, transforming exhaustion into something that could pass for determined resilience, Lu Zeyan’s mind wandered through the wreckage of the last few hours like a survivor picking through ruins.

Shuyin was back.

His supposedly imprisoned ex-fiancée, the woman they had successfully sent to prison for a lifetime, had returned with glowing jade eyes and a steel spine hidden beneath a carefully crafted veneer of vulnerability.

His entire conviction of her, the framework of lies and planted evidence he’d so meticulously constructed, was being systematically dismantled by internet sleuths and legal experts who had nothing better to do than destroy his life.

His relationship with Lin Yueling, which should have remained his secret to keep, his carefully guarded private indiscretion, was now splashed across every news site and social media platform in the country.

His company’s stock was in freefall.

His family was threatening disownment with the casual cruelty that only blood relatives could manage.

His career hung by a thread so thin it was practically invisible.

And somehow, impossibly, in the middle of this absolute catastrophe, he’d just agreed to give Shuyin a billion yuan and a villa.

She’d played him.

He knew she had, could feel it in his bones like the ache before a storm.

But how?

And more importantly, how much of this chaos was her deliberate orchestration versus opportunistic timing?

The woman he’d known for years couldn’t have managed this level of strategic manipulation.

That Shuyin had been smart but naive, talented but trusting, so completely in love with him that she’d never seen his betrayal coming until the cell door closed behind her.

This Shuyin was fundamentally different, harder, more calculating, with jade eyes that saw everything and revealed nothing of the thoughts moving behind them.

Had prison changed her that profoundly, or had she always possessed this capability, this cold strategic brilliance he had simply never noticed because he’d been too focused on using her to actually see her clearly?

"Done," the makeup artist announced, stepping back to admire her work with the satisfaction of someone who’d accomplished the impossible.

"You look almost human."