Yao Chen called her up in advance before picking her up that evening and told her, "Wear something pretty. Especially your underwear." There was a lazy tone in his voice, as if he was saying to the lamb on his plate; 'Lie down. I'm ready to eat.'

Han Yanyan understood that this meant a result had been achieved, and dolled herself up beautifully before going downstairs. There were no longer any cheap clothes in her wardrobe - from underwear to coats to shoes to bags, Yao Chen had bought her everything.

'Clothes make the woman'. It wasn't a false saying. Han Yanyan was already beautiful in cheap and ill-fitting clothing. Han Yanyan dressed to the nines in expensive clothes was a stunning, scholarly-looking beauty.

Yao Chen was very satisfied. Both with her, and with his own foresight.

"Don't I have to go to work today?" she asked.

"Not today, and not from now on," he told her.

Han Yanyan stared at him. Yao Chen rolled his eyes. "Does my girlfriend still need to work?"

"Is the matter settled?"

"Don't worry about it. First, eat." Yao Chen exhaled a ring of smoke, looked at the little lamb on his plate, and smiled.

Dinner was steak with red wine. The restaurant is elegant, the food exquisitely prepared. Yao Chen seemed to know his way around western utensils, and his etiquette wasn't bad either. Given his high school dropout, gangster background, Han Yanyan guessed that he must deliberately sought out a teacher to train him.

After dinner, Han Yanyan put her napkin aside and asked, "Can we talk about it now?"

Yao Chen took a sip of red wine and swirled it around his glass. "You're quite good at western food etiquette."

"I've attended school lectures on the subject," Han Yanyan replied.

But these so-called lectures were only theoretical things, not practice. Expertly cutting food with a knife and fork, elbows tucked, shoulders straight, were details difficult to achieve without a period of training, even if one knew technically how to do it. Once upon a time, foreign aristocratic ladies had even practiced controlling the angle of their elbows with straps on their shoulders and chests.

Yao Chen had indeed received lessons from a teacher, but Han Yanyan had still done better than him. It was because she had once received the full upbringing of a lady from the upper class.

It didn't quite sit right with him, but since it was such a trivial matter, he didn't take it personally.

When their plates had been removed, he told her, "Try calling your parents."

Han Yanyan called suspiciously, only to find that she had been blocked. It wasn't her who had blocked her parents, but them who had blocked her.

She was quite surprised.

Yao Chen handed her a brown paper bag, smiling, which she opened to find a stack of signed documents. She leafed through it carefully and said, startled, "A predatory loan?"

Three months ago, Yao Chen's people had spammed Han Yanyan's younger brother's phone number with advertisements. Little Brother Han had been willing to sell a kidney to buy a new phone, so as soon as he saw the text messages, he had reached out to them. He hadn't cared about the terms. He put his signature down on a contract to repay 20,000 yuan, got 5,000 yuan in cash, and gladly bought the gaming laptop his heart desired.

When the loan came due, he couldn't pay. He was then bamboozled into signing an IOU for another 60,000, and when that expired unpaid... In three months, the initial loan of 5,000 yuan had snowballed into 700,000.

When Han Yanyan's parents found out, it was as if the sky would fall.

"Usually we ask for two hundred thousand after three months. For five thousand to become seven hundred thousand, I've got to say, your brother's brain... " Was really something to write home about. Thankfully, Han Yanyan's brain was obviously working, something Yao Chen was quite relieved to think about.

Han Yanyan didn't respond. She was reading the last piece of paper. It was handwritten.

After the debt had snowballed into 700,000 yuan, scenes of phone threats, banging at the door, and being confronted at work had all appeared, one after the other. Her family had been falling apart. They didn't have anything close to that amount of money. When the family savings of under 100,000 yuan had been handed over to the lenders, they were faced with the future of selling their house. At that moment, the man from the lenders had said, "I hear that your family also has a daughter, a college student, very beautiful?"

Mother and Father Han, induced by the loan company, had written this guarantee that the debt would be repaid by Han Yanyan, their daughter studying in K City.

If this had been set in ancient times, it would be selling a daughter to pay for a debt. No wonder she had been blocked.

When she had finished reading, she threw the stack on the table and leaned back in her chair, silent and desolate - no matter how she really felt, her character was that of a daughter who was "strong inside, unwillingly exploited by her parents but bound by blood, painfully conflicted", and she had to behave accordingly.

One of her hands on the table was clenched into a fist, so tight that her knuckles turned white. She paid great attention to details.

"They thought that we would kidnap you and force you to sell yourself. Well, that's what we suggested, anyway," Yao Chen said.

He looked at her drooping lashes and red eyes, sighed, and stretched out his hand. Covering her hand with his, he comforted her by saying, "Don't be sad. Blood isn't all that important. They didn't bring you into this world to give you life, but merely as a byproduct of their own pleasure. Will thinking this make you feel better?"

He patted her hand again, then held it.

His grip was tight. He may have been comforting her, but he was also reminding her that his ultimate goal for tonight was to fuck her.

It was inevitable.

Han Yanyan raised her eyes up to look at him.

Ah.

frostcrystal

Hello!!! I bet you're wondering why I've been sparse on updates lately and I have a good reason.

I just got married!! Ahhh! The lead up to the wedding was super stressful because a lot of people in the wedding party got last-minute exposures to COVID (including me). But thankfully we were all negative, and the wedding itself could have hardly been more perfect!  Anyway, now that this is all over I hope to get back to more regular translating.