Chapter 14#

From the moment Yan Zishu arrived, Fu Jinchi had been far too occupied with his hosting duties for them to exchange so much as a private word.

After a while, Fu Jinchi delivered a brief speech — a few rounds of ceremonial remarks, a snip of the red ribbon — and then personally led his guests inside for a tour.

The hotel was laid out in the manner of a manor, continuing the aesthetic of the old colonial-style building: quiet, graceful water corridors and pavilions, copper railings and a decorative splash pool outside, floral wallpapers and vintage tiles within.

Yan Zishu drifted along with the crowd, listening to people praise it as distinctive and full of character, in tones that may or may not have been entirely sincere. He offered a few agreeable sounds of his own.

Once the tour concluded, the hall manager had already arranged tea and refreshments for the guests. When the eating and drinking was done, those who had no further business were free to take their leave.

Yes — the whole formality moved that quickly.

Outside, Fu Jinchi saw his guests off, shaking hands one by one as they departed.

Yan Zishu stood at the far end of the line. When his turn came, Fu Jinchi showed no hurry — he saw the guests ahead of him to their cars first, then turned back and extended an invitation in the easy manner of a close friend: “Do me the honor of staying for a meal?”

Yan Zishu was still standing where he’d been waiting, but gestured at the guests’ departing vehicles with deliberate innocence. “Isn’t this playing favorites, Mr. Fu?”

Fu Jinchi said, laughing: “Between you and me — as packed as it was in there, you’re the only person I actually know. How could they possibly be the same?”

“Surely not — I saw several Fu family elders just now.”

“Elders are a different matter. Entertaining them is exhausting work. Hardly worth the effort.”

A man’s tongue is a silver snake. He said it with every sign of being perfectly serious.

Seeing no immediate sign of refusal from Yan Zishu, Fu Jinchi pressed his advantage while the moment held and pulled him warmly along: “Just opened — consider it testing the restaurant for me. Come on, I’ve been on my feet all morning and I’m starving, and we haven’t had a chance to say a word to each other.”

Yan Zishu let himself be steered back inside. A few turns through the corridors and they arrived at the restaurant.

While they waited for the food, Yan Zishu offered a few more congratulatory remarks — wishing the opening great success, the standard pleasantries. Fu Jinchi returned the courtesy in kind, asking after his workload and such. The atmosphere was, for a time, quite pleasant.

In truth, part of the reason Yan Zishu had agreed to stay was the phone call from the previous evening. He’d assumed Fu Jinchi might use the occasion to speak privately about Yuan Mu — either to deliberately let some piece of information slip, or to try to extract some piece of information from him.

Neither happened. Which left Yan Zishu with no natural way to raise the subject himself.

Fu Jinchi seemed to have genuinely only wanted to treat him to a meal.

Though there was admittedly no great loss in accepting a meal at a five-star establishment.

Fu Jinchi had the restaurant manager put together a simple selection of dishes. When they arrived, it was — how to put it — aggressively refined.

The menu, it turned out, offered not only standard Chinese and Western options but also a special section devoted to an ostentatious revival of historical recipes — dishes reconstructed from texts like the Shanjia Qinggong, a Song dynasty compendium of rustic cuisine: Peach Blossom Rice, Golden Chicken, Prefect’s Broth, Chilled Pagoda Tree Leaf Noodles, Plum Blossom Soup Dumplings…

The restaurant manager came personally to introduce the lore behind each dish with considerable self-congratulation, before withdrawing with a trace of satisfied pride.

The reality was that Prefect’s Broth was amaranth and aubergine, Chilled Pagoda Tree Leaf Noodles were cold noodles, and Golden Chicken was a bird boiled in sesame oil and salted water — that sort of thing. The cooking was genuinely competent, but the performance clearly outweighed the substance.

Yan Zishu had not intended to offer any opinion. Fu Jinchi, of course, insisted on asking.

Yan Zishu turned a page of the menu and felt compelled to remark: “What — no Imperial Jade Nectar Wine?”

Then he caught himself, slightly startled to realize that he had started making offhand jokes with Fu Jinchi without meaning to.

Fu Jinchi looked unbothered — amused, in fact: “Art draws from life, as they say. That’s business — always a bit of sleight-of-hand.”

He slid the menu across the table without any embarrassment. It fell open to the Golden Chicken entry, printed alongside two lines of Li Bai: The hall holds ten goblets of emerald wine; the cup holds one dish of golden chicken. “You see — with those two lines attached, you add a zero to the price.”

Yan Zishu laughed, shaking his head: “No merchant was ever born honest.”

He was laughing at the archetype Fu Jinchi embodied — slap a palatial name on something and the price soars to the heavens — but there was no price regulator coming to intervene.

“Premium consumption” was a mutual arrangement: both parties willing.

Fu Jinchi was entirely at peace with his own methods: “You work in the art industry — you people conduct auction sales at astronomical prices, and yet you find fault with me for astronomical markups? We’re the same, you and I. You know what wealthy people are actually paying for — it’s status, it’s position, it’s the feeling of being treated as someone important. Someone always has to provide them with a place to spend money on all of that.”

He offered his warmest smile: “They’re going to burn the money one way or another. Why not let them burn it here?”

“You’re quite right,” Yan Zishu said, a smile at the corner of his mouth. “That’s exactly why you have a talent for business. That was the whole of what I meant.”

Somewhere in the exchange, without quite knowing when it had started, Yan Zishu found himself trading banter with Fu Jinchi.

Fu Jinchi reached over to ladle soup for him. “Try this — the chef is genuinely skilled, trained on state banquet cooking. You won’t find it elsewhere.”

Yan Zishu quickly took the ladle: “Allow me.”

Their fingers touched briefly. He pulled his hand back; the soup bowl was already in front of him.

Since there was a Golden Chicken, naturally there had to be its pairing of emerald wine. Though the Imperial Jade Nectar itself was absent, a glance at the beverage list confirmed these selections were well on their way to the one hundred and eighty per glass category.

Yan Zishu declined, citing the drive back.

Fu Jinchi didn’t press. He only said: “Another time.”

Yan Zishu had intended to go straight back to the office afterward, but as he was leaving, his phone rang urgently. “Mr. Yan…”

Fu Jinchi tactfully stepped a few paces away, and came back only once the call had ended. “Something urgent at work?”

Yan Zishu paused for a moment, unsure whether he should be the one to say it — hesitated — and then, wanting to see Fu Jinchi’s reaction, told him: “Miss Yuan had a fall. There was some bleeding. There’s a possibility she may miscarry.”

Fu Jinchi’s mild surprise looked genuine: “She’ll need to be careful, then.”

Yan Zishu decided to go to the hospital and see things for himself.

Today, with Fu Weishan absent, he hadn’t taken the CEO’s car — he’d driven a company pool vehicle instead. Everyone knew that pool cars came with their own special kind of unreliability. As he was pulling out of Golden Phoenix Terrace, the engine suddenly began to smoke, and the car gave up entirely.

He was standing at the entrance arranging a car when Fu Jinchi pulled his own vehicle around and offered to drive him.

On the way, looking to ease the silence, Fu Jinchi reached over and switched on the audio system. Classical music began to drift from the speakers.

Another call came in. Yan Zishu picked it up, and the person on the other end launched into a detailed account. Fu Jinchi lowered the volume. He glanced at Yan Zishu from the corner of his eye — and found Yan Zishu already looking at him sidelong, those dark irises holding something unreadable.

Fu Jinchi felt a small stir of something. “What is it?” He thought he might need to say: don’t worry, I didn’t hear anything.

The truth was that from the moment he’d heard the news, Fu Jinchi’s mind had gone quite naturally to the conclusion that all of this must have been set in motion by Yan Zishu.

He had warned Yan Zishu not to get involved — but Fu Jinchi also understood that a person like this would hardly take instructions from him so readily.

It had been said in many quarters, both inside the Fu family and beyond it: this Yan person was extraordinarily devoted to Fu Weishan, and there had been no shortage of unkind speculation about the nature of that devotion — something along the lines of the loyal senior maid Xiren and her young master Baoyu.

The first time Fu Jinchi heard that comparison, he’d felt like applauding: Xiren schemed to the end of her ingenuity, and still never became a proper concubine, did she?

But what struck him as strange now was not the accident itself. It was that Yan Zishu, having just heard the news, showed not a trace of relief. Instead, his brow had creased — barely — and whatever was passing through his mind produced an expression that was genuinely hard to read. Not satisfaction. Not calculation. Not triumph. Rather — the look of someone who has seen the hand of fate at work, and is watching the person beside them with eyes that hold that knowledge.

But whatever that elusive quality was, it lasted only a moment, dissipating like mountain mist — and then it was gone.

Yan Zishu turned his gaze back forward. “Nothing. I’m sorry for making you drive all the way out here.”

Fu Jinchi smiled, said of course not, and turned the volume back up.

What Yan Zishu had described was, in fact, a somewhat understated account. Yuan Mu had fallen down a staircase in a small square that morning. Her attendant had found her quickly, and an ambulance had been called. By the time they were on the road, the procedure had long been completed — the child was gone.

A nurse pushed a small trolley past the door of the corridor. Yuan Mu was in a private single room, but her boorish father had been stationed beside her from the start, rattling on without pause.

“What the hell were you thinking? We had everything arranged. You go and do this to me?”

“I keep telling you — I didn’t fall on my own. Someone pushed me, when I was passing through that square.”

“That’s exactly why I told you to stay put and not go wandering around! Couldn’t sit still, could you — had to go out. Had to wait for something like this to make you happy?”

Yuan Mu had reached the end of her patience: “Am I supposed to lock myself inside forever? Do you think you’re keeping a pig?”

The man was hopping with rage: “A pig would at least have produced something! What’s wrong with you — even a pig managed better than you! You’re worse than a pig!”

“Will you keep your voices down?” A nurse leaned in through the door. “This is a hospital. No shouting. You — the patient needs rest. Stop disturbing her.”

Yuan Mu’s father, furious, jammed a cigarette between his teeth, only to receive another dressing-down from the nurse. His mood by now was beyond repair. He snapped back at her that there was no one else around, what was one cigarette — but the combat effectiveness of a veteran nurse at a public hospital was not to be underestimated. He slammed the door and stormed off.

Some time later, the young nurse came back and looked in at Yuan Mu: “There’s a Mr. Yan here to see you. Do you want to let him in?”

The single room came at a premium, and visitors weren’t permitted to wander in without permission from the patient.

Yuan Mu closed her eyes for a moment, feeling hollowed out in every direction. “Fine. Let him in.”