Chapter 62#
The contact Ji Yang had just added was named Wen Yu. His business card read “Heng’an Securities, Senior Investment Consultant.” He wasn’t old, yet his demeanor was remarkably composed.
When Peng Jiaying brought a group of people in, they happened to run into each other.
Both sides nodded in friendly greeting.
“Who was that?” Qian Yitian, the chatterbox, pulled out a chair and was the first to ask, watching the figure walk away. “Pretty handsome.”
Peng Jiaying took the business card from Ji Yang’s hand, glanced at it, and leaned in to whisper against Ji Yang’s ear: “What’s going on? Heng’an Securities has been getting close to the Chamber of Commerce these past few years. Is this one of Chu Zhengqing’s people? Deliberately approaching you?”
Ji Yang took the card back. “Probably not.”
Peng Jiaying: “Not one of Chu Zhengqing’s people, or not deliberately approaching you?”
“I don’t know if he’s Chu Zhengqing’s person,” Ji Yang said. “But he definitely didn’t approach me on purpose. This restaurant was Lin Yue and my last-minute decision—we just picked it randomly on an app. He couldn’t have specifically staked out this place waiting for me. Most likely just a coincidence.”
Peng Jiaying: “Then why did you exchange contact info? You don’t like adding people casually.”
Ji Yang shrugged, quietly sweeping a glance toward the restaurant entrance.
Jiang Lei’s people made no effort to hide from him. More like a plain bodyguard, half a shoulder visible at the window.
“Little Young Master Ji, what are you looking at?” Qiao Qiao followed his gaze and turned around, asking curiously.
Ji Yang smiled lightly. “Nothing. Let’s eat the fish—fresh, should taste pretty good.”
The clay pot of clear-broth fish was just served, steam billowing off it.
Goji berries and red dates floated in the milky white broth, the fragrance rising richly. The colleagues’ moods gradually eased as well. Although the bid materials still weighed on their minds, Ji Yang had organized this gathering on his own initiative—nobody wanted to spoil the mood.
Halfway through the meal, while everyone was raising their glasses, Peng Jiaying leaned over and whispered: “I had an inside contact look into the qualification re-review. Someone on the committee has relayed a message—they want us to submit an additional audit report. The deadline is extremely tight: three days.”
“Three days?” Ji Yang frowned.
“Yeah. I asked around. There are very few auditing firms in the circle that can handle rush orders, and even fewer that can produce foreign-related qualification certifications. Moreover, anyone taking our case right now would be openly going up against forces still connected to the Ji family.”
Ji Yang set down his chopsticks and thought. “Can Huang Kai help with this?”
Peng Jiaying shook his head: “His wife’s side of the family got swept up in the Jin Hu Sheng investigation. All their affiliated companies are on the audit list. Right now they’re ducking for cover, let alone helping others.”
Ji Yang didn’t press further. His fingertips traced the rim of his glass, his gaze settling on the white mist rising from the fish soup, as if lost in thought.
No one at the table disturbed him.
Everything that could be done for this bidding process—they had already done.
From here on, it felt very much like all they could do was leave it to fate.
After dinner, the gathering broke up. Ji Yang said he wanted to take a walk and said goodbye to everyone at the door.
The evening lights were just coming on. Streetlamps stretched his shadow long across the ground.
As Ji Yang reached a bus stop, a car pulled up to the curb.
Wen Yu leaned out from the car. “Fourth Young Master, want a ride?”
“You recognized me?” Ji Yang wasn’t surprised to see him.
The other man adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses on his nose bridge and chuckled softly: “When I saw you walk into the restaurant, I just felt that you—in every way—fit my aesthetic perfectly. Actually, by the time I asked for your contact info, I already knew who you were.”
Ji Yang: “Thanks, but you don’t need to give me a ride. I don’t live far.”
Wen Yu didn’t give up, driving slowly alongside him. “Really not up for a chat? I know you’re missing a compliance audit report. Heng’an Securities has a branch office that specializes in handling special enterprise qualification assessments—they’re not bound by Fanzhou’s local industry regulations. I can make the introduction for you.”
Ji Yang laughed in amusement. “You’re telling me this, and it’s not purely because I happen to match your aesthetic preferences?”
“That’s of course a completely different matter,” the other said, his manner graceful and suave. “I never mix personal preferences with work. I do have conditions.”
Ji Yang: “Such as?”
Wen Yu: “The new round of outsourcing bids for Jianyuan’s security systems—Heng’an wants in.”
Hearing this, Ji Yang really laughed.
“You’re remarkably well-informed.”
Wen Yu smiled: “What can I do? Right now every company in Fanzhou has their eyes on Jianyuan. With your Yi Yuan under its umbrella, it’d be hard not to attract attention.”
In the end, Ji Yang did get into Wen Yu’s car.
Wen Yu drove him back to Bowman.
“You live here?” Wen Yu looked up at the building.
Ji Yang unbuckled his seatbelt. “As you can see, how could a down-and-out young master like me afford a place like this? It’s my bodyguard’s place. I’m just a temporary tenant.”
“Bodyguard?” Wen Yu said: “As far as I know, many of the people in the Ji family’s renowned security system got in through Jianyuan’s selection process. Affording a place like this isn’t that unusual. I’m just curious—which of the Fourth Young Master’s bodyguards is it?”
Ji Yang stepped out of the car and shut the door.
He rested both elbows on the car window, bent down, and laughed softly: “Mr. Wen, as this concerns personal security matters, I’ll have to decline to answer.”
“Of course,” Wen Yu returned the smile. “As it should be.”
At that moment, across the street.
The phone Jiang Lei was using wasn’t an ordinary device—it was their internal communication channel.
Cutting-edge camera technology continuously transmitted crystal-clear images from across the street. Everything except sound—even the curve of the other party’s mouth was captured in perfect detail.
“What are you chatting about, so happy about it?” Jiang Lei muttered.
After muttering, he spoke into his earpiece: “Honestly, I didn’t want to send this to you. But Wen Yu’s identity is a bit special, so I figured I should give you a heads-up.”
“Hmm.” The voice from the earpiece was deep. “Just keep watching.”
“About the Yi Yuan matter—going through Jianyuan would actually be simpler, but it doesn’t seem like the young master intends to do that,” Jiang Lei said. “So we just keep watching like this? I’m starting to feel like I’m catching someone in the act of cheating.”
Nie Xu: “Jianyuan is the investor. He won’t go to Jianyuan unless it comes to that.”
“Are you two really that clear-cut about it?” Jiang Lei said. “I would have thought, given that you’re cohabiting, the young master’s first reaction would be to come to you.”
Nie Xu: “Business is business, personal is personal.”
Jiang Lei: “So serious. And I recall who it was who never once showed a hard heart—except for that time Lu Li took him away.”
Jiang Lei seemed fearless, watching the screen and commenting: “This guy surnamed Wen really is decent-looking. Social elite through and through.” Then added: “His sexual orientation has never been a secret. I hear his standards are brutally strict—his targets are always pretty and well-behaved boys.”
Nie Xu’s voice revealed no emotion. “Well-behaved?”
Just as he said this, the car in the footage drove off.
Jiang Lei: “He left… no wait, why isn’t the young master going inside? He turned around—is he looking at this way? Is his awareness really that sharp?”
In the footage, Ji Yang stood there for about half a minute, then crossed the road directly and headed over.
Through the car window glass, he knocked on it.
Jiang Lei sighed, rolled down the window, and put on a grin: “Fourth Young Master.”
Ji Yang’s eyes swept over the earpiece in the other’s ear, then returned to Jiang Lei’s face. “The Ji family must be in total chaos right now, and the head supervisor of the first security team comes to personally shadow me? Want to come up and sit?”
“No, no,” Jiang Lei waved his hands.
Over the comm channel, Nie Xu: “Give him the earpiece.”
Jiang Lei immediately removed it and handed it over.
Ji Yang put the earpiece on while turning to lean against the car’s body.
From the other end of the earpiece came the tap-tap-tap of typing on a laptop. For a moment, no one spoke.
Whatever Nie Xu was working on seemed to have reached a brief stopping point before he finally said: “Do you know that guy surnamed Wen?”
“Just met him.” Ji Yang shifted his weight to his other foot.
Nie Xu tapped his pen against his hand. “Just met him, and you let him give you a ride home?”
Ji Yang: “If I didn’t let him drive me home, how would I know that Chu Zhengqing wants to use Yi Yuan to pry open an opening into Jianyuan?”
Nie Xu wasn’t surprised. “So you did it deliberately?”
“Yes,” Ji Yang said. “He just happened to be able to provide exactly what I wanted. Why not make use of it?”
“The materials issue will have a new turning point in a couple of days,” Nie Xu said. “Stay away from him.”
Ji Yang watched the nighttime traffic. “You never think to tell me what you’re planning to do. Now you’re not even here—if I really did something, you wouldn’t even see it.”
Nie Xu’s voice took on a trace of danger. “Forgot how the contract was signed?”
Ji Yang, too, thought of the contract, and was choked up.
He said: “What if I just find him pleasing to look at? Is that not allowed either?”
Nie Xu: “Try it.”
Then he added firmly: “Not allowed.”
Ji Yang knew this path was a dead end.
The earpiece fell quiet.
When he first heard the other’s voice, Ji Yang actually hadn’t wanted to talk about this with him.
He wanted to ask how things were at the Ji family. He wanted to ask what he was doing right now.
Ever since he’d noticed Jiang Lei’s people following him, he’d known it must be Nie Xu’s arrangement. Accepting another person’s business card, adding contact info, riding in a stranger’s car home—although he had perfectly legitimate reasons, he couldn’t deny the deliberate provocation he’d hidden beneath it all.
He didn’t know why he’d done it.
But he just couldn’t hold back.
It was pretty childish, actually.
But when he actually discovered Jiang Lei’s car, discovered that the person on the other end of the comm channel was the very person he’d expected—
The feeling was more complicated than he’d imagined.
This thread of complexity deepened when, from the earpiece, came a hurried: “Boss, the Supervision Team is here.”
“Understood,” Nie Xu responded.
Ji Yang didn’t wait for him to say more. “Go do your thing.”
Nie Xu acknowledged, then paused briefly. “If anything comes up, find Jiang Lei. And what I just said—did you remember it?”
Ji Yang concealed the uncertainty stirred by whatever was happening on the other end, and deliberately said: “I remember. You told me to go try it.”
Nie Xu’s breathing lengthened.
“Good. You’ll find out whether the fact that I’m not there means I truly don’t know what you’ve been up to.”
The communication cut off.
Ji Yang turned and tossed the earpiece back to Jiang Lei, circled around to the passenger side, and climbed straight in.
Jiang Lei, looking at the message he’d just received—“Watch him twenty-four hours a day”—rubbed his nose and said: “If you wanted to provoke him, you could’ve done it before hanging up. Why push his buttons at the very last moment?”
“Did I provoke him?” Ji Yang asked.
Jiang Lei nodded, gave a thumbs up, and said: “In all these years, you’ve done something nobody in the entire system has ever dared to do. He doesn’t respond to either soft or hard tactics—my advice is don’t mess with him. If—if—the day ever comes when you really tick him off, maybe soft approaches would still work. Call it a small friendship tip from someone you once saved.”
Ji Yang recalled how he’d been plenty soft when he first started trying to add Nie Xu—Brother, brother, I love you—and in the end he couldn’t even get his contact info added.
Ji Yang looked thoroughly skeptical: “Really?”
Jiang Lei: “Eighty percent sure. The remaining twenty depends on his mood at the moment, maybe?”
Jiang Lei: “And you’re asking me what his mood is right now, when you just poured gasoline on the fire?”
The Supervision Team people were definitely going to have a rough time.