Chapter 16#

As the person theoretically nursing a secret infatuation with Fu Weishan, this should have been exactly the result Yan Zishu wanted.

Nonetheless, he made a token gesture of dissuasion. “I think you should give it more thought. Forgive me for being direct, but your family circumstances don’t appear to be particularly comfortable. You said yourself before that you couldn’t afford to lose this job—”

That landed predictably wrong. Ji Chen stiffened as though he’d been insulted. “Don’t worry — I’ll still repay the money!”

Having been wavering, he was now resolved.

When the matter of the resignation reached Fu Weishan, Fu Weishan stepped in and held him back: “Don’t make any rash decisions just yet — give yourself some breathing room. You, me — let’s both take some time to think. Keep work and everything else separate. The company will look into the altercation. In the meantime, your final exams are coming up — think of it as a break. Come back for the summer, how does that sound?”

Because yes — if Ji Chen simply walked out the door now, everything that had come before would be a sunk cost.

Fu Weishan was certainly not about to relinquish someone without ever having had a taste.

Besides, for a man accustomed to a steady diet of flattery and accommodation, “being rejected” was an exceptionally rare life experience, touching directly on his dignity and self-regard. The threadbare romances of pulp fiction had always begun precisely this way, and for good reason.

Since it was only an internship, an unpaid leave of absence was easy enough to arrange. Ji Chen was temporarily removed from Yinghan’s internal gossip orbit.

The bad news was that his finances had become a problem. The contract mishap earlier that month had eaten most of his internship stipend — the payroll transfer had left only a few hundred yuan in his account.

And then, misfortunes arriving in clusters: once Ji Chen was back at school, the class bulletin announced the semester’s scholarship and financial aid disbursements. He’d previously received a hardship subsidy, but found that the slot had been given to someone else.

Ji Chen was bewildered. He went to ask his class advisor, who looked it up and said: “You didn’t submit an application form last semester.”

It was only then that Ji Chen remembered: a male classmate had asked whether he’d filled in his application, and offered to submit it along with his own. Ji Chen had handed over his completed form.

The dim realization now dawning was that the classmate had apparently betrayed him.

But the classmate denied it, insisting he had handed all the forms to the class committee. The class committee had no recollection either way — it was impossible to remember how many forms had been submitted — leaving the whole thing unprovable, with no way to tell at what point the form had gone missing.

It was an unpleasant thing to have happened within a class. The advisor, not wanting to make it a larger incident, chose willful ignorance: “Well, since the allocation for this semester has already been finalized, there’s nothing to be done now. You’ll just have to submit your application for next semester — and be more careful not to lose it.”

Ji Chen was hardly going to get into another fistfight over this. In the end he could only absorb the bad luck and move on.

All of these developments were perfectly known to Yan Zishu, sitting in the senior executive suite of Yinghan Group, well above it all. The person who had previously been watching Yuan Mu had now been redirected to monitor Ji Chen’s movements and report back.

The standing instruction remained: observe.

They didn’t understand why all their capabilities were being trained on an ordinary male university student who was reasonably good-looking but spectacularly accident-prone, but an employer’s money was an employer’s money. You did what you were told.

In truth, Yan Zishu was simply tracking in real time where the plot had got to.

But in his observation of it, he found himself thinking: it was commonly said that children of hardship grow up early — yet Ji Chen seemed to be the one exception to that rule.

As the male lead’s love interest, he drifted through life in a perpetual fog. It wasn’t that he committed any truly unforgivable errors; it was more that he had grown up, always, inside a glass enclosure, like a fragile little white flower, with no real capacity for surviving adversity.

Then again, a helpless, endearing quality was itself a kind of protective coloration. And so throughout his life, Ji Chen had frequently earned a measure of tender indulgence from elders, neighbors, and teachers on the basis of his face — and had, on the whole, never suffered too greatly.

According to the intelligence gathered: although Ji Chen had grown up in constrained circumstances, and his mother’s health had never been good, she had still done what she could to spoil him within her means. In periods when even his living allowance was stretched thin, she had somehow found a way to first buy him the Transformer toy he wanted; she had placed the fish meat in his bowl and told him she preferred the fish head, and Ji Chen, to this day, still believed her.

Perhaps the original sin of kindness was naivety.

Even the most devoted mother, though, could not shelter her child indefinitely. In recent years especially, Ji Chen’s mother had been declining, and the weight of keeping the household together had increasingly shifted onto Ji Chen’s unprepared shoulders.

Temporarily without his internship income, Ji Chen had no choice but to look, alongside exam revision, for other work through the campus employment center.

The jobs worth having were fought over; they were almost never available. What perpetually remained were the dregs — handing out flyers, wearing mascot costumes — poorly paid, physically grueling work that no one wanted.

One day the student coordinator posted in the group chat: “One-day banquet service job available, standing shift, somewhat tiring, male students only, day rate — anyone interested?” with the pay scale attached.

Ji Chen felt a small, decisive stir of something, and messaged the coordinator privately to put his name down.

Money was tight. Good options were few. He wasn’t in a position to be selective.

Other male students also applied afterward, but following a brief interview, it was Ji Chen who got the job.

On the day of the banquet, Ji Chen changed into the uniform — white shirt, black vest, black bow tie — and, following his brief training on the protocols, moved through the glittering crowd with his tray, weaving between the guests.

Above him, an enormous crystal chandelier caught the light in every glass drop. Across the expensive hand-woven carpet, expensive men’s leather shoes and women’s heels moved back and forth. Men in impeccable suits and women in polished, composed elegance held their glasses and spoke with easy authority.

He had not expected to encounter Fu Weishan here.

Wave after wave of people orbited Fu Weishan — three or four at a time, a toast, some conversation, and then the next rotation.

The moment Ji Chen registered that well-defined face, something in his chest lurched wildly and without permission, and he immediately ducked behind the nearest pillar.

Fu Weishan’s stated reason for the leave was exam preparation. To be found moonlighting here during that period would be, at best, awkward.

But Ji Chen couldn’t stay hidden indefinitely. The floor supervisor noticed: “Everyone else is run off their feet and you’re just cowering back here? Please — you’re here to work, not to be waited on.”

Ji Chen had no choice but to ease back out, staying as side-on as possible and keeping well clear of the area where Fu Weishan was standing.

Even so, he found himself repeatedly stealing glances in that direction — and though Fu Weishan didn’t spot him, his gaze connected, across the full width of the room, directly with Yan Zishu’s.

Ji Chen’s step nearly faltered. He opened his mouth instinctively, as though to offer an explanation.

But there was half a venue between them. There was no way anything he said would carry.

Yan Zishu turned his attention elsewhere almost at once, giving no sign of recognition — the way one’s gaze passes over a speck of dust on a windowpane: not worth particular notice.

Ji Chen bit his lip. Then the floor supervisor hissed at him: “What are you standing there staring at? Can’t you see that guest over there has their hand up?”

He looked. The guest with the raised hand was, of course, in the cluster immediately surrounding Fu Weishan.

Under the supervisor’s prompting, Ji Chen shuffled forward with reluctance, caught between going and not going.

He turned — and nearly walked his tray straight into a male guest.

He caught himself before anything spilled; if he’d soaked someone’s clothes, there would have been no way to cover the cost.

“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.” No time to think — Ji Chen apologized immediately.

“No, no — I wasn’t watching where I was going.” The guest replied, with perfect composure. “Could you actually do something for me?”

Ji Chen glanced at the floor supervisor in relief.

The supervisor, amenably: “Fine — give your tray to Xiao Wu, let him take those drinks over.”

The guest accepted a glass of wine from Ji Chen’s tray, then waited while Ji Chen handed the tray off to his colleague.

Summer was almost here. Outside, the night air was thick and warm; inside, the air conditioning was cranked cold enough to numb the fingers if you were underdressed.

The guest led Ji Chen to a semicircular balcony, out of the sightlines of the main hall.

Behind them, floor-length windows looked into the interior, blocked by thick drapes. The sense of privacy was immediate.

Ji Chen looked up. The guest was very tall — a head and then some above him. He wore a fitted double-breasted navy Italian suit, beautifully cut, four buttons, the kind of elegance that required no effort.

Ji Chen spoke, a little haltingly. “Was there something you needed help with?”

The guest took a sip of his sparkling champagne and said, entirely casually: “Nothing, really. I only noticed you seemed to be in a difficult spot. Did you run into someone you know? Someone you’d rather not be seen by?”

It was a perceptive guess — people working in service, especially those still adjusting to the role, sometimes found themselves genuinely unnerved by running into someone familiar, or even a past adversary. The slight, irrational feeling of being diminished was real.

Ji Chen didn’t know how to explain. He simply allowed the assumption to stand, and felt, in spite of himself, grateful.

Then the guest quite naturally fell into conversation: “Have you been doing this work long?”

“No — I’m a student at Nanhua University. I’m here for a part-time shift.” Ji Chen shook his head.

“That explains it. A student from a prestigious school — a certain amount of pride is to be expected.”

“No, it’s not that.” Ji Chen’s face flushed. “It’s just… I really did run into someone I know.”

The guest smiled at that. “You students spend so much time in the ivory tower — you tend to have a stronger sense of self-regard than most. But once you’re out in the working world you’ll find: everyone’s just out here trying to make a living. Nothing to be embarrassed about. Strip away the uniforms and everyone’s the same.”

The same? Ji Chen glanced through the gap in the drapes at the gleaming interior and felt a small, formless melancholy settle over him.

No matter how hard he worked, someone from his background couldn’t simply become part of that world.

To say nothing of someone like Fu Weishan, who was a different species entirely — even the sharp, polished competence of Yan Zishu was a height Ji Chen couldn’t easily imagine reaching.

He affected a light smile and answered with a phrase he’d seen circulating online: “Some people are born in Rome, some people are born as beasts of burden. Those of us from ordinary families are the latter — we have to work twenty extra years just to catch up.”

The guest replied, with a warmth and steadiness that came with age: “You might not believe this, but I happen to be one of the beasts of burden myself.”