Chapter 10#

While they were talking, the internal office line rang. Without releasing the back of the chair, Fu Jinchi stretched his long arm sideways and picked it up, making a series of noncommittal sounds — impossible to tell whether it was urgent or not — and ended with a cool: “Wait.”

Yan Zishu stood promptly. “You have things to attend to — I’ll get out of your way.”

This time Fu Jinchi made no move to stop him, but before he left, he pressed an invitation card into his hands — for the opening of a new hotel. “Would you pass this along to my brother?”

“Of course.” Yan Zishu glanced at it.

“Though I imagine it’ll be you who comes, in the end?”

“That depends on CEO Fu.”

“Your CEO certainly won’t come himself. See you then.”

“…Mm.”

Fu Jinchi personally walked him to the front entrance of the tea house. His car was already waiting.

On the way back, he hit the peak-hour rush and sat at a complete standstill.

The cars were packed together in a solid mass at the intersection, and a chorus of impatient horns blared all around him. With nothing else to do, and no practical way to work, he let his thoughts wander as he gazed out the window. He scrolled through his phone without much interest, his eye falling on the invitation card on the passenger seat; he tapped the date into his reminders.

He thought: Fu Jinchi had read the situation correctly. For Fu Weishan, he would far rather spend three hours grinding through a French dinner to court his quarry than appear at some illegitimate half-brother’s hotel ribbon-cutting. When the time came, he’d almost certainly send Yan Zishu in his place.

His thoughts drifted, as they tended to, toward Fu Jinchi. There was always something of the dissolute gentleman about him — his speech impeccable, “please” and “thank you” and “pardon the trouble” dispensed with effortless generosity — yet he made absolutely no attempt to conceal the calculating, inscrutable current that ran beneath it all.

Yan Zishu had reason to believe that “my younger brother,” the phrase Fu Jinchi wore out from constant use, was also a deliberate needle in Fu Weishan’s side.

From there it wasn’t hard to imagine: if these two had been unlucky enough to grow up together as children, Fu Jinchi would have been a thoroughly incorrigible troublemaker, the kind who could drive the legitimate young heir Fu Weishan to complete distraction without ever giving him any satisfying recourse — a born scoundrel.

The light turned green. Traffic lurched forward. Yan Zishu smiled at the image — he felt it was rather accurate.

He set aside the stray thoughts, fell in behind the car ahead, and pressed the accelerator with patient restraint.

He still had to account for himself to Fu Weishan when he got back.

*

Up to this point, the plot appeared to have developed a few small divergences.

According to the original storyline, Yan Zishu should have dealt with Yuan Mu — and the child she carried — with ruthless efficiency and without hesitation.

But his choice to remain within the bounds of the law had resulted in a failed negotiation and a retreat with nothing to show for it.

There was genuinely nothing to be done about it. Even lawbreaking had to be considered case by case — going after a man was one thing, but raising a hand against a woman and a child ran against certain principles Yan Zishu held as a person, and no amount of Fu Weishan’s displeasure was going to change that.

Fu Weishan was, of course, very displeased. The words that fell from those thin lips were cold and precisely two syllables: “Whore.”

Yan Zishu naturally could only apologize, acknowledge that he had failed to handle things effectively, and offer no further explanation. He made his admission of fault with an entirely blank expression — while privately thinking, not for the first time: if his employer weren’t so promiscuous and irresponsible, why would a chief assistant be spending his days not on company operations and development strategy, but on the endless parade of Fu Weishan’s below-the-waist affairs?

Since Yuan Mu was unwilling to budge, it simply meant that Fu Weishan’s opening offer hadn’t been sufficient. Further negotiation would have to wait for another day.

But a mistress he had never once taken seriously had now dared to push back against his authority, to sink her teeth in — the sheer presumption of it.

Fu Weishan nursed his simmering anger. So when he found a small error in a work document shortly afterward, he erupted.

Yan Zishu stood to one side and received the tirade with bowed head.

The secretarial office sat adjacent to the CEO’s suite. They could hear perfectly well that Director Yan was on the receiving end of a dressing-down — and that the error in the document was apparently the fault of someone lower down the chain. Not a single person dared breathe too loudly, terrified that the blame would be traced back through the ranks and arrive at their own desk.

When Yan Zishu came out, everyone buried themselves in their work with fierce concentration and said absolutely nothing.

Only Helen stepped forward, holding a sheaf of contracts, and asked with careful tact: “Would now be a good time to bring these to CEO Fu?”

Yan Zishu smiled. “Probably not today. Day after tomorrow would be better.”

Helen took the hint, returned to the others, and announced: “CEO Fu is a fire-breathing dragon for the foreseeable future. Do not provoke him for the next two days!”

Yan Zishu went back to his desk and carried on with the day’s work as usual.

That evening, unexpectedly, Fu Jinchi called to check in — asking with admirable directness: “How was it? Did you get an earful when you got back?”

The voice on the other end carried a light laugh, and something in the way it came through the phone felt warmer than it had any right to be.

Yan Zishu closed his laptop and sighed. “At this rate, I’m starting to wonder if you’ve had a camera installed in the CEO’s office as well.”

“I’d need to find a way in first.” Fu Jinchi said, still amused. “No camera, no inside source — just a guess. I know what my brother is like when he makes mistakes: he blames everyone else. He’s been that way since childhood. You don’t know what it’s like when he—”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a recorder running right now,” Yan Zishu said, “trying to draw me into complaining about my superior, so you could use it against me?”

“I wouldn’t stoop to such a crude method. Though I welcome you to come over willingly.”

“Then what was the purpose of this call?”

“Oh, right — I just wanted to remind you of something.” Fu Jinchi said. “As for Ms. Yuan: I really was only watching out of idle curiosity. But she and the Yuan family have connections with other members of the Fu clan. The point is, you were right not to get further involved — saves you from being squeezed from both sides.”

Yan Zishu hadn’t looked into the matter deeply, but hearing this didn’t surprise him. Plenty of people wanted to get into Fu Weishan’s bed; plenty of others wanted to put someone there for him. They all wore clean, unremarkable faces on the surface, while the relationships behind the scenes linked together in chains.

What did catch him slightly off guard was that Fu Jinchi had chosen to tell him any of this.

Yan Zishu thanked him without any particular change in expression and hung up.

If there were no plot constraints, he thought, he might genuinely consider the idea of jumping ship to Fu Jinchi’s side. At least it would be less taxing on the mind.

*

Yuan Mu’s refusal to willingly terminate the pregnancy was, for Fu Weishan, an unexpected nuisance.

It wasn’t just Yuan Mu he had never taken seriously — even her father, whom he’d encountered at the golf course, he had regarded with nothing more than a cool, private contempt: Ah, another small figure willing to run errands as my caddy.

And yet, for all that: Yuan Mu’s father might be a vulgar little upstart, but he at least had managed to find himself on the same golf course as Fu Weishan, diligently cultivating relationships with men above his station, one foot already edging toward the threshold of the truly powerful.

What followed seemed to confirm Fu Jinchi’s words. Yuan’s father did indeed attach himself to other members of the Fu family, and a collaborative arrangement was reached.

There was nothing that money could not buy — including, apparently, having one’s daughter elevated to the position of Fu Weishan’s wife.

Or to put it differently: given sufficient funds, it was a trifling matter.

So it was not long before Fu Weishan was summoned back to the family compound. Yan Zishu drove him there.

The ancestral home sat partway up the hillside. Several clan uncles deployed their most diplomatic language, wielding the weight of seniority to apply pressure to Fu Weishan. The message wound through their pleasantries in one direction only: since he had gotten a woman with child and stirred up the question of an illegitimate heir, why not simply make it official?

The reasons they put forward began with the high-minded — family feeling, clan solidarity, the ties of blood — and progressed to the concrete: projects, equity stakes, investment arrangements. Courtesy first, coercion later.

Finally, the most venerable of them — the Third Uncle, meaning Fu Zhizhang’s younger brother — stepped in to play the reasonable mediator: “These days everyone speaks of reproductive rights. Reproductive rights, at the end of the day, belong to the mother. If the child’s mother insists on giving birth, what can any of us really do? What matters most is that the Yuan family is still a cooperative partner in certain areas, and what we are discussing now is how to resolve this with the least cost to everyone…”

Fu Weishan nearly laughed out of sheer fury.

When that woman had first been delivered to his bed, she had been a disposable plaything.

And now, having turned around and schemed to claim his seed, she had somehow become an untouchable young lady from a respectable family?

This Third Uncle of his — docile and obedient enough while his older brother was alive — had in recent years quietly acquired something of an alpha’s bearing.

The head of the Fu family was, after all, not a formal title but a matter of who controlled the most power and commanded the most weight. And Fu Weishan, as the younger generation, found himself at a disadvantage in terms of sheer presence — he could afford to be indifferent to his Third Uncle and the others to their faces, but he could not truly afford to ignore the assets and shares they controlled. Every one of these clan uncles had their own web of interests behind them.

Fu Zhizhang in his lifetime had kept the dissenters firmly in check, but a man’s death was like a lamp going out. His influence could not hold them forever.

Fu Weishan, as Fu Zhizhang’s son, had all the appearances of a refined and honorable man — but unfortunately, he had not inherited his father’s iron fist.

Yan Zishu watched from a remove, a cold observer. The meeting at the ancestral home ended without resolution, as might have been expected.

From Fu Weishan’s perspective, he felt not merely a deep loathing for this unborn child he had never met, but a genuine conviction that he himself was the victim.

And yet there was also a strange, formless feeling that had begun to take shape — as if this situation ought not to have become so complicated.

As if all that should have been required was a single word to his assistant, and Yuan Mu and her child would have vanished without a trace, ceasing to trouble him forever. Fu Weishan would not even have needed to dirty his own hands or burden his conscience.

In the original plot, that was precisely what had happened. Yan Zishu had removed the rival on his own initiative, without Fu Weishan’s knowledge, and had quietly borne the pressure of the Yuan family’s counteroffensive.

In reality, the order Yan Zishu had given to the man assigned to watch Yuan Mu was: observe.

Just observe.

For her part, Yuan Mu had moved swiftly — she relocated to a new address, and now went about accompanied by two attendants at all times, wrapped in a semblance of protection.

Yan Zishu had glimpsed her once from a distance, from across the crowd. She was walking with her belly held high and a satisfied air. He watched her for a moment, then turned the car around and drove back.

He was dragging his feet deliberately. The result was that matters had settled, for the time being, into a stalemate.

Compared to the standoff between Fu Weishan and Yuan Mu, Yan Zishu found that the situation more closely resembled a standoff between Fu Weishan and himself.

Presumably because the male lead was unwilling to incur any moral taint, he couldn’t very well come right out and say “go and take care of her and the child.” So Yan Zishu was equally content to play the fool — and if he was honest, more than a little curious to see how it all resolved itself in the end.

Neither party was willing to be the executioner, and yet the child was taking shape with every passing day. Would he come into the world after all?

*

For the time being, fortunately, the rumor of the illegitimate child had not spread beyond the walls of the Fu family compound.

On Yuan Mu’s end, she still harbored hopes of a gentler resolution. She did not want to irreparably break with Fu Weishan, so she had refrained from turning it into a public scandal.

This “fortunately” was, of course, from Fu Weishan’s perspective — it meant there had been no impact on his relationship with the male lead.

Fu Weishan was in the full heat of his pursuit of Ji Chen, and naturally he kept the matter hidden from the young man with great care, making sure Ji Chen had no exposure to the various sordid undercurrents of the wealthy elite.

To the outside world, Fu Weishan continued as always — the picture of a successful man, working, socializing, and entertaining without interruption.

If nothing else, compared to a woman like Yuan Mu with her bottomless ambitions, Ji Chen’s guileless and undemanding nature was precisely the quality that men of Fu Weishan’s sort prized above all else.

Yan Zishu could see it plainly enough: as the back-and-forth continued, what had begun in Fu Weishan’s mind as a cat toying with a mouse had imperceptibly deepened into something more genuine. He was starting to take Ji Chen seriously.

The last time Ji Chen had nearly been dismissed, he had been fortunate enough to encounter an “enlightened and magnanimous” CEO, who not only allowed him to stay but developed a clear interest in him. After that, Fu Weishan had mounted a methodical campaign — engineering one opportunity after another to be close to him, giving him gifts, appearing and departing at his side.

By now, the romantic speculation had lost its novelty within Yinghan entirely.

Ji Chen riding the VIP elevator whenever he pleased, sitting at the executive round table in the company canteen, wandering freely in and out of Fu Weishan’s CEO suite — none of these special privileges drew so much as a second glance anymore.

If there was still anything worth discussing, it was, firstly, whether Fu Weishan had yet succeeded in getting the young man to bed, and secondly, whether the two of them would make their relationship public.

The number of people eagerly currying favor with Ji Chen grew steadily. They were clever about it, though — no one was in any hurry to be the one who punctured the pretense.

It was rather as if Fu Weishan had drawn a private, insulated world around Ji Chen, and was wrapping him inside it, so gently that he could barely feel it.

Even Yan Zishu sometimes marveled: after everything that had happened, was it truly possible that Ji Chen still hadn’t sensed Fu Weishan’s intentions?

“Assistant Yan.” Ji Chen’s head appeared around the door of the CEO’s office. Seeing no one inside, he stepped in fully. “Is CEO Fu still in his meeting?”

“He is.” Yan Zishu turned his phone face-down on the desk, concealing the latest photograph of Yuan Mu that had just come in. “Did you need him for something?”

“Ah — no, actually I was looking for you.” Ji Chen glanced around, a little sheepish. “I just wanted to ask — how busy is CEO Fu lately?”