Let me just say—the pacing in this section is absolutely relentless and I cannot complain. We go from a quiet, almost tender midnight dumpling scene to a full-blown business trip to a nightclub confrontation in what feels like the span of a few hours, and somehow it all works.
The chapter opens with this deceptively calm moment. He Yuanzhou comes home late, asks for dumplings, lingers in the kitchen. It's almost domestic. Almost normal. And then—BAM—he's dragging her to the airport the next morning. The transition is so smooth you barely notice the tonal shift until you're already on the plane. That's skilled writing right there.
On the plane, we get this quiet tension. Heavy makeup, sulkiness, the flight attendant note incident. It's a breather scene, but it's doing double duty: establishing Jiang Wu's personality, showing He Yuanzhou's control, and setting up the "back door" joke that pays off later. The author is weaving threads everywhere.
Then the hotel arrival. He carries her, she almost slaps him, the bathroom scene, the suit change, the landmine conversation about Jiang Qian. Each beat builds on the last, and just when you think it's winding down, he drops "remember to lock the door" and leaves. She's left there in the presidential suite, and instead of moping, she calls her friend and decides to go to a club. This is where the pacing really picks up—she's on a mission to have fun, the Elysium Corridor is described with this electric energy, and then He Yuanzhou appears like a storm.
The chapter ends on such a perfect note: her in the backseat, eyes red, caught between guilt and something else, with him having just claimed her in the most dramatic way possible. I needed to sit down after reading that.