My CEO Keeps Wanting to Eat Me - Chapter 4

Once I began to suspect Shen Qinglan had pica, I could no longer look at her normally.

One day, I passed the company’s culture wall.

It displayed a photograph of Shen Qinglan from years ago, when she had been developing the African market.

An endless, desolate savanna stretched behind her. She wore an outdoor jacket, her hair tied back casually, her gaze remote and sharp. A few local people holding spears were just visible in the background.

The photo was old and blurry, yet Shen Qinglan’s stunning beauty still shone through.

Xiao Zhao sidled up and nudged me mysteriously with his elbow.

“Hey, Lu Jia. Admiring Ms. Shen’s old battle record?”

I nodded. “She was so cool back then.”

“Cool doesn’t begin to cover it!” Xiao Zhao lowered his voice and glanced around as if preparing to tell a ghost story. “The old-timers say Ms. Shen risked her life for contracts in those days.”

I had heard a little about Shen Qinglan’s early entrepreneurial history.

They said that when she first entered business, she ran her own sales calls and endured endless hardship. She even conducted market research in Africa herself. Her start-up story was supposedly the stuff of legend.

“It was chaotic over there. Ms. Shen was fresh out of college, with no resources and no supply chain. She had it rough, and she was chasing the African market everyone else had written off.”

“I heard that to earn their trust, she cut her finger and swore a blood oath with a tribal chief!”

I swallowed, my throat tightening. “A-a blood oath?”

“Exactly! You cut a finger, drip the blood into wine, and each person drains a cup!”

Xiao Zhao spoke with such animation that you might have thought he’d been standing there holding the bowl.

“Rumor also says she took part in some mysterious ritual. To fit into the local culture, she followed the tribe and… ate raw meat and drank raw blood. Just imagine, a place where people live on raw flesh and blood…”

My eyes nearly popped out.

A ritual?

A blood oath?

Raw flesh and blood?!

In that instant, I looked at Shen Qinglan’s cool, ascetic face in the photograph and felt my filter shatter.

Forget some unattainable flower on a mountaintop.

This woman stood at the top of the food chain!

I thought back to her recent string of bizarre thoughts.

*A little cream cake… So fragrant.*

*…Want to eat.*

*The allure of a woman in uniform… Want to eat.*

*Sparkly… Want to eat.*

A horrifying possibility dawned on me.

Could the thing she wanted to eat be… me?

And could “eat” mean… literally eat?

Wash me clean, sprinkle me with cumin and chili powder, then roast me over a fire?

A chill raced down my back and cold sweat broke out at once.

No.

I simply could not connect this polished executive in Armani and crisp perfume with a savage tearing raw meat apart on the African savanna!

“And another thing…” Xiao Zhao continued embellishing the story, his eyes gleaming with the eerie light of gossip. “That tribe was supposedly an offshoot of a cannibal tribe…”

My knees buckled. I nearly dropped dead on the spot.

Case closed.

Mystery solved.

No wonder she always stared at me so intently.

Anyone forced to watch a juicy pork knuckle float past every day would get hungry, wouldn’t they?

I was that pork knuckle!