Chapter 15#

Yan Zishu set the fruit basket he’d bought at the hospital entrance on the bedside table. “I heard about the child. I’m sorry.”

Yuan Mu’s face was a sallow yellow. She glared at him coldly. “You don’t need to come in here crying crocodile tears. You must be barely holding back the smile right now.”

Indeed — not only Fu Jinchi, but most people would have assumed that Yuan Mu losing the child was Fu Weishan’s doing.

And that the one who had carried it out was none other than his trusted instrument, Yan Zishu.

In all likelihood, not a single person would believe that Yan Zishu had actually been the one to let her go. It was simply the plot exerting its corrective pull.

He sat down in the chair across from the bed, and into his mind came a classic horror film: a survivor who appears to have escaped a disaster, only to find that no matter how they dodge and flee, death will arrive in due course, following its predetermined sequence. No one gets out.

So “crocodile tears” was perhaps not quite the right expression. Better: the fox mourning the dead rabbit.

This was also why Yan Zishu had come to the hospital without informing Fu Weishan first.

On the surface: since the story had kept to its established track regardless, he had come to walk through the necessary scenes.

Internally: he felt rather like someone who had pulled over beside a car accident on the highway, stood at the roadside for a moment, and then had to get back into their own vehicle.

Continuing forward without pause, while quietly turning over the question of how to outrun fate.

In practice, therefore, what followed between Yan Zishu and Yuan Mu was a conversation of no particular substance — two minor characters exchanging a few barbs.

Yuan Mu had just been told by her own father that she was worse than a pig. Her heart had gone numb.

She was, in the end, always a puppet in someone else’s hands. Now she had nothing.

If she had simply kept the pregnancy quiet, she might have passed it off as though it had never happened, gone back to life as a borderline-irrelevant minor celebrity.

But the semi-scandal that had hit the trending searches had torpedoed even that. She had tried to catch the chicken and lost the rice. No path forward now.

And if her agency came after her for damages, she would still have to go back and ask her father — the one who had just called her worse than a pig — for money.

Not so different from the unhappy ending laid out in the original plot.

*

After he left the hospital room, Yan Zishu received a short video clip. Events had moved too quickly for the assigned watcher to capture it, but they had found a way to pull footage from a nearby security camera. The footage showed Yuan Mu, visibly pregnant, descending a staircase in the square outside, her attendant beside her — and behind them, a group of schoolchildren jostling and racing each other, their noise and energy crashing into her, and one of them catching her at precisely the wrong moment.

The watcher asked: “Mr. Yan, should we look into this further?”

Yan Zishu stepped out onto the busy street. “It was an accident. What is there to investigate? No need to go any further.”

Whatever angle you looked from, he was the one who’d be blamed for it.

Earlier, Fu Jinchi had dropped him at the hospital and taken his leave — helpfully, and with exactly the right degree of discretion. Yan Zishu flagged a taxi back to the office, then sent word to the motor pool to contact the insurance company and have his car towed from Fu Jinchi’s hotel for repairs.

Once all that was done, he stood at the floor-to-ceiling window looking down, and allowed himself a moment to absorb the fact that this whole absurd business had closed as untidily as it had begun — and that the final sum total was a car needing repairs.

There would, of course, be some trailing consequences. Yuan Mu’s father had failed to get what he wanted; certain parties within the Fu family had lost something in the bargain, and would inevitably redirect some of their displeasure toward Yan Zishu, creating a degree of nuisance for Yinghan Group’s operations.

But those attacks wouldn’t amount to much. Just as Yuan’s father’s retribution in the original plot had been — and Yan Zishu had handled that alone.

Whether Fu Weishan had quietly breathed a private sigh of relief was impossible to say. He certainly showed nothing on the surface.

To all appearances, he remained the same cold, wealthy CEO.

Yan Zishu’s workdays continued to look just as packed as ever. What no one knew was that, in the wake of all this, he had quietly begun a rather audacious project of his own — discreetly moving certain personal assets into an account at a Swiss bank.

He was also slowly and carefully constructing a false identity, to be named as the account’s designated beneficiary. A contingency measure.

Like the protagonists of films who resist their fate — never going into battle unprepared.

As for whether he would ever have the chance to withdraw that money and begin some other kind of life — who could say, without placing the bet?

*

Throughout this entire illegitimate-child episode, from beginning to end, Ji Chen had remained entirely oblivious.

But under the quiet pressure Yan Zishu had applied, he had nonetheless thought it over and turned down Fu Weishan’s pursuit.

It had not been an easy decision. When Ji Chen went home that weekend, though, his mother was coughing while she cooked and asked him whether there was a girl at school he liked — if so, he could bring her home some time. He answered with some awkwardness.

His mother was always talking about getting better so she’d have the energy to hold a grandchild one day. He felt he couldn’t let her down.

So Ji Chen went to Fu Weishan’s office, bowing and apologizing, and Fu Weishan responded with considerable magnanimity — it was fine, he could understand, changing one’s orientation was after all something requiring great courage for most people — and he even apologized on his own behalf for the impulsive confession.

Fu Weishan assured Ji Chen, to his face, that business and personal matters were separate things, and that he would continue to regard Ji Chen positively and support him in his work going forward.

Ji Chen left, grateful.

The very next day, while eating in the company canteen, he was pointed toward the staff section by an administrative worker — the round table was reserved for senior management, and the long rectangular tables at the back were for ordinary employees.

Where one ate lunch was, in itself, a trivial matter. What it produced was a different thing: a quiet, unmistakable shift in how things felt.

A moment later, Fu Weishan entered the canteen with a cluster of middle management around him. Staff immediately had food served to the executive table. Fu Weishan chatted and laughed with the others, and not a single glance came toward the corner where Ji Chen sat.

As for the professional courtesies — the moment Yan Zishu let it be known that Ji Chen had turned Fu Weishan down, everyone quietly recalibrated.

“So he played too hard to get and lost the game?”

Ji Chen was back to being the person nobody minded calling on for errands.

Fu Weishan needed to signal nothing to anyone. He only had to watch, and permit it.

Then one day, the beleaguered HR director appeared before Yan Zishu again with an uncomfortable expression and informed him that Ji Chen had gotten into a physical altercation with a colleague during working hours. Would Director Yan advise on how to proceed.

This time Yan Zishu put Ji Chen in a small meeting room at the far edge of the office floor, and left him there for two hours.

The room was useful for small group discussions — good privacy — but in the afternoons the light was poor, and with the door closed it had a slightly oppressive atmosphere.

Ji Chen was slight and lean, pale as a dressed chicken, and not built for fighting. His face still throbbed dully where it had taken a punch.

He had been waiting in the claustrophobic room for what felt like a long time, no one coming in, feeling rather as though he’d been put in solitary confinement. He scrolled through his phone mechanically, not really registering anything, while the scene from the argument played back on loop in his head.

Shortly after lunch that day, Ji Chen had ducked into the emergency stairwell to make a phone call. As it happened, two male colleagues from his department had also slipped in there to smoke.

He knew them — they worked in the same team.

The two of them were crouched up on the half-landing above, not noticing anyone below, talking freely and without particular restraint.

“…People always used to say the best thing was to be born a woman — if you couldn’t be bothered to grind, just find a rich husband. But I guess times have changed, men can work the same angle now. What’s this Ji Chen’s got that we haven’t? Doesn’t do a lick of real work, just floats around the office all day, and everyone has to treat him like royalty.”

“Come off it, you’re just jealous you don’t look like him. If you did, you’d be getting the same.”

“Please, not for me — too disgusting. You think I’d sell myself like that? We’re not built that way, man.”

“Ha, fair point.”

“Besides, what would I want with his face? All gender-ambiguous and what not — back home we’d call that type a er yizi. Like they were born without a—”

The sentence didn’t finish, because Ji Chen appeared at the top of the stairs having hung up his phone, glaring at them.

The two men, caught gossiping by their subject, lost their composure for only a moment before recovering their bravado. Being caught out didn’t seem to trouble them at all. For every person in the company who had been busy fawning over Ji Chen, there was someone else who couldn’t stand watching it — and these two fell squarely into the latter camp. Besides, the kid had lost his backing now. Nothing to be afraid of.

The one who’d said er yizi looked Ji Chen up and down with a challenging smirk. “Well, if it isn’t young master Ji — come for a smoke?”

Ji Chen kept his voice level. “I heard everything just now. I’d ask you to speak with a little respect.”

“Respect? I’m not sure I understand what that means. You seem educated — why don’t you explain it to us?”

“You—”

The slightly more civil one of the pair offered: “All right, fine, we were out of line. Still — respect cuts both ways. You’d have to give people something to respect. The thing is… there’s been a bit of frustration with the work side of things. Both parties have something to answer for. Can we just leave it at that?”

His colleague, however, kept the sarcastic edge: “Get out of here — both parties? He’s the CEO’s favorite, he doesn’t need to back down for anyone. He’ll go file a little report, and we’re the ones who’ll be finished.”

Ji Chen, anger fully ignited, stepped in front of the man. “That’s completely made up. You apologize.”

The man naturally refused, and with cheerful rudeness added something to the effect of apologize to your grandmother.

Ji Chen, who had never been given to impulsive acts, threw a punch.

It was a detonation of everything that had been building up in him over weeks.

The two of them grappled, and it was the slightly more civil colleague who eventually pulled them apart.

Ji Chen had lost all sense of how long he’d been sitting in the room. His phone battery was nearly dead. He was debating whether to go look for a charger when the door finally opened.

He stood up quickly. “Assistant Yan…”

“Sit down.” Yan Zishu had significantly less patience today. He dragged a chair around and sat. “How long ago was it that you submitted that written self-reflection? And the HR department is back here telling me they’re worried this might be senior employees bullying a newer one. Tell me what happened.”

Ji Chen didn’t want to say. He made a few halting sounds, as though there was something he couldn’t quite bring himself to say.

Yan Zishu waited ten seconds. “Is there something you can’t bring yourself to say?”

Ji Chen still said nothing, eyes fixed on the table surface.

“What provoked you to throw a punch?”

Silence.

“Or who started it?”

Silence.

“My time is limited. If you have something to tell me, tell me. If you don’t speak, how is anyone supposed to know what’s going on for you?”

“Assistant Yan, I’ve made up my mind.” Ji Chen looked up. “I want to resign.”