Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

Three distinct modes of communication operate in parallel within this room, like three rivers flowing in the same direction without interfering with each other.

Lu Mingfei spoke, Erii wrote on a notepad, and Frilian drew a light in the air. Then, both pairs of chopsticks simultaneously reached for the last slice of beef in the pot. Frilian's chopsticks were the fastest; the instant she grabbed the slice of beef, Lu Mingfei's chopsticks had just dipped into the pot. Erii, on the other hand, wasn't involved in the struggle at all; she was focused on adding new cabbage to the pot and didn't notice the slice of beef at all.

Frillie placed the sliced ​​beef she had picked up onto Lu Mingfei's plate.

“For you,” she wrote in the air, the word “light” appearing in the rising steam from the hot pot, like a tiny, fleeting magic spell.

Lu Mingfei was stunned for a moment, and then his ears began to burn.

He lowered his head and stuffed the slice of beef into his mouth, not daring to look up while chewing, and mumbled a "thank you" indistinctly.

Erii looked up at them, then lowered her head again to continue arranging cabbage in the pot. She showed no particular reaction to this scene, neither curious nor sarcastic, as if Frilian giving the meat to Lu Mingfei and giving it to herself were of the same importance.

The black dragon sake is crisp and mellow, and before you know it, the effects of the alcohol begin to creep in.

Alcohol is a strange thing; it doesn't make you more sober, but it does make you more sluggish in some ways and more active in others.

At this moment, the area of ​​Lu Mingfei's brain responsible for fear and anxiety was suppressed by alcohol, while the area responsible for appreciating beautiful things was fully activated.

After the alcohol took effect, he was less afraid of Erii. He had previously approached this red-haired girl with the mindset of "keeping a close watch on a nuclear warhead," but the alcohol blurred that fear, replacing it with a more direct and superficial feeling.

After a few drinks, a faint blush rose on Erii's fair face, like a thin layer of rouge spreading on white porcelain. The pink hue spread from her cheekbones to her earlobes, then gradually faded along the contours of her face, making her look even more captivating than usual.

Her movements also relaxed a bit, no longer the kind of motionless meditation. Occasionally she would adjust her posture or use her chopsticks to stir the unfinished mushrooms in the dish.

Lu Mingfei put down his chopsticks, picked up his wine glass, and took another sip. The sake was slightly cool when it entered his mouth, but after sliding down his throat, a warm sensation slowly rose from his stomach.

He leaned back in his chair, looking at the scene before him: hot pot, sake, rain pounding against the window, and two quiet, beautiful girls. Suddenly, he felt that he hadn't really lost out by living this long.

The moment that thought crossed my mind, a dark figure on the roof of the capsule hotel across the street pressed the shutter.

In the photo, Erii, wearing a pink cherry blossom pajama, is picking up a piece of cabbage with chopsticks, her face slightly flushed; Frillie, wearing a gray sweater, is about to bring a wine glass to her lips, her profile particularly defined under the warm light; Lu Mingfei is leaning back in his chair, a silly smile softened by alcohol on his lips.

The steam from the hot pot rises in the center of the image, blurring the outlines of the three people into a soft, misty haze.

The photo was sent over the network, through the torrential rain of the Tokyo night sky, through countless fiber optic cables and nodes, and finally appeared on two different screens.

The first screen was in a room whose location was uncertain. Su Enxi was slumped in the sofa, her fluffy hair now hiding a few more magpies than yesterday. Three laptops and five cell phones were lit up on the coffee table in front of her at the same time, and the room was filled with the mixed smell of potato chip crumbs and energy drinks.

She looked at the photos she had just received, a slight smile playing on her lips, and slid her finger across the touchpad, zooming in and out on the image.

“The bride the boss picked for this good-for-nothing is indeed beautiful,” Su Enxi said, her tone scrutinizing but not lacking in admiration. “She’s no less beautiful than Chen Motong, it’s just that her clothes are a bit tacky.”

The clothes she was referring to were the cotton pajamas with cherry blossom patterns that Erii was wearing.

In Su Enxi's opinion, the design of this pajama set is an aesthetic disaster. The colors are too plain, the patterns are too childish, and the fit is too loose, making it impossible to show any figure when worn.

In contrast, the three standard love hotel outfits hanging on the wall at least had a clear aesthetic design. But the face and figure beneath the pajamas were simply too stunning, so much so that even the terrible pajamas looked like a lotus emerging from clear water on her.

"The bride is very beautiful, but unfortunately she hasn't fallen in love with the groom yet, and the groom is still afraid of her. These two fools' attention is entirely on the beef hot pot."

Mai Shude hung from the beam with one hand and held an open book in the other, but her eyes were not on the pages. Instead, she stared at Su Enxi's screen over the spine of the book.

Her white silk nightgown hung down from the beam like a still waterfall.

"With Frilian also present, it felt like a sequel to 'The Incompetent Wife'."

"The Incompetent Wife" is the title of an old Japanese film about a cowardly husband and his wife who is incapable of doing anything. However, Mai Shutoku's use of this title clearly indicates that she wasn't discussing film history.

She paused, then changed to a more straightforward way of putting it.

"Don't you think we're like zookeepers at a panda sanctuary right now?"

Su Enxi was stunned, and responded in a way that was somewhere between a sneer and a sigh.

"Your analogy is really accurate." She examined the photo again, her gaze lingering on each of the three people's faces for a few seconds.

“An endangered and rare animal with enormous destructive potential was placed in a reserve. The keepers provided it with a nutritionally balanced diet, regularly monitored its health indicators, and even arranged for a male panda to live with it, hoping that they could reproduce naturally. However, the male panda only focused on eating bamboo, and the female panda was also single-mindedly focused on eating bamboo.”

Su Enxi pointed a finger at Lu Mingfei's head on the screen, magnifying his silly grinning face by two times.

"This male panda even brought back an unidentified species to eat bamboo with."

Mai Shude turned a page in the book and then turned back.

"How long do you think it will take for Genjiro's side to find this place?" she asked.

"Given the efficiency of the Snake Clan, and with the added incentive of a billion-dollar bounty, it should take no more than forty-eight hours." Su Enxi typed rapidly on another computer, pulling up several sets of data. "The rain in Tokyo is getting heavier, the air pressure is continuing to drop, and the frequency of earthquakes is also increasing. We didn't have much time left to begin with, and now our 'groom' is still having hot pot with his 'bride'."

There was no real blame in his tone; rather, it conveyed a sense of resignation and helplessness.

“At least he’s feeding her,” Mai Shude said, closing her book. “He’s much better than when we first met this girl, back when she wouldn’t even sit at the same table with anyone to eat.”

Su Enxi didn't reply. She opened the photo again and looked at the three blurry outlines behind the steaming hot pot.

In a Tokyo torrential downpour, a small room bathed in warm red light, a beef hot pot and sake, a quiet girl and a giggling boy. The scene somehow exudes an indescribable warmth, like a fleeting, unreal tranquility in the eye of a storm.

Another clap of thunder boomed outside the window.

Chapter 752 Lu Mingfei is even worse than a beast

"What does it mean?"

With a somersault, Jiu Demai fell from the beam. Her white silk nightgown billowed in the air like a wave suddenly billowing in the wind, but when she landed, it was so light that it made almost no sound. Her bare feet made only a very slight friction as they touched the wooden floor.

She tossed the detective novel onto the coffee table, its spine thudding between Su Enxi's pile of empty energy drink cans and potato chip bags. Then she crossed her arms and looked down at Su Enxi, who was curled up on the sofa, her eyes saying: You don't even understand this.

“Captive pandas are not easily attracted to the opposite sex, but they are also very precious; every one that goes extinct is one less inhabitant. Therefore, the most crucial job of the keepers is to get male and female pandas to mate,” she began, her tone flat and even, as if she were giving a pre-job training to a new intern. “They go to great lengths to find mates for the pandas, cramming them into the same cage, trying every possible way to arouse the male pandas’ interest in the females. Someone even came up with a brilliant idea: showing the pandas videos of other pandas mating.”

Su Enxi's eyebrows twitched suddenly, her expression swinging back and forth between "What kind of weird operation is this?" and "But it actually makes sense logically."

"The result is often that the female panda beats the male panda to a pulp over a bundle of bamboo, or vice versa," Mai Shude summarized. "Now, the two of us are the zookeepers, and those two are the male and female pandas."

She tapped the photo on the screen.

In the photo, the male panda is leaning back in his chair, a silly grin softened by alcohol on his lips, with lingering grease. The female panda sits quietly opposite him, picking at a piece of cabbage with the tip of her chopsticks, her face blank as if it were a sheet of paper that has never been written on.

“We’ve already snatched that angelic beauty from the Snake Clan for him. All he has to do is one thing—be a beast. Is being a beast that hard?” Su Enxi said. She pulled out the last intact potato chip from deep inside the bag, snapped it in half with a crunch, and the crisp cracking sound was filled with heartbreaking disappointment.

“The boss’s order is to marry the head of the Uesugi family to Lu Mingfei, not just to snatch him away and call it a day.” Mai Shude walked to the coffee table, bent down and picked up an unopened bottle of energy drink. She twisted off the cap and took a sip, then immediately frowned. Strawberry flavor, her least favorite flavor. “In the end, you’re the one who started this whole thing. You had nothing better to do than say you wanted to give Lu Mingfei another girl.”

Su Enxi paused in her chewing. Her expression underwent a three-step transformation in a very short time: first, the embarrassment of being exposed; then, the stubbornness of denying it to the death; and finally, the nonchalant acceptance of giving up.

"How would I know? I was just joking." She stuffed the remaining half of the potato chip into her mouth and mumbled incoherently, "That night we were chatting in the group chat, and I said that Lu Mingfei, that good-for-nothing, would probably never find a wife in his life. Why don't we find him a Japanese girl while he's in Japan? Who knew the boss would take it seriously and even specifically name Uesugi Erii. My god, why doesn't he just ask for that Princess Charlotte from Morocco?"

"You mean that supermodel princess we bumped into at the Gucci launch event?" Mai Shude raised one eyebrow. "She's already taken, isn't she? Her boyfriend is a duke from a European royal family, I think."

"Does the boss even care about something like this?" Su Enxi waved her hand. "If he sets his sights on a woman, he'll order us to snatch her back for Lu Mingfei, even if she's hiding at the ends of the earth!"

She paused, her gaze returning to the photo on the screen, settling on the quiet, oblivious face behind the steaming hotpot.

"However, on the other hand, this underworld princess is no easier to deal with than the Moroccan princess."

“No, the Moroccan princess is much easier to deal with; at least she’s a normal human being,” Mai Shude corrected her.

She grabbed a second laptop from the coffee table, her ten fingers flying across the keyboard, the screen scrolling with lines of code and tables of data.

"The Moroccan princess has social media accounts, a publicly verifiable itinerary, a network of relationships that can be analyzed and dissected, and at least five emotional weaknesses that can be precisely exploited. Our underworld princess, on the other hand, has been locked in a building for twenty years, never attended school, never made a single friend, never touched any smart devices, and doesn't even know the most basic language communication. From an intelligence perspective, she is a complete blank slate. A blank slate is precisely the most difficult to manipulate because there is nothing on it, and you can't even find a fulcrum to leverage it."

“Right now, our male and female pandas show absolutely no signs of being in heat; they’re just diligently munching on bamboo,” said Mai Shude, glancing at the photo on the screen again.

In the photo, Lu Mingfei's chopsticks are stuck into the boiling soup pot, picking up a large slice of fatty beef. The focused seriousness on his face makes it look less like he's eating hot pot and more like he's defusing a bomb that could explode at any moment.

"It's true that feelings develop over time. They've only known each other for a short while, and they're already getting all worked up about it. Isn't that a bit too lewd?" Su Enxi said.

“We don’t have time to wait for them to develop feelings over time,” said Mai Shude, slamming her notebook shut and her expression suddenly turning serious.

She pointed out the window. The curtains were not drawn; the heavy velvet curtains covered the entire room completely, but the sound of the rain pounding against the glass still penetrated through the layers of fabric, like tens of thousands of fingers simultaneously pounding on a door leading to an abyss.

"Starting tonight, at least 400,000 people in Tokyo are searching for the head of the Uesugi family. The underworld, the legitimate world, the Snake Clan, the Metropolitan Police Department, and even ordinary citizens. The radius of the 1 billion yen bounty has enveloped every corner of the city. They won't stop until they find him. They didn't go out today; this torrential rain saved them. But what about tomorrow? The day after? That love hotel can't be a long-term refuge; eventually, someone will knock on that door."

Mai Shude herself was imagining that scene: a thug wearing a floral shirt and a thick gold chain knocked on the door of a room on the fifth floor of a love hotel, tilted his head and peeked inside, and then his eyes were not lit up by greed, but by fear.

It wasn't because I saw Lu Mingfei, but because I saw the red-haired girl slowly raise her eyelids.

"Are you planning to keep them cooped up in that love hotel until they've even had a baby?" Su Enxi realized the seriousness of the situation. She put down the bag of potato chips, sat up straight on the sofa, and a pair of eyes that were starting to work seriously appeared beneath her messy long hair.

"Based on your experience, how many days does it take to pick up a girl?" she asked Mai Shude.

Chapter 753 Making Erii's Beauty Surpass Frilian

Mai Shude remained silent, forced to admit that she indeed had the right to speak.

“I almost forgot there was a rare species here with zero dating experience,” she said. “A girl doesn’t need days to accept a man. It only takes a moment, a moment when something inside her is stirred. That moment can take a week, a month, or a year; it accumulates, and then it naturally falls into place. But while it’s the same moment, Caesar might only need a day. He just needs to step into a room, show a half-smile, and say his third sentence, and that moment has already arrived. But Lu Mingfei—”

"—It will probably take a lifetime."

"Damn it! What right do you have to talk so eloquently here? You don't have a boyfriend either!" Su Enxi blurted out.

"At least I have a line of men chasing after me, while you just hide at parties to secretly take pictures of handsome guys and then send them to me on WeChat."

"Don't hit someone in the face, don't insult someone by revealing their shortcomings..." Su Enxi instantly shrank eight degrees.

Whenever she bumps into a handsome male model or a young rich kid at a party, her first reaction is always to take out her phone and secretly snap a picture, then quickly send it to Mai Shude, followed by a comment like "How about this one?" or "Guess how old he is?" or "Never mind, he's too handsome, I'm not good enough for him."

"So what can we do now?"

Mai Shude did not respond immediately.

She walked to the enormous wardrobe deep inside the room, opened the door, and saw two rows of clothes hanging neatly inside.

One row belonged to her, with everything from evening gowns to tactical uniforms; the other row belonged to Su Enxi, or more accurately, a row of oversized T-shirts, hoodies, and flashy beach shorts, with a few mismatched custom-made evening gowns scattered among them, like aristocratic refugees who had mistakenly wandered into the wardrobe of an ordinary citizen.

“On one side is a blank slate girl who knows nothing about the rules of human society, and on the other side is a perpetual loser with zero experience in love.” She took a pair of sharply tailored black trousers from the hanger. “They are like two chemically stable inert substances that will not react naturally when put together. Silicon and oxygen need to be heated to 1,400 degrees Celsius to become silicon dioxide. What they lack is not time, but a catalyst.”

She pulled out another hanger from the back of the closet, on which hung a sharp black suit.

"Take that bottle of Black Dragon sake, for example. I had the delivery company send it over. Generally speaking, alcohol is best at breaking down the barriers between men and women. Champagne and red wine have historically been considered aphrodisiacs. However, it seems the effect wasn't ideal. The alcohol only helped Lu Mingfei relieve some of his fear, but it didn't embolden him. He's probably holding a glass right now, reveling in his own moment of glory, and has no idea what to do."

"Tsk tsk! A true beast!" Su Enxi slammed her hand on the sofa armrest, her face full of heartache and indignation. "If I were a man, my legs would go weak the moment I saw a beauty of the Uesugi family head's caliber! You haven't seen her up close. I glanced at her from the helicopter, and that face combined with that figure—calling her the most beautiful girl in Japan would be a conservative assessment. Is Lu Mingfei blind or what?"

“If it were Chu Zihang, I believe he could be truly immune to beautiful women, but Lu Mingfei probably hasn’t reached that level yet.” Jiu De Mai took the black trousers from the hanger and laid them flat on the back of the chair, then reached to undo the belt of her pajamas. “He’s afraid of the Uesugi family head. In his eyes, the Uesugi family head isn’t a pretty girl at all, but a walking human weapon. The way he looks at her is exactly the same as the way you look at your limited edition nuclear warhead model at night—full of awe, but definitely not the kind of look you’d want to have your arms around while sleeping.”

“Besides, Frilian’s place in his heart is just too firmly established,” Mai Shutoku continued, tossing her silk pajamas onto the bed to reveal her black undershirt. “She’s the girl he loves, the only one who shines in his darkest days. To make him overcome his feelings for Frilian, he must truly feel the beauty of the Uesugi family head as a girl, not as a weapon.”

She stood in front of the dressing mirror and began to use hair clips to pile her cascading black hair on top of her head. In just a few seconds, a neat bun was formed.

“In comparison, dealing with the Uesugi family head is much easier.” She reached for a lipstick on the vanity, glanced at the shade, and put it back. “The only young man she’s ever met is Genjiro. The sample size is small. So what we need to do is simple: make Lu Mingfei look better than Genjiro, and we’ll win her heart. It’s like in a market that only sells one brand of mineral water; you just need to add another brand to capture 50% of the market share.”

"This sounds absurdly difficult," Su Enxi said, counting on her fingers one by one, her despair deepening with each count. "We have to teach a blank slate of a girl what feminine charm is within a few days. Then we have to transform that good-for-nothing Lu Mingfei into a romantic nobleman, making him surpass the god-like Genjiro. Genjiro! A born super-bloodline, the young leader of the entire Japanese underworld, his face is so handsome I almost want to use his picture as my desktop wallpaper. How could this Lu Mingfei possibly surpass a god?"

Su Enxi has the ability to trigger a financial tsunami of any level. She can mobilize astronomical sums of money within 24 hours to push a country's currency to the brink of collapse. Her short-selling report once made three hedge fund managers consider jumping off the top of the exchange.

Making a blockhead and a good-for-nothing fall in love was a task completely beyond her capabilities.