Chapter 1.12

Ling Xia stood in front of a mirror, adjusting the collar of his white button-down shirt. He wore black slacks, and his black hair laid neatly on his head, for once styled. After he finished fiddling with his collar, he took one last glance at himself in the mirror and headed down the stairs.

"Oh, you're done," Li Ming's father noticed. He passed Ling Xia on the way upstairs to take a shower and patted Ling Xia's shoulder. "Why don't you get everything else ready while I get ready?"

Ling Xia solemnly nodded. He slipped his laptop into a soft black case along with a USB that had the entire powerpoint he was planning on showing over there.

Where, you might ask? Well, yesterday, Ling Xia was contacted by a certain venture capital firm about wanting to meet him about his proposal. And very quickly too considering he only put it up a week ago.

In a few minutes, Li Ming's father ambled down the stairs. Ling Xia grabbed the laptop case and a cloth mask and the two got in the car. Li Ming's father drove them to a large office building(1).

Before he got out of the car, Ling Xia put his mask on and thanked Li Ming's father seriously for the ride. He looked up at the humongous building in front of him. It towered over every other building near it. A silent declaration of power, Ling Xia figured.

He composed himself and pushed the glass doors open. Everything was squeaky clean inside. White tiles with thin black streaks underneath a waiting area with nice chairs and a receptionist desk in the spotlight. The receptionist quickly noticed him and courteously asked him what he was there for.

"My name is Ling Xia, I am here for an appointment at 4:30." Yes, he used a pseudonym, even though it wasn't really a pseudonym because it was his real name.

"Alright, let me just look for that name…" The woman scrolled through the monitor screen. Ling Xia had no idea what she was doing, but she had used the keyboard to enter something into whatever she was looking at.

"Found you…" The woman murmured to herself before glancing up at Ling Xia. "Ah, yes, if you'll just wait over there where the chairs are for somebody to come and take you where you need to go." Ling Xia smiled and thanked the receptionist before following her words. He sat down and observed his surroundings.

There was an elevator near him and a door leading to the stairs next to them. On the other side of the floor, another set of stairs stood behind another door.

The most defining feature of the building was probably that it was huge.

Ling Xia sat, just looking around the place, and soon enough, a man in a black business suit walked up to him.

"Hello," he greeted Ling Xia. "You must be Ling Xia." Ling Xia nodded. "Please follow me."

Ling Xia followed the man into the elevator. The man pressed the number five and they stood in awkward silence that nobody broke until the doors opened with a ding.

The man led Ling Xia down the hall into a meeting room. He opened the door, politely letting Ling Xia into the room before himself. He closed the door quietly as Ling Xia gazed around a room full of people already in their chairs looking back at him.

Each one was dressed impeccably, with no flaws anywhere. Their uniform black business suits gave off a serious and intimidating vibe. The man behind Ling Xia brushed shoulders with him as he passed by him, causing Ling Xia to be startled. The man also took a seat at the long conference table.

Ling Xia smiled stiffly. He'd been to many different meetings with big shots, but this was on a different level of solemn.

He wanted to introduce himself, but before words could come out, he coughed. He turned to the side, coughing a few more times into his fist. The rest of the people in the room watched him silently, waiting for what they came here for. Once Ling Xia's coughing fit finished, he cleared his throat.

"Excuse me. Hello. My name is Ling Xia, and I'm the one that had an idea for helping nerve regeneration. I'm here to present my idea about it. Would you like me to start presenting or…?" Ling Xia trailed off while simultaneously connecting his laptop to the projector and keeping eye contact.

One woman opened his mouth, and Ling Xia's eyes instantly moved to connect with hers. "May we ask why you are wearing a mask?"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I have a bit of a cold today, but I didn't want to pass up this opportunity because of it, so I chose this as a compromise."

That was a lie. Ling Xia also faked the coughs earlier. In light of his earlier scandal with Yang Lizhen, he felt more confident in his proposal if his face was covered. That was why he took the cloth face mask with him.

Seeing that there were no more questions for him, he started introducing his idea. He talked in a clear and concise way, always getting the point across first and foremost. Some of the businessmen in the room looked at the screen attentively as Ling Xia spoke, some took notes, and some of them had cold faces all throughout. They looked like they weren't even listening, their expressions didn't change no matter what Ling Xia said. It was as though there was a wall separating them, so none of his words reached them.

It was a bit discouraging, but Ling Xia also knew that they were only doing this because they wanted to see his resolve for this project. Ling Xia was quite young for this, so it was only right that some people wanted to know if he was ready and worth the investment.

Ling Xia finished his presentation while continuing faking a cold and asked if there were any questions.

"Yes," a person spoke up. Ling Xia looked in the direction of the voice, finding two men there. Ling Xia's eyes swept across their profiles.

One man was also wearing a mask, just much more ornate and probably more expensive. It actually looked more like a masquerade mask given that it only covered the top of his face and not his mouth. It was definitely not for a cold.

The other man had a buzzcut and looked like he came from the military with his stoic expression. He sat ramrod straight in his chair while staring directly at Ling Xia. The only thing that didn't fit with his military look was that he had bangs that hung down on his face, even covering his eyes a bit, which messed up the entire look.

He and the person next to him had similar faces, Ling Xia thought they might be related.

"Nerve regeneration takes a lot of time. Customers will be dissatisfied with it if they have to go through the process for a long time, especially such a tedious one as nerve regeneration where mistakes cannot be allowed. Do you have a way to solve this problem?" the man with the buzzcut asked.

Another test. It was commonly known that the easiest way to speed up nerve regeneration was…

"A shock of heat."

Ling Xia noticed the man with the masquerade mask had turned his head slightly toward him. His barely visible eyebrow rose above his mask, silently telling Ling Xia to explain. "Nerve regeneration can be sped up by shocks of heat."

Murmurs broke out through the room, even the people who originally had cold faces were whispering. Ling Xia was confused at the sight.

'Don't tell me that people in this world don't know that! That's so obvious! I saw a research paper about it online! I did my research, and now you're telling me that it's gonna go to waste? Are you kidding me?'

"Where did you get that information?" the man with the buzzcut asked, showing his curiosity by leaning forward in his chair.

"It's relatively new, but there are some websites detailing the process." There was really only one, but Ling Xia was planning on making one more as soon as he got back to Li Ming's house.

Apparently, the news was unprecedented for them. They were all in the biotech industry, but nobody knew this vital piece of information.

"Um, are there any more questions?" Ling Xia hesitantly changed the subject, trying to be as polite as possible while also breaking everybody out of their thoughts.

"Could you please explain the third part of the process again? I don't quite understand how it would help," another man questioned.

"Ah, yes. Let me just go back a few slides. The reason that this helps is…"

The Q&A session continued uninterrupted this time. Finally, the woman at the head of the table stood up. "I think that's enough for today. Mr. Ling, we'll contact you with our decision by tomorrow."

Ling Xia was taken aback by these words. Did they really value his idea so much that they would contact him only after one day? He left anyway after handing the people there a USB drive with the presentation in it, thinking that this was a success.

He called Li Ming's father, informing him that the meeting was over and asking him to pick him up. Unfortunately, Li Ming and his family actually lived half an hour away, so Ling Xia had to wait that long with nothing to do. He didn't know when the meeting would end, so he had just told Li Ming's father that he would call him when he was ready, and now he was paying the price.

Luckily, the office building of the venture capital firm was in a town square. There were a lot of shops around, and Ling Xia wandered around the area. He entered a shop that seemed like it was popular, ordering their specialty.

Sitting down at an empty table, he removed his mask and started eating. The spoon the shop gave him was a weird shape, so it felt odd to hold, but he managed.

Just as he finished his food, the jingle of bells sounded throughout the shop signifying the door opening. Ling Xia thought nothing of it and got up to throw away his trash, but as he turned around, he was met face-to-face with a familiar face.

"Ling Yu?" Ling Xia questioned with eyes wide in surprise.

"Ah, Li Ming? What are you doing here?"

"I had to do something near this shop, and I decided to stop by this shop. Who are your friends?" Ling Xia nodded to the people behind Yang Lizhen.

"Hmm? These are my childhood friends." He turned around to face his friends. "Guys, this is Li Ming. Li Ming, this is Han Ying, Han Yang, Lu Shuhen, and…" Yang Lizhen paused and met eyes with Ling Xia. "Bu Huai."

Ling Xia's face didn't change when he heard these words, but inside, his heart was ramming into his chest.

If he could get on Bu Huai's good side, Mu Ninghua would lose her biggest protector, and it would be so much easier to get revenge.

He knew he didn't want to take revenge earlier because it wasn't his place, but when Mu Ninghua tried to get Chu Yan's men to kill him again and tried to give him food with drugs in it these past few days, those were most definitely aimed at him. There was a point when too much truly became too much, and Mu Ninghua had crossed that line and then some. He would pay all that back tenfold!

Of course, that would only work because Bu Huai was Mu Ninghua's future husband!

Notes:

1: The driving age in China is 18, so Ling Xia couldn't drive himself.

Ummm... bad news. I'm going on hiatus... for one or two weeks. Yeah, sorry for making it seem bad at first, I just really wanted to. I'm going on vacation, so I won't have time to update or write anything. I'll see you guys in a week or a week and a half?