Dragon Raja: Lu Mingfei finds a Freylian

For example, after three drafts were rejected, Shunji Kumagai came up with a "wet accident" plan, which involved arranging a small accident where a building's air conditioning drain pipe suddenly burst, so that the bride could stand precisely under the pipe, and then the groom could take off his coat and rush up to cover her.

Mai Shude dismissed the solution with the question, "What do you use to burst the air conditioner's water pipes in winter?" Shunji Kumagai thought for a moment, agreed, and went back to continue revising it.

Chapter 766 Lu Mingze's Toy Was Stolen by the Elf

The manager of the matchmaking agency, Haneda, has yet to get any opportunity to make a move.

His expertise lies in weddings themselves, and before the prerequisite task of "getting the bride and groom to fall in love with each other first" is unlocked, he has nowhere to put his skills to use. But he can't leave the dispatch center before the show wraps up.

Saketo Mai stipulates that all experts must be on-site at all times to deal with any emergencies that may occur and require their respective expertise to provide assistance.

So, Mr. Haneda, who was over thirty, energetic, and full of the desire to "bomb a wedding of the century at Meiji Shrine," could only relieve his boredom by exercising.

He brought his own pair of dumbbells, cast iron with black rubber, each weighing fifteen kilograms, and started practicing them one after another in a corner of the hall.

Curls, presses, lateral raises—every movement was imbued with the anxiety of "since the groom hasn't made a move yet, I'll do one more set."

Sweat rolled down his forehead and neck, hitting the marble floor. His assistant silently handed a clean towel to this top wedding planner in Japan.

While lifting dumbbells, he kept muttering, "Hurry up, hurry up, I've taken care of everything at Meiji Shrine. I've already placed an order for the white kimono from the best craftsmanship workshop in Kyoto, and I've also finalized the matchmaker. I've visited all the old gentlemen in the Imperial Household Agency. All that's left is for the groom to say the words."

Then he abruptly finished his last curl, his bulging biceps stretching the cuffs of his charcoal gray suit tightly, and added, "Why are young people these days so unpleasant when they're in a relationship?"

If Lu Mingfei knew that in some corner of this city, there was a man sweating profusely while lifting dumbbells, anxiously preparing for his wedding, he would probably think that his life had become absurd to an unprecedented degree.

Lu Mingfei's grades weren't great back then, and he was filled with envy for those top students who were admitted to Tsinghua and Peking Universities through special admission programs.

They don't have to squeeze onto that single-plank bridge where thousands of people compete; they received their admission notices early on and can sit at home drinking iced cola while others spend the whole night studying in the study room.

Now he enjoys services even more outrageous than guaranteed admission to university: a "three-free" marriage express – no need to meet the mother-in-law, no need to send betrothal gifts, and no need to buy a wedding house. The bride's parents don't need to show up, the invitations are all designed by a specialist, and the honeymoon route is scouted by an entire team of experts in advance – a one-stop, all-inclusive marriage plan.

The problem was that he hadn't realized he was soaking in this immense happiness. Right now, he was curled up in the bathtub of a love hotel, wrapped in a spare blanket he'd found in the closet, with a rolled-up towel under his head, snoring loudly.

What he dreamed about is unknown, but on the infrared monitoring screen in the dispatch center, his heart rate was stable at 68 beats per minute, clearly indicating deep sleep.

"The wedding will be held at Meiji Shrine, is that the boss's idea?" Su Enxi asked slowly.

“Yes,” Mai Shude replied. “The wedding agency was also chosen by the boss. They are indeed the only ones in all of Japan that can arrange weddings at Meiji Shrine. That shrine is under the jurisdiction of the Imperial Family and is directly managed by the Imperial Household Agency. It is almost impossible for ordinary people to set up a wedding there. Even the second generation of top-tier entrepreneurs have to wait for several years. To put it bluntly, the wedding agency is a profit-making organization run by the Imperial Household Agency itself. It’s like the Imperial Household Agency has set up a company and rented out the Imperial Family’s venue to ordinary people for weddings.”

“Sometimes I really think my boss is a jerk,” Su Enxi said. She rarely uses such a blunt word to describe her boss. “But sometimes I feel like he’s Lu Mingfei’s biological father.”

Why are you suddenly saying this?

"Don't you think he cares about Lu Mingfei's feelings to an abnormal degree?" Su Enxi said. She closed her laptop, unusually focusing all her attention on the conversation.

"Think back to how Lu Mingfei felt when he heard that Caesar was going to have his wedding at Meiji Shrine. Caesar and Nono had a perfect wedding at the most prestigious shrine in Tokyo. And him? He didn't even know what to wear, and stood on the approach to Meiji Shrine watching others hold hands, recite vows, and exchange rings from afar."

"He wants to marry Frilian, surrounded by countless blessings."

"The boss just doesn't want Lu Mingfei to fall in love with Frilian. Every step the boss takes this time is aimed at making Lu Mingfei change his mind, finding him a better bride than Frilian, creating a love story for him that is more perfect than Caesar and Nono's, and giving him a wedding that is even more grand than theirs. The venue is the same place: Caesar and Nono are at Meiji Shrine, and Lu Mingfei and the head of the Uesugi family are also at Meiji Shrine."

Jiude Ma Yi was taken aback.

Her stunned expression wasn't the exaggerated blankness that others could easily see through, but rather an extremely brief pause.

The ninja training ingrained in her bones since childhood gave her precise control over her body language down to every single facial muscle. Her facial expression remained almost completely unchanged, but the finger that had been tapping her arm stopped, hovering in mid-air, resting on a question she hadn't yet figured out how to answer.

“I don’t understand either,” Su Enxi continued. “Lu Mingfei has always been a puppet in the boss’s hands. Every step he takes is a move in the boss’s game. He helps the boss contact the Dragon King, helps the boss collect information, and helps the boss advance his grand game, which none of us can see the whole picture of. But puppets are eventually discarded; that’s the rule of the game. Once a piece is played, it should be taken off the board. All intelligence operations follow this logic. Agents are shelved after completing their missions, and informants are no longer needed after providing intelligence. But this time, the boss’s behavior is too strange.”

She raised her eyes and looked straight at Mai Shude.

"It seems he genuinely wants to find Lu Mingfei a girl better than Frilian. It's not an act, not to get that girl to complete some strategic mission, it's just about finding him a girl. And he's gone to great lengths to make that girl truly fall in love with Lu Mingfei, not pretending, not in exchange for benefits. He transferred both of us over, a team of sixty-five people, and spent over a hundred million yen, just to make two young people he personally picked out fall in love seriously."

"He manipulated Erii to compete with Frilian, but he didn't need to do it at all. It wouldn't affect the White King's revival or hinder the exploration of the Japan Trench. The boss could have just pretended not to see it; he never cared about these petty matters of love and relationships before. But this time he did, and he took it more seriously than anyone else."

Su Enxi took a deep breath.

"The only explanation is that Frilian's high profile angered him. The puppeteer couldn't stand his puppet being stolen... But think about it carefully, in your heart, is the boss such a sentimental person?"

“No,” Mai Shude said, “He is a tyrant.”

Chapter 767 Seven Days

Mai Shude's phone rang at that moment.

There was no caller ID, no number, no location, not even an abbreviation of a name. There was only a lonely green answer button floating on the pure black background, like an emerald suspended in the void.

Mai Shude picked up her phone.

"Girls, you've worked hard! How's our bride and groom doing?" The boss's voice flowed from the receiver, as usual lively to frivolous and cheerful, making it impossible to tell whether it was genuine or deliberate.

In the background, there are faint sounds of slowly flowing water and occasional birdsong in the distance. Perhaps he has moved his office to a beach on a tropical island, or by a hot spring in a deep mountain forest, or a secret hideout hidden deep in the folds of the earth that only he knows.

Lu Mingze never answers the phone from the same place or in the same time zone; his voice always arrives after crossing half the globe, like a satellite ejected from the equator.

"Things are progressing according to your plan, and the expert team is fully in place. There was no real progress today, but Tokyo Love Story will officially launch tomorrow," Mai Shutoku replied.

"With such a strong team of experts backing them up, how could they fall in love with each other in just a few days?" the boss asked, his tone as casual as if he were asking at the market how much a pound of sea bream cost today.

He always has the ability to throw out the most outrageous questions in the most nonchalant way, making the person answering feel like they're making a mountain out of a molehill.

Mai Shude mentally reviewed the available resources: a 65-person production team, 17 of whom were top experts in their respective fields in Japan; seven broadcast vans; an unlimited budget; a wedding planning agency that had already booked a date at Meiji Shrine; a cup of hot milk laced with a trace of sleep aid; a lazy bum curled up in the bathtub snoring; and a red-haired girl who had just acquired her first rubber duck.

"We'll try to do it within half a month," she said.

In just half a month, two completely unrelated young people were able to build a relationship from scratch that was enough to lead to a wedding. In the real world, this speed is already close to the limit.

It only takes three minutes to prepare a bowl of instant noodles, but to truly warm a person's heart, half a month is an optimistic, almost reckless, expectation.

There was silence for a few seconds on the other end of the phone.

"Seven days."

"Seven days?" Shotoku Mai was taken aback.

Even for a whirlwind marriage, seven days is far too tight. The fastest-paced dating shows on the market take two weeks from the first meeting to holding hands on stage, and at least three months of preparation time should be reserved from holding hands to the wedding.

At this point, Erii Uesugi and Lu Mingfei haven't even connected yet. Erii's attitude towards Lu Mingfei is currently only at the stage of "being willing to eat the fatty beef he puts on her plate," while Lu Mingfei's attitude towards Erii is at the stage of "trying to overcome the stress reaction of seeing her as a nuclear warhead."

The two people were not separated by a thin sheet of paper, but by an entire bulletproof glass door.

"We only have seven days at most. We'll let them fall in love within six days, and the wedding will start on time at sunset on the seventh day," the boss said.

He said this as if he were arranging a casual meeting at a street cafe, rather than planning a wedding that would ruin the two of them for the rest of their lives.

"The head of the Uesugi family is an unparalleled beauty; every man should love her."

"Kefrilian has a huge influence on Lu Mingfei." Mai Shude rarely voiced her dissenting opinions in front of her boss; in fact, this was almost the first time.

However, the existence of Frilian is the most uncontrollable risk point in the entire plan.

The silver-haired elf mage was sitting on the sofa in the love hotel, with a copy of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms" turned to the last page on his lap. He closed his eyes to rest but did not fall asleep, his ears constantly listening for any sounds around him.

Lu Mingfei did have feelings for her. These weren't the intense flames of love at first sight, but rather feelings nurtured little by little by time and companionship, growing deeper and more resilient. He wouldn't easily set these feelings aside, unless—

“I’ve read a book,” the shopkeeper began, his tone suddenly shifting from light and cheerful to that of an old man sitting by the fireplace reminiscing about something that happened long, long ago.

If it weren't for the faint sound of tropical water flowing on the other end of the phone, Mai Shude would almost have thought he was sitting at an oak table in a library.

"That book says that there are 20,000 people in the world who will fall in love with you at first sight. Unfortunately, you may never meet even one of them in your entire life. Love at first sight is not magic, it is fate."

“Frilian was the first person on Lu Mingfei’s destiny path. The first time we encountered fate, we were all caught off guard and lost miserably in the face of fate,” the boss said slowly. “The second time we faced it, we were fully armed. We can’t lose twice at the same thing.”

Mai Shude did not fully understand what was being said.

What about 20,000 people? What about love at first sight? What about the first and second people on the line of fate? This is the boss's consistent way of speaking. He never gives you the complete information. He only gives you a string of keys with worn-out numbers, and makes you guess which one can open which door.

But she understood one thing: the emotions the boss had invested in this matter went far beyond what a puppeteer would do with a mere puppet. He had once lost badly in a gamble with fate, at a certain time and place.

That defeat was related to Lu Mingfei, and also to a girl whose name she didn't even know.

This time, he wasn't going to lose again.

This realization stirred something deep within Mai Shude's heart.

"Of course, it would be great if we really failed, so our little angel Lu Mingfei could slide a few more meters down the abyss of despair!" The boss's tone completely reversed in an instant, switching from a somber retrospective to a lewd and gleaming laugh.

It took Mai Shude a long time to learn not to show any unnecessary expressions at such moments, because she still couldn't judge how much truth and falsehood were behind each switch.

"Seven days is the deadline?" asked Mai Shude.

She hadn't fully understood what her boss had said in the previous paragraph about fate, failure, and the twenty thousand people. She decided to put those words aside for now and savor them later when she was alone. But the order had already reached her ears completely.

Ninjas are like soldiers; a soldier's duty is not to understand orders, but to execute them. As long as the order is clear enough, there's no need to question the reasons behind it.

"Yes."

Chapter 768 Haircut and Styling (Part 1)

After several days of torrential rain, Tokyo was greeted with an unusually sunny morning.

Lu Mingfei sat in the beauty salon's rest area, waiting for Erii and Frilian to get their hair cut.

He felt extremely uncomfortable.

The receptionist brought Lu Mingfei a cup of coffee. He buried his head and gulped down several mouthfuls. Then, feeling numbness in his legs, he changed his sitting position. After changing, he found that his legs were even more numb than before.

Lying on the sofa next to him was a white poodle, whose owner was unknown. It looked him up and down with its wet black eyes, its gaze clearly conveying the disdain of "What are you doing in a beauty salon?"

Lu Mingfei glared back at it, thinking to himself, "If a dog like you can come, why can't I?"

He looked around; the beauty salon was decorated very elegantly.

The off-white marble floor was polished to a mirror-like shine, and European-style oil paintings with gilded frames hung on the walls. A crystal chandelier overhead cast dappled light. A faint scent of essential oils floated in the air—a blend of floral and herbal aromas he couldn't name. It wasn't pungent, but after a while, it made him feel as if he were steeping in a cup of lukewarm herbal tea.

The numbers printed on the price list at the entrance made him, someone who was paid by the hour in Takamagahara, instinctively want to look away. Although he did indeed still have the stack of banknotes that Chu Zihang had given him in his wallet, he couldn't help but feel weak in the knees at the thought of spending money on something like this.

Last night I impulsively agreed to take Erii out to play, so I have to get up early this morning.

This morning, Lu Mingfei was fully awake as soon as he opened his eyes because Erii was standing silently by the bathtub.

Lu Mingfei rubbed his eyes and woke up. The first thing that caught his eye was a bright red kimono, hanging neatly less than half a meter from the edge of the bathtub.

His gaze followed the crimson hakama upwards to the white shawl, tied with a large red silk sash at the waist; further up was Erii's pale face, her red eyes quietly watching him in the dim morning light of the bathroom.

Her long hair was tied high behind her head with a bright red ribbon of the same color. She stood in front of the bathtub against the warm light that wafted from the bedroom, looking as if she were both watching over him as he slept and waiting for him to get up for a pre-arranged duel.

This entourage clearly indicates they're about to go out shopping.

Meanwhile, Frillie was already standing at the door, adjusting her trench coat and finishing her breakfast with a cup of iced coffee.

Lu Mingfei yawned, kicked the blanket in the bathtub aside, and his kneecaps cracked twice as he stood up.