Chapter 091: The Flower-Crown Dive

This story is entirely fictional.

Yiyi’s online chats came one after another.

“Stop bragging. Don’t you know what I used to do? I came from athletics. Sure, I was only an amateur, but I was still a third-tier athlete. Ha! Not your match? What a joke that would be.” Dai Yunjiu laughed until he nearly doubled over. It had been a long time since he had laughed so freely.

Just then, while he was still laughing heartily, Gao Yating knocked at the door outside, a folder in her hand.

“Someone’s here. We’ll talk another day. Bye for now.” After saying goodbye, Dai Yunjiu closed the chat window.

“Come in,” he replied.

Gao Yating entered the office and saw Dai Yunjiu sitting there. “I could hear laughter coming from inside just a moment ago. Why is it so quiet now that I’ve come in?”

“Is that so? I was just chatting with a comrade from the army. We were talking happily, so I laughed. Was I really loud enough to be heard outside?”

“Yes. Not only outside, probably the whole building could hear you,” Gao Yating said with deliberate exaggeration.

“Then let it be that way,” Dai Yunjiu replied, his tone a little cold.

Gao Yating deliberately moved to the side of the computer, wanting to see who Dai Yunjiu had been chatting with.

But when she could finally see the screen, nothing she had hoped to find was there. The chat window was gone.

She looked a little disappointed. “You even closed the conversation window?”

“Yes. You wanted to see whether I was telling the truth, didn’t you? Should I reopen my chat app and show you?” Yunjiu said, pretending to be calm.

“That won’t be necessary. I believe you,” Gao Yating said.

She said she believed him, yet she was puzzled by his recent indifference toward her. Seeing his cold attitude, she felt uneasy and wondered, “Could this brat be fooling around with some other woman behind my back?”

Gao Yating returned to the other side of the desk and sat down in the swivel chair.

After a brief pause, she said in a displeased tone, “I came to talk to you about something. Recently, we’ve been losing a large number of players from Dahe, and Huaguan’s betting volume has fallen off a cliff. Last month, our betting figures in the HZ region also dropped sharply because of Dahe’s impact. Mr. Will at headquarters has asked us to investigate the cause and come up with a solution. These are last month’s betting report figures.” She threw the report hard onto Dai Yunjiu’s desk and strode away.

Yunjiu was a little surprised. He had not expected Gao Yating to lose her temper at him for the first time.

In truth, he was full of grievances as well, but he had no one to talk to.

The words trapped inside him made him miserable. Yet he could no longer indulge himself as he once had, running to the seaside when he was unhappy, shouting until he was hoarse, then lying down on the sand to let it all drain away.

But now, as he thought that his life seemed to be replaying yesterday’s story once more, the darkness before his eyes felt as though it were closing in again.

He sat in his chair for a long while before he finally came to himself.

“Always Mr. Will, Mr. Will. Is Will your father? Go die of AIDS, you bastard,” Dai Yunjiu muttered, looking at Gao Yating as she slammed the door behind her, his mood terribly foul. Even he himself did not understand how, in just over ten days, his feelings for one person could have swung so violently between love and hatred.

He picked up the stack of monthly reports Gao Yating had slammed onto the desk and studied the shifting figures. His hand clutched at his own hair.

He carefully analyzed the changes in the monthly data, marking the report with a red pen.

Then he opened the betting network’s management platform, first downloading and printing the old betting records. He laid the printed reports on his desk and examined the players whose betting activity had changed most dramatically.

From the players whose wagering had dropped sharply, he traced the corresponding managers and discovered that most of these players were friends of Xiao Jin, the police officer. For the past three months, some of them had wagered almost nothing on the Huaguan betting network. Next were the customers of Leng Junfeng. Like Xiao Jin’s clients, their betting activity on Huaguan had also plunged; some placed only token bets on insignificant matches.

From this situation, he identified the crux of the problem. The main reason was that the customers of the two managers had not been betting for three months.

He picked up the phone on the desk and told Gao Yating, “I basically understand the reason for the drop in betting volume now. The problem lies with one of our managers and with Xiao Jin from the police bureau.”

“Our manager? Who?” Gao Yating pressed.

“Leng Junfeng. Over the past three months, his customers have basically placed no bets at all. One possibility is that they’ve been using another betting site. We still don’t know which one they’ve been betting on, but that shouldn’t be hard to find out,” Dai Yunjiu replied.

“Then investigate it as soon as possible. See whether there are any signs on the computers used by Leng Junfeng and Xiao Jin themselves that they’ve been operating other betting websites,” Gao Yating ordered.

“Don’t worry. I’ll check it and report back to you,” Dai Yunjiu promised.

He did not leave the office until nightfall.

Through the company’s server terminal, he checked the betting pages Leng Junfeng’s computer had once visited.

Using the data retrieved from the server, he found the website Leng Junfeng had browsed: the Boyin betting site.

Yunjiu remotely infiltrated Leng Junfeng’s computer and found a folder whose name consisted of only two letters: BY.

The folder was encrypted and could not be opened, so Dai Yunjiu left the office.

He hurried to Gao Yating’s office and knocked on the door.

A voice from inside told him to come in. After entering, Dai Yunjiu closed the office door.

During this period, Dai Yunjiu had not come to Gao Yating’s office for a long time, and even their nights together at the villa had become no different from strangers passing in the dark. Seeing him now in her office, a rare smile appeared on her face.

Dai Yunjiu stood before her desk, feeling somewhat restrained and uneasy.

Both Dai Yunjiu and Gao Yating knew that the conflicts caused by recent events had already become a wall and an obstacle in their relationship. Although Gao Yating felt apologetic toward Dai Yunjiu, he did not seem inclined to accept it. His dissatisfaction with her had already begun to show on his face.

Gao Yating also knew that her own mistakes had led to this situation. She had begun to regret having spent the night with Will during the Dahe inspection trip. If she wanted to show gratitude for Will’s help and lifesaving favor, she should have found some place farther away to dally with him, rather than hurt Dai Yunjiu again after he had already been hurt once before.

After learning of Dai Yunjiu’s past from Leng Junfeng, her own heart had also begun to ache faintly.

In her mind, having an affair with another man might not have been the true reason behind Dai Yunjiu’s pain. She knew that his fear was the real and fatal thing.

Otherwise, why for so many days had Dai Yunjiu slept in his pajamas, wrapped himself so tightly, and dared not come close to Gao Yating by even a hair’s breadth? As time went on, even Gao Yating herself began to feel dirty and ashamed before Yunjiu.

Sometimes deep in the night, when Gao Yating looked at the soundly sleeping Dai Yunjiu, she could not sleep at all. She would stare out the window and watch the scenery outside shift from darkness into daylight.

Seeing Dai Yunjiu standing stiffly before her desk, it took Gao Yating a long time before she motioned for him to sit.

Looking at the data analysis and evidence Dai Yunjiu had brought, Gao Yating understood that it was Leng Junfeng stirring up trouble that had caused HZ’s business to decline so sharply. “With things like this, do you have any good way to deal with it?”

“At the moment, our basic judgment is that Leng Junfeng is betraying us from within. We still don’t have proof that he’s truly placing bets on someone else’s site. I’ve already entered his machine and obtained the data from the Boyin betting site he visited, but he himself doesn’t seem to have placed any bets there. If we want evidence, we’ll have to wait for the right opportunity, identify the IP address of the site he’s using, and then use my hacking skills to get the data in hand. If we rush to accuse him of selling us out now, it won’t intimidate him; it’ll only alert him,” Dai Yunjiu suggested.

“Then arrange for a few of your men to track the players on this list for three to five of them, get their IP addresses, and then use your technical means to obtain all their data,” Gao Yating said with great seriousness.

“I’ll arrange personnel as soon as possible and handle it properly. I’ll report to you at the earliest opportunity,” Dai Yunjiu said, preparing to leave.

“Aren’t you coming back to the villa with me?” Gao Yating called after him as he turned away.

Dai Yunjiu did not even look back. He only said, “These next few days I’ll rest in a hotel room. My body isn’t feeling right, and I’m not fit to do much anyway. Going back would just mean the two of us staring at each other. Better to spend some time apart and think about our relationship.” After speaking, Dai Yunjiu opened the door and left Gao Yating’s office.

“All right. You should rest properly and take care of yourself. You mustn’t collapse,” Gao Yating said, sounding as though she understood him perfectly.

To be continued.