Chapter 13#

Yuan Mu? Trending?

Yan Zishu hadn’t heard yet.

But once he hung up, he found that the person he’d assigned to keep watch had also just forwarded him the relevant material — arriving at almost the same moment.

Fu Jinchi’s intelligence network was, it had to be said, impressively fast.

A minor celebrity like Yuan Mu, the kind propped up entirely by money and manufactured traffic, was in practice barely visible. Nine out of ten of her trending appearances were paid for: showcasing her figure at the gym, looking gorgeous while running errands barefaced — pure, meaningless hype. On the rare occasion something trended on its own, it was usually an unflattering exposé.

This time, though, the item — SHOCKING: Rising starlet Yuan Mu spotted out and about, visibly pregnant and Father of the child unknown — rumored to be someone outside the industry? — looked like an exposé at first glance, while not being quite one.

Of course: a starlet who hadn’t yet accumulated enough traffic to coast on, and who still dared to let an out-of-wedlock pregnancy go public — it was safe to say her career was finished regardless of what happened next.

Yan Zishu looked through the photographs posted by a string of entertainment accounts, along with lengthy posts making a great show of investigative analysis. They’d bundled together more than a dozen photographs of men who had been publicly associated with Yuan Mu, inviting speculation about who the father might be — as though she were some major figure worth this level of scrutiny.

The key detail: buried among the rest was one photograph, taken on a phone, pixelated and easy to overlook — a rear shot of Fu Weishan with his arm around Yuan Mu, walking into a hotel from the car.

None of the theatrical analysis named Fu Weishan. There was only a vague mention of a certain CEO of a certain surname. But the warning embedded in that photograph was pointed enough.

To be clear, Fu Weishan wasn’t a celebrity. But as a regular fixture on domestic wealth rankings, he was far from unknown. And even if he had been: the moment a story like this gained traction, people would figure out who he was soon enough.

The threat Yuan Mu could pose lay here: a publicly listed company like Yinghan Group was not immune to the impact of its senior management’s public image on its share price. Setting aside the moral dimension entirely, a major shareholder’s domestic disputes could also affect board dynamics. Ordinarily, as long as no serious scandal erupted, these things could be managed — but a sudden burst of negative press would inevitably stir speculation among retail investors, which in turn could send the share price into turbulence.

It had happened just a couple of years ago: the founder of a Fortune 500 company in East China had been embroiled in a sexual assault scandal involving a female student. The story hadn’t even been adjudicated yet, and his company’s stock had already cratered to a point where it was painful to look at — a genuinely damaging blow.

And then there were the cases of an ex-wife’s lawsuit freezing assets and killing an IPO, or of internal marriage disputes leaving a company exposed to acquisition — the most expensive divorce proceedings in living memory…

A CEO was still a person, and persons were always constrained by capital. That was simply the reality of it.

So whatever Fu Weishan did in his private life — cycling through mistresses at will, living in whatever extravagance he liked — was his own affair. Wealthy men were seldom unsullied. But deliberately feeding his private life to the media to be held up for public ridicule was a different matter entirely.

The saving grace, for now, was that the trending item remained squarely in the territory of minor-celebrity gossip. It had not yet ripened to the point of drawing significant attention.

Yan Zishu reached Fu Weishan at once.

Fu Weishan wasn’t particularly alarmed — it was more like being bitten by a bedbug: mostly just deeply unpleasant.

He was convinced that Yuan Mu and her father weren’t truly prepared to go scorched-earth — they were only capable of this sort of ambiguous, non-committal prodding.

Yan Zishu listened to another eruption on the other end, heard the directive to “shut it down,” and went to find the PR department.

For a large company like Yinghan Group, operating in the art industry, cultivating relationships with media outlets and individual content creators was ordinarily part of the natural course of business. And yet a trending item involving Fu Weishan had apparently gone up without so much as a whisper of advance warning to anyone on the inside.

Whether it was the chief assistant’s office or the PR department responsible for managing public narrative, both had only found out after the fact. That was a failure of oversight, by any measure.

Though — if you didn’t know what Yan Zishu knew about the backstory, it would hardly have occurred to anyone in PR to anticipate this kind of thing blowing up.

The PR director himself, even after seeing the photograph showing only Fu Weishan’s back as he entered the hotel, still didn’t fully grasp what was happening.

Yan Zishu closed the door and laid out the situation plainly. Only then did the director think, privately: What the hell — the boss had a mistress, the mistress turned on him, and I’m supposed to have seen this coming? When he was off losing himself in his private pleasures, it certainly didn’t occur to him to loop me in.

But what he said aloud was a careful professional analysis: “The way it stands, it’s not too bad yet. Since they haven’t directly named our CEO, whoever’s behind the trending item is obviously nervous too — they’re testing the water first, leaving room to maneuver. They’re probably looking to negotiate some kind of advantage.”

Yan Zishu said: “That’s exactly right. The follow-up is mine to handle. But the media angle needs watching. That’s going to take your full attention.”

The PR director quickly assured him: “Understood, understood — we’ll do our best to keep them from running anything irresponsible.”

Though honestly — with the internet this sprawling, public narrative was never something you could fully suppress just by trying. The most efficient thing would have been to not be a womanizer in the first place.

He kept that thought to himself, and got to work: activating contacts, getting on the phone with journalist connections and platform managers, laying the groundwork.

The message to all of them: if anything surfaces implicating the Yinghan CEO, sit on it for now.

After all, “if this escalates, it could affect company share price” was not a scenario anyone wanted to leave to chance.

It was well past closing time by now, but since Yan Zishu was sitting right there in his office, the PR director couldn’t very well say this seems like it can wait til tomorrow and show him the door. Under that watchful presence, he talked himself hoarse making calls, which was its own kind of ordeal.

The PR director had heard plenty about Yan Zishu’s reputation for relentless dedication, but encountering it in person was another thing. He couldn’t help thinking: When it comes to anything involving CEO Fu, only this Yan person goes all-in like this. What normal human being wants to stay late doing this? Classic workaholic management culture.

While Yan Zishu was there keeping him company through the late-night shift, his phone rang again — Fu Weishan this time. He stepped out to the conference room to take it.

“Keep an eye on things,” said the voice on the other end. “Don’t let Ji Chen see any of this.”

Yan Zishu said: “Rest assured — he shouldn’t know anything.”

The next day, Ji Chen arrived at the CEO’s suite, completely ignorant of all of it, to hand in his written self-reflection.

His eyes slid toward the inner office. Yan Zishu said, flatly: “CEO Fu isn’t in.”

Ji Chen jumped slightly. “Oh — I wasn’t — I wasn’t looking for him.”

Yan Zishu skimmed the document and waved him off.

Privately, though, a somewhat darker thought crossed his mind: if he were to walk over right now and drop the news of Yuan Mu’s pregnancy directly into Ji Chen’s lap — what would his reaction be? Could he handle it? Or would it be like lighting the fuse on a bomb ahead of schedule?

*

Bang bang bang — bang bang bang — bang bang bang bang —

Clang clang!

Golden lions bearing fortune; gongs and drums shaking the sky.

On this auspicious day, Fu Jinchi’s newly prepared Chinese-style hotel opened for business.

The hotel shared its name with his tea house on the outskirts of the city: Golden Phoenix Terrace. The architectural style ran in an unbroken line from one to the other; membership was valid at both; it was evident he intended to build this into a proper brand.

By Fu Jinchi’s own modest account, the tea house had been a gift from his father, something he merely kept running for amusement. The hotel, planted in the middle of the commercial district, was entirely his own work — busy streets on one side, retreat on the other. Securing a plot of land in a location like this had been no small achievement.

When you counted the time, this project had been in preparation since before his banishment to Hong Kong City. Though the man in charge had been away in the interim, the project had never been abandoned.

However refined the establishment’s sensibility, a grand opening in China was a grand opening — festivity and spectacle were non-negotiable. Old traditions held.

Congratulatory flower baskets in vivid colors stood in a row. Fu Jinchi had engaged a lion dance troupe: one lion for the eye-dotting, one to gather the greens, one to welcome in the wealth.

The hall manager stood on the upper floor, dangling a red envelope and a head of lettuce from a long bamboo pole. The lion climbed its way up a human ladder and swallowed them — this was the “gathering of greens,” symbolizing a flourishing harvest. Then the drums stilled, the lions came to rest, and each lion’s mouth released a scroll of paired couplets: one reading May this hall shine with brilliance, growing finer with every passing year; the other, May this opening bring good fortune, the source of great wealth. The assembled guests responded with a suitable round of applause.

The opening ceremony itself was kept to a manageable scale. Fu Jinchi had invited a selected group of acquaintances — though a few of these were people of some standing.

Yan Zishu wore a black suit, slightly conservative, though it read as fitting enough in a crowd where the average age skewed older.

Three or four members of the elder Fu generation had also come to offer Fu Jinchi their support. These men all recognized Yan Zishu — he had spent so long as Fu Weishan’s shadow that the association was automatic — and promptly found in him an enthusiastic conduit for prying into Fu Weishan’s romantic situation.

There was: He’s old enough now, he should be thinking about settling down. I hear something good is in the works for him?

And: Even if that one doesn’t suit, just say what type you prefer — we can certainly make introductions.

Yan Zishu smiled his way through each one, delivering fictions with perfect composure: “CEO Fu is very occupied with work at the moment. As for his personal affairs, I’m really not in the loop.”

While he said all this, Fu Jinchi was on the other side of the room, keeping up his gracious host’s smile and holding court on all sides — and finding, in the gaps, a few moments to glance over.