Gu Huaian's Company Apartment is the studio apartment near the company building where Gu Huaian often lives for convenience. More than a temporary address, it is the most concentrated private setting for the relationship between Gu Huaian and Shen Tang: a place removed from formal family gatherings and public entertainment-industry scrutiny, yet close enough to the company that work, publicity, money, and performance remain present in the background. The apartment therefore becomes a domestic backstage in which the appearance of marriage must be maintained even when the two people are still learning how to inhabit one another's space.

Definition and Setting

Gu Huaian uses the apartment because of its proximity to the company building. After getting out of the shower, he is shown drying his damp hair there, a small domestic detail that establishes the apartment as a lived-in personal base rather than an office or hotel. Its quiet interior contrasts with Shen Tang's preference for lively surroundings; when she arrives, the stillness makes her restless, and merely sitting there without work feels awkward to her.

The apartment's practical arrangement also creates immediate limitations. It has only one bedroom, leaving Shen Tang uncertain about where she is expected to sleep and wondering whether she will again have to use the sofa. That detail gives the space a concrete domestic tension: the marriage agreement may define their obligations as largely performative, but shared housing turns the supposedly simple arrangement into a negotiation over privacy, comfort, and boundaries.

Shen Tang's Arrival and Domestic Negotiation

Shen Tang recognizes the building when she and Gu Huaian reach its entrance. She is in a daze as they register her and record her fingerprint, and her question about what the procedure is for shows that the apartment is not merely a place she is visiting casually. Her access is being formalized, suggesting that Gu Huaian is incorporating her into the practical routines of his residence even while the terms of their marriage remain contractual.

The apartment's importance is sharpened by the marriage agreement itself. Shen Tang is promised five million per month, payment of her living expenses through her husband's card, and a settlement of two hundred million when the two-year agreement expires and they divorce. She is not required to perform conventional wifely duties; instead, she is expected to appear occasionally at family dinners and preserve the image of a loving couple. In that context, the apartment is where the public fiction of marriage begins to acquire private logistics. Fingerprint registration, sleeping arrangements, and the question of whether she should remain after an evening together turn an abstract contract into a shared material life.

Gaming and Mediated Social Space

Although the apartment is quiet, Shen Tang brings lively social energy into it through online gaming. A message from Miao Miao invites her to play, and Shen Tang opens King of Glory while waiting for Miao Miao to finish another match. She is then pulled into a room containing a player identified as Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex. The game allows her to remain socially connected even while she is physically isolated inside Gu Huaian's residence.

The apartment also becomes the setting for gendered conflict mediated through the game. While Shen Tang is left alone in the bottom lane, the opposing marksman and support repeatedly harass her, while the opposing mid-laner and jungler gank her several times. Miao Miao helps on a few occasions, but the paired teammates do not come to her lane. When the score reaches zero to three, Shen Tang asks the jungler for assistance and receives an insult questioning how she achieved her rank and implying that she had relied on sexual access. The private apartment thus contains a public, networked arena in which Shen Tang's identity as a woman and player is attacked, while her response converts the hostility into another form of social interaction.

The gaming connection later extends directly to Gu Huaian. After several days without playing, Shen Tang logs in and discovers that Gu Huaian is online and has reached the King rank, though she is unsure whether he achieved it himself or had someone boost the account. Before she can create a room, Gu Huaian pulls her into his. The apartment consequently links physical proximity with digital companionship: even when the room is too quiet for Shen Tang, the game supplies a shared activity through which the couple can approach one another without immediately confronting the emotional implications of their relationship.

Private Backstage and Public Performance

The apartment stands in sharp contrast to the public environments surrounding the couple. Shen Tang is a Z-list celebrity whose company promotes her through scandal, pairing her with male celebrities to exploit attention while online rumors label her with a succession of degrading epithets. During livestreams, she maintains a professional smile while black fans flood the room with abuse, accepting that the attention will increase her share of the revenue. At a formal banquet, by contrast, she enters arm in arm with Gu Huaian, and he introduces her as his wife to influential guests who have come to seek cooperation rather than conflict.

Against this backdrop, the apartment is a backstage zone where the labor of appearing affectionate can loosen, fail, or be renegotiated. The marriage contract requires the couple to preserve the image of love at family dinners and other public occasions, but the apartment exposes the practical awkwardness beneath that image: Shen Tang's impatience with silence, Gu Huaian's restrained reactions, and the unresolved question of where she will sleep. It is a space in which the couple can move between role-playing and ordinary behavior without either mode fully replacing the other.

Narrative Significance

Gu Huaian's Company Apartment is significant because it transforms proximity into a recurring test of the contract marriage. It is close to Gu Huaian's workplace, but its function is private; it contains the residue of professional life while forcing the characters into domestic decisions that cannot be settled by publicity strategy alone. The single bedroom, the recorded fingerprint, and the repeated use of games as companionship make the apartment a material map of their changing relationship.

The location also concentrates the novel's contrast between performed emotion and lived interaction. Outside, Shen Tang's scandal-based fame and the couple's affectionate image are managed for audiences, companies, family members, and online viewers. Inside, the same relationship is expressed through silence, irritation, logistical uncertainty, shared screens, and invitations to play. The apartment therefore marks the point where a carefully priced arrangement begins to generate habits and encounters that exceed its written terms, even though the evidence at this stage still presents those developments through awkwardness and negotiation rather than a completed romantic resolution.