Overly Intense [Criminal Investigation] 58p1

Chapter 58 p1: Bring Her Back

After Liu Jia left, Qin Luo sent a message to Shang Yi.

In just a minute, Shang Yi’s messages came flooding in.

A ten-second voice message, followed by a thirty-second one, and then the duration grew longer and longer. The dense notification sounds squeezed Qin Luo. The aftereffect of staying up all night was that she felt dizzy looking at anything.

Qin Luo clicked on the shortest one.

[Little Qin, I’ve discussed it with the other shareholders. We feel that the resources invested in this reading group have not yet been rewarded. According to the public opinion situation, it has been affected very little. There’s no need to suspend the project now. We’ve signed an agreement with the leaders of the cultural window to be stationed there.]

Shang Yi’s voice was calm and steady, and he was always polite to Qin Luo.

Qin Luo pinched her brow, leaned back in her chair, and clicked on the thirty-second voice message.

[The reading group is not the same as those influencers under you. Its strategic point is to stabilize the big leaders of the cultural office. No matter how much of a stir this project makes, it’s a model of social responsibility. We’ve spent a lot of effort to set up the venue before, and you’ve also gotten a bunch of educational resources. Jiajia just talked to the next wine merchant and car merchant last month. If you say you’re not going to do it, then you’re not going to do it. I can’t explain this to the shareholders. Besides, besides persuading me, you also have to persuade the other representatives. My suggestion to you now is to coordinate a temporary suspension, or you can say that you’ll change the format to liven up the project.]

Qin Luo didn’t want to listen anymore. She typed to Shang Yi.

[President Shang, let’s talk in person.]

Shang Yi replied: [Alright, I’ll contact you when I get to Logos.]

Qin Luo didn’t eat lunch. She locked her office and lay down on the sofa to catch up on sleep.

In her dream, she was back before the college entrance examination.

She had become a nearsighted patient again, and she couldn’t capture any image of Shen Yiyi, only a cold and indifferent back.

Qin Luo felt a stuffy heat in her chest, an indescribable pain.

She reminded herself that this was just a dream.

After Shen Yiyi had left, her life had not become worse. She had written a grand female protagonist’s cool story, had completely shaken off that noisy small town. She now had a gun in her hand that could shatter those broken dreams.

But she had done nothing.

Qin Luo just slowly woke up from her dream.

She put on the suit that had been covering her, relieving the discomfort from the dream. The feeling of being saved and then abandoned was attached to the midday sun, shining on her, softening the fantasy.

Qin Luo rubbed her face.

She seemed to know where the smell of laundry detergent she had smelled in front of the Roman sculpture when she was in Berlin had come from. It was the white powder that her grandmother had poured into the bucket at the end of the plum rain season, the childhood that had taken away the dampness and haze.

Everything in these sixteen years was an urgent proof that she could scrape clean that layer of smell, to transform herself from a defective product into a genuine display piece.

Faith was just a so-called hypocritical packaging.

No matter how high she stood, she was still entangled in shame.

Knock knock—knock knock—

Qin Luo got up and opened the door. Zhan Luo was standing outside with a cup of coffee. “Sister Qin, I’m your assistant from today on!”

Qin Luo took the cup of coffee. “Okay, when President Shang arrives, you can come to the meeting with me.”

***

Shang Yi was sitting opposite Qin Luo, wearing a golf casual outfit. He looked like he had just finished playing. Zhan Luo had just poured him a glass of water. He was very resistant to using public cups and suggested that Zhan Luo get a whole bottle of mineral water.

Zhan Luo was even more dissatisfied with Shang Yi. He turned and got him the cheapest Yibao from the break room, not the business water.

“You look terrible. Have you not been resting well these past two days?”

“Logos is in this situation. If I could rest well, President Shang would blame me for not working hard.”

Shang Yi crossed his legs, one hand on the desk, his fingers tapping lightly on the tabletop. “You and Liu Jia are the soul of Logos. As long as you’re here, Logos will be fine.”

Qin Luo said in a deep voice, “Let’s get to the point.”

“Right, right, right, let’s get to the point.” Shang Yi picked up the Yibao and looked at it, then unscrewed the cap. As he tilted his head back to drink, he happened to catch a glimpse of Zhan Luo standing beside him. “This is…”

“This is my assistant, the contact person for the reading group project, Zhan Luo.” Qin Luo introduced him to Shang Yi, and then introduced the big boss to Zhan Luo. “Little Zhan, this is the founder of Ariose, and also one of our investors at Logos.”

One of the investors, the one whose black material had been dug up by Ranmei, the culprit who was ridiculed by passersby for Logos being controlled by men.

Zhan Luo smiled at the other. “President Shang.”

Shang Yi had some impression of Qin Luo’s previous assistant. He raised an eyebrow. “Ah, Little Wang resigned?”

Qin Luo nodded.

Only then did Shang Yi turn his gaze back to Zhan Luo, looking him up and down. “Aren’t you afraid of being scolded for hiring a male assistant?”

“Weren’t you also scolded recently?” Qin Luo joked.

Shang Yi smiled. “I’m not a public figure. A few scoldings won’t affect my quality of life. Seeing them so angry, but it doesn’t bother me at all. Let them be.”

Shang Yi was almost fifty. He was born abroad and was of Chinese descent. He had come to China in his thirties with a capital company and had later founded Ariose in China. His investments were generally focused on culture and education. When Logos was just starting to seek expansion, it was he who had taken the initiative to find Liu Jia.

He was the earliest investor in Logos and had gradually become one of the largest shareholders after several rounds of financing.

He did not pursue long-term returns and was more concerned with the commercial potential of cultural and content output in society. So when Qin Luo had discussed the female re-employment and reading group with him, he had helped Qin Luo push for the project’s implementation at the shareholder meeting.

He had even fully supported the investment in the movie Her Kill.

Shang Yi advocated a cultural image strategy. He believed that only pursuing financial returns was too short-sighted. He always said: “If I hadn’t accurately invested in Logos back then, believing that Logos had a magnificent development prospect, then the promotion of feminism in society would be even slower now. The public opinion creators are all killers I’ve trained.”

“President Shang, the reading group program has been broadcast for four seasons, and it’s been held offline for many years. It’s been quite difficult to maintain a financial balance these years. The current public opinion is also not good. I’m thinking of taking a break.”

As Qin Luo spoke, she pushed the organized reading group project on the table in front of Shang Yi. “The reading group has taken up a lot of my personal energy these years. It may be an image strategy point for Logos, but for me, it’s like a spiritual pillar. I’m also very reluctant to part with it, but from the perspective of the company’s future commercial development, it violates its original intention.”

“Original intention.”

Shang Yi picked up the report and flipped through the pages perfunctorily. After a couple of glances, he closed it. “Qin Luo, you don’t seem to have figured out what the original intention is.”

He placed the report quietly back on the table. “Living a better life is the greatest original intention of a person.”

Qin Luo turned a deaf ear to this kind of guidance. “President Shang, you’ve also participated in the reading group twice, including your own new book signing, where you gave a speech. You know what state the people who participate in the reading group are in.”

The Logos reading group had originated from Qin Luo’s book signing. Her first book, The Red String, had had a two-hundred-person speech in Nanjing, coordinated by the Writers’ Association and the publishing house.

At the symposium, she had talked about the writing difficulties of female writers, the shortcomings of her work, and the overlap between the characters and reality. After that day, her speech had been edited and posted online.

Later, for Qin Luo’s second and third books, the number of people at the book signing symposiums had increased dramatically. There were more and more readers, and the spread was getting wider and wider.

Later, Qin Luo had Logos, and she started her own social media platform. Some old readers had sent private messages to Qin Luo through her account.

They told Qin Luo that in these past few years, they had found their goals through reading and had rekindled their hope for life, like a bright pearl shining on a dark road. They asked Qin Luo if she could participate in more offline book signings and open up more reading symposiums so that more people could participate.

Qin Luo was touched by these praises, and so she had started the reading group.

But Qin Luo’s reading group had conditions.

Not everyone could participate in the symposium. Most of the people who could get tickets had either financial or spiritual gaps.

For example, students, people in high-risk spiritual professions, patients with depression, single mothers, people with social disabilities…

The screening of these people was mostly done through the psychological institutions under Logos, or through social counseling institutions, or through court aid.

There was also a small portion of staff who had emerged from the re-employment public welfare projects. They were dispatched to the Shanghai reading group for internships to receive better educational resources in the big city.

Of course, the returns of the reading group were difficult to see.

It was like a beautiful business card standing in the public eye, becoming a leading project supported by the government, becoming the most outstanding cultural community in the creative park.

At this thought, Qin Luo smiled wryly.

Shang Yi had gone to great lengths to choose a location for the reading group. He had led the government to find a newly developed cultural park, rented the largest factory building, and hired a Korean decoration team to create such a uniquely designed building.

Foreign tourists would often mistake the reading group for an exhibition center without seeing the sign, and people would often take photos at the entrance.

Recently, some netizens had also made a fuss about this in public opinion.

They said: “The design is so noble. Is it for people who need help to read? If I were to listen to a symposium in there, I would probably be even more anxious.”

Qin Luo sighed and said to Shang Yi, “President Shang, you are of Chinese descent. You know about these so-called confrontational trends now, and you also know that Logos’s remarks can bring traffic and benefits in every resistance. If Logos were in a foreign country now, it would be just a gorgeous clown. In my eyes, it might be an insignificant faith or original intention, but if you look at it with the eyes of capital, it’s just a media propaganda tool, or an image project, and some so-called political votes.”

“The female track is the future consumer trend. This is what you said to Liu Jia when you invested in Logos. I know this is your view as a businessman. Although our positions are different and our profit methods are different, our main goal at that time was to let a larger capital protect Logos’s growth.”

“But now Logos has grown in scale, from a dozen employees to hundreds of employees. It has gradually begun to develop in a purely commercial direction uncontrollably. If you put the reading group in the middle of Logos, it will seem out of place.”