Chapter 20#

Zhang Yan came up to the floor, spotted Yan Zishu, and launched into his customary and somewhat painful greeting: “Well, if it isn’t Director Yan!”

Yan Zishu had long since stopped bothering to correct him. He addressed the actual matter: “Here for the partnership documents? I was just about to have someone send them down.”

Zhang Yan turned, and at that moment Ji Chen came trotting over, collided squarely with him, let out a startled yelp, and sent the papers in his arms flying across the floor.

Zhang Yan: …

It was rather like having a colleague insist on bringing their child to the office, obliging everyone to watch where they stepped at all times.

But Zhang Yan immediately assembled a smile and crouched down to help gather the papers. Ji Chen was, after all, “the CEO’s favorite at the moment.”

— Much as, if the colleague in question were senior management or even your direct supervisor, the calculation changed entirely: who would ever find fault with their child?

Ji Chen thanked Zhang Yan repeatedly, finding him very warm and approachable.

Of course, everyone found Ji Chen warm and approachable these days.

Zhang Yan offered a few flattering remarks in Ji Chen’s direction before taking his leave of the floor.

Even someone as seasoned as Helen, who wasn’t about to start going out of her way to ingratiate herself, was noticeably more patient than she used to be.

Since Yan Zishu had made such a public point of clearing Ji Chen’s name and personally arranging for him to be welcomed back to the secretarial office, everyone had arrived at two conclusions:

First: the little intern had found his way back into high favor. The male employee who had verbally abused Ji Chen received his HR reprimand and then, using it as a convenient excuse, promptly left for another company — the civil colleague, by contrast, stayed on without incident.

Second: Director Yan was, and remained, an intimate of the throne. After all, most people reasoned: matters touching the boss’s personal romantic life could only be entrusted to someone the boss trusted completely. Who else would be in a position to intervene so freely?

In the short term, this was the effect Yan Zishu had wanted. Performed for Fu Weishan’s benefit, and for everyone else’s as well.

Laying groundwork for eventually moving against the male lead’s love interest — that part went without saying.

As for whether there was someone who, from beginning to end, had stubbornly maintained a dislike of Ji Chen —

Aside from Yan Zishu himself, Ben had been exactly that person in the original plot. Written from his very first appearance to his last with a thorough, undisguised aversion to the male lead’s love interest, regardless of how much favor the boy accumulated — never once bending to give him a kind word. Until, inevitably, overextending his petty schemes and being made an example of by the male lead to vent the love interest’s grievances, he had been forced to make an ignominious exit.

That had been the proper trajectory.

Only now — well, Ben simply didn’t have the spare time.

Sometimes he couldn’t help wondering whether he was being slowly psychologically manipulated by Yan Zishu’s management style.

When Ben had first been pulled onto the project, his thought had been: How can there possibly be such a lucky break?

Ben had studied a general arts subject, came into the company as an ordinary administrative secretary, and faced both a low salary ceiling and a vague career path. To put it bluntly: without some specific stroke of luck, he would remain a small cog in the machine forever. Unless he could eventually rise to Helen’s position — but there was only one of those, and the competition was steep, and it wasn’t guaranteed to be his.

What Yan Zishu was offering was precisely the kind of stepping stone he needed. Work hard, have someone above you who recognized you and pushed you forward, and there was a real chance of leaving behind what people dismissively called “admin work going nowhere” and moving into a core business function.

So at the beginning, Ben had thrown himself in with real energy — even feeling something he hadn’t felt in a long time: a flicker of genuine professional ambition.

Only, after working with Yan Zishu for a while, his thought had become: How can there possibly be such a lucky break.

This was the genuine article, working without regard for day or night.

And being put to use by Yan Zishu without mercy, at all hours, on all fronts.

Before, there had been Helen sitting between him and the chief assistant like a buffer. He hadn’t fully appreciated how much she absorbed.

Only now did he understand: Helen had been silently enduring a very great deal.

It was, of course, not without reason that everyone hated the type who made productivity their religion.

Under this volume of work, watching Ji Chen drift through each day at his unhurried, bird-sipping-water pace was an additional irritation Ben found hard to suppress. Probably also just the natural frustration of the overworked toward the incompetent.

He’d watched enough romantic dramas to know the type: the endearingly clumsy lead who spills coffee on the CEO today, loses an important file tomorrow, with each mishap somehow serving as a catalyst for the relationship. Between Ji Chen and Fu Weishan, something of the sort played out every few days, reliably. For those involved, it was presumably a warming of feelings. From where Ben was standing, the two of them were increasingly steeped in each other, their glances across the room growing ever more saturated.

Ben watched it all with a face of pure neutrality, the single internal commentary being: anyone who can’t carry their share of the work is deadweight.

As a man, he supposed there was some understanding to be had for a certain type of male attraction toward “people who still look like high schoolers.”

But if a person’s mind was also at the high-schooler stage of development, they had no business being in an office.

It was only after observing Yan Zishu’s manner with Ji Chen for a while that Ben decided he had, in fact, been quite shallow in his thinking.

For instance: Ji Chen would come shuffling over and hold out a loose stack of papers to Yan Zishu. “Assistant Yan, is this the meeting agenda you need later? I downloaded it from the system and printed it for you — could you take a look?”

Ben would think, privately: Oh for — he just printed it loose. Is the company out of staplers? The motivational posters about attitude and details were not for nothing.

“Yes, that’s the one.” Yan Zishu would say pleasantly. “Thank you — I was just about to look for it.”

The moment Ji Chen was gone, Yan Zishu would feed the whole stack into the shredder without looking at it. “Ben, remind me to have a proper copy of the meeting agenda ready.”

… Ben would, of course, proceed to produce one. Perfectly stapled. Checked down to each punctuation mark.

There was no denying it: Yan Zishu’s attitude toward Ji Chen continued to follow the model of a valued household pet. Feed it, water it, go with the grain of it, keep it content. If the pet dragged something in from outside, that was an impressive achievement — he’d give the pet an approving pat and say good boy, then quietly dispose of the offering the moment it turned away.

Apart from a slight environmental guilt, everything proceeded without incident.

And so Ben, though he still regarded Ji Chen with something less than warmth, had absorbed the virtue of keeping that to himself. No more casual needling; he kept his head down and focused on his own work. (The volume of that work being what it was also contributed.)

“You’ve grown a lot lately,” Yan Zishu said to him once, by way of praise. “You seem more steady than before.”

Ben felt a chill at that, the immediate mental image being: This isn’t the kind of praise he gives Ji Chen, is it?

But he thought back over the sheer quantity of late nights he’d put in alongside Yan Zishu, and reassured himself: no, no, categorically not.

The sorrows of working life.

*

Yan Zishu had been careful to keep Ji Chen away from his own work documents — but there was no way to prevent every kind of accident.

When Ben opened the document folder in the reserved private dining room at Golden Phoenix Terrace, he found that what was inside was not the partnership proposal they were about to discuss, but several outdated auction planning documents from the previous year.

In other words, a folder full of waste paper.