Why Is the Wealthy Young Lady O Like That? - Chapter 1

“You’re saying! You—you’re getting married!!!”

The sudden spike in volume made the customers in the cat café perk up their ears. Noticing the gazes turning toward them, Qinghe instinctively covered her mouth, muffling the lingering echo in her palm.

A gust stirred up by a certain little cat brushed past the hem of her clothes. Xu Siran, sitting across from her, looked down and saw that Qiuqiu, the cat who was usually the clingiest, had hopped onto her lap.

Her terrible mood was healed a little. She rubbed the kitten’s head, looked at her good friend Qinghe, and said with a pained expression, “Yes. You heard right.”

One second ago, Qinghe had still been doubting her own hearing. Now that her friend had declared there was absolutely nothing wrong with it, her shock did not lessen at all. Stammering, she asked, “Why are you suddenly getting married?”

It was complicated.

Even Xu Siran herself had only received the news three days ago.

That day, she had just come out of the library when her alpha mother suddenly called. First, she asked what Xu Siran was doing. Xu Siran answered honestly that she had just reached the lakeside pavilion and was about to go to the school food street for dinner.

She had just wanted to say a little more and praise that restaurant’s tomato beef brisket rice bowl for being genuinely delicious when she heard her alpha mother say in a very strange tone, “Siran, come home right now.”

Fine then.

No tomato beef brisket rice bowl for her.

She did not ask any more questions, because her mother’s tone sounded as if something major had happened. As for whether it was good or bad, she could not guess at all. So she took the campus shuttle to the main gate, hailed a car, and went back to Shengxi Yufu.

She usually lived at school and rarely went home. After winding through the villa district of Shengxi Garden, she finally arrived home. She had just entered and was changing her shoes in the foyer when she heard her nominal older sister, Xu Buran, ask,

“Mom, my younger sister and I were born at the same time and have the same birth characters. How did they settle on Siran?”

Xu Siran paused. She did not understand what that meant. What did “settle on her” mean?

…And what was this about birth characters? These days, theology and metaphysics were no longer popular. If she remembered correctly, even the old grannies at the village entrance back in her hometown had been atheists.

“…Mom doesn’t know either,” she heard her Omega mother, Qin Shan, answer.

After changing her shoes, she deliberately made the sound of footsteps, walked around the corridor cabinet, and entered the living room. Just then, her alpha mother, Xu Can, happened to come down from the second floor.

“Siran’s back.” Xu Can said gently, “You must be hungry. Why don’t we eat first?”

Xu Siran was indeed hungry. And so, the location of their conversation changed from the living room to the dining room. The kitchen auntie in the villa was very good at cooking. When Xu Siran finished the vegetables piled in her bowl and a bowl of rice, she looked up and only then realized that the other three had barely touched their chopsticks.

…Oh.

She did eat pretty quickly. Usually, when the other three had only eaten half their meal, she was already full.

At this moment, the three of them all had different expressions. Xu Can’s expression was faint. Qin Shan looked like she wanted to speak but stopped herself. Xu Buran lowered her lashes, her face full of worries. Xu Siran thought for a moment, then asked,

“Mom, did you call me back because something happened?”

Xu Can put down her chopsticks, wiped the corner of her lips with a napkin, and spoke at an unhurried pace. “The Ni family has recently been choosing a marriage partner for their next heir. All the upper-class families in the entire capital submitted candidates. Guess who the Ni family chose in the end?”

? The Ni family?

Two question marks popped up in Xu Siran’s mind. Which Ni family? She really was not familiar with the upper-class circles here in the capital, because she had not lived here in the past.

Fate had played a gigantic joke on her. She had only been brought back and acknowledged by the Xu family two years ago.

Before she turned eighteen, she had lived in a small village in the south. The tallest things she had ever seen were the endless mountains. When she was eighteen and preparing to go to the county government to apply for a loan for her university tuition, a luxury car stopped at the entrance of the village.

After spending half the afternoon, she finally sorted out the whole story.

In short, because of all kinds of melodramatic reasons, she had been switched by a nanny at birth. Then, through all kinds of coincidences and misfortunes, it was not until recently that her biological mothers discovered the truth from back then and quickly found her.

And so, she went from a tiny village surrounded by mountains to the capital city filled with towering buildings. From an orphan girl in a mountain hollow, she became a member of the Xu family.

She coughed and wanted to ask which Ni family. Beside her, Qin Shan, who had been hesitating over whether to speak, seemed to see the little question mark floating above her head and said aloud, “Yuanlong Group.”

! Oh, so that was it.

If they said Yuanlong Group, then she understood.

Although she did not know exactly which industries Yuanlong was involved in, she knew it was the leading enterprise in the capital and the champion of the yearly corporate rankings. Quite a few graduates from her university had found jobs at Yuanlong Group and its subsidiaries, and she had heard their annual salaries were all very high.

She pulled back her thoughts and followed the thread of the conversation. “Who did they choose?”

Because she had never really appeared in public, she did not know many candidates for wealthy-family marriage alliances either. She was too lazy to guess and simply felt that whoever had been chosen must be an outstanding elite who perfectly met the standards for a marriage alliance.

The dining room suddenly grew even quieter. Outside the window, thunder flashed, and her alpha mother dropped a thunderclap out of nowhere.

“You.”

?

!

??!

Xu Siran suspected she had developed auditory hallucinations. After freezing for five seconds, she once again tried to understand and buffer this piece of news. “Me?”

“Yes.” Xu Buran, who had not spoken until now, said, “You.”

?!?!?!?!?!$#^@%&*^%$#@+++failure completely crashed… restart failed. Because she could not understand this news at all, Xu Siran crashed for quite a while.

She could not remember exactly how long it lasted. In short, her brain seemed to keep popping up failure and error windows. She tried to understand it countless times, and only at the very end did she finally push open a window and find the decryption key.

She took a deep breath and said in disbelief, “Why me!?”

Why her!

Help. She had never even met the other person, had never expressed any intention in that regard, and had certainly never actively and enthusiastically fought for the opportunity.

Besides, she herself did not fit the standards of this kind of real wealthy-family marriage alliance at all!!!

Contrary to Xu Siran’s reaction of asking why, Xu Can felt that this was simply fortune falling from the sky, because their family and the Ni family were not on the same level at all.

So much so that when she received the Ni family’s call and processed what it meant, she was so excited that she froze for several seconds. Only after the person on the other end reminded her did she hold back her laughter and answer.

…

After a few soft taps, the kitten slipped out of her arms. Once Xu Siran had summarized the whole course of events for her good friend Qinghe with a troubled expression, she frowned and took a fierce bite of the mango mille crêpe cake on the table.

Seeing this, Qinghe also frowned in distress. After thinking it over, she asked, “Then what are you planning to do?”

Xu Siran let out a long sigh. “…I don’t want a marriage alliance.”

Qinghe supported her friend unconditionally. “Then don’t marry!”

But… Xu Siran looked like she wanted to say something but stopped herself. After frowning and taking another bite of mango mille crêpe, she whispered, “But before telling me, my mother had already accepted their transfer, and she used that money.”

One billion. Transferred in a single payment.

It was enough to solve the funding difficulties the Xu Group had recently been facing.

Her family rarely told her about business matters. It was only that day in the dining room, when she rejected the marriage alliance and resisted, that she found out the company had recently run into trouble.

The promise had already been made, and the money had already been spent. The marriage alliance was already set in stone. Besides, these wealthy circles had hands and eyes everywhere. It was not something she could refuse just by saying no.

Qinghe stirred her coffee. “…Then, then is there still…” She had stammered ever since she learned to speak as a child. Usually it was not too bad, but the more urgently she wanted to talk, the more she stammered. So she tried to slow down and asked softly, “Is there any other way?”

The moment her voice fell, the phone on the table suddenly vibrated.

Xu Siran picked it up and saw an unfamiliar local number. Although she did not know who it was, it had not been marked as a spam number or anything of that sort. She pushed aside her terrible mood, answered the call, and said politely,

“Hello.”

The other end of the phone was silent for several seconds. Just as Xu Siran was about to ask in confusion who the caller was, an exceptionally pleasant voice sounded, like the clear flow of a mountain stream.

“Hello, I’m Ni Jia.”

This time, the silence lasted even longer. Completely unprepared, Xu Siran held the phone and had no idea what to say. Her thoughts were a mess, so she replied in total nonsense, as if answering automatically after reading a message: “…Hello, I’m Xu Siran.”

! What was she saying?

Of course she knows you’re Xu Siran! she retorted to herself inwardly.

She lowered her eyes and looked at the tiny bit of mango mille crêpe left on the table. Her brain spun rapidly as she tried to think of how to salvage this.

Just as arrow-like light passed through the window and landed on the table, that voice like wind in the forest and music from a spring rang beside her ear once more.

“Three o’clock this afternoon. I’ll see you at the Civil Affairs Bureau.”