Assistant Cen (Contract Affairs)

Assistant Cen (Contract Affairs) is the administrative hinge of Shen Tang and Gu Huaian’s contract marriage. He first appears as the man seated opposite Shen Tang in a cafe, lightly pushing up his gold-rimmed glasses while asking for her opinion. Before she can answer, unfamiliar memories reveal the marriage agreement before her: she will perform no ordinary wifely duties, attend occasional family dinners, maintain the appearance of an affectionate couple, receive 5 million per month with living expenses charged to Gu Huaian’s card, and collect 200 million when the two-year agreement ends in divorce. Assistant Cen is therefore not merely a messenger. He is the person who turns an emotionally empty arrangement into a precise, lucrative, and enforceable social performance.

Identity and Administrative Function

Assistant Cen works in the orbit of Gu Huaian’s business and private affairs, handling the practical execution of decisions that Gu Huaian makes. His first function is contractual: he presents the marriage agreement, explains its conditions, and begins the negotiation with Shen Tang. His manner is sufficiently formal to match the seriousness of the document, yet the arrangement itself is unusually commercial. The marriage is designed to provide the outward image of a loving couple while protecting both parties from the obligations normally associated with marriage.

His position also places him between Gu Huaian’s private intentions and Shen Tang’s immediate reactions. When Shen Tang’s delighted response makes it clear that she has no objection to the agreement, Assistant Cen still moves through the expected professional procedure. He begins to suggest that she need not accept it if she does not wish to do so, but her laughter interrupts the formality. Later, when Gu Huaian adds a supplementary contract, Assistant Cen receives the instruction to deliver it and obtain Shen Tang’s signature, with an additional 1 million per month offered if she agrees. He thus carries not only documents but also the financial adjustments through which Gu Huaian attempts to revise the terms of the relationship.

The Contract and Its Changing Terms

Assistant Cen’s clearest early scene occurs when he hands Shen Tang the supplementary clauses and tells her to review them before signing. He specifically informs her that Gu Huaian has authorized an extra million each month. Shen Tang, who had intended to read the terms carefully, signs immediately after hearing the amount. Assistant Cen is shocked and asks whether she is not going to read the document first. The exchange establishes a recurring contrast: he treats the marriage as a matter requiring clauses, review, and procedural caution, while Shen Tang treats it as an extraordinary opportunity to secure money for herself and the orphanage.

The arrangement’s financial structure matters because Shen Tang is not entering the marriage from a position of comfort. She is a Z-list celebrity burdened by scandalous online labels and a public image that makes her company pair her with nearly every male celebrity in order to exploit attention. At the same time, a child from the orphanage where she grew up has leukemia and needs expensive surgery. The child is not her biological brother, but Shen Tang regards the orphanage children as family and has already spent her savings helping them. Assistant Cen’s paperwork consequently becomes connected to a broader redefinition of kinship: a legal marriage supplies the money that a fragile substitute family desperately needs.

The contract also becomes an instrument for showing how the relationship changes beyond its original design. At first, Assistant Cen delivers Gu Huaian’s breakfast to Shen Tang, explicitly identifying it as food Gu Huaian asked him to bring. Shen Tang reacts with mixed feelings and remarks on the oddity of an assistant as busy as him being responsible for meal delivery. Later, Gu Huaian tells Assistant Cen to remember that Shen Tang will come by to deliver food and asks him to receive her. Assistant Cen understands that Gu Huaian seems to have forgotten the marriage is contractual. His silent recognition is important: the assistant notices the emotional drift before the principal openly acknowledges it.

Messenger Between Public and Private Worlds

Assistant Cen repeatedly appears at moments when the couple’s staged public image must be connected to their private arrangements. At a formal banquet, Shen Tang enters arm in arm with Gu Huaian and attracts considerable attention before Gu Huaian introduces her to two older acquaintances as his wife. Although the evidence does not place Assistant Cen inside that introduction, his administrative work makes such appearances possible: the contract requires occasional family dinners and the maintenance of a loving-couple image, and he is the figure who manages the concrete obligations surrounding that performance.

His work also intersects with the entertainment world’s unstable publicity. Shen Tang’s reputation is built on constant scandal, and even her hospitalization produces an absurd rumor that she was beaten and crippled by a legal wife after being exposed as a mistress. When Shen Tang later encounters Assistant Cen, she greets him as someone familiar from the recurring machinery of her marriage and career. His presence is a reminder that private arrangements are never entirely private for her; meals, appearances, documents, and rumors all require someone to coordinate the movement between backstage agreements and the public stage.

Assistant Cen’s role similarly touches Shen Tang’s livestreaming career. During one broadcast, fans have already waited for the stream to begin, while the male anchor adopts an artificial, apologetic persona and offers lucky bags as compensation for the delay. The scene echoes the contract marriage’s logic of managed appearances: an audience receives a performance, and inconvenience is repaired through a carefully chosen gesture. Assistant Cen is not the performer in that livestream, but his administrative position belongs to the same world of timing, presentation, compensation, and impression management.

Professional Composure and Comic Reactions

Assistant Cen is generally defined by restraint, but his composure repeatedly cracks in response to Shen Tang’s unconventional behavior. He is astonished when she signs the supplementary contract without reading it, and he is visibly unsettled by the force of her response to the initial agreement. These reactions make him a useful observer of the mismatch between ordinary expectations and Shen Tang’s priorities. To him, a marriage contract is a document whose clauses deserve scrutiny; to her, the promised payments are a life-changing rescue from poverty and a means of protecting the orphanage.

He also becomes nervous in the later routine of Gu Huaian’s household. When Shen Tang sees him approaching, she worries that he has brought another pile of work and quickly asks whether he has eaten before he can speak. The joke depends on their established pattern: Assistant Cen is associated with additional duties, instructions, and paperwork, even when he is only arriving to perform an ordinary task. His bureaucratic presence has become part of the domestic atmosphere.

At work, he serves as one of the few people able to notice Gu Huaian’s internal distraction without sharing its cause. Assistant Cen observes that Gu Huaian has spaced out repeatedly in a single day and calls him back to attention. When Gu Huaian recovers, he explains that Shen Tang will later deliver food and instructs Assistant Cen to receive her. Assistant Cen’s conflicted reaction reveals a quiet professional judgment: the employer’s behavior no longer matches the stated terms of the agreement. He does not openly challenge Gu Huaian, but he recognizes the contradiction between a contractual husband and a man arranging domestic care.

Relationships and Narrative Significance

Assistant Cen’s most important relationship is with Gu Huaian, whom he serves as an exceptionally trusted operational intermediary. Gu Huaian communicates decisions through him rather than handling every encounter personally: the initial agreement is presented through Assistant Cen, the supplementary payment is conveyed through him, and food is delivered through him. This arrangement gives Gu Huaian distance and control, while making Assistant Cen the visible face of decisions that may carry emotional or financial consequences.

His relationship with Shen Tang begins as formal and transactional but becomes familiar through repetition. She recognizes him, worries about the work he may bring, accepts meals from him, and jokes about the range of tasks assigned to him. He, in turn, witnesses her impulsive signing, her financial motives, her public scandals, and her gradual movement into a more genuinely domestic relationship with Gu Huaian. Because he remains close to the paperwork while observing the couple’s conduct, he functions as a measuring instrument for the distance between their declared arrangement and their lived behavior.

Assistant Cen’s narrative role is consequently that of a threshold figure: he stands between law and emotion, employer and spouse, backstage instruction and public display. He does not drive the principal conflicts, and the available evidence does not present him as a fully independent rival, confidant, or ideological opponent. His importance lies in the precision of his position. Every time he carries a contract, a meal, a message, or a schedule, the novel converts an abstract relationship into a concrete action and lets the reader see whether the couple is still obeying the terms they once signed.

Development and Overall Characterization

Assistant Cen remains professionally practical even as the contract marriage begins to acquire the signs of genuine attachment. He continues to deliver instructions and food, monitor Gu Huaian’s schedule, and manage the documents, but the meaning of those tasks changes around him. The same administrative channels that once established distance gradually carry evidence of care. A marriage originally defined by occasional appearances and financial compensation begins to produce regular concern, domestic routines, and expectations that exceed the written agreement.

His characterization is therefore comparatively restrained and functional rather than melodramatic. He is recognizable through competence, caution, and understated comic bewilderment, yet he can still surprise the reader by noticing what Gu Huaian himself has not admitted: that the contractual arrangement is becoming emotionally real. Assistant Cen’s ending significance does not depend on a spectacular personal transformation. It rests on his sustained position beside the changing couple, where the smallest administrative detail—an extra million, a document awaiting a signature, breakfast delivered, or food received—becomes evidence that the boundary between contract and marriage is steadily dissolving.