That night, I asked the System to lock Zhou Heng’s soul out of my room. Sleepwalking around with a ghost floating nearby wasn’t exactly my idea of a restful evening.

Turns out, I slept better than I had in years. No nagging in my ear. No mention of Ning Luo. No self-absorbed speeches about the agony of true love.

The peace didn’t last long, though. Early the next morning, a barrage of shrill phone chimes dragged me out of sleep. It was the downstream plant manager, his voice panicked to the point of cracking.

“Ms. Gui!”

“You need to get to the factory right now!”

“Everything’s blown wide open!”

I sat up straight, instantly alert. “What happened?”

“The workers are striking! The whole plant’s in total chaos!” He panted heavily into the receiver. “That European contract Mr. Zhou signed was already on an insanely tight deadline. If we get delayed any further, we’re going to miss the delivery window. The liquidated damages clause alone will cost us ten times the order value!”

Every last trace of sleepiness evaporated. I fired off a string of questions while throwing on my clothes. After a few fast-paced exchanges, the full picture came into focus.

First thing this morning, someone had deliberately leaked a rumor across the factory floor.

The story was that with Zhou Heng gone, I no longer had the stomach to run Dongfang Technology and was preparing to sell out to the Sheng Corporation. The Sheng family, however, only cared about our optoelectronic control chip patents and our core engineering team.

The rest—the administrative staff, the assembly line workers, the entire downstream production network—would be liquidated without a second thought.

According to the rumor, as soon as the core technology was handed over, I was going to shut down the plants, pocket the cash, and cut and run, leaving thousands of employees out in the cold.

It would have been funny if it weren’t so infuriating. If you’re going to smear someone, at least make it plausible.

Back in the day, Zhou Heng and I scraped together every penny we had, lived on instant ramen, slept under office desks, and pulled all-nighters in the lab just to develop the very first domestic optoelectronic control chip. Our whole dream back then was simple: never have to answer to anyone else again, and never leave core technology in foreign hands.

Years of pouring in money, sweat, gray hair, and nearly our own lives—and now people were saying I was going to sell it off? I’d sell Zhou Heng off a hundred times before I sold Dongfang Technology.

Beside me, Zhou Heng’s spirit was visibly shaken. It took him a long moment to stammer out, “That… that’s impossible. Dongfang is our life’s work. Who would spread something like that?”

I let out a cold laugh, grabbing my car keys as I headed for the door. “Who do you think? Within twenty-four hours of your death, who benefits the most from tearing Dongfang apart?”

Zhou Heng’s expression darkened instantly. For the first time since he died, reality seemed to hit him squarely in the chest: some people loved him, but others only loved what he could give them.

Sheng Tianling clearly thought he had the upper hand. Spreading rumors and inciting a strike was just a cheap tactic to throw me off balance and force a fire-sale valuation. A man with zero vision, but a mind full of dirty tricks.

I needed to handle this in person. Right now, matching wits with the Sheng family was secondary—keeping my people calm was priority number one.

When my car pulled up to the factory gates, more than a dozen groups of workers had already gathered outside. The air was thick with tension, like a powder keg waiting for a single spark.

The moment I stepped out of the car, the plant manager and senior executives rushed over, but the crowd of workers moved faster, surging forward to surround us.

Zhou Heng’s ghost turned pale with anxiety. “Vivi! Get back in the car! They’re furious—reasoning with them right now is dangerous!”

Right on cue, a tidal wave of shouting crashed over me.

“Ms. Gui!”

“Are you really shutting down the plant?”

“What about the residential solar systems we bought from you?”

“I dropped two hundred thousand yuan on that setup!”

“Yeah!”

“Refund us!”

“Pay us back!”

“If the company gets sold, who’s going to handle the maintenance?”

Voices overlapped, rising in pitch as people jockeyed to get closer, fingers practically pointing into my face. I couldn’t even blame them. If this were just about losing a job, they could always look elsewhere—it wouldn’t have boiled over into a riot like this.

The real issue was our residential solar program.

A while back, the company launched an initiative allowing employees to install Dongfang solar equipment on their own rooftops. Participation was completely voluntary. Many workers invested around two hundred thousand yuan to get set up, selling the excess power back to the national grid for a steady ten to fifteen percent annual return.

It was designed as a long-term investment, not a quick flip. If the company went under and their setups malfunctioned down the road, who was going to honor the warranties?

To the wealthy, two hundred thousand yuan was just a watch. To an average factory worker, it was the savings of a lifetime.

I raised my voice to explain, but no one was listening. The crowd surged forward, tempers flaring. A few of the hotter-headed men clenched their fists, staring at me as if I’d already skipped town with their money.

The situation was spiraling out of control fast. The plant manager and executives were being pushed back step by step, unable to hold the line.

Even Zhou Heng panicked, throwing himself in front of me with his arms spread wide, trying to shield me. “Back off! All of you, step back! Don’t touch her!”

Looking at his ghostly back, I felt a strange urge to laugh. When he was alive, I sacrificed everything for him and he barely gave me the time of day. Now that he was dead, he was putting on this grand performance of the protective lover. Who was he even acting for?

Just as I was weighing whether to fall back into the car, a commotion echoed from inside the factory compound.

A group of people came rushing out—some limping, some with a single eye, some on crutches, others with a leg paralyzed since childhood. Their gait was uneven and frantic, but they moved with surprising speed, forming a human wall between me and the angry crowd.

“Who thinks they can mess with Ms. Gui?”

“You want to get to her? You go through us first!”

“Ms. Gui isn’t that kind of person!”

Their voices weren’t loud, but the sheer conviction behind them brought the angry crowd to a sudden halt.

I recognized every single one of them. They were the “disabled dead weight” Sheng Tianling had scoffed at earlier. The ones who had been rejected by countless employers, written off by society as a burden.

Years ago, I had fought every executive in the room to hire them.

Zhou Heng and I both started with nothing. We knew what it was like to survive on instant noodles, sleep under office desks, and endure the contempt of people who looked down on us. Back then, we made a promise to each other: if we ever made it big, we’d give a hand up to those who needed it most.

Sadly, I was the only one who remembered that promise.

When Dongfang Technology expanded, I proposed creating dedicated roles for workers with disabilities. Zhou Heng shot it down immediately. “Vivi, we’re running a business, not a charity. Don’t let your heart bleed too much.”

It wasn’t until I threatened to walk away from the company entirely that he reluctantly gave in. Irony had it that a video of our disabled employees leaving work went viral later on, boosting the company’s public image tenfold.

Life works in funny ways. Sometimes, good deeds done for profit yield nothing. But good deeds done out of pure conscience always come full circle.

I didn’t cry when Zhou Heng died. I didn’t cry when he left me standing alone at the altar. But right now, watching these people standing tall in front of me—watching those unsteady legs strain to shield me—a sharp sting hit the back of my nose.

I turned to look at Zhou Heng.

“Look at them,” I said softly, my voice tight. “Look closely, Zhou Heng. A single signature from you—one stupid gift deed—and you almost wiped out the livelihoods of thousands of people.”

“The thing you threw away for ‘love’ is something the rest of us have to carry on our shoulders for the rest of our lives.”