Chapter 18#

But once a seed of suspicion has been quietly buried, even if it lies dormant for a time, you can never be entirely certain it will never take root. It needs no sunlight, no rain — only a mouth willing to invert the truth.

Yan Zishu understood this perfectly well, and was under no illusion about what Fu Jinchi was playing at.

He was simply using whatever came to hand — significant matters and trivial ones alike — to chip away, piece by piece, at the trust between Fu Weishan and his “capable subordinate.”

Given that the man occupied the role of villain, this was perfectly logical behavior.

Even rather clever, if one was being fair.

But regardless of what Fu Jinchi said or what Fu Weishan thought, the selection of a chief supervisor for Yinghan Group’s art finance collaboration with Dongyun Bank still had to go through the executive office meeting for deliberation. Company decision-making procedures couldn’t simply be circumvented.

The matter was approved and put to the meeting, where the majority of the executives present ended up nominating Yan Zishu.

There were two reasons. First, he genuinely was the more suitable candidate — capable, and thoroughly familiar with the project’s preparatory groundwork. Second, the client relations director and the other colleagues present had all witnessed what happened at that dinner; since the words had already been spoken in front of Qin Maosheng, and Qin Maosheng had taken them at face value, reversing course afterward and assigning someone else would make the company look unreliable and inconsistent.

On a rational level, Fu Weishan understood this.

But having something that should have happened naturally end up being steered by Fu Jinchi’s meddling — it sat wrong with him, and he couldn’t shake the feeling.

The others in the room didn’t know what he was bothered about. They simply assumed, as a matter of course, that he would favor someone he trusted.

Any reasonable person would think a boss ought to arrange a decent career path for a key right-hand person. Even if it was merely the promise of future rewards, the gesture had to be made — otherwise it seemed cold and calculating, lacking in basic human warmth.

To save face, Fu Weishan had no choice but to be magnanimous. He kept his expression blank and gave his verdict: “The Dongyun partnership is of significant importance to the company. Yan Zishu — set aside the other matters you have on hand and focus on leading this one. Any further comments?”

A moment of silence in the room. No objection was raised.

Yan Zishu, also present, rose and said, in the manner that was expected: “Thank you for CEO Fu’s trust and the company’s investment in me.”

Making clear that his gratitude belonged to Fu Weishan, and to no one else.

This suitably deferential response finally smoothed some of the irritation from Fu Weishan’s expression.

It was also, in its way, a display of his own capacity for generous leadership. Fu Weishan told himself: it was the right arrangement. He would let it stand.

Coming out of the meeting room, several executives clapped Yan Zishu on the shoulder, joking that his business cards would need to be reprinted — after all, there’d be a “Project General Manager” credit to add now, ha ha ha, and so on.

Only one person greeted the news with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes: “Assistant Yan may be talented, but one could argue he’s too young. Taking on a project of this scale all at once — getting the more senior employees to buy into his authority might not be so straightforward.”

This person was a vice president named Li Chang’an.

Li Chang’an’s surname was Li, but by blood relation he was Fu Weishan’s cousin on the maternal side — his mother had been born into the Fu family and married out. Since Yinghan was a family enterprise, no matter how thoroughly modernized, its joints and sinews were still thick with the aunts and uncles and cousins who could be counted by the catty. Such nepotism was unavoidable.

Li Chang’an had always been good at ingratiating himself with Third Uncle, which was how he’d landed a vice president’s chair — though it was, as a rule, a seat warmed by very little actual work.

Just now in the executive meeting, Li Chang’an had put forward a different candidate, someone from his own faction, for the Dongyun project. Having been out-argued, he had naturally come down to the floor to cause some oblique trouble.

Yan Zishu sidestepped the provocation and adopted a humble manner, looking down as he replied: “Director Li is right — I’m still relatively inexperienced. I may not be equal to the challenge of leading such a project. I’ll be counting on your guidance on the work front.”

Li Chang’an, finding that nothing he said provoked a rebuttal — that every barb fell on someone who simply absorbed it without returning fire, like performing a one-sided act — pursed his lips and lost interest.

The other vice president who had been congratulating Yan Zishu spoke up pleasantly: “Director Li, if you had any objections, why didn’t you raise them in the meeting just now?” Without waiting for an answer, he added: “Oh, though I suppose Director Li misses eight meetings out of ten — you may not have had time to get up to speed on the discussion. Shall we ask the secretary to remind everyone to speak more slowly the next time you’re able to join us?”

Li Chang’an took the hit. He had hardly put in a proper day of work in months — showing up as rarely as a mythical creature was not an exaggeration. He’d made the rare appearance at this particular executive meeting specifically to try to push his own candidate for the project, and had failed.

The vice president who’d spoken up wasn’t especially close to Yan Zishu; he simply had a longstanding distaste for the sort who collected a salary for doing nothing.

After Li Chang’an had gone off in a huff, the same vice president said to Yan Zishu: “Don’t let him rattle you. The executive meeting chose you because you’re the right person for it, full stop. As long as you deliver, no one can take the credit from you.”

Yan Zishu smiled. “I know. We’re all working for the company — I’ll naturally give it everything I have.”

The vice president clapped him on the shoulder once more, said a few more encouraging words for form’s sake, and returned to his own office.

Yan Zishu was genuinely unmoved by all of it, in either direction. Strip away the politics and the personalities, and what was left was simply this: there was a project. He would do it.

Working with data and documents — complex, shifting, demanding as they were — was at least more within his area of competence than spending every day attending to his employer’s romantic entanglements.

And what self-respecting workaholic could decline an opportunity pointing toward a promotion and a pay rise?

He hadn’t pushed for it himself, because according to the plot he was supposed to be entirely devoted to Fu Weishan, heedless of self-interest.

From the outside, he had seemed content to occupy this attendant role indefinitely — diligent, uncomplaining, making no demands.

Not pushing was one thing. But when someone else had done the work of placing the prize directly in front of him — was there any reason to refuse it?

That would be an insult to ambition.

In his previous life, he wouldn’t even have waited for a vice president’s encouragement — not trampling others on the way up would have been the height of his restraint.

He ran the numbers in his current situation: whether or not a formal promotion followed hardly mattered for now — mainly because he had no idea how long his time at Yinghan would last regardless — but the project performance bonuses were real and tangible. Having those in hand was worthwhile.

A job title couldn’t be taken with him. Money, however, could do a great deal — from constructing a false identity to moving funds.

Should he ever manage to break free of the plot’s constraints, these resources would serve as the foundation for starting over.

In a reasonably good mood, Yan Zishu stood beside his workstation, spritzed a little water on the pothos with the spray bottle, then took off his glasses and gave them a wipe.

When he put them back on, the calculation and acuity in his eyes were again concealed behind the lenses.

In that case, he owed a word of thanks to Mr. Fu for stirring things up.

As for the office politics?

No particular concern. It was simply the required coursework that every working person had to get through.

*

As the project team was being assembled, Yan Zishu first took the secretarial office’s Ben out for a cup of coffee.

The moment they sat down, he came straight to the point: “You’ve been feeding information to Fu Jinchi. Was that your initiative, or did he approach you?”

The booth around them was empty. The café had its steady stream of passersby. Ben’s expression changed at once. “Director Yan, this—”

He almost shot up from his chair, looked around both ways, then looked back at Yan Zishu — who was sitting there with perfect composure, showing not the slightest sign of having come to settle scores.

Ben lowered himself back into the seat, perching now with only half his weight on the chair.

A server in an apron arrived with a tray and set two cups of coffee on the small table. Both men stopped talking until they were gone.

Once the server had moved off, Yan Zishu said, with no particular inflection: “Don’t be nervous. If you sat in my position, you’d find it quite easy to see these small maneuvers. But do you know why I’m only coming to you about this now?”

Ben kept his face calm while his back grew cold with sweat. “Director Yan — or, Director, I mean — I don’t know. Please, go ahead.”

What Fu Jinchi had been doing, quietly gathering information from Ben, was something that could be read in very different ways depending on how far you wanted to push it.

At the lighter end: chatting idly about office gossip with a personal acquaintance.

At the heavier end: suspected unauthorized disclosure of a superior’s private matters or company confidential information.

Yan Zishu regarded him for a long moment, then picked up his cup. “Let’s be direct about it, then. What’s done is done and I’m prepared to let it go. But going forward, I intend to bring you onto the Dongyun partnership project — on the condition that you can guarantee your mouth stays shut.”

This genuinely threw Ben. He was startled by the threat and then startled all over again by what came after it: “What — wait — you mean—”

He’d started out as an ordinary administrative secretary, been caught engaging in back-channel activities, and was now apparently being offered an opportunity as a result. This was not a thing that happened.

Slack-jawed, he searched Yan Zishu’s face for any sign that he was being sarcastic.

“So, can you manage it?” Yan Zishu asked. “If not, I’ll find someone else.”

For a moment Ben came dangerously close to swearing his loyalty on heaven and earth.

When he went back, a new title appeared on his business card: Project Manager’s Assistant.

His allegiance, once categorized as pro-Yan-leaning, became the permanent and unshakeable variety.

Prior to this, Yan Zishu’s consistent curtness toward Ben had caused Ben to gradually cool on him. And a petty person being a petty person, he was never going to stay still for long — Fu Jinchi had bought him with a few small favors, and Ben had been passing along the occasional piece of seemingly inconsequential office news in return.

As Yan Zishu had said: if you had the inclination and looked down from the top, it wasn’t difficult to find these things. The IT department, for instance, could open back-end access logs. Anyone connected to the company WiFi while conducting this kind of activity left a trail down to the last detail.

After looking into it, Yan Zishu concluded that Ben had been careless — using his personal phone on the company network, of all things — but had still known where the line was. He hadn’t dared pass along anything of real commercial sensitivity. So far, the disclosures had been limited to minor trivialities.

At this level of offense, Yan Zishu could have reported it: a reprimand and a docked salary would have followed for certain, but whether it rose to the threshold of dismissal or criminal misconduct was genuinely uncertain.

The question was: what did he gain from doing that?

A subordinate who had committed exactly this kind of error was precisely the asset you couldn’t find when you went looking and didn’t expect when it landed in your lap.

Yan Zishu had never believed in, and had never expected, unconditional loyalty in the workplace. His philosophy as a manager was this: allow a subordinate to make their mistake, get hold of the leverage it provided, and then forgive them magnanimously — even extend a favor. This produced better results, for less effort, than straightforward rewards.

It proved out accordingly. Ben was now, in every respect, Yan Zishu’s to direct.

Petty people had their uses. It was an undeniable fact of office life that the petty person often outmaneuvered the upright one.

The first task Yan Zishu assigned Ben was one suited precisely to a petty person: arranging a meeting with Fu Jinchi, quietly, without any visible hand behind it.

Ben was somewhat bewildered. I just got caught secretly feeding information to Fu Jinchi. And now I’m supposed to go and invite him out directly? Is this some kind of trap?

But he did it anyway, because Yan Zishu was now, within the formal hierarchy, his direct superior.

He forwarded the location of a designated bar, then still felt uneasy: “Is this… all right?”

“What could possibly be wrong with it?” Yan Zishu said, without looking up from his screen.

“Just… if he turns up, what should we say to him?” Ben probed carefully.

“Oh.” Yan Zishu said, with perfect serenity. “We’re only sending him a location. That doesn’t mean anyone has to show up.”