As expected.

Within days, word rolled in from Luyu and Zixia Chen like a cold wind through reeds.

They traced the trail step by step, like footprints in wet sand, and found the Qin family’s freighter at a port about to slip into foreign waters, its belly stuffed with fighter-jet parts.

At first, the men aboard tried to punch through the harbor with guns, like boars charging a thorn hedge.

Luyu’s face went black as thunderclouds; he called in armed helicopters, and cold muzzles pointed down like winter rain, so the tough guys went quiet.

It could’ve ended there, like a lantern snuffed at dusk, but Nana Toki thought the hidden mission was already half done, so why not finish it in one clean sweep.

So.

Thick-skinned as a rhino hide, the maid filed a report like a frost-edged blade, accusing the Qin family of smuggling arms.

The people in X Capital had long wanted to hit the Qin and Si families, like hawks circling over two fat hares.

With the Si Family crippled by the Qins, and now the Qins exposed, the top brass in X Capital were grinning like cats at cream.

They sent a team to search the Qin warehouses, boots drumming like hail on tin.

The search turned up a sizable cache of weapons, crates rising like a rusted tide.

The Qin family, old and young, stared as counterterror units pulled out batch after batch, their faces blank as winter ponds.

Especially the patriarch; even in prison he was a man lost in fog, never understanding how a mountain of guns sprouted in his house when only his key fit the lock.

How did those weapons get in here!?

Of course.

He wasn’t the only one stumped; even Zixia Chen stood like a tree in wind, baffled.

Luckily, Nana Toki’s heart could be soft as spring mud; remembering the tea Zixia once bought her at the station, she whispered the truth like a secret under moonlight.

“Actually... I slipped that batch in myself.”

“...”

“Tsk, you’re one filthy maid!” Zixia’s worldview shattered like glass in a quake; this woman planted evidence like a seasoned gardener of lies.

Brazen to the point of madness!

But Zixia blinked, then snapped back like a bowstring. “Hold up—where’d you even get the guns?!”

She’s a maid, right, so where did a pile of arms fall from the sky?

“Uh... I probably picked them up?” Nana tested the words like dipping a toe in icy water, keeping a safe step back.

“Spit it out!” Zixia’s face went stone-cold as slate; he drew his gun with a snap like a branch breaking.

“...” Damn it. Overplayed it like a peacock in a storm.

Because of that mess, Nana Toki got nagged for days like a mosquito in summer.

Six days out of seven, Zixia showed up at her place, hovering like a watchdog, afraid she was a smuggler too.

Nana Toki: “...”

The Qin patriarch’s arrest for arms smuggling hit Huaiyue Qin like a hammer on thin ice.

With the dragon head gone, the Qin clan slid into a financial freeze, cracks spreading like frost on glass.

In X City, eyes on Qin assets flashed like knives in the dark.

After half a month in X City, Nana saw Huaiyue Qin on TV, announcing bankruptcy with a voice like fallen leaves; all her companies and properties were swallowed whole.

Compared to months ago, her face carried heavy tiredness like rain-soaked cloth, the iron-lady aura dimmed like a lamp at dawn.

By then.

The twin umbrellas of black and white that once blotted X City’s sky had been torn to rags, and ordinary people sang and danced in the streets like lanterns in a festival.

Nana Toki slipped back into a quiet life, like a boat on still water.

She did want to go stir the pot with the Protagonist Lord, to snap his red thread with Mengmeng Feng like cutting a kite string.

But after the Qin bankruptcy, Yiwei Yang vanished like mist at noon; no matter how she searched, there was only bare shoreline.

Mengmeng Feng, meanwhile, ran home after school like a wind-chasing girl, as if nothing had cracked.

Nana started to suspect the Protagonist Lord had bolted to another city to play Sea King, hearts bobbing after him like fish to a lure.

One day, on the way to pick up Qingyu Si, Nana passed a junkyard and saw Yiwei Yang, both legs ruined, hunched like a broken kite; that was when the picture snapped into focus.

He’d been there at the Qin smuggling op, a pawn on a rainy chessboard.

Once the operation blew open, his special mission shattered like clay, and the verdict was failure.

The System had given Yiwei Yang a special task: help the Qin ship reach open sea, a straight line across gray waves.

He knew nothing about the arms; when he saw Zixia Chen’s team bag the men, he realized his golden-finger System had sold him out like a shopkeeper with slick hands.

By then it was too late; the moment the mission failed, the System cut him loose like a rope over a cliff and reclaimed every gain he’d ever earned through it.

Stripped of everything, Yiwei Yang aged decades overnight like a pear left to wrinkle, drifting through his days in a fog.

He stopped going to school; later, after a theft incident, he was expelled like a leaf swept off a step.

No skills, no will to work—he survived by scavenging, like a stray picking through tides of trash.

But it didn’t end there.

He’d tangled Huaiyue Qin’s company into it as well, threads crossed like vines.

He had invested in her firm; when the System repossessed his assets, a hole yawned in her finances like a sinkhole.

She thought he was running off with the cash; she went to confront him, words soaring like sparks.

He had no way to explain, his throat a dry well; in her fury, she had his legs broken, and only then did the storm pass.

After that, the Qin main branch hit a money crisis like a ship hitting rocks, and Huaiyue Qin had to sell her company to keep the clan’s engine coughing.

It only delayed the winter; days later, the main house fell, and her company, heavy with debt, was snapped up like a dying fish.

Huaiyue Qin herself was drowning in debt, weights tied like stones to her ankles.

And that wasn’t the end of the nightmare.

It was the first step into a night without stars.

The buyer of her company was someone she’d never have pictured in ten thousand dreams: Kaiwei, the man who’d drugged her before, a snake coiled under a warm rock.

One midnight, he broke into her apartment like a cold draft, tore her nightgown like paper, and shoved a sheet under her eyes like a knife.

Her face went white as chalk.

Her debts were a tidal wave; with the company included, she herself counted as his property, like a bird in a painted cage.

That IOU, near a bill of sale, shattered her last scrap of strength and dignity like porcelain on stone.

After that, she was his toy like a doll behind glass, and she moonlighted as a hostess in a hotel, living off meager flesh-sold coin like dew on dry grass.

“Tsk, that’s miserable,” Nana sighed, carrying Qingyu Si home under streetlights like strings of cold stars, never noticing that their fall was a web she’d woven.

“What do you want for dinner tonight?”

With fewer servants in the villa, the Si Family’s cooking shifted like seasons; Nana grabbed ingredients on the way home, and Yiyi Liu took the stove.

Nana felt light as spring wind today and invited her lady’s opinion.

“Oysters,” Qingyu said after a long think, eyes steady as a lake.

Oysters?

Nana remembered her lady couldn’t handle that kind of thing, a body that bucked like a skittish colt.

But seeing that stubborn look like a set jaw of granite, Nana swallowed her half-formed words like a stone and said nothing.

She took Qingyu to the market and bought a few jins, shells clacking like little bells.

That night.

The villa saw the expected and the unexpected, like twin thunderclaps over the eaves.

Expected: Qingyu Si really couldn’t eat oysters; after forcing down a few, her eyes rolled back like pale moons, and she nearly pitched into the table.

Nana caught her fast as a hawk stoops, or Qingyu’s face would’ve kissed the rice like a clumsy lover.

Nana stared, speechless, like a cat left in rain; if you can’t eat it, why stuff it down?

Until Qingyu cracked her eyes, weak as a spring sprout, and solemnly asked for artificial respiration like a princess issuing a decree.

Nana froze, then the truth lit like a lantern—this idiot was a genius.

As for the unexpected...

Yeah, Qingyu Si was truly the Nesting Phoenix, a feathered destiny tucked in human guise.

That actually surprised Nana; the trashy System hadn’t lied this time.

The System, catching a stray insult, muttered ellipses like raindrops: “...”

How did Nana confirm it?

She gritted through her gag reflex and gave a fake CPR with a wet tissue in between, lips meeting paper like a failed bridge.

A familiar current stirred in her dantian like a warm spring bubbling up, and that was her proof carved in light.

Without that feeling, she swore she’d have lopped Qingyu’s head the moment the girl sat up, and finished that hidden mission that still lacked one dog-life—Qingyu’s—to be done.

Knowing you can’t eat it and eating it anyway—are you trying to die?

Afterward, Nana glared at Qingyu’s face like a storm cloud gnawing the ridge.

But Qingyu seemed lost in a rosy memory, cheeks pink as peaches, eyes fixed on Nana’s lips like a moth to flame.

“Let’s eat oysters once a week,” she told Yiyi Liu, dead serious as a priest.

The weekly oyster plan got vetoed—love your body like a garden.

Qingyu sulked, silent as a closed door, and iced Nana for a day; as the maid, Nana didn’t coax, she gave her the cold shoulder like a stone.

Then.

At deep midnight, Qingyu used the day of neglect as her excuse and slipped back into Nana’s bed like a cat into warm laundry.

Nana found herself wondering if this girl was really the Nesting Phoenix; why was the pride so high and the sense so low, like a peacock on a rooftop?

Dumb stayed dumb all the same.

When she first confirmed Qingyu was the Nesting Phoenix, Nana balked like a horse at a shadow; time smoothed that out like ripples dying on a pond.

Her lady had inherited the Nesting Phoenix’s zero-common-sense, death-chasing quirk, a star that loved the edge of cliffs.

The cold goddess she’d once imagined? Turned out to be a blank-faced, low-battery airhead, a three-no statue with a gremlin inside.

Maybe it was the sweetness tasted from those oysters; though Yiyi Liu stopped serving seafood, Qingyu started sneaking bites like a thief of pearls.

Then she’d faint in a spot easy for Nana to find and wait for a rescue kiss like a fox staged on a path.

Genius-level tactic, if you asked her.

Nana nearly died of fury, smoke rising like incense.

As an outsider, Yiyi Liu watched the mistress and maid chase each other across the villa like swallows, her smile bright as a spring bloom.

Her lady’s “friendship” with her best friend felt off, like a painting hung crooked.

She couldn’t name it, until one dinner when Qingyu suddenly confessed to Nana, words falling like petals onto hot soup.

The spoon in Yiyi’s hand trembled like a leaf, and she soberly confirmed that something really, truly wasn’t straight here.

Even Uncle Chen on the other side of the table gaped, eyes wide as full moons.

Only Nana stayed calm; facing the confession, she gave a flat “Oh,” like a pebble dropped in a deep well, and left it there.

Qingyu bristled again, dissatisfaction flicking like a cat’s tail.

Her maid had grown too bold lately; discipline was in order, like reins on a spirited mare.

Then.

Again at midnight, Qingyu used the day of neglect as her banner and crawled into Nana’s bed like dawn sneaking past curtains.