Chapter 21#

According to plan, they were to meet with Qu Jianmin, the project lead from Dongyun Bank’s side, within the week — to finalize the broad framework of the partnership and confirm several key contractual terms, with a letter of intent to be signed on the spot.

In practice, these details had already been worked through in multiple rounds of negotiation and passed through legal review on both sides. Under normal circumstances, there should have been no significant points of contention remaining.

And yet, at this moment, every document they needed had vanished.

Including the full set of corporate authorization documents that granted Yan Zishu the authority to act on behalf of the company — the power of attorney and the legal representative certification materials.

When the principals from each party sat down to negotiate and sign, they were expected to produce the original authorization documents, which alone gave their words and signatures the standing of official company acts.

Ben was absolutely certain he had checked the document folder before leaving. There was no way he’d packed the wrong things.

His heart lurched. Disaster, he thought, and quickly bent close to Yan Zishu’s ear to tell him.

Yan Zishu quietly felt his pocket — and found that the USB drive he always carried was missing as well.

Zhang Yan, sitting beside them, asked with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes: “What’s wrong? Nothing wrong with the materials you’ll need shortly, is there? Better check quickly — that would be a real problem. Manager Qu just messaged — he’s stuck in traffic, but he’ll be here in fifteen minutes at the latest.”

Using the hotel rather than a company conference room had been Zhang Yan’s suggestion, on the grounds that it gave the client appropriate prestige. Ever since the Qin Maosheng dinner at Golden Phoenix Terrace, Dongyun’s side had gravitated toward this venue for business, and it seemed to have become a standing arrangement.

“Another fifteen minutes?” Yan Zishu said without any change of expression. “Excuse me — I need to use the restroom.”

“The private room has a bathroom — why go out?” Zhang Yan pointed this out with a pout.

Ben produced an implausible excuse: “Oh, actually I need the restroom too. Director Yan’s being courteous and letting me go first.”

Zhang Yan let out a derisive sound.

Fortunately, by this point Yan Zishu’s visits to Golden Phoenix Terrace had reached the stage of genuine familiarity. He went downstairs, spotted the hall manager on his rounds, and stopped him. “Excuse me — I have something of an emergency. Could I borrow a computer and a printer?”

The manager considered this and agreed. “Right this way — you can print from the front desk terminal.”

Yan Zishu shook his head. “Is there a color printer? One with the highest possible color accuracy.”

The corporate authorization documents and legal representative certificates all bore bright red company seals. Going back to the office to have them resealed was out of the question at this point — but if a digital scan could be printed with accurate enough color, it would pass casual inspection. As long as no one looked too closely.

He was helped in no small part by the fact that this particular hall manager had seen him at the ribbon-cutting ceremony and remembered him as a friend of the proprietor’s. A quick phone call later, the manager led him to the hotel staff office, woke a sleeping computer from standby, and said: “The printer is connected — just select the default one.”

The office was a single-person room with no one else in it — probably the manager’s own workspace.

Even better. The documents required confidentiality.

Yan Zishu downloaded the files needed for the meeting from his cloud storage.

Fortunately he was thorough by habit — important documents were always backed up in at least three places: local computer, USB drive, and cloud. The USB being gone was an inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

The printer whirred steadily, and the other documents came through quickly. Only the scan of the authorization documents printed with a visible color shift, the red coming out distinctly off.

This posed a small problem.

The hall manager, who had stayed to help, examined the output with a practiced eye. “This machine is usually fine, but this cartridge has been in a while — the ink delivery might be a bit off. Give me a moment; I’ll get a new one from the back.”

“I appreciate it.”

“Not at all — it’s the least I can do.”

The manager wasn’t worried about leaving Yan Zishu alone in the room — there were cameras on the walls — and went out and turned right.

Five more precious minutes passed. The office door opened again, and the person who came in carrying a new ink cartridge was Fu Jinchi.

Yan Zishu had been hunched over looking at the screen. He straightened up at once.

Fu Jinchi came in alone. The hall manager was nowhere to be seen.

Fu Jinchi was wearing a smoke-grey silk shirt today, with a matching striped jacket; his hair swept back in that effortlessly airy style. Clear-browed, fine-featured — every time he appeared he looked as though he’d just stepped away from a stylist.

Yan Zishu spoke first. “Mr. Fu — I cleared it with the manager to use the printer. No objection, I hope?”

Fu Jinchi said: “Of course not — for something this minor, you don’t even need to ask. Use whatever you like.”

Despite the words, he kept the ink cartridge in his hand and showed no sign of passing it over.

Yan Zishu narrowed his eyes slightly. He genuinely had no time for this. He simply leaned forward and took it from Fu Jinchi’s hand.

Anticipating resistance, he was caught off guard when Fu Jinchi released it without a word.

The man leaned against the side of the room, watching Yan Zishu deftly open the printer’s casing: “I stepped in when you needed it. How are you going to thank me?”

Having recently watched rather too many television dramas, Yan Zishu said off the top of his head: “Not like those shows where they say ‘you’ll have to kiss me first’, I hope.”

Fu Jinchi found this entirely agreeable. He smiled. “Go ahead, then — sounds like a fair deal for me too.”

Yan Zishu looked up and regarded him for a moment, as though conducting a brief assessment of whether the face in front of him cleared some aesthetic threshold.

The printer started up again, paper sliding through. Fu Jinchi looked back, immovable, unhurried.

Desire and attraction were always a pair of magnets.

Given that Fu Jinchi had been circling him for this long already…

Yan Zishu leaned forward, one hand resting lightly on the back of Fu Jinchi’s neck, and touched his lips briefly against Fu Jinchi’s — a dragonfly alighting on water.

Beside them, the printer hummed with its warmth, giving off the faint smell of paper and ink.

Fu Jinchi’s gaze deepened. He moved to turn it into something real — and Yan Zishu had already stepped back, thumb brushing his own lips.

This was his expression of thanks, and naturally it was on his terms.

“And in exchange, Mr. Fu keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t go letting things slip. Is that sufficient?”

“I can give it some thought,” Fu Jinchi said.

“The client arrives any minute.” Yan Zishu gave him a small push. “I genuinely have to go back up. We’ll talk later.”

The new cartridge printed the seals in a vivid, fresh red — without pressing the paper flat and looking very closely, there was nothing to fault.

Yan Zishu picked up the printed sheets, still carrying a trace of warmth from the machine. That mechanical warmth always gave him the faint, fleeting illusion of a human temperature. It didn’t last.

Fu Jinchi said: “Then that failed draft of the authorization — shall I take care of destroying it for you?”

Yan Zishu folded it quickly and put it in his own pocket. “No reason to trouble Mr. Fu with that. I’ll handle it myself.”

He logged out of his cloud account, shredded the files from the computer, cleared the cache, and then — remembering something as he was about to leave — said to Fu Jinchi: “One more thing — since there wasn’t time to clear the print history, I’ve reset the printer to factory settings. Could Mr. Fu arrange to have someone reconnect it to the computer? Apologies for the trouble.” And went back upstairs.

Fu Jinchi leaned over to check, and found that, sure enough, all user settings had been wiped.

He raised an eyebrow, then noticed that the computer monitor had also been turned at a slight angle — just enough to face away from the security camera mounted on the wall behind and to one side of it.

A silent reply to his own prior “precedent.”

Fu Jinchi laughed.