CHAPTER 706: YUQI’S AND SONGJIA’S PAST

"Anyway, where was I... Oh, right, the crash scene. There was nobody left in the car, so Mom had to do a funeral with your old clothes.

She was crying so much at that funeral. I was crying so much too... Only Yueyue and Nami were too young to remember it."

"What happened after the funeral?" Xiaoyun curiously asked as Yuqi’s voice suddenly got quieter and quieter.

"Mom started drinking nonstop for years... Our grandparents were the ones taking care of us until she got out of it."

"How did she get out of it?"

"You should be thankful Wuli and Shuli are her best friends... Or else Mom probably wouldn’t have lived long enough to see you."

"I know you helped, too."

As Xiaoyun gently patted her on the head, Yuqi didn’t push it away as she snuggled up to his chest even more.

"Do you want to know what happened to your company?"

"Of course. Did it go as planned, or did something bad happen to it? Leyan wasn’t running it while drunk, was she?"

"She only started running it after she got out of the drinking habit... Grandma was running the company until she... couldn’t."

Yuqi’s words made Xiaoyun’s hand freeze again as he instantly knew the grandma she was talking about was his old man’s wife.

"When did she... pass away?"

"A month after Mom stopped drinking. She was barely holding on after both you and her grandson passed away in the same year."

"Songyi died?"

"Yeah... He got into some sort of fight with thugs and was stabbed to death. It was just streaks of bad luck in the family.

When Mom took over the company, it was a complete mess. The plan you had made before passing away was half-useless."

"Half useless? Really? I spent years crafting that. It was a cumulative sustainability safety plan. How did it become useless?"

"Because your plan didn’t include what to do when a global recession hit. You literally left at the worst time possible, you know that?"

As Yuqi looked back at her with a grumpy look, all Xiaoyun could do was awkwardly scratch his head, as he knew exactly what she was talking about.

"Crap. I should have written something about that. But there should have been enough cash flow to survive the crash, right?"

"Yeah, there was. But it took years to recover... Xiaoyun, you know, Mom was seriously considering just selling your share of the stock completely?"

"To be honest, that was what I originally expected her to do. Selling it to get enough money to raise you guys would make more sense."

"She wasn’t about to give up the years of work you had put into the company. Your plan wasn’t all that useless when she actually started putting it into work."

"Really? I thought you said it was just useless a few seconds ago."

"I said half-useless. It’s just not as useful as it could have been. But just enough to convince the majority of the board to keep her as the CEO."

"I see... If I remember correctly, though, you took over the company at some point, didn’t you?"

"Of course I did. I sped up everything in life just to take over from Mom. You should have been happy I took it over, or else Mom would have remarried."

"Remarried?"

Xiaoyun looked genuinally shocked for the first time as he had never once ever heard of the possibility of Leyan remarrying someone else.

"Mom had a lot of people chasing after her. Especially one of our main competitors who wanted the title of putting one of the few female CEO under his boot."

"What does that have to do with Leyan and remarrying?"

"They went out of their way to force every single one of our distributors to break already signed contracts to boycott us."

"That’s... absurd."

"Not as absurd when they happened to be one of the richest coal operations that was looking to expand into other fields of business."

"You still haven’t explained what that has to do with Leyan and remarrying," Xiaoyun asked again.

"Do I really need to explain it down to the detail?"

Seeing him nod his head, Yuqi rolled her eyes as she let out a small sigh before resuming the story.

"The company was going through a little liquidity crisis when interest rates got more expensive, while the company had already agreed to a massive energy contract.

All the major stockholders and the board of directors wanted us to incorporate the company with that coal mining CEO who had more than enough cash flow.

Not to mention it also happened to perfectly complement our business, providing coal towards the potential energy sector we had been expanding into."

"You serious? That bad of a timing?"

"Yeah. And guess what? That coal mining CEO went on Television to say they’ll only agree to a merger if Mom marries his son.

Now you get why the whole breaking contract happened in the first place? Mom was about to fold under pressure just to keep the company going."

"Where are the provincial officials? There’s no way they will just let Songjia conglomerate fail when so many people in Guangdong work for us."

"Xiaoyun, do I need to wake you up or something? They already bailed out businesses once during the Great Recession."

"Right..."

"Anyway, if I hadn’t taken the position as CEO any faster. You probably could have said goodbye to Mom forever."

"Thank you so much then... Wait, how did you deal with the problem then?"

"Break contracts, duh. I’m not some idiot who’s going to not cut our losses. Giving up the energy sector is better than selling out my own mother."

"The board agreed to that?"

"What else are they going to do? Force a woman to marry some stranger in the hope that the merger will actually go through?"

"Oh, right."

Xiaoyun quickly facepalmed himself as he took someone talking on the TV seriously rather than as a joke.

"Mom almost got sold by the board, thought. They were so convinced of not taking losses that they almost denied me from taking Mom’s position."

"They dared to do that?"

"Why wouldn’t they? You aren’t here anymore... To them, we’re just a slightly bigger shareholder whose share had been diluted over the years."

"Wait, how did you get into position? Did you have the majority or something?" Xiaoyun curiously asked.

"Of course, I had the majority. All I needed to do was to blackmail a few of the smaller shareholders and make Mom hand over her position."

"Blackmail?"

As Yuqi suddenly reached her hand down onto his crotch, a chill traveled down his spine as she gently squeezed it a little.

"This kind of blackmail... Imagine being recorded with a prostitute in a dark room. You tell me how they would vote after that."

The moment she lets him go, Xiaoyun’s face only gets more intrigued rather than scared about how she even learned all these dirty tactics.

"Yuqi... You really just graduated from university? And took the company over at such a young age?"

"I graduated from the same university you went to at 18, just two years before the outbreak...

You took the company over at a young age, too, no? Right after graduating from college and meeting mom?" Yuqi questioned back.

"I was just in the right place at the right time. I-I was more lucky than anything. Yuqi, how did you even learned all these... tactics?"

"It’s just things I had to do to survive growing up without a father... Talking about you, asshole."

Xiaoyun could only awkwardly chuckle as he scratched his head. He couldn’t say sorry again as he saw the genuine frustration building up on her face.

"Ahem, what happened in the year you took the company over? Did everything just go smoothly until the outbreak?"

"Of course not. What made you think I was staying late in the company when the outbreak happened?"

"Um... I just thought you might have been a workaholic or something. I mean, you’re the one who lashed out at Leyan the day we came back home."

"Hmph!"

Yuqi crossed her arms as she didn’t speak up any further. It was clear Xiaoyun had spoken too brutally honest.

"Okay, so the company was in a bad situation after the loss of the energy sector... I’m sure you made a great recovery with the genius ideas in your head, right?’

After a short silence, Yuqi finally spoke up again as the anger suddenly vanished. In its place was a hint of shame and embrassment, surprisingly.

"I could only keep the company afloat, and that’s it... I just couldn’t expand anywhere, no matter what I tried to do."

Her voice got quieter and quieter, looking a little embrassed as she nervously played with her own finger.

"That’s already extremely impressive for someone straight out of uni. Do you know how many people would fail at the first step?"