Chapter 26#

This time, Fu Jinchi finally managed to shoo a fully conscious Yan Zishu into the bathroom to shower properly, and stood watch until he came out with his hair blown dry.

Yan Zishu would never have guessed, going by appearances alone, that Fu Jinchi could be such a fussy person.

Not only that: by the time he emerged, a pot of century egg and lean pork congee had finished cooking on a timer in the kitchen, and was sitting on the table at exactly the right temperature to eat.

It was still early — the morning sun hadn’t gathered its full ferocity yet, and the sky outside was washed clean and clear.

Yan Zishu sat down at the table in a daze. His hair, unshaped by any product, was dry and soft, which softened his edges considerably and gave him the look of someone thoroughly at home — though still no match for the genuinely surreal quality of Fu Jinchi’s presence in his kitchen.

He watched Fu Jinchi carry over two more small side dishes, and was nearly struck dumb for the second time.

Not that there was any reason Fu Jinchi shouldn’t know how to cook — well, in a sense, the man was in fact in the restaurant business.

Courtesy required acknowledgment. He cast about for the right phrasing. “You’re… quite domesticated.”

Fu Jinchi pulled out a chair and sat down without ceremony: “Of course I am.”

Yan Zishu fell silent again.

The two of them ate breakfast across from each other.

Fu Jinchi could read the surprise in him: “Did you think I was the type who’s never lifted a finger in my life?”

He leaned back, frank and unhesitating: “Let me put it this way — while Fu Zhizhang was alive, I cooked for him with my own hands for quite a few years. If I hadn’t made myself useful to him, why would he have taken any interest in me as a son?”

Fu Jinchi smiled. It was a very cold smile — even, faintly, self-mocking.

His eyes held no warmth that had anything to do with filial feeling.

On the surface, this sounded like pure nonsense. A man of Fu Zhizhang’s power and position — was he really in need of an illegitimate son to cook for him?

And who would value someone for such an arbitrary reason?

But in the space of a moment, Yan Zishu’s mind was running through the intelligence he’d accumulated, and the scattered pieces were quietly weaving themselves into a shape, the outline of something beginning to emerge.

There was one thing everyone knew: Fu Zhizhang had only reached his mid-fifties before dying — by any measure an untimely death. However great the loss, even the most formidable person is equal before illness. Stomach cancer had tormented him for several years — famous doctors consulted, repeated surgeries performed, most of his stomach removed — and in the end, the cancer cells continued spreading regardless.

Fu Zhizhang had commanded the world for half his life. He would not have been cheaply moved by anyone’s attentiveness.

If anything, there was no shortage of people lining up to be attentive to him; you could have counted them from the east of the city to the west.

But an old cat mourns its kittens, and old people cherish their children. Everyone has their moment of weakness when the end draws near.

What if — while his own body was visibly failing him, illness advancing day by day — there was still a devoted son at his bedside?

Yan Zishu looked at him steadily. What he didn’t know was that Fu Jinchi, at this moment, was seeing it too.

A hospital room thick with antiseptic. A bleached white ceiling and white sheets. Fu Zhizhang, consumed by illness, skeletal with it.

Fu Jinchi’s definition of him: his father in the biological sense.

The once tall, strong man lying in that hospital bed had wasted away entirely — inevitable, given that barely any stomach remained, leaving him to eat small amounts frequently throughout the day. Fu Jinchi opened the insulated container he’d brought: small, nutritious, carefully prepared dishes, each one made to Fu Zhizhang’s palate, immeasurably better than the bland clinical meals a nutritionist would have assigned.

Fu Jinchi arranged the folding tray table over his lap with practiced ease, set out the bowl and chopsticks. When necessary, he could feed him by hand.

Fu Zhizhang sat up, breathing with effort: “You’re the only good one among them. Look around — who else even comes to see me these days?”

Fu Jinchi smiled warmly: “Father, what a thing to say. You’re going to get better. You’ll live to be a hundred.”

In that smile, there was grief and sorrow in exactly the right measure.

Fu Zhizhang waved one withered hand and sighed, with the air of someone who had made his peace with fate: “Ah. That would be difficult.”

No one looking at this scene would have known that in the first two years after the stomach cancer diagnosis, there had been a period when Fu Zhizhang still had people test the food Fu Jinchi brought — checking for slow-acting toxins, or anything that might interfere with his cancer treatment. Nothing had ever been found.

Until one day, Fu Zhizhang seemed to find his own caution slightly laughable and quietly discontinued the practice. Perhaps by that point, as his body deteriorated further, his manner toward people had grown correspondingly warmer and more gentle.

To leave everything to the legitimate son and heir, Fu Weishan? He wasn’t willing. There was no logic to it.

And in the earlier years, in the era when Fu Zhizhang had ruled without dissent, he would have considered the entire farce of testing for poison too absurd to even contemplate.

— Who, in those days, would have dared move against someone like him?

Back then, he would only glance at Fu Jinchi with cool indifference, and if in good humor might taste a spoonful of the broth, before saying, flatly: “Making yourself into a maidservant.”

But in private, Fu Jinchi’s mother gripped his shoulders with both hands, and Fu Jinchi had been hearing her voice in his ear since he was old enough to understand: Don’t listen to what your father says out loud. Men all like being pleased. He loves my cooking, so I’ll teach you everything. You have to please him. Get him to like you. Otherwise — what do we have to live on?

His mother was a gentle, accommodating woman. She understood the principle of to capture a man’s heart, you must first capture his appetite.

That was the full extent of her understanding. Fu Zhizhang would occasionally visit the modest place where she and her son lived, and those were the happiest hours of her life.

She raised her son to be, like her, a model of quiet deference — eyes lowered, head bowed, agreeable in all things. Like a concubine hoping for the emperor’s favor.

And as Fu Jinchi grew, he became increasingly his mother’s image.

Men don’t do domestic work — that was a skill one could simply learn.

For those in positions of weakness, pleasing others was a highly trained competency.

Fu Weishan’s mother, though she despised Fu Zhizhang, had found one of his metaphors apt enough to borrow: she too looked down and laughed at the illegitimate son as someone born for servitude. A good name meant nothing. The son of a maidservant was fit only to wait on others.

As the cancer spread and Fu Zhizhang’s condition deteriorated, the secret held for a year, held for two — but not for three years, not for five. While he was still fighting the illness, there were already people outside his door asking how long he had left to live.

The real purpose behind most of those inquiries was to calculate when he might finally die.

At this point, Fu Zhizhang looked at the son at his bedside — and saw not a maidservant, but a devoted child.

Fu Weishan did come to visit his father occasionally. This legitimate heir, who had been given every advantage and was the object of every expectation, was genuinely busy with company matters — and on most visits, he sat at the bedside for a while, listened to the doctor summarize the condition, and updated Fu Zhizhang briefly on the state of the business.

Fu Weishan had been raised in ease and comfort from childhood; his entire life had been one of being waited upon. There was no reasonable expectation that he would know how to care for another person.

At their level of society, when a family member was ill, there were servants, nurses, home care workers. Who would need to do anything themselves?

Nor could Fu Weishan easily comprehend what it felt like to be confined to a sickbed for months, counting the days.

This was natural and expected.

Fu Zhizhang understood all of this. It was just that — with the attentive, warm-hearted elder son present every single day, for comparison —

He thought: I have held the world in my hands for so many years. And in the end, it turns out the one who is truly close to me is the illegitimate one.

Once, Fu Zhizhang overheard even Fu Weishan asking a doctor outside: “How much time does my father have left?”

He stared at the ceiling and lay awake all night — the cancer had by then spread to the liver and lungs, and rest was already difficult regardless.

Two days later, Fu Zhizhang summoned his personal lawyer and revised the will.

When Fu Jinchi learned of this, he knelt at the bedside, and not a trace of greed showed in his expression — only carefully composed worry: “What do I need money for? You’re the only family I have. As long as you get better — that’s worth more to me than anything.”

Fu Zhizhang patted his hand: “You are my son. What belongs to you should come to you. Otherwise, I couldn’t rest easy.”

*

Sitting across from Yan Zishu, Fu Jinchi tapped his chopsticks idly against the table edge, his smile as cold as it could be made: “The unfortunate thing is that Fu Zhizhang didn’t live long. And his wife was similarly short-lived — they quarreled for most of their lives together and both ended up dying of cancer. In that respect, at least, they were well-matched.”

Yan Zishu looked down.

But truth be told, Fu Jinchi’s cooking was genuinely good.

*

Over the course of that weekend, Fu Jinchi apparently decided he had no intention of leaving. Later that day he even had medication delivered to the door — some taken internally, some applied externally — leaving Yan Zishu mildly exasperated. “I wasn’t aware this was standard procedure for a one-night arrangement.”

Fu Jinchi returned the question: “The way you say that, it sounds like you’ve had quite a few.”

Yan Zishu said: “Don’t probe. I don’t make a habit of casual encounters.”

Fu Jinchi smiled: “You seem to me like someone who’s relatively new to all this. Just more confident in theory.”

Yan Zishu had no interest in pursuing this line of conversation. Any further and they’d be edging toward dangerous territory again.

Fu Jinchi added: “Do you want to do this yourself, or shall I help?”

Yan Zishu obligingly extended his hand. “Thank you. I’ll manage.”

He settled into the sofa with the medication, and found himself genuinely puzzled — he had apparently lowered his own threshold by degrees, until he’d allowed Fu Jinchi to simply inhabit his private space, moving around in it freely. But since things had gone this far, forcibly ejecting him seemed unnecessary and, frankly, overwrought. This wasn’t how he’d imagined things would go. He’d expected something more transactional — each getting what they wanted, followed by a clean and unemotional parting.

Though Fu Jinchi had been correct about one thing: Yan Zishu genuinely had no prior experience with this kind of arrangement to draw on.

Even less experience establishing any long-term intimate connection with another person.

Being pursued had always been an ordinary feature of his existence, but for most people it was no different than moths flying toward a flame.

His mind was too precise; it made it too easy to inadvertently cause harm.

The overly timid fell back in the face of his indifference. The overly forceful triggered immediate resistance.

Only Fu Jinchi seemed to have found, without instruction, exactly the right degree of pressure — and moved forward by precisely one step.

No further than that.

A work call pulled Yan Zishu back to reality.

In fact, it wasn’t particularly urgent. The caller simply knew he was available and didn’t hesitate to ring — and Yan Zishu did, indeed, shift seamlessly into work mode, immediately calling the relevant employees one after another, disturbing their Saturday afternoon without the slightest remorse.

He took the tablet from its locked drawer, preparing to deal with the documents, and gave Fu Jinchi a brief, eloquent glance —

Which clearly communicated that Fu Jinchi really ought to take himself off now.

In Yan Zishu’s world, work had always come first.

He rang people in the middle of the night often enough that more than one employee had speculated, or sourly wished, that his private life simply didn’t exist.

This now proved that even when it did, it was no barrier to working overtime.

Seeing this, Fu Jinchi didn’t linger. He changed back into yesterday’s clothes without fuss.

Only before leaving, he remembered to pull Yan Zishu into his arms and raise the matter of having been blocked.

“My work WeChat frequently needs to be logged in on company computers.” Yan Zishu said, giving him a sidelong look. “If Mr. Fu intends to continue sending messages that could constitute workplace harassment, I’m afraid maintaining the block is the safer option.”

“Surely there’s a way.” Fu Jinchi sounded faintly aggrieved.

Yan Zishu’s solution was to recommend the app that left no chat records — the same one he used with Ben. Only after Fu Jinchi had downloaded it on the spot, and given his solemn undertaking not to engage in overt harassment through any official channel, was his account finally unblocked.

“One more thing — since we’re on the subject.” As he was leaving, Fu Jinchi seemed to recall something and mentioned it in passing. “You have to leave people a way out if you want to keep encountering them. After your performance with Li Chang’an, I took the trouble to smooth things over with him afterward. That man has a very small capacity for grievance — he’d need a little more incentive to let it go, otherwise the two of you would just keep feuding and end up permanently at each other’s throats in the office.”

Yan Zishu raised an eyebrow. “Oh? What form of smoothing over?”

Fu Jinchi said, casually: “Giving him what he needed, appealing to what he wanted. He’s short of money right now, so I had someone send him a cheque.”

He didn’t mention the sum — but Yan Zishu doubted it was small, and suspected the situation was less simple than described.

Sure enough, Fu Jinchi leaned close to his ear: “And since the casino proprietors in Macao were good enough to give me some consideration, I took the trouble of asking them to extend a little more patience to Li Chang’an on his debts, and to raise the credit limit he can gamble on account. So he’s in no immediate rush to gather funds anymore — he can take his time repaying when circumstances improve.”

The words were light, almost idle — but they landed in Yan Zishu’s chest like a stone thrown into still water, sending up a sudden, cold wave of shock. “You—”

He looked at Fu Jinchi — the fine, composed features, the effortless elegance — and listened to him describe, in the offhand tone of someone relating a generous act, what he had done for this distant cousin of his. And felt something cold move up the back of his spine.

Only a ghost, or a child of three, would believe Li Chang’an would use that cheque to pay down his gambling debts.

Knowing full well that the man was a gambler who had lost himself — and thoughtfully giving him money, giving him more time, and even permitting him to continue accumulating credit at the casino table — no one could fail to see where this went.

The gambler would throw himself headlong into the trap, take the money with trembling, grateful hands, and try to win back everything he had lost — until he had nothing left, until every last thing had been wagered away, until he tumbled from the abyss into a deeper darkness still.

And yet Fu Jinchi had done nothing wrong.

To all appearances, he had simply been a kind benefactor, relieving Li Chang’an of his immediate financial distress.

So Fu Jinchi smiled and asked: “What’s the matter with me?”

He lifted his hand and pushed a strand of Yan Zishu’s dark hair aside.

Li Chang’an was choosing to slide toward his own destruction. Fu Jinchi was simply standing to one side, smiling at nothing, and giving him a small, helpful push.

There had never been a moment — until now — when Yan Zishu felt it so concretely and clearly: Fu Jinchi genuinely hated these people.

He wanted to watch them die.

With an indiscriminate malice that touched them all.

After a long moment, Yan Zishu breathed out, something like a sigh.

But then — what did it have to do with him?

Li Chang’an was probably delighted right now, wasn’t he?

The thought resolved quickly. Yan Zishu’s mind was clear: given Fu Jinchi’s “generosity,” Li Chang’an had not only resolved his immediate debt crisis but had an unexpected windfall to take back to the table. In the short term, he had every reason — emotionally and financially — to stop making trouble at the company.

More importantly: Yan Zishu’s earlier warning to Mrs. Li, delivered in front of her husband, had inevitably planted seeds of suspicion. That had been a risky move — if the secret of Li Chang’an’s near-hundred-million gambling debt came out at the wrong moment, Yan Zishu would be the obvious trigger point in whatever explosion followed.

The saving grace was this: for Li Chang’an to burn through the cheque Fu Jinchi had given him, and then let the original hundred-million debt compound into two or three hundred million — that was clearly not a matter of weeks. The casino, meanwhile, would be happy to keep him entertained for quite a while yet.

By the time things came to a head — a year or two down the road — the sharpest edge of the conflict would no longer be pointed at Yan Zishu. Even if Mrs. Li recalled the incident by then, she would have accumulated far more recent evidence of her own; the time gap would have diluted whatever Yan Zishu’s role had been.

In that light, Fu Jinchi’s “smoothing over” genuinely warranted another round of thanks.

He found himself almost amused. What exactly was this — two people on the wrong side of the story, destined by nature to collude?

Yan Zishu turned the corner of his mouth up. “Nothing. I’m reflecting on how truly magnanimous Mr. Fu is. What a man of warmth and loyalty. What devoted fraternal feeling.”

Fu Jinchi said, with equanimity: “Zishu, you really are an intelligent person. No wonder I like you.”

And with that, Fu Jinchi kissed him goodbye.

*

Yinghan Group.

Compared to the single employee with no dependents — no family to feed, free to change jobs whenever the mood struck — a man like Zhang Yan, middle-aged, with a family, a household, a career that looked from outside like modest success, would never dare casually throw away a job.

Put plainly: even stripped of Li Chang’an’s patronage from behind, even with Yan Zishu riding over him —

He still couldn’t afford the pride of walking out.

Because in today’s world, a middle-class family that looked prosperously comfortable to outsiders could collapse in two months like a sandcastle the moment cash flow stopped. Zhang Yan had only to think of the monthly mortgage on the school-district apartment, the BMW car loan, his son’s international kindergarten and elite enrichment classes, and the credit card statements stacking up — and as long as he hadn’t dropped dead, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and keep working.

As for why Li Chang’an had suddenly pulled back and withdrawn — Zhang Yan didn’t fully understand it, and couldn’t exactly ask outright.

It had just happened, suddenly: Li Chang’an’s face went dark, and he told him to stand down and wait. And then, equally suddenly, this deputy director who’d been smashing things around his office in fury did a complete reversal — walking with a spring in his step, practically floating.

Reading the signs, Zhang Yan half-suspected Yan Zishu had bought Li Chang’an off with a substantial bribe — but it didn’t quite add up.

What possible offer could have been large enough to make Li Chang’an abandon his entire stake in this?

Even setting aside all else: over a company project? Would Yan Zishu really bleed that much?

The kind of benefit that would impress Li Chang’an — Yan Zishu’s salary and bonuses combined didn’t come close.

Zhang Yan had no reliable answer to this. Partly because these days he couldn’t easily get in touch with Li Chang’an at all.

The truth was that Li Chang’an was in a frantic hurry to get back to Macao and “recover his losses” — which naturally required some measure of discretion, and meant his whereabouts couldn’t be shared too widely. He’d offered some pretext and then disappeared from the office for an extended stretch once again.

Without his backer, dealing with Zhang Yan directly was perfectly straightforward.

Given that Li Chang’an as deputy director had been accepting commercial bribes for years, it was exceedingly unlikely that Zhang Yan had received no portion of this. Pick any one instance, and there was a ready-made piece of leverage to use.

Bribery by a non-government official — anything over the threshold counted as a significant amount under the law.

That threshold was easy to clear.

File a case, and the sentence could run to five years or less with imprisonment.

Not that the prison sentence mattered most: if Zhang Yan were to acquire a criminal record, his son would be barred from ever sitting the civil service examination.

Yan Zishu considered himself a person of reasonable compass. He had no interest in pursuing Zhang Yan to absolute ruin.

But Zhang Yan did need to understand that any leniency was a choice — and it was his choice to extend it.

Yan Zishu, as project lead, sat down with Zhang Yan for a private talk.

The two of them spent an entire afternoon behind the closed door of a meeting room. Zhang Yan spent most of it wiping his forehead with his sleeve — though no sweat was actually present.

“As Manager Zhang knows, this project is already significantly behind schedule. This is exactly the kind of moment that calls for everyone to pull together and overcome the difficulties.” Yan Zishu said. “Going forward, both of us will need to put in more effort and worry less about getting our individual due. Don’t you think?”

Zhang Yan’s face twitched into a smile. “Ha ha, absolutely — working our hearts out for the company is nothing less than our unconditional duty!”

Yan Zishu said, with perfect composure: “I was just being polite. In practice, the responsibility falls mainly on you.”

“…”

Zhang Yan silently cursed Yan Zishu’s entire ancestral line in his head, but didn’t dare make a public break with him.

At this particular moment, Yan Zishu held all the cards.

When the two of them reappeared in front of the company’s employees, they still looked like the best of colleagues.

In any case: Zhang Yan had indeed made promises to Manager Qu, reaching a separate arrangement and agreeing to a kickback. Yan Zishu had no intention of pursuing the kickback further — water that’s too pure has no fish, and attempting to claw back what had already been promised would push things to breaking point and wasn’t in anyone’s best interest. The optimum outcome was clear.

And the nice thing was: the kickback had been promised by Zhang Yan. If it ever came to light in an audit —

It had nothing to do with Yan Zishu.

As long as Yan Zishu maintained that he hadn’t known, the worst he could face was a charge of insufficient oversight.

Insufficient oversight or not — the plot might well have run its course long before any such accounting. He wasn’t going to be at Yinghan forever.

After my time comes, let the flood come.

But since Zhang Yan had swallowed his benefit, he would do things Yan Zishu’s way.

For the stretch that followed, Yan Zishu simply pushed Zhang Yan, relentlessly, to go and negotiate with Dongyun Bank — to get the contract signed along the originally agreed framework.

Whether Zhang Yan worked things out quietly with Manager Qu through back channels, or whether he had to grovel and plead — Yan Zishu only looked at outcomes.

He did not accept can’t be done as an answer.

After every progress meeting with Yan Zishu, Zhang Yan would cycle through the full repertoire of profanity several times internally.

Zhang Yan had technically, per Fu Weishan’s directive, been granted permission to report directly to the CEO. But dare he? Not now.

This did, at least, give Ben a small measure of consolation — it seemed, finally, that he was no longer the only person in the project team being squeezed.

With Zhang Yan no longer openly dragging his feet, and the project lead being constitutionally incapable of accepting anything less than full speed, the whole enterprise abruptly lurched forward like a horse-drawn carriage that had just had an engine installed. The earlier delays had cost them real time, and in line with Yan Zishu’s usual approach: however much had been lost, that much would be made up.

No requirement that every foot soldier sacrifice themselves completely — but anyone in a position of responsibility, anyone he could see, could forget about any comfortable breathing room.

The person who had switched the documents received particular attention. While others were grinding nine-to-nine-six, he was being pushed close to a zero-zero-seven schedule.

Zhang Yan had promised his son a trip to the amusement park, and the entire summer had passed without it happening. At the tail end of the summer break, his son’s birthday arrived, and the boy made a fuss for his father’s time. Left without options, Zhang Yan submitted an annual leave request at short notice — only to have it returned by HR, who explained that Yan Zishu had given them a list of names: anyone on it requesting leave required his personal approval first.

At the end of his patience, Zhang Yan tracked down Yan Zishu and pointed at him: “Everyone has children. Could you not make an exception here?”

“I don’t.” Yan Zishu said, without looking up. “Finish your work and you can go. But have you?”

Zhang Yan felt ready to spit blood from sheer frustration.

And Zhang Yan was not the only frustrated party.

*

The impressively composed Mr. Fu had been in somewhat poor spirits lately.

He had, some weeks ago, finally achieved what he’d been angling for and gotten Yan Zishu into bed. Quite a triumph — managing to pluck this particular flower from its inaccessible heights. And then, once it was over, everything went back to exactly the way it had been before. He could barely get the man on the phone, let alone flirt with him — the answer to everything was I’m working overtime.

Overtime was probably the single greatest deterrent to all earthly desire. Nothing else came close.

That evening under the amber streetlight, Yan Zishu had looked at him and said, with perfect ease: I’ll allow you to come in as an honored guest. A flirtatious turn of phrase, of course. But what Fu Jinchi had since discovered was that the operative word in that sentence was not honored guest — it was once.

One evening of indulgence. One.

That said — if Fu Jinchi could simply let it go at that, he wouldn’t be Fu Jinchi.