22: Chapter 22 Suppressing 70% of her strength? The female CEO is determined to play along to the end.

Lin Yan took the blue plastic folder and walked quickly back to the main office area of the Public Relations Department.

He walked straight into his private office, closed the blinds behind him, and shut out the prying eyes of the employees outside.

He threw the folder onto his desk, collapsed heavily into his swivel chair, and rubbed his stiff cheeks vigorously with both hands.

This was simply an unsolvable deadlock.

If he intentionally wrote this psychological profile report poorly to hide his identity,

Luo Qingcheng would definitely use his lack of professional competence as an excuse to pressure him within the Shenghai Group, or even force him to resign.

Once he lost the protection of being a Senior Public Relations Manager at the Shenghai Group, he would be completely exposed to Su Wanqing's hunting gaze.

But if he used his max-level Empathy Talent to completely strip away Zhang Jianye's psychological defenses,

that report, full of insight and manipulation, would become ironclad proof for Luo Qingcheng that he was L.

Lin Yan leaned back in his chair, feeling like his head was about to explode.

He reached out, opened the blue folder, and forced himself to focus on Zhang Jianye's resume.

As his gaze swept quickly over the text, Lin Yan's innate Empathy Talent began to operate automatically.

Zhang Jianye, forty-five years old, a graduate of a prestigious university's finance department, with a stay-at-home wife and one son and one daughter.

Attached to the resume was a photo of Zhang Jianye speaking at a business forum.

Lin Yan stared at the facial muscle structure of Zhang Jianye in the photo, his gaze lingering for a long time on the man's slightly raised chin and tense eye corners.

This was a man who was extremely arrogant and had a very strong desire for control.

He was accustomed to holding the absolute dominant position in business negotiations and would not allow any subordinates to raise objections.

However, his tie was slightly crooked, and there was an imperceptible wrinkle on the cuff of his suit.

This indicated that his family life was definitely not as harmonious as it appeared on the surface.

A man with a strong desire for control, if he could not get absolute obedience from his wife at home, would bring this repressed emotion into his work.

His aggressiveness at the negotiation table was actually a defense mechanism to mask his inner anxiety.

As long as one intentionally questioned and provoked him repeatedly on some trivial details during the negotiation,

his emotions would spin out of control, thereby revealing flaws when it came to concessions on core interests.

Lin Yan quickly constructed a complete psychological model of Zhang Jianye and a strategy to defeat him in his mind.

This plan only needed three minutes to write, and it would guarantee that Luo Qingcheng would win a complete victory at tomorrow's negotiation table.

But Lin Yan could not write it like that.

He picked up the signature pen on the table, scribbled a few black lines on the draft paper, and erased all the sharp vocabulary in his mind.

He opened the document on his computer and began to wrap this report in the most rigid, official corporate jargon.

He changed "extremely arrogant" to "has a relatively strong personality and values personal authority."

He changed "using provocation to break down defense mechanisms" to "suggest maintaining patience during negotiations and adopting roundabout tactics to avoid direct conflict."

He deliberately piled up a large number of basic theoretical terms from public relations studies in the report.

He made the entire document look like homework copied from a textbook by a fresh graduate.

Lin Yan typed on the keyboard, and every word was written with extreme difficulty.

He had to control his skill level to about seventy percent.

He needed to let Luo Qingcheng see that he had indeed done some investigation, but he could not let her smell that unique scent of soul manipulation that belonged to L.

After struggling until the end of the workday, Lin Yan finally printed out the report, which he had revised over a dozen times.

Holding the paper that still smelled of ink, he took the elevator to the top floor and the Presidents Office.

Luo Qingcheng was still in a meeting, so Lin Yan handed the report to the secretary and turned to flee from the floor that made him feel suffocated.

At eight o'clock in the evening, only a few scattered windows in the Shenghai Group building were still lit.

Luo Qingcheng finished a three-hour high-level meeting and returned to the Presidents Office, exhausted.

She threw the meeting minutes in her hand onto the desk and immediately saw the psychological profile report neatly placed next to the keyboard.

Luo Qingcheng walked behind the desk and sat down; without even taking a sip of water, she opened the three-page report.

The office was so quiet that only the rustling sound of turning pages could be heard.

Luo Qingcheng's gaze swept quickly over the words that Lin Yan had carefully packaged.

After reading it for the first time, her brows furrowed tightly.

This report was written too ordinarily, so ordinary that it was even a bit mediocre.

It was filled with various rigid theoretical analyses, without any breakthrough points that would make one's eyes light up.

This completely contradicted the terrifying insight that Lin Yan had displayed in the office last Friday.

Luo Qingcheng leaned back in her chair, her fingers gently stroking the edge of the report.

She closed her eyes, filtered out all the nonsense in the report, and kept only the most core conclusions.

"Strong personality."

"Values authority."

"Suggest roundabout tactics."

Luo Qingcheng opened her eyes, and an extremely intense light burst forth from the depths of her eyes.

She grabbed the red pen on the table and drew heavy lines under these terms.

Lin Yan was deliberately hiding his true abilities.

He had spotted Zhang Jianye's weaknesses of arrogance and a strong desire for control, but he didn't dare to write down the method to break those weaknesses directly.

He had wrapped the truly lethal blade in those cumbersome academic terms.

This attempt to cover up actually exposed the extreme panic in his heart.

Luo Qingcheng pulled open the drawer and took out the old mobile phone that had been kept turned off.

She turned it on, clicked into the now-defunct Spark software, and pulled up a chat record that L had sent her four years ago.

"The more invincible men appear in the business world, the more fragile their inner defense mechanisms are."

"You don't need to go head-to-head; you just need to gently poke at the authority area he cares about most, and he will reveal his flaws due to emotional loss of control."

Luo Qingcheng looked at this line of text on the screen, then looked at the report Lin Yan had submitted on the desk.

The underlying logic of both was exactly the same.

Lin Yan had simply taken L's sharp rhetoric and covered it with a gentle public relations coat.

Luo Qingcheng's fingers gripping the red pen turned white from the force.

She flipped the report to the last page and wrote five words forcefully in the blank space.

"You are hiding very deep."

The pen tip tore through the paper, leaving a red mark on the desk underneath.

Luo Qingcheng threw the pen aside, covered her face with both hands, and let out a low laugh from her throat.

"Lin Yan, do you think you can pull the wool over my eyes by suppressing your power to seventy percent?"

"The more you try to hide, the more it proves that you are afraid of being recognized by me."

"I am becoming more and more interested in playing this tug-of-war game about your identity with you."

Luo Qingcheng stood up, walked to the floor-to-ceiling window, and looked at the brilliant night view of the city outside.

Her level of suspicion toward Lin Yan had now soared directly from thirty percent to sixty percent.

With just one more push, she would be able to completely tear off the gentle and refined mask on Lin Yan's face.