Mind Reading

Mind Reading is the story’s central supernatural device for turning private consciousness into an audible presence. By a stroke of luck, Gu Huaian discovers that he can hear Shen Tang’s thoughts even when her mouth is still, converting an ordinary contractual marriage into an asymmetrical encounter in which one person’s inner life is no longer private. The ability initially offers Gu Huaian practical protection, but it also forces him to hear the unruly, comic, suspicious, and emotionally revealing stream behind Shen Tang’s composed public behavior. Its decisive significance lies in the way it changes not only what Gu Huaian knows, but also what the marriage can become.

Discovery and Operation

Mind Reading first appears as a startling break between Shen Tang’s spoken words and Gu Huaian’s perception. In the car, Shen Tang silently wonders whether the overworked tycoon has an eight-pack. Gu Huaian abruptly tells her to be quiet, although she has said nothing aloud. When she protests that she did not speak, her inner voice immediately insists that she really had not, and Gu Huaian realizes that her mouth has not moved even though he distinctly heard her speaking. The driver’s surprised reaction reinforces that the exchange is not normal conversation but the first visible sign of a private channel accessible only to Gu Huaian.

The ability does not seem to require Shen Tang’s consent or a deliberate transmission. Gu Huaian hears thoughts that she never intends to share, including her attempts to remember the terms of their agreement and her sudden speculation about his appearance. He tests the situation indirectly by asking whether she remembers the contract, while Shen Tang reviews its contents internally and reassures herself that she can perform the role of a loving wife. The scene establishes the mechanism’s dramatic irony: Gu Huaian receives information that Shen Tang believes is securely contained within her own mind, while Shen Tang continues to interpret his reactions through ordinary social assumptions.

At first, Gu Huaian treats the new ability as useful surveillance. He accepts that he can understand what Shen Tang is thinking and reasons that this may help him remain alert if she deliberately causes trouble. Yet the power is not a clean strategic advantage. Shen Tang’s inner voice is so constant that it interferes with his work, making the ability a form of involuntary cognitive overload as well as a source of information. The novel therefore presents Mind Reading as both assistance and burden: it removes uncertainty about another person while replacing uncertainty with an unfiltered flood of consciousness.

From Contractual Suspicion to Intimacy

The power enters the relationship when Gu Huaian still intends only to endure the two-year contract period and then divorce Shen Tang. His original view of her is shaped by the public narrative surrounding her: she is a Z-list celebrity, an ever-trending scandal figure burdened with accusations such as being a loose tea bitch, a plastic surgery freak, a compensation scammer, and a troublemaker. Her company’s public-relations strategy pairs her with nearly every male celebrity she has worked with, making her appear to be an industry-wide source of scandal that others avoid. Shen Tang herself plans to leave entertainment, believing that success is not meant for her and questioning why she should struggle for it.

Mind Reading destabilizes that image because Gu Huaian encounters the person behind the reputational surface. Shen Tang can maintain a professional smile while black fans flood her livestream and her popularity rises because of the abuse. She privately calculates that the broadcast will still bring her money through the company split, while the shopping cart is filled with agricultural products intended to help farmers clear excess fruit from remote mountain regions. Her outward composure, inward cynicism, financial anxiety, and practical willingness to complete the work cannot be reduced to the scandalous persona assigned to her by the entertainment industry.

The ability also reveals how Shen Tang’s ambitions are tied to family responsibility. When Wang Brother asks whether she has earned enough money to retire, the question hurts her because she had wanted to make enough to buy a house and improve her siblings’ living conditions. His argument that bad publicity is still publicity, and that being noticed is necessary in an industry where many people never make a splash at all, reframes her scandalous visibility as an economically valuable form of labor. Through Mind Reading, Gu Huaian can perceive the private cost beneath the public performance, even when Shen Tang does not explain herself and others remain unwilling to believe her.

This access gradually changes Gu Huaian’s emotional position. The man who initially expects divorce later kneels and humbly asks Shen Tang whether they can avoid divorcing. Mind Reading does not itself create affection in a simple mechanical way; rather, it makes sustained misrecognition difficult. Gu Huaian repeatedly hears the gap between Shen Tang’s words and her private judgments, sees her vulnerability beneath her defensive humor, and becomes unable to maintain the detached interpretation with which he entered the marriage. The supernatural device thus converts knowledge into attachment, while making that attachment morally complicated because it begins with an advantage Shen Tang did not choose to grant.

Social and Emotional Consequences

Because the power exposes inner speech, it makes every social performance unstable. Shen Tang may promise to behave properly or present a calm expression, while her thoughts wander toward suspicion, mockery, tactical calculation, or attraction. Gu Huaian must respond not only to what she says but also to what she thinks, creating comic misunderstandings and moments in which he appears irrational because he is answering an invisible conversation. His command for her to be quiet is the clearest early example: he reacts to a thought she has not voiced, and she concludes that he may simply be exhausted from overwork.

The same mechanism intensifies the novel’s use of gaming as social interaction. Shen Tang plays King of Glory with Miao Miao, waits for her to finish a match, and encounters another player whose identification is Cool Tyrannosaurus Rex. In one match, she is repeatedly pressured in the bottom lane while the enemy mid laner and jungler gank her; after reaching a score of zero to three, she asks the jungler to gank bot and receives a misogynistic insult about how she obtained her rank. Elsewhere, Gu Huaian reaches the King rank and pulls Shen Tang directly into his room, while another team includes two girls who main mage and support and a boy who begins scolding as soon as he enters. These scenes show that inner knowledge exists alongside mediated, rule-bound interaction: Mind Reading gives Gu Huaian access to Shen Tang’s private reactions, while games expose how gender, rank, teamwork, and verbal abuse shape public identities.

The power also complicates emotional labor. Shen Tang’s professional smile during the hostile livestream is not evidence that she feels unaffected; it is a work practice that preserves visibility and income. The guests who later wolf down the food on camera, with Ao Ziping even shedding a tear, reveal how quickly public performance can give way to genuine bodily reaction. Gu Huaian’s access to Shen Tang’s thoughts allows him to observe this distinction from within: the smile belongs to the professional role, while the inner voice carries the sharper and more immediate response. Mind Reading therefore functions as a narrative instrument for separating displayed emotion from lived feeling without making either one entirely false.

Privacy, Disclosure, and Resolution

For Shen Tang, the most disturbing consequence is the loss of mental privacy. She initially cannot accept the existence of Mind Reading and feels as though she is naked in front of Gu Huaian, because every unspoken thought may become available to him. Her discomfort is not merely embarrassment over stray fantasies. The ability threatens her control over self-presentation, the boundary that lets her decide which motives, fears, judgments, and memories become part of a relationship. Gu Huaian’s knowledge makes concealment impossible even when she remains silent.

Later, Shen Tang’s attitude becomes more complicated. After learning that there is a way to resolve the ability, she can tolerate its existence more easily, though she still refuses to unlock it through the intimate act required by the strange condition. She regards their first such experience as beautiful and does not want it reduced to a mechanical means of activating supernatural access. Both characters tacitly avoid discussing the issue, creating a silence around a power that has already made silence impossible. The contradiction is central: they can hear thoughts, yet they still preserve certain matters through mutual non-discussion.

Mind Reading eventually intersects with questions of Rebirth. After considering the ability and its implications, Shen Tang narrows her eyes at Gu Huaian and asks whether he is reborn. The question signals a shift from treating the power as an isolated anomaly to placing it within the larger hidden structure governing both their lives. Gu Huaian’s supernatural perception has taught Shen Tang that the visible explanation is rarely complete; private knowledge becomes the route by which deeper secrets can be tested.

The ability is finally removed. After an intimate encounter, Shen Tang asks Gu Huaian whether he can still hear her inner thoughts. He listens carefully and shakes his head, confirming that he can no longer hear them. Shen Tang is excited enough to nearly leap up before an injury forces her to lie back down, and she blames him for the consequence. The ending restores the mental boundary that had been violated at the beginning, but it does not erase what the ability changed. Gu Huaian has learned to know Shen Tang beyond her public reputation, Shen Tang has confronted the vulnerability of being completely legible, and their relationship has moved from contractual distance toward a form of intimacy that must survive even without supernatural assistance.

Narrative Function and Significance

As a narrative device, Mind Reading creates layered dramatic irony. The third-person narration can present Shen Tang’s silent reactions while also showing Gu Huaian hearing them, so readers understand both the thought itself and the danger that the thinker does not know it has been exposed. A casual glance, a sudden command, or an apparently unreasonable response can therefore carry two meanings at once: one within Shen Tang’s ordinary social interpretation and another within Gu Huaian’s privileged knowledge. The resulting asymmetry produces humor, suspense, and emotional pressure without requiring either character to announce every feeling directly.

The concept also opposes the novel’s recurring systems of public labeling. Shen Tang is repeatedly treated as a scandalous type by the entertainment industry, by online commenters, and by people who interpret her actions through rumor. Mind Reading appears to offer the opposite of rumor: direct access to the supposedly authentic person. Yet the novel does not make inner speech perfectly transparent or morally pure. Shen Tang’s thoughts are noisy, impulsive, contradictory, and sometimes strategically self-protective. The power reveals her, but it does not simplify her. Its deeper significance is that intimacy requires learning to hold together the public figure, the private voice, the professional calculation, and the emotional wound rather than replacing one with another.

For Gu Huaian, Mind Reading begins as a defensive advantage over a wife he expects to leave and ends as a force that makes emotional detachment untenable. For Shen Tang, it begins as an invasion that makes her feel exposed and ends only when the relationship has developed enough to confront the loss of that extraordinary access. The ability’s disappearance is therefore not a return to the beginning. It is the point at which knowledge gained through supernatural means must become trust, memory, and chosen closeness.