Chapter 41#

The scene in front of him sketched itself in Yan Zishu’s mind as an irregular polygon, drawn in a thoroughly melodramatic style.

An absolute mess.

The next sequence of events proceeded accordingly: Ji Chen threw a silent sulk, turned and made to storm off without actually erupting. Fu Weishan, ever protective of appearances, could stomach a private scene — but a public spectacle in front of Secretary Zhu was as good as a slap across his own face, and whatever guilt he’d momentarily felt curdled into indignant fury.

Fortunately, Fu Weishan had quick reflexes. He improvised an on-the-spot lie about having “a quarrel with a younger brother at home” and smoothed things over.

Secretary Zhu was not without his own questions, but he had to get to work and had no time to probe further. He got into his car with his secretary and left.

Fu Weishan then hurried off after Ji Chen. Left on the pavement were Yan Zishu and Miss Zhu — plus the original instigator, Fu Jinchi, leaning against his car some distance away, sunglasses on, legs casually crossed, entirely at ease.

Miss Zhu and Yan Zishu stood close to each other, looking at one another, briefly at a loss.

Miss Zhu asked: “Well — are you going to go check on them?”

Yan Zishu had been intending to, but his phone rang. Fu Jinchi’s voice arrived to stop him: “Two lovebirds having a spat — they always make up in the end, and there’s probably a romp involved in the resolution. What are you going over there for? To watch?”

Yan Zishu pressed two fingers to his temple at this characteristically outrageous assessment.

Fu Jinchi watched from a distance and reminded him: “The blind date is still standing right there. You can’t just leave her.”

That was true. Yan Zishu ended Fu Jinchi’s call, then rang Fu Weishan: “About Miss Zhu—”

Fu Weishan only said, hastily: “Handle it.”

Yan Zishu agreed.

To her credit, Miss Zhu was pragmatic about it. Hearing a brief account, she shrugged: “You don’t need to explain. It’s not hard to read. That was a boyfriend showing up, wasn’t it? If he was going behind his partner’s back to attend a blind date, the partner had every right to come and make a scene. Not much to say.”

Yan Zishu called a hire car and opened the door for her. “I’m sorry about this.”

He bore some responsibility himself — when she’d asked about Fu Weishan’s orientation, he had told her one truth but withheld another: the fact that there was already someone in the picture.

Miss Zhu didn’t lose her temper. She got in composedly: “Please do go check how things look on CEO Fu’s end, and send me a message afterward. If his partner isn’t on board with the whole matchmaking arrangement, we might as well end this on good terms.”

The driver, a BMW hire car veteran, heard all of this and showed no reaction whatsoever. The face of a professional.

Yan Zishu watched the car disappear before letting out a measured sigh.

Miss Zhu had been collected and rational in front of him from start to finish.

What he could nonetheless sense, beneath that composure, was the quiet resignation — the numbness and the absence of hope about the shape of her future.

If things could just go simply, who would choose otherwise.

He looked up. The main road flowed with traffic, an unbroken stream. Along the service road, Fu Jinchi’s car eased toward him and stopped at the kerb. The window came down; the sunglasses were off, and in their place a gracious, agreeable smile. “I can’t stay parked here long. Coming in?”

Yan Zishu smiled faintly, and opened the passenger door. “Find somewhere without security cameras.”

“You do know how to give orders.” Fu Jinchi laughed softly, and made a loop before eventually pulling into a lane behind the restaurant.

A new air freshener had been placed in the car since last time — a subtle scent, in a delicate glass bottle, pale gold liquid swaying gently.

Fu Jinchi raised the windows, sealing the space. He rested an arm over the steering wheel. “Will this do?”

Yan Zishu considered a moment, then went straight to it: “You’ve been spending so much time with Xiaochen lately. Was all of it just to engineer this scene today?”

Two seconds of quiet fell inside the car.

Fu Jinchi’s features were refined, but his expression now carried a particular lightness — the look of someone not entirely serious about anything. “Fu Weishan hasn’t given me any actual work to do, so naturally I have time to fill. Besides — my brother going around deceiving both parties at once, conducting a marriage courtship behind his lover’s back. Doesn’t anyone with the faintest sense of justice feel obliged to do something about it?”

Yan Zishu gave him a steady look. “And Ji Chen? Is it partly that you find him especially easy to manipulate?”

“He’s all right — a bit easier than you, I’d say.” Fu Jinchi was entirely shameless about it. “I tell him something and he believes it. I was honestly surprised at first that Fu Weishan would take an interest in him. Having seen him now, though — Fu Weishan’s own mental faculties aren’t exactly formidable, so of course he needs this kind of simple-minded admiration from someone. The two of them are well-matched, in their way.”

Yan Zishu stared forward in silence, and offered no defense of his employer’s intelligence.

Fu Jinchi asked, with a trace of provocation: “So — you’ve now ruined Fu Weishan’s blind date. Are you pleased? Or not pleased?”

It seemed that from the moment Fu Jinchi had found the insurance policy, he had simply taken it as given that Yan Zishu harbored some unspeakable feeling toward Fu Weishan.

Yan Zishu had never found a suitable moment to refute this.

This wasn’t a suitable moment, either.

Fu Jinchi was watching his profile, as though catching every microexpression.

Yan Zishu didn’t answer — he was, in truth, somewhere else in his head.

If he were being honest, he had no particular feeling about it one way or another. It wasn’t his business to have feelings about it — it hadn’t been his blind date.

Either way, the male lead couldn’t successfully end up with a match from a blind date. Even if he could have, Yan Zishu would have sent an anonymous tip to kill the arrangement.

That was his job. His task.

What the question actually produced in him, if anything, was a faint amusement —

Did Fu Jinchi genuinely believe he was the only perceptive person in the room?

If he were truly perceptive, he would not, in the original plot, have walked headfirst into such a complete catastrophe of his own making.

After a while, Yan Zishu returned his attention to the present. Fu Jinchi’s right hand rested on the gear shift — long fingers, strong, knuckles defined, half-closed, half-open. Yan Zishu paused, and placed his own hand over it. “I know what you’re planning next.”

Fu Jinchi raised an eyebrow. “Do you? Let’s hear it.”

Yan Zishu said, quietly: “The government’s Treasure Pavilion platform project. You want to prevent Yinghan Group from winning the bid.”

In the original plot, Fu Jinchi’s approach to Ji Chen, and his exploitation of Ji Chen, had been precisely the mechanism by which he had derailed Fu Weishan’s plans one by one.

Fu Jinchi smiled: “I thought you were going to say something more revealing. That part’s obvious enough, isn’t it?”

Yan Zishu continued: “So what you did today — bringing Ji Chen here to cause a scene, hoping Fu Weishan would be inadvertently outed in front of Secretary Zhu and his daughter — was partly for the spectacle, but partly hoping to offend the Zhu family enough that Secretary Zhu would withhold any further support or guidance from Fu Weishan’s side. Is that right?”

In the original plot, Fu Jinchi had then, at the moment when Ji Chen was most wounded and vulnerable, stepped in as a sympathetic older figure — comforting him, standing by his side, condemning Fu Weishan’s betrayal, packaging himself as a selfless and uncommonly decent person.

Fu Jinchi said evenly: “Go on.”

Yan Zishu said: “But even if this blind date ultimately fails, that alone probably won’t determine the final bid outcome. Procurement has oversight mechanisms for fairness. Secretary Zhu presumably wouldn’t abuse his position to manipulate the results over something personal like this. As long as Yinghan’s bid is strong enough and fortune is on their side, there’s still a path to winning.”

In the original plot, precisely for this reason, Fu Jinchi had subsequently used Ji Chen’s trusting and guileless nature to obtain access to a company computer and extract the core content of the bid documents — successfully causing Yinghan’s bid to fail, and throwing the company into a crisis of internal suspicion over the leaked materials.

Fu Jinchi nodded: “Mm. So — and then?”

“So in order to go further, you’d need to move on another front.” Yan Zishu said. “Given how close you’ve gotten to Ji Chen, and given that he is, in your words, not particularly sharp — I’m wondering if you might be planning to use him to get access to the bid documents.”

In the original plot, Fu Jinchi did achieve his goal of sabotaging the bid — but in the course of his growing contact with Ji Chen, he was gradually moved by the young man’s unconditional trust. When Yinghan subsequently investigated for an internal source, Fu Jinchi had even gone so far as to expose himself in order to shield Ji Chen from being implicated — and in doing so, handed Fu Weishan’s faction a piece of leverage they used to bring legal trouble down on him.

That wasn’t all. He had begun by trying to interfere in Fu Weishan’s relationship, and ended up falling irrecoverably in love with the same person himself.

What manner of fool was this.

Fu Jinchi’s eyes showed approval: “You really do know me well.”

Yan Zishu looked down: “No — I was guessing at most of that.”

His heartbeat had picked up slightly. In his mind, two small factions of himself were conducting a messy, inconclusive internal war.

Yan Zishu could not face this conclusion with any equanimity.

Without knowing when it had begun, his thinking had changed — had become indecisive and tangled in a way it hadn’t been before.

Samson had been born with the strength to kill a lion with his bare hands, unstoppable in battle — yet the moment he let ordinary human feeling stir in him for a woman, he exposed his weakness. His lover cut his hair, and the most powerful man in the world became a helpless creature, left for his enemies to gouge out his eyes and do with him as they pleased.

Once ordinary feeling entered the picture, even a giant became just a man.

Fu Jinchi let his smile drop. “So, Yan Zishu — having analyzed all of this at such length, what exactly are you trying to say? Asking me to stop?”

Yan Zishu was quiet for another long moment. “No. I’m only asking you to keep your distance from Ji Chen. Stop drawing him in.”

He tightened his grip slightly. Fu Jinchi felt the pressure on the back of his hand.

Yan Zishu seemed, finally, to have arrived at some kind of resolution: “Whatever you want to do… I’ll help you.”

He was, of course, lying.

The future was murky, and there were many things he couldn’t see clearly. But in saying those words, the one thing Yan Zishu knew with certainty was this: he had no wish to watch Fu Jinchi fall from any height. Love? That wasn’t quite the word. Perhaps all people were drawn toward strength, in their way — who could say for certain.

Even if the destined outcome was still the destined outcome, this particular shot could be his to fire.

If his finger was the one on the trigger, perhaps the trajectory could be deflected, even slightly, from its mark.

That would be enough.

Yan Zishu was surprised at himself for making this choice — it was not at all like him.

But his mood had begun to sink, saturated and heavy, like denim soaking through. Because by the time it came to it…

This was, frankly, a choice born of self-delusion. The person being shot at had no obligation to appreciate the consideration.

Hearing this, Fu Jinchi became cagey: “How rare. Are you genuinely willing to betray Fu Weishan?”

Yan Zishu had no explanation available for his own motivations. He only said: “Yes.”

Fu Jinchi continued: “But why would I trust you?”

Yan Zishu allowed himself a natural-looking smile. “You and I are the ones on the same boat now.”

Fu Jinchi smiled back, saying neither that he believed it nor that he didn’t.

Yan Zishu had no wish to stay longer. “CEO Fu’s car is still in the restaurant parking lot. I need to drive it back. I’ll head off.”

“One more question.” Fu Jinchi called after him. “On what grounds exactly are you asking me to keep my distance from someone else?”

Fu Jinchi tilted his head slightly, looking over at him with a faint smile. “Don’t tell me you’re jealous.”

“Think whatever you like.” Yan Zishu set his jaw, pushed the car door open, and let himself out. “That’s all I had to say.”