Gu Huaian’s acquisition of mind-reading ability is the decisive disruption that changes his relationship with Shen Tang and alters the story’s rules of intimacy. He begins as a man intending only to endure their two-year contract marriage and divorce, but the unexpected ability lets him hear the private thoughts of a wife whose public behavior and inner commentary rarely match. What first appears to be an advantage becomes both a source of information and an exhausting intrusion into the carefully managed distance between them.

Causes and Initial Conditions

Gu Huaian enters the marriage agreement with limited expectations. The document permits Shen Tang to avoid ordinary wifely duties, requires only occasional family dinners and the appearance of a loving couple, and promises her five million per month, living expenses charged to her husband’s card, and a two-hundred-million settlement after the two-year term ends in divorce. His original objective is therefore endurance rather than romance: he expects to perform the arrangement, protect himself from unnecessary complications, and leave when the contract expires.

Shen Tang’s circumstances make the arrangement especially useful to her. She is a low-ranked celebrity whose reputation is dominated by relentless online rumors and labels including “loose tea bitch,” “plastic surgery freak,” “compensation scammer,” and “troublemaker.” Her company’s public-relations team pairs her with nearly every male celebrity she has worked with in an attempt to exploit attention around her, turning her into a figure many people in the entertainment industry avoid. She is prepared to quit, while her manager, Wang Brother, argues that even hostile publicity remains publicity and reminds her that she once wanted enough money to buy a house and improve her siblings’ living conditions. The contract thus places a private financial bargain beside a public identity already built from scandal and performance.

The First Manifestation

The ability becomes unmistakable during the nighttime journey to the old residence. Shen Tang, dressed in pajamas, meets her contract husband in a tailored designer suit after initially treating his message as a scam. In the car, Gu Huaian works while Shen Tang studies him in silence. Her thoughts focus on his clear skin, his workload, and whether the wealthy employer has an eight-pack. Gu Huaian suddenly tells her to be quiet even though her mouth has not moved.

Her surprise confirms the strangeness of the encounter. When she protests that she said nothing, Gu Huaian wonders whether he has hallucinated and pinches his brow. He then notices the crucial fact directly: Shen Tang’s lips remain still, yet he distinctly hears her speaking. Shock is visible in his eyes, and the event changes the value of silence between them. Shen Tang believes she is privately observing him; Gu Huaian discovers that her private observations are audible to him as if they were spoken aloud.

The ability is not limited to simple, isolated impressions. Gu Huaian tests the situation indirectly by asking whether Shen Tang remembers their agreement. She answers aloud that she remembers and will behave well, while mentally reciting the contract and reviewing romantic-novel conventions so she can perform a convincing loving marriage. Gu Huaian realizes that he can understand what she is thinking in her heart and accepts that this is now a continuing condition rather than a single hallucination. The new knowledge promises warning against deliberate trouble, but it also makes her inner voice so noisy that he cannot finish his work.

Operation in Social Encounters

The new ability immediately interferes with Gu Huaian’s ordinary management of appearances. At the old residence, Shen Tang sees a hostile-looking young girl and privately speculates that she might be his ex-lover, secret admirer, or unrequited fiancée. Gu Huaian answers that she is a cousin before Shen Tang has voiced the question. Shen Tang is startled by his accuracy and wonders how he could know what she was thinking. Gu Huaian recognizes that he has revealed too much and silently resolves to be more careful.

This exchange establishes the central asymmetry of the ability. Shen Tang’s thoughts remain involuntary from her perspective, yet Gu Huaian can use them to anticipate her misunderstandings, correct her assumptions, and monitor the difference between her social performance and her actual reactions. The mind-reading does not make communication transparent in a healthy sense; instead, it creates a second, hidden channel that only one spouse knows exists. Every casual answer from Gu Huaian can therefore expose the existence of that channel, forcing him to conceal the very power that gives him an informational advantage.

The contrast continues beyond the family setting. Shen Tang maintains an apparently professional smile during a livestream filled with hostile comments, treating the abuse as a source of traffic and future income from her company split. The program’s stated mission is to help farmers by selling agricultural products from remote mountainous regions with overstocked fruit. Her public composure is consequently labor: she performs steadiness while her private reactions remain distinct from the face presented to viewers. Gu Huaian’s ability makes such separations newly legible, not only in marriage but across Shen Tang’s celebrity work, family appearances, gaming sessions, and online interactions.

Consequences for the Plot and Relationships

Mind-reading changes Gu Huaian’s position from a distant contractual partner into an unwilling witness to Shen Tang’s unfiltered judgments. He can hear attraction, suspicion, irritation, strategic calculation, and comic speculation without receiving them through dialogue. The ability repeatedly exposes the gap between the wife he expected and the person she has become, especially because he had assumed a different romantic script for her. Instead of encountering a woman whose behavior simply confirms the contract’s terms, he encounters a consciousness that continually unsettles his interpretations.

The power also becomes a hidden mechanism for tracking Shen Tang’s developing social world. Miao Miao later asks her to play games, and Shen Tang logs into King of Glory, where she discovers that Gu Huaian is online and has already reached the King rank, though she does not know whether he achieved it himself or had someone boost the account. In another game, after Shen Tang requests a jungle gank while suffering under repeated attacks in the bottom lane, a teammate responds with a sexual insult about how she must have obtained her rank. These gaming exchanges show why inner access matters: spoken or typed language can be hostile, performative, or strategically evasive, while Shen Tang’s inner voice reveals her immediate assessment of teammates, allies, and the man increasingly entering her private attention.

The same principle applies when Gu Huaian appears in more formal public settings. At a banquet where guests of higher status gather to seek cooperation rather than provoke conflict, he walks in arm in arm with Shen Tang and introduces her as his wife. The event requires a polished performance of marital unity; his mind-reading supplies a backstage view of the woman participating in that performance. The contract’s outward fiction is therefore sustained through ceremony, while the ability continually threatens to turn concealed reactions into another form of evidence.

Narrative Significance

The event functions as both a plot device and a formal redefinition of privacy. Before it, the marriage agreement seems to divide life cleanly into contractual duties, financial rewards, and emotional noninvolvement. After it, Gu Huaian possesses access to the part of Shen Tang that the agreement cannot regulate. He can hear the thoughts that precede speech, including thoughts about his appearance, his relatives, his workload, and his conduct, but he cannot openly acknowledge the source without changing the relationship again.

Its dramatic force comes from the mismatch between control and intimacy. Gu Huaian initially wants a predictable two-year arrangement, yet the ability makes Shen Tang unpredictable precisely because he hears what she does not intend to disclose. It offers practical protection against deception while producing constant sensory and emotional overload. Shen Tang, meanwhile, continues to believe that her inner life is private, so her candid thoughts become an involuntary counterpoint to her public smiles, contractual promises, livestream persona, and formal presentation as Gu Huaian’s wife. The acquisition of mind-reading ability therefore converts a marriage based on distance into a relationship governed by hidden knowledge, accidental revelations, and the growing impossibility of treating either spouse as merely a role.