Chapter 32

After lunch break, Wen Jiu stepped out of her room and found Su Yaoyao waiting at the door, tilting her little head up, peach-blossom eyes misty and fixed straight on her.
Peach-blossom eyes looking at anyone, from any angle, always came with that soft, lingering tenderness.
Wen Jiu almost thought Su Yaoyao had fallen for her.
“Jiujiu, I think my brother only likes me because he hasn’t met many girls,” Su Yaoyao said.
Wen Jiu didn’t speak, but her eyes gave her away.
Ah, you’ve finally realized your brother likes you!
And your big brother too! Hurry up and notice him as well!
“But according to the novels,” Su Yaoyao said solemnly, “I absolutely can’t help him go on blind dates or find him a girlfriend. Otherwise he’ll go crazy.”
Wen Jiu: “…”
You couldn’t really say she’d been brainwashed by webnovels, after all, Su Yaoyao was literally a webnovel heroine. Maybe the tropes did apply in this world.
“Mm, that’s an excellent point,” Wen Jiu praised, clapping enthusiastically like she was coaxing a kid.
Anyone else might have thought she was being sarcastic, but this was Su Yaoyao, no one responded better to over-the-top encouragement.
Riding the momentum, Su Yaoyao continued, “I think I should just get along with my brother normally and become someone with goals and dreams. If he really likes me, it shouldn’t matter what I’m like. If he only likes the obedient version of me, then he’ll naturally see his true feelings clearly one day.”
“I’ve decided, I’m going to write a novel,” her peach-blossom eyes lit up, the mist clearing to reveal a whole lake of light.
“Fantastic,” Wen Jiu said, still cheering her on. “Yaoyao, you’ve got a direction now, that’s amazing.”
If Wen Jiu were the young lady, she’d definitely lie flat and never “strive” for anything. But other people’s joys and sorrows weren’t shared; seeing Yaoyao so genuinely excited, she felt pretty happy for her too.
In the afternoon, they went out on the sea to fish. Su Yaoyao was full of energy, her head crammed with the story ideas she wanted to write.
Wen Jiu, meanwhile, saw the light at the end of the tunnel and couldn’t stop smiling either.
The young lady glanced between the two of them and felt a faint twinge of pity.
It’s just sea fishing. Have they really never done this before? Why are they this happy?
She could understand Wen Jiu, sure, but had the Su family really never taken Su Yaoyao out to play?
The young lady cleared her throat. “I’ll give each of you a yacht. From now on, if you want to come out to sea and fish, just come.”
The surprise fell out of the sky and smacked Wen Jiu on the head.
“Ah?” she squeaked.
Finally lifting her head out of the world of novels, Su Yaoyao blinked, dazed. “Yao Yao, why are you suddenly giving me a yacht?”
The young lady was not big on explaining. She pursed her lips, her exquisite little face full of proud tsundere.
“Because I feel like it. Why does everything need a reason?”
Aside from her brothers, almost no one had ever given Su Yaoyao a gift from the heart.
She froze for a moment, eyes darting back and forth, unsure if she ought to offer something in return.
Even if she couldn’t use her cards, she still had a lot of property in her own name she could give away.
Wen Jiu stepped forward and yelled from the bottom of her heart, “Young lady, I’ll follow you for the rest of my life!”
Miss Qin didn’t give Yaoyao a chance to say anything. She sped up, practically jogging away, one hand covering her face.
“How embarrassing, Wen Jiu, you never used to be like this!”
In the past, she’d only say these things when it was just the two of them; how had she suddenly started making such over-the-top declarations in public?
The young lady didn’t care about people staring at her, but she absolutely refused to be stared at like some circus monkey.
She darted into the cabin and called for the yacht to set off as fast as possible.
Facing the open sea, the corners of her lips quietly curled up.
She was not in a good mood. Definitely not.
She sent Wen Jiu a red packet with no accompanying message.
But Wen Jiu understood perfectly.
The young lady didn’t actually dislike it, she just didn’t say so out loud.
“You two, how many fish are you going to catch today?” the young lady asked.
Su Yaoyao glanced at Wen Jiu. Wen Jiu lifted her left hand. “Five.”
The young lady: “No ambition.”
“And you?” She looked at Su Yaoyao.
“I’ll catch five too,” Su Yaoyao said, sticking close behind Wen Jiu and parroting her word for word.
The young lady: “…”
“You as well. No ambition!” she scolded them both together.
Soon, the bodyguards brought over the fishing gear.
Wen Jiu had never fished in her life. At most, she’d watched people do it in videos in her previous life. After transmigrating into the book, she barely looked at her phone anymore; even those fleeting video clips were a distant memory now.
She ran her fingertips along the rod, thinking it felt pretty nice.
It was also Su Yaoyao’s first time fishing. She didn’t have any hands-on experience, but her knowledge was broad.
“This is a standard obsidian rod, deep-sea tuna-bone fiber and carbon nanotube composite. It’s very strong and flexible,” she explained, then looked nervously at Wen Jiu. “It’s… it’s okay to say that, right?”
Outside of romance, Su Yaoyao was anything but stupid. It was just that, as a child, whenever she explained things to other kids, they accused her of showing off. When she got older, after some of them bullied her, they escalated to calling her fake.
Slowly, she just stopped expressing her own thoughts. Even when she knew the answer, she wouldn’t volunteer it.
But Wen Jiu and Qin Yao weren’t like those people.
“Of course it’s okay! Yaoyao, you’re amazing. I know nothing about rods, if you hadn’t told me, I’d be totally clueless.”
Su Yaoyao couldn’t help herself; her pink lips pressed together and then curved upward, revealing a shy, irrepressible smile.
“Then how much does a rod like this usually cost?” Wen Jiu asked.
She felt like it was pretty comfortable to use. Whether she actually caught anything or not, now that she had a yacht, she could buy two to keep on board.
“Let me think… I remember my brother saying a basic one like this is around 280,000.”
Wen Jiu gave an excellent demonstration of what “eyes like copper bells” looked like.
How much?
Two hundred and eighty… thousand?!
If this was the common model, how much did the fancy ones cost?
She thought about it and decided maybe she didn’t need to “equip” the yacht with rods at all. She could just take it out for a spin, call that “using it.”
After baiting the hook and tossing the line into the sea, they settled in to wait for a nibble.
The young lady came back over and said, almost casually, “Since I’ve given you the yacht, I’ll have the butler handle the annual maintenance and fuel. If you want to take it out, just contact him.”
Wen Jiu didn’t fully grasp all the implications. She just treated it as another example of Miss Qin being nice to her, like when the young lady handed her a bowl while serving herself rice, and nodded enthusiastically. “Okay, okay!”
“I’m not staying with you. If we all crowd together, the fish will run away,” Qin Yao said, sauntering off again.
Su Yaoyao trailed after her for two steps before Wen Jiu called her back mysteriously.
Thinking it over, Wen Jiu realized there was no way the young lady had walked over just to chat. She must have thought of something and come specifically to say it.
“Yaoyao, generally speaking… how much are the yearly maintenance and fuel on a yacht?” Wen Jiu asked.
Su Yaoyao didn’t even have to count on her fingers. “I remember my brother saying even an ordinary yacht costs around five hundred thousand a year to keep. Maintenance is anywhere from a hundred-something thousand to over three hundred thousand, and fuel is fixed. Even if you just come out occasionally, it’s still more than a hundred thousand a year just for fuel.”
Wen Jiu, who’d thought having over a million in savings made her a little rich woman: “?”
…What?
Had her ears just betrayed her?
She had no idea how much the yacht itself cost, but just the yearly expenses were half a million?
With her measly pile of savings, by the fourth year she’d have to sell the boat.
No wonder the young lady made a special trip over, of course she knew Wen Jiu couldn’t afford to keep a yacht afloat.
Uuugh, Miss Qin is too good to me…
She must have raised her chin on purpose and strolled over just to drop that one line, then sauntered off so Wen Jiu wouldn’t feel awkward or inferior.
Su Yaoyao rested her rod on the rail and leaned in, her gorgeous face suddenly filling Wen Jiu’s world.
“Yao Yao really treats you well,” she said softly.
Wen Jiu almost choked on her own breath. For a second she had no idea what Yaoyao meant.
She forced out a laugh. “Right? I think so too, our young lady’s really good to me.”
“‘Good’ is relative,” Su Yaoyao said, cupping her face, staring at her with utter seriousness. “You’re good to me, so I’ll be good to you too.”
“Mmm… I don’t know what you’re missing, so I’ll give you an island,” Su Yaoyao said seriously. “That one across from us. My brother gave it to me as one of my eighteenth birthday presents. From now on, it’s yours.”
A string of very simple words somehow turned into complete mush in Wen Jiu’s brain.
“Island across from us,” “birthday present,” “one of,” “it’s yours”…
Was this… right?
Strictly speaking, today was only the second day of their friendship.
“No, no, no, that’s way too much,” Wen Jiu said. No matter how much she liked the idea, she didn’t dare accept it now.
“Ah?” Su Yaoyao was visibly disappointed. “Why don’t you want it? If you’re worried about staff costs and upkeep, I can give you a savings card when we get back. For the next eighty years you won’t have to worry about any expenses on the island.”
Wen Jiu shed metaphorical tears of yearning, tears of a woman who truly wanted something but didn’t dare take it.
She gritted her teeth, swallowed her desire, and even forced out a decent excuse. “I… don’t really like Australian islands.”
That thought had never even crossed Su Yaoyao’s mind. Her expression froze; she muttered to herself, “You’re right. When you give a gift, you should think about whether the other person actually likes it.”
“Then when we get back, I’ll give you an apartment in Haishi,” she decided. “I don’t know if you’ve already bought a place there, so I’ll try to pick one that isn’t on the same street as yours.”
“That way you’ll have one more apartment.”
She said “give you a place” the same way other people talked about giving out the little plastic gems that cost fifty cents outside a primary school.
Wen Jiu’s heart wavered even more.
“You’re not allowed to say no. Compared to an island, an apartment is really not that expensive. If you’re worried about property management fees and transfer taxes, I’ll pay those too. Within the seventy-year ownership period you won’t need to worry about any extra costs, and I’ll prepay your utilities as well.”
You can prepay utilities? Wen Jiu felt her horizons expanding.
No, her priorities were drifting.
“Yaoyao…”
“You’re not going to turn me down again, are you?” Su Yaoyao pursed her lips, cheeks puffing slightly, looking like a little puppy someone had abandoned on the roadside, as if she might burst into tears at any second.
“No, I’ll accept,” Wen Jiu said quickly.
“Wow, you’re so nice. We’re best friends now.” This was the first time Su Yaoyao had successfully given someone a gift like this, and she was so happy she nearly spun two full circles on the spot.
“Yaoyao, you can’t just casually give things like that away. They’re too valuable, and it makes it easy for bad people to target you,” Wen Jiu reminded her gently.
“I know. I won’t give things to strangers or bad people. But Jiujiu, you’re different.”
“Meeting you and Yao Yao is the luckiest thing that’s ever happened to me!!!”