Chapter 11: The Blind Date
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Sunday.
Inside an old residence somewhere in the city.
The Gu family, to which Gu Zhaoyue belonged, had dwindled over the generations.
Their family traditions were deeply conservative, which was why Gu Zhaoyue, despite being twenty-seven or twenty-eight, had never been in a relationship.
“Dress a little more nicely today. Your blind date is a postdoctoral researcher, after all. You have to show him your most beautiful side.”
Gu Zhaoyue’s mother was a mature woman who had retained all her charm.
Though she was in her fifties, she had maintained herself so well that she looked no older than a woman in her thirties or forties.
She was the dancing goddess of the neighborhood plaza. Many men from outside the community even took the bus every day just to come dance there.
Gu Zhaoyue was patient with her students at school, but toward her mother she was remarkably impatient.
It was practically a common ailment among female teachers.
“What are you nagging me for? It won’t work out anyway.”
Gu Zhaoyue’s mother, Lu Xiuying, raised her arched brows. “What did you say?!”
Gu Zhaoyue muttered under her breath, not daring to openly challenge her mother.
She threw on an unattractive outfit, skipped makeup, and did not even brush her teeth.
Even so, her astonishing beauty was impossible to conceal.
The Gu family had once produced a prime minister, so Gu Zhaoyue’s parents had always held people with advanced degrees in special regard.
The Gu family did not worship money, but they did worship education.
Thus, Gu Zhaoyue’s blind date this time was a man in his thirties with a postdoctoral degree—and an overseas returnee at that.
Following the location he had sent her, Gu Zhaoyue rode an electric scooter to an upscale restaurant.
It was a Western restaurant, which Gu Zhaoyue did not particularly like. She preferred the traditional cuisine of her own country.
Before long, Gu Zhaoyue spotted her blind date.
He wore gold-rimmed glasses and had short, slightly curled hair parted to one side, its texture carefully styled. Paired with his sharply defined features, he was the archetypal handsome man.
In the brief dozen or so minutes he had spent waiting for Gu Zhaoyue, three women had already approached him to ask for his contact information.
“Hello, my name is Shen Feng. I didn’t expect you to be even more beautiful than in your photograph.”
Shen Feng had not expected his blind date to be so stunning.
Gu Zhaoyue’s beauty was entirely unadorned—natural, pleasing, and effortless.
Even without makeup, she was more captivating than every woman Shen Feng had encountered before.
With a single glance, Shen Feng made up his mind that he had to win her over.
Gu Zhaoyue, however, felt the exact opposite. The moment she saw Shen Feng, she rejected him outright.
Her first impression was that he was unreliable.
His appearance was indeed attractive, but there was an arrogance between his brows. The way he looked at her was like a hunter admiring its prey, and the predatory intensity was far too strong.
The two of them made desultory conversation, though Shen Feng did most of the talking while Gu Zhaoyue held her phone and replied to Zhou Chen’s messages.
Zhou Chen: “Is your blind date handsome?”
Gu Zhaoyue: “He is, but he has that Korean kind of handsomeness—too delicate, almost feminine. I don’t like it.”
Zhou Chen: “Tall, handsome, and rich, and you still aren’t tempted?”
Gu Zhaoyue: “How do you know he’s rich?”
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Zhou Chen: “Just guessing. Anyone who gets set up with a great beauty like you has to be tall, rich, and handsome.”
Gu Zhaoyue: “Since when did you learn to sweet-talk people? Go study!”
Zhou Chen: “I’m off, I’m off. [Meme]”
Gu Zhaoyue could not help letting out a soft laugh at the amusing meme.
Shen Feng could not resist asking, “Who are you chatting with? You look so happy.”
Gu Zhaoyue put down her phone. “No one important. One of my students.”
Shen Feng’s eyes lit up. He had found the subject that interested her.
“I heard from your mother that you’re the star Chinese teacher at No. 1 High School. Even on an occasion like this, you still take the time to talk with your students. That dedication is admirable.”
Gu Zhaoyue gave him a professional smile. “You’re too kind.”
Shen Feng hurriedly lifted his wineglass. “Listen to me—I put that badly. That’s not what I meant. I’ll punish myself with a drink.”
He had done it deliberately: first implying that Gu Zhaoyue was thoughtless enough to chat with students regardless of the occasion, then pretending to realize his mistake and steering the conversation toward drinking.
Alcohol could cloud the mind.
If he could get Gu Zhaoyue drunk and take advantage of the situation, everything would fall neatly into place.
Shen Feng had already investigated her family. The Gu family was unusual, with deeply old-fashioned and conservative views.
Once they had slept together, Gu Zhaoyue would essentially be his.
As long as he demonstrated his influence, even if Gu Zhaoyue wanted to report him afterward, his parents would persuade her to stay with him.
As the meal continued, Shen Feng repeatedly emphasized that he had connections in the education bureau.
If she got together with him, he claimed, she might even become a university professor in the future, gaining both fame and fortune.
But Gu Zhaoyue remained only mildly interested. The red wine in front of her stayed untouched.
Seeing that getting her drunk would not work, Shen Feng asked a waiter to bring over a bottle of soft drink.
Only then did Gu Zhaoyue begin to drink.
When Gu Zhaoyue got up to use the restroom, Shen Feng pretended that he needed to go as well.
As he passed by her seat, he slipped a pill into her drink.
His movements were swift and practiced, suggesting that he had no idea how many times he had used the trick before.
He was confident that he had avoided the notice of every customer and waiter—and that he had even chosen a blind spot in the surveillance coverage.
What he could never have imagined was that a creature less than a tenth the size of a fly had witnessed everything.
“All right, all right. So that’s how you want to play it?”
In Zhou Chen’s bedroom, Zhou Chen sat cross-legged on the bed, sneering again and again.
Given Gu Zhaoyue’s beauty, anything that happened to her was bound to happen more often than it did to ordinary people.
He had assumed that such incidents were rare in a law-abiding society. It seemed he had overestimated the purity of the world.
After Gu Zhaoyue finished using the restroom, she noticed a crowd gathered outside the men’s room.
“Damn, someone’s having an epileptic seizure in there!”
“Make way, make way! That lunatic is covered in filth!”
Hearing the shouts, Gu Zhaoyue quickly stepped back.
The men’s room soon fell silent. A few minutes later, an ambulance arrived and carried the person who had suffered the seizure away on a stretcher.
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To Gu Zhaoyue’s astonishment, the man was none other than Shen Feng.
What kind of situation was this?
She had come out for a blind date, only for her date to suffer a seizure in the restroom, covered from head to toe in excrement. Did it really have to be so disgusting?
One of the women who had approached Shen Feng earlier was a short-video blogger. She was now posting online:
“Can someone explain this to me? The gorgeous guy whose contact information I had just gotten started having a seizure in the restroom!”
Watching the ambulance disappear into the distance, Gu Zhaoyue had no choice but to pay the bill herself.
When she learned that the bottle of red wine Shen Feng had ordered cost more than two thousand, her heart bled.
Since Gu Zhaoyue did not drink alcohol, she could only pack the bottle of soft drink and take it home.
After riding her electric scooter home, Gu Zhaoyue complained bitterly to her mother and told her about Shen Feng’s seizure in the restroom.
“Even if I’m getting a little older, you didn’t have to find me someone like that, did you?”
Lu Xiuying was completely bewildered. After calling to confirm what had happened, she had nothing to say and could only endure her daughter’s reproaches.
“It was an accident this time. I’ll introduce you to someone better next time.”
Gu Zhaoyue snorted. “I don’t want anyone. My students are about to sit their university entrance examinations, and I don’t have the time or inclination for this sort of thing.”
“All right.”
Knowing she was in the wrong, Lu Xiuying did not say anything more.
At noon, Gu Zhaoyue and Lu Xiuying drank the bottle of soft drink together.
The mother and daughter both collapsed unconscious.
They did not wake until evening.
The incident left Gu Zhaoyue shaken. She had never imagined that the drink had been drugged.
She reported it to the police at once, but the surveillance footage from the Western restaurant contained no direct evidence proving that Shen Feng had tampered with the drink. In the end, the matter went no further.
Gu Zhaoyue knew perfectly well that Shen Feng had been the one to drug it.
Her instincts told her that he was not a good man.
Fortunately, he had suffered a seizure in the restroom.
Wait.
Had it really been a seizure?
Gu Zhaoyue was an exceptionally intelligent woman. She immediately connected the incident with the recent cases involving people suddenly developing severe mental disorders.
When she called to inquire about Shen Feng’s condition and learned that it was identical to those in the other cases, an audacious thought suddenly sprang into her mind.
She had just been drugged, and then the person who had drugged her had been turned into a mentally ill man.
There had to be a direct connection between the two events.
Could the mastermind who was turning people into the mentally ill be protecting her?
The moment the thought appeared, Gu Zhaoyue dismissed it. It was simply too bizarre.
Still, she dearly wanted to know who the culprit was—the person capable of turning others into the mentally ill.
…
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