Clan Building System: I'm not the Protagonist?!-Chapter 98: A Beauty [4]

Lin Zhaoyue leaned forward just a little more, her leg still pressed uncomfortably close against Fang Yuan’s beneath the table, as if anchoring herself to him.

Her finger ceased its idle tracing and tapped the stone surface.

"Since I live around here now, Husband..." she began, her tone featherlight, dripping with faux innocence but beneath it, a quiet steel rang clear.

"...it’s terribly inconvenient, you know. To keep traveling back and forth... just to catch a glimpse of you." 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝔀𝓮𝒃𝙣𝓸𝒗𝒆𝒍.𝙘𝒐𝒎

Her lashes fluttered dramatically, like a delicate bird pretending to be wounded. "Especially when I feel so... faint."

She lingered on that word like it was a performance, sighing softly as if she might collapse again right there.

Then, slowly, her head tilted, and her gaze locked onto his, steady, unwavering, too intense to be playful.

"Wouldn’t it be simpler," she continued sweetly, "if I just stayed... here? In the Fang estate."

Her voice dipped, warm as honey but just as sticky. "Just for a little while, of course. Until I recover my strength... and my resources."

That final word was wrapped in silk but carried a weight behind it, a veiled blade behind the fan.

Her smile didn’t waver.

But her eyes made it clear: If you say no, I’ll make myself even more inconvenient elsewhere.

Fang Yuan stared at her, unmoving, while his mind churned at full capacity.

This girl was spouting absolute nonsense.

No—bullshit of the highest quality. The kind spun from silver words and silk smiles, the kind meant to entangle.

Yet even as that thought crossed his mind, another more pressing one crept in behind it.

The crisis loomed. The Fang family had just severed all trade ties with the Gu. So resources, support, influence were now in a precarious position.

And now, seated just across from him with stars in her eyes and hidden knives in her sleeves, was a solution.

A volatile, seductive, terrifying solution.

The Lin family.

Even now, the name carried weight across the northern regions like thunder on a clear day.

When he was seven, he still remembered it clearly, when the Lin clan came to visit Coldwind City, even the five great families had gathered at the gates in full ceremonial dress to greet them.

A clan that didn’t knock when it entered; it announced.

Fang Yuan’s gaze hardened slightly as he stared at Lin Zhaoyue.

And as if sensing it, not the contents of his thoughts, but the intensity of his focus, her expression shifted.

She beamed brightly and eagerly.

Like a cat thrilled that the mouse finally looked back at her.

She had no idea what calculations ran behind his eyes, but to her, that look alone was enough to make her heart flutter.

He was watching her.

And in her mind, that could only mean one thing.

He was starting to give in.

Fang Yuan He simply meets her unnerving stare, calm, steady, and unreadable.

For a long moment, the silence between them is taut as a bowstring, her leg still pressed shamelessly against his beneath the stone table, her finger poised like a dagger that had yet to strike.

To any outsider, it might look like hesitation.

But within Fang Yuan’s mind, the calculation was swift and cold.

This was inevitable.

Resisting a Nascent Soul cultivator, especially this one... head-on would be like trying to dam a flood with a paper fan.

It wasn’t bravery. It was idiocy.

And Lin Zhaoyue, for all her honeyed words and fluttering lashes, wasn’t here to play fair. She was here to win.

So he stopped thinking in terms of rejection.

Instead, he started seeing her for what she was, an opportunity cloaked in obsession, a weapon wrapped in silk.

Dangerous, yes. But if wielded correctly...

He could bleed the Gu family dry and feed the Fang clan’s roots all in one elegant move.

Fang Yuan leaned back slightly, a thoughtful frown ghosting his lips, not irritation, but the silent rhythm of a strategist calculating variables.

"Stay here?" he repeated, voice calm and almost distant. "The Fang estate isn’t an inn, Lin Zhaoyue."

She opened her mouth, likely ready to pout, plead, or press—

But he didn’t give her the chance.

"However..." his tone shifted, cool and surgical, slicing straight to the bone, "coincidences can be mutually beneficial."

His eyes sharpened.

"Your Lin Clan," he continued, "has influence far beyond Coldwind City. Especially along the Jade Serpent Trade Routes in the north, if memory serves."

He paused just long enough for her pupils to tighten. She was listening.

"The Fang family," he went on, tone growing almost bored in its precision, "finds itself at a disadvantage recently. Severing ties with the Gu family has left a few... logistical inefficiencies. Tiresome little things."

He leaned forward again, not threatening but the shift in weight carried weight.

His voice lowered, measured, deliberate.

"I dislike inefficiency, Zhaoyue."

Lin Zhaoyue’s smile stayed perfectly in place, sweet and composed but behind it, something shifted.

A glint, sharp and unmistakable, lit up in her eyes. The kind of look that flickered when a cat found a bird that wanted to be caught.

She watched, with the unblinking stillness of a predator sizing up something rare: not prey, but a mate that might finally bite back.

His words weren’t rejection. They were negotiation.

And to her, that meant everything.

He saw her as useful. As someone who mattered. Someone tied to his plans.

And to Lin Zhaoyue, nothing sounded more romantic.

"Oh, you want access to those trading routes through our owned channels?" she asked, her voice a slow purr.

Her hand fluttered lazily in the air, "Mmm... I find them terribly boring, so I wouldn’t know much."

But even as she spoke, her leg remained firmly pressed against his under the stone table a quiet insistence, as intimate as it was unyielding.

Then she turned her head just slightly and looked at him.

Her gaze locked with his like a chain snapping tight, unwavering, burning, hungry.

"If it pleases my husband to have smoother trade," she said softly, her voice dropping an octave as if sharing a secret only the shadows should hear, "I suppose... I could speak to Father about it."

She leaned forward just a breath, the space between them thickening.

Her breath ghosted faintly against his neck, and her next words barely crossed the line between threat and promise:

"I can be very persuasive... especially when it concerns my husband’s needs."

Her nail tapped once more on the stone table, a soft, deliberate click like a dagger being set on a board before the first move of a very dangerous game.