After casually tossing Lu Ziqiao a few thousand yuan in petty cash just to make the parasitic grifter scram, Adrian turned his attention to his newly appointed lackey.
"Meijia, how has the new job been treating you these past few days?"
"Smooth sailing! Oh, Boss, it has been absolutely smooth sailing!" Chen Meijia proudly flashed a thumbs-up, puffing out her chest with an air of profound, self-righteous arrogance. "Landlord, you have no idea! After the local commercial tenants found out I was your official sub-landlord and rent collector, they practically worship me like a living goddess. Now, whenever I stroll down to the night market, the food stall owners don't even dare to charge me for my meals!"
"Meijia, you absolute idiot! You are actually abusing your delegated authority to extort free food from street vendors?!" Hu Yifei immediately stepped up, aggressively poking Meijia in the forehead with a stiff finger. "Do you realize that is basically illegal racketeering? If the authorities catch wind, your civil qualifications will be permanently revoked and you'll be prosecuted for corruption!"
"Oh, Sister Yifei, please!" Meijia whined, quickly scurrying to hide behind Adrian's tall frame, peering out timidly. "It isn't that I refuse to pay them! They just violently refuse to accept my money out of sheer respect. What am I supposed to do, force it down their throats?"
Adrian swirled his drink, highly amused. Honestly, he wouldn't classify Chen Meijia as genuinely stupid. She possessed a terrifying, almost subconscious instinct for self-preservation and personal advantage. After all, if she truly had zero brains, a naive girl like her would have been trafficked to some remote mountain village years ago. Yet here she was, living a relatively comfortable, consequence-free life in the heart of Shanghai.
"Unchecked power truly is the ultimate breeding ground for absolute corruption. You need to sit down and listen to my political ethics lectures!" Yifei sighed, rubbing her temples. Seeing Meijia deploy her signature, wide-eyed innocent look, Yifei knew lecturing the airhead was entirely futile and gave up.
Fortunately, Meijia was just a glorified rent collector. She lacked the intellect to orchestrate any serious, catastrophic crimes. As long as Adrian didn't personally hold her legally accountable, her petty food extortion wasn't worth a second thought.
Honestly, the iPartment downstairs bar seemed to possess some kind of dark, time-warping magic. The second you sat down on the leather sofa and listened to this bizarre group of people bicker, time simply evaporated. Before Adrian even realized it, the clock had already ticked past 10:00 PM.
"Well, I must be heading back for the night. Let us all drink again when our schedules align," Adrian announced smoothly, raising his glass to the group.
"Absolutely! Boss, you have to come down and bless us with your presence more often!" Lu Ziqiao raised his glass, shouting with genuine, ecstatic fervor.
Because Adrian technically owned the establishment now, their entire VIP tab was permanently comped. To parasites like Lu Ziqiao and Chen Meijia, any high-end gathering that didn't cost them a single penny was an absolute triumph!
"Landlord... wait, Landlord! Could you please reconsider that entire UFC competition thing?"
Seeing that Adrian had finished his drink and was preparing to leave, Zeng Xiaoxian quickly scrambled out of the booth. He grabbed Adrian's sleeve, pulling him slightly aside into the shadows of the hallway, his voice dropping to a frantic whisper.
"What exactly do you mean, Teacher Zeng?" Adrian squinted, his dark eyes flashing with calculating mischief. "Do you wish to enter the cage as well?"
"No, no, absolutely not!" Zeng Xiaoxian practically shivered at the thought, forcing a sly, desperate smile. "I just wanted to say... could you please, please not sign Hu Yifei up for such a barbaric, brutal bloodsport?"
Admittedly, neither Yifei nor Zeng Xiaoxian had ever officially confessed their feelings, but the heavy, pathetic romantic tension between them was glaringly obvious to everyone in the building. As a spineless coward, Zeng Xiaoxian was naturally terrified of the tomboy entering a lethal UFC deathmatch, but he knew he lacked the masculine authority to persuade her to back down. So, he had resorted to begging the billionaire to cancel the registration.
"Barbaric? But I intend to participate in the tournament myself," Adrian replied smoothly, completely rejecting the plea.
He naturally knew exactly what Zeng Xiaoxian was trying to accomplish, and he absolutely refused to let the pathetic radio host have his way.
'If you want to play the protective hero and spend time alone with Hu Yifei, you are going to have to bleed for it,' Adrian sneered internally. 'If the female protagonists of this complex remain clustered together, even a god couldn't conquer them all at once. They must be isolated, stripped of their support networks, and broken down one by one!'
"Ah! No, wait, Landlord, what I actually meant wasn't... I just... I mean..."
Zeng Xiaoxian immediately began to stammer incoherently, his face flushing with panic. Whenever he was confronted with the slightest bit of pushback, the man's brain completely short-circuited. Honestly, his pathetic personality perfectly mirrored the weak-willed protagonist from Adrian's previous apocalyptic timeline. They were the kind of men who possessed absolutely zero spine, instantly retreating the second they faced a real obstacle.
If it weren't for the fact that Zeng Xiaoxian was technically the canonical 'protagonist' of this timeline, possessing a thick, reality-bending aura of plot armor and dumb luck, he would have died in a gutter years ago. Without that cosmic luck, how could a coward like him ever hope to conquer an apex predator like Hu Yifei?
"Zeng Xiaoxian, what the hell are you whispering about over here?"
Hu Yifei strode over, casually throwing a toned, athletic arm directly around Adrian's shoulder. She tilted her head, glaring suspiciously at the radio host.
Hu Yifei was a genuinely terrifying contradiction. Do not be fooled by the fact that she casually draped herself over men and frequently wore skin-tight, highly revealing clothes that made her look like a promiscuous party girl. In reality, deep down to her absolute core, she was an incredibly traditional, fiercely conservative woman.
The only reason she engaged in such casual, tactile physical contact with men was because, in her own mind, she didn't view herself as a fragile woman. She viewed herself as one of the guys. And bros didn't fuss over a friendly arm around the shoulder.
Of course, any foolish predator who misinterpreted her casual physical contact as an invitation for sex would very quickly discover what true, hospitalizing cruelty felt like.
"It's nothing," Adrian shrugged indifferently, leaning slightly into her touch to savor the faint, intoxicating fragrance wafting from her skin.
Although she was a violent tomboy, Yifei was immaculate. She scrubbed herself thoroughly every single day, naturally exuding a clean, incredibly charming scent. It was the exact reason why, despite her explosive temper and homicidal tendencies, she was relentlessly pursued by wealthy aristocratic heirs. The fragrance was dangerously subtle—you couldn't detect it unless you were deep in her personal space. But once you inhaled it, it was maddeningly enticing, making a man want to pin her down, bury his face in her neck, and ruthlessly devour her from the inside out.
"Teacher Zeng was just asking me for the details on the UFC qualifiers," Adrian lied smoothly, a dark smirk playing on his lips. "I believe he actually wants to sign up for the heavyweight division."
"Him? Zeng Xiaoxian?!" Yifei scoffed loudly, rolling her eyes with absolute, crushing disdain. "Are you out of your damn mind? You want to step into a professional UFC cage? Registering for the local neighborhood committee's elderly ballroom dance competition is about the absolute limit of your physical capabilities. A deathmatch? What a joke."
"Who says I'm crazy?!" Zeng Xiaoxian's fragile ego flared up instantly under her mockery. He puffed out his chest, preparing to bluff his way into the tournament to save face in front of his crush. "Let me tell you the absolute truth, Yifei! In the underground martial arts world, I am actually known as the legendary—Ahhhhhh!"
Before Zeng Xiaoxian could finish his pathetic boast, Adrian's hand moved with the blinding, imperceptible speed of a master assassin.
His rigid knuckles struck a highly specific, exposed nerve cluster directly in the center of Zeng Xiaoxian's lower lumbar spine.
Thwack.
Zeng Xiaoxian immediately collapsed, letting out a high-pitched, agonizing scream that sounded exactly like a pig being slaughtered at the butcher block.
Adrian retracted his hand smoothly, his expression a mask of polite concern.
'I cannot allow this idiot to ruin my carefully laid tactical isolation,' Adrian calculated coldly as Zeng Xiaoxian writhed on the floor.
If Zeng Xiaoxian actually signed up for the UFC purely out of bruised pride, even though he would be brutally knocked unconscious in the first ten seconds of round one, Yifei's maternal instincts would flare up. She would spend all her free time nursing the pathetic host's injuries in the hospital. If she was preoccupied with his recovery, Adrian's window to isolate and conquer her would be completely slammed shut.
Therefore, the absolute best, most efficient tactical option was to publicly cripple the man's pride with a spine strike, forcing him to completely surrender before he ever stepped into the ring.
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Give me powerstones.
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