Chapter 43#

Tan Xiao, that little lettuce kid, had an extraordinary adaptability that few could match. Whatever had happened, had happened — best to just sleep it off.

He took a hot shower, flopped into bed, and slept straight through to ten in the morning local time.

It was Geneva’s rainiest season. The drizzle had fallen all night and showed no sign of stopping. Tan Xiao went to the window and looked out. A misty haze hung over Lake Geneva, completely swallowing the Alps in the distance.

The silent lakeside estate was shrouded in rain and fog, more like an isolated island cut off from the world.

Tan Yun had yet to summon him. The household servants barely spoke to him either. He’d tried to strike up conversation with someone — maybe borrow a phone for a moment — only to discover that the staff had been instructed to avoid speaking with him as much as possible. They were also forbidden from bringing phones onto the estate grounds.

No phone. No internet. No one to talk to. He could only dig through the study for a few books and bring them back to his room to read.

Three days later, the rain finally stopped. Tan Xiao went out to the courtyard and discovered, to his surprise, that the household kept a Great Dane. The dog was as quiet and taciturn as everyone else on the estate — Tan Xiao had heard almost no sound at all these past few days.

But dogs have a sharp sense for human kindness. The Great Dane warmed to Tan Xiao quickly. It was gentle and docile. Tan Xiao unclipped its leash and let it run with him all around the grounds. A shame he had no phone or camera — a dog this handsome, against a backdrop this beautiful, would have made for incredible photos.

Around midday the sun came out briefly and the lake mist thinned. Tan Xiao spotted a small vintage motorboat moored at the dock. He knew how to handle one. He thought about taking the dog out — just half an hour across the water would bring them to Évian-les-Bains on the French side, a little town famous for its water and flowers. No flowers now, probably, but he could at least go have some fun with the French.

But the dock worker had no intention of handing over the boat keys. After consulting with the butler over the intercom, he delivered a stiff refusal: the weather forecast called for afternoon rain, the lake would be unsafe. The poor young master, under house arrest, was denied.

The young master tried to say a few more words to the dock worker. The man bowed and walked away.

Tan Xiao made do with the dog in the garden. Sure enough, late in the afternoon, rain came again. He brought the Great Dane back up to his room.

“Do you have someone special?” Tan Xiao asked the dog, in German.

The dog, naturally, did not answer. It flopped down and rolled onto its back.

He scratched its belly and asked again in his halting French. Still no verbal response. Finally, he switched to Chinese and bragged to no one in particular: “You useless German dog. Back home, Chinese mutts hold town meetings every day. I’ve never been to one, but I’m pretty sure there’s always a dog in charge of making the PowerPoint slides. And you can’t even talk.”

The Great Dane understood none of this, and tilted its head at him.

He decided the dog was far too handsome and adorable, and proceeded to thoroughly knead and squish it. The dog was enormous but also impressively capybara-like in temperament — clearly quite fond of Tan Xiao, it submitted happily to being mushed in every direction.

Playing with a large dog was exhausting. When Tan Xiao finally ran out of energy, he cupped the dog’s face in his hands and said: “I miss my husband so much. How do you manage to look a little like him?”

He burst out laughing at his own words. If Zhang Xingchuan ever heard that, he’d probably faint from indignation.

“Do you know why I brought you up here?” Tan Xiao said, wrapping his arms around the dog’s neck. “You’re the only one here who plays with me. If I don’t keep you close, I won’t get to see you tomorrow.”

That night, after he fell asleep, the Great Dane was taken away regardless.

Another week passed. Tan Xiao lay with his chin propped on the windowsill, watching the rain. It was heavy today — even the lake had disappeared from view.

He felt off. Maybe he’d caught a cold. Or maybe he was simply going stir-crazy. He kept waking up in the middle of the night, and the accumulated fragments of broken sleep had left his mind sluggish. He’d even started having auditory hallucinations — he’d hear his phone vibrating, hear the mechanical voice of Siri, hear Zhang Xingchuan calling his name.

In the first few days after arriving, he’d kept up his appetite diligently. He wasn’t going to do something as stupid as a hunger strike. He had to maintain his health and energy.

But over the past couple of days, even that had faded. The kitchen kept trying to tempt him with dishes from every cuisine imaginable, and he could barely eat any of it.

Sometimes he felt afraid. Maybe Tan Yun intended to leave him forgotten here forever. Maybe this was his punishment.

And Zhang Xingchuan — why hadn’t he come yet? Had he been unable to find him?

Or had Zhang Xingchuan run into some kind of trouble? Was he in danger?

He also felt flickers of regret. He shouldn’t have told Zhang Xingchuan to come find him on the day they parted. He should never have said those words.

Zhang Xingchuan should stay in China, be an entrepreneur, live a peaceful and happy life. Forget about him. That would be best.

Tan Xiao suddenly noticed, reflected in the windowpane, that he was crying into the rain.

He snapped awake. Modern people accustomed to constant information and social interaction — when placed in a state of extreme isolation, the mind begins to malfunction. Emotions go numb. Cognition starts to degrade.

He quickly ran back through the thoughts he’d just had. What was that about telling Zhang Xingchuan to forget him? Absolutely not.

Come find him already. Zhang Xingchuan, you idiot. What kind of husband are you?

But that moment of clarity, the brief flare of mental activity, passed quickly. The restlessness, the listlessness returned. He kept glancing around. Where was that phone sound coming from? Was someone calling for him? Was anyone there?

That evening, two strangers appeared in his room — a man and a woman, neither of them young.

Confused, he greeted them in German: “Good evening.”

Both of them looked startled. The man asked, “Do you speak English?”

Tan Xiao switched to English. “Yes. Who are you?”

“How are you feeling right now?” the man asked.

“Fine,” Tan Xiao said.

“Do you remember what day you arrived here?”

“Ten days ago.”

The man and woman exchanged a glance.

“Are you lawyers?” Tan Xiao asked.

“We’re doctors,” the woman said.

“Have I caught a cold?”

The female doctor asked, “How has your sleep been lately?”

“Not great,” Tan Xiao said. “Am I sick? What’s wrong with me?”

“Is there anything that feels uncomfortable?”

“Do auditory hallucinations count? I miss my phone so much that I keep hearing it ring. Sometimes I hear my husband calling my name.”

“Your husband?” the female doctor repeated.

“Yes. I’m married. He’s Chinese.”

Both doctors were silent for a moment.

They asked a few more simple questions. Tan Xiao answered them all. Only after they left did it slowly occur to him: what kind of doctors were these? Traditional Chinese medicine at least involves observation and pulse-taking. These two just asked questions?

He was getting ready for bed when the butler came with two pills — the doctors had prescribed cold medicine, he was told.

“Thank you,” Tan Xiao said.

“Would you like a more comfortable pillow?” the butler asked.

“No, thank you. I just want to sleep with my own pillow,” Tan Xiao said politely. “But thank you again.”

“Good night. I hope you have pleasant dreams.”

After the butler left, Tan Xiao realized, a beat too late, that the butler had been unusually talkative tonight.

That night he slept deeply. He slept until the sun was high — except it was still overcast, so there was no sun.

Shortly after breakfast, he spotted a car turning into the estate from the main drive lined with plane trees. A few days ago, he would have immediately braced himself for a confrontation with his sister Tan Yun.

Now he only wondered: who’s here?

The moment Zhou Ruofei stepped into the room and laid eyes on Tan Xiao, he knew something was wrong.

Tan Xiao was an extraordinarily sharp kid. His eyes and expressions were always animated. Even freshly woken up, he would never turn his head this slowly, with that flat, vacant look, his face so empty of expression.

He looked like someone had hollowed him out. Zhou Ruofei felt a cold jolt of unease.

The doctors had told Tan Yun: under conditions of extreme stress and social isolation, your brother has developed sleep disturbances, mild auditory hallucinations, a distorted sense of time, and slowed physical awareness. Without timely intervention, the next stage could be dissociation — what people commonly recognize as a psychiatric condition.

“Big brother?” Tan Xiao said. “What are you doing here?”

Cold sweat broke out on Zhou Ruofei’s forehead. “I… I was…”

“Did my sister ask you to come?”

At those words, Zhou Ruofei felt an almost giddy relief. At least Tan Xiao’s reasoning was intact. It couldn’t be as serious as those two doctors had described.

Then again, that made sense — they’d have to paint a grave picture for Tan Yun. If something truly went wrong and couldn’t be undone, they’d have no way to answer for it.

“How are you feeling?” Zhou Ruofei sat down beside him and pressed a hand to his forehead — a gesture that meant nothing medically speaking, since psychological distress didn’t manifest as fever.

“Not bad. I slept well last night. Feeling much clearer today.”

“Your sister got scared. She called me last night and told me to come quickly. I think she’d been crying.”

Tan Xiao looked confused. “What happened to her?”

Zhou Ruofei didn’t answer. “Do you hate her right now?”

Tan Xiao gave him a strange look. “No. I’ve already kind of forgotten what she looks like.”

“…” Zhou Ruofei went quiet.

After a moment, he said, “You probably don’t know — the outside world has been in complete chaos.”

“How so?”

“Your husband has been tearing through Geneva. He filed a lawsuit against the M Hotel Group here, and it’s been all over American social media for days. Chinese travel apps are going all-out to recover the debt — rallying overseas Chinese communities to boycott M Hotels, with the government quietly stoking the flames from behind… Never mind all that. Some media outlets just love those sensationalist anti-China headlines.”

Tan Xiao suddenly laughed. His eyes flickered back to life. “So what if he went all-out? That deadbeat company owes Wencheng tens of millions. We weren’t exactly rolling in money to begin with. We worked hard for every penny — why should we just let them steal it?”

“That’s not all,” Zhou Ruofei said. He noticed that as long as he kept talking, Tan Xiao’s state continued to improve, so he kept going. “He and that lawyer of his escalated your confinement to the diplomatic level. I don’t know how they managed it, but the embassy reached out to your family through the Swiss police, demanding the Doria family restore your freedom as a Chinese citizen. It’s been going back and forth for nearly half a month.”

Tan Xiao had been smiling right up until that last sentence. He went blank. “How can it have been half a month?”

Zhou Ruofei’s expression grew somber. He touched Tan Xiao’s forehead again. “Little brother. Today is your twenty-first day here.”

Attorney Hua was a gifted workaholic. For years she had run on five to six hours of sleep a night and still brought full energy to her work. She’d been a grinder since her youth, and people often said — not always kindly — that she was too intense, like she was running on adrenaline.

Working alongside Zhang Xingchuan in Geneva for more than half a month, she finally understood what “running on adrenaline” actually looked like.

Since arriving in Switzerland, Zhang Xingchuan had become a regular presence at the embassy, the arbitration center, the police station, and in the local media. In the first two days, before the story had gained any traction, he hit walls everywhere except the embassy. Nobody cared about a small Chinese business owner who’d come to Europe to “collect a debt.”

The embassy staff were thorough and responsible. They had immediately activated the consular protection emergency protocol, verified Tan Xiao’s details, provided legal guidance and channel support, and formally requested local police intervention.

Before Zhang Xingchuan’s arrival, Attorney Hua had already filed a police report with the local lawyer she’d hired. After Zhang Xingchuan came, he went to the police as well. But it was obvious the police were stonewalling — they had no interest in antagonizing the Doria family on behalf of Chinese nationals, and had brushed the lawyers and Zhang Xingchuan off by saying Julian’s surname was Doria and this was a family matter.

Only after the embassy stepped in did the local police finally approach the Doria family. The Doria lawyers played them in circles — first saying Julian was ill and resting, then saying Julian had already left Geneva to vacation in France.

Attorney Hua pushed for visitation rights, at minimum wanting confirmation of Tan Xiao’s mental and physical condition. The opposing lawyers refused to give any concrete response. That arrogant old white man — masterful at legal maneuvering, she’d grant him that — sent Attorney Hua storming home to curse in Cantonese for three minutes straight.

The debt dispute between Wencheng and the M Hotel Group had been submitted to the Swiss Arbitration Centre. M Group’s legal team was determined to find loopholes and drag things out, counting on Wencheng eventually losing patience and swallowing the loss in silence.

If Wencheng’s own lawyers had come to negotiate, that might well have been the outcome. Wencheng was too young a company, the legal team inexperienced, with insufficient familiarity with overseas law.

This time, Zhang Xingchuan had taken matters into his own hands. He didn’t know much about European law, but he understood the core principle: speed. Stir up public opinion fast, and shrink M Group’s room to keep playing games. Alongside the standard legal channels, he brought in local media to cover the story, had Wencheng’s PR team back home coordinate with domestic outlets to issue press releases — no sentimental human-interest pieces, just facts. How the security deposit had been frozen. How much of the transaction payment had been withheld. Dates and amounts, laid out plainly.

After the recent events, Wencheng’s public goodwill in China was still at its peak. How could a company that had successfully stood up to foreign pressure end up losing tens of millions?

Win the battle and still have to pay? Based on what? This wasn’t the Qing Dynasty anymore.

The scale of public outrage far exceeded Zhang Xingchuan’s expectations. M Group’s previous apology letter had been nothing but a show to placate Chinese consumers, and the fury of having been deceived carried a far more powerful backlash. The boycott of M Group’s hotels was fiercer than the last round by a significant margin.

Zhang Xingchuan saw this as a potential opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. He quickly agreed to a live broadcast interview with Geneva media. On camera, in addition to announcing that formal negotiations with M Group had begun, he mentioned a “missing” friend who had disappeared after arriving in Geneva.

The host asked, “Are you implying something?”

He answered: “I just want to find him. And bring him home.”

A local netizen dug up the identity of the “friend” he was referring to — the mixed-heritage young scion of a shipping empire. But the post was quickly deleted, and the account that posted it was just as quickly banned.

Zhang Xingchuan had nearly exhausted every available avenue.

If nothing else worked, his last resort was to force his way onto the lakeside estate. He’d already tracked down the address. But the private road began two kilometers from the estate gates, and stepping onto private property without permission… Switzerland was also a country where firearms were legal.

The breakthrough came on the second Monday after his arrival in Geneva.

He was waiting in the hotel lobby for Attorney Hua to come down — they had an appointment at the embassy.

An unfamiliar mainland number called him. He assumed it was a media contact and picked up.

“Hello,” said the voice on the other end. “I am Tan Xiao’s doctoral supervisor.”

Rewind to the day Tan Xiao had flown to Geneva — more than ten days before this moment.

Leaving a Beijing dusted with the season’s first snow, crossing the long stretch of night, Tan Xiao slept on the plane and woke to send Zhang Xingchuan a message about wanting ice cream.

At the time, he was thinking: what could he still do for himself? Rapunzel at least had her long hair. What did he have?

He was twenty-four years old. His life had been given to him by his mother, and sustained all these years by the Doria family. What did he actually own?

Zhang Xingchuan had once asked him why he loved studying so much. Weren’t you supposed to be a slacker?

He’d said it was to avoid having to work. That wasn’t really true. He’d always known, from a young age, that he had nothing of his own. He’d once felt that work was meaningless too — he didn’t need the money. But studying was interesting. What he learned belonged to him. Knowledge couldn’t be taken away by anyone.

And the act of acquiring knowledge had given him a social identity he could stand on.

The terminator line appeared on the horizon. Sunrise over the clouds entered Tan Xiao’s eyes — but it wasn’t the sun rising. It was the night being torn open by a single thread of light.

Tan Xiao composed an email to his doctoral supervisor and a separate one to his postdoctoral advisor. Dear Professor, if I am unable to report to my position on schedule in a few days’ time, something has certainly gone wrong. Please help me.

Ten-odd days later, in this timeline, his doctoral supervisor had reached out to Zhang Xingchuan.

A young scholar — PhD in finance from Tsinghua University, soon to take up a position at the Boya Postdoctoral Research Station — had gone missing in Europe.

The university would send a formal letter to the Chinese Embassy in Switzerland and file a comprehensive report with the Consular Affairs Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Attorney Hua came hurrying out to the lobby and found Zhang Xingchuan sitting on one of the sofas, one hand pressed over his eyes.

“Are you all right?” she asked, alarmed. “Are you feeling unwell?”

Zhang Xingchuan lowered his hand. His eyes were a little red. “Senior sister,” he said, “I thought I’d run out of roads.”

“Then don’t go out today. Stay and rest.”

“No, that’s not — " Zhang Xingchuan laughed, words tumbling out of order. “My wife — you know about him, senior sister — he’s just young, but he’s capable and he’s smart. I’d run out of roads. And he was the one who found a road for himself.”