At the Qiao family’s welcome banquet, Qiao Nian was branded a “good-for-nothing,” had her luggage thrown outside, and was paid 50,000 yuan by the Qiaos to sever ties with them. Just as she was left homeless on the street, her top-tier star brother, Lu Yan, arrived in a custom-made 3-million-yuan Phaeton to take her home, instantly humiliating Qiao Weiwei, who had been flaunting her million-yuan Porsche. Back at the Lu estate, Qiao Nian moved into a thousand-square-meter villa inside the Second Ring Road. Her biological father turned out to be a tenured professor at Yenching University, and her grandfather was a business tycoon who controlled half of the global energy industry.
From then on, Qiao Nian’s secret identities kept coming to light. She scored a perfect 750 on the college entrance exam and became the provincial top scorer, face-slapping the Qiaos, who had mocked her. Her anonymously run livestream shop, “Sister Nian’s Finds,” brought in over 100 million yuan in a single broadcast, backed by the world’s top supply chain. Her Suzhou embroidery piece, “Hundred Birds Paying Homage to the Phoenix,” created under the name Lu Nan, was acquired by the National Museum, eventually revealing her as an inheritor of the intangible cultural heritage of Suzhou embroidery. Then An Yu, a capital tycoon from the capital, posted their marriage certificate and exposed their years-long secret marriage, giving her the added aura of “Mrs. An.”
Qiao Weiwei repeatedly copied her work, while the Qiao family’s opportunism led them to try again and again to latch onto powerful people, only to be face-slapped each time. In the end, Qiao Weiwei was jailed for stealing research materials, and the Qiao family collapsed completely. Qiao Nian didn’t stop there. The AI cancer-diagnosis project she worked on was featured in Nature. She turned down a salary worth tens of billions to stay and serve her country. Her Suzhou embroidery was selected for the Louvre, and she helped establish the Global Alliance for Intangible Cultural Heritage, becoming its vice chairwoman. With a fortune of hundreds of billions, she also became Forbes’ youngest Chinese woman billionaire.