Chapter 50#

Yan Zishu turned his face and let his tone go light. “Doesn’t living like this wear you out?”

Fu Jinchi said only: “It does. What can you do about it.”

Yan Zishu asked: “Have you ever thought about putting everything down and walking away?”

Fu Jinchi didn’t answer. He appeared to find the question tedious.

Yan Zishu continued: “You don’t like coming back to the family estate. You don’t enjoy dealing with these people. You’re an adult — you could simply choose not to come back, never see any of them again. You have your own business, you’re doing well, you’re perfectly capable of a good life. You could even leave this city entirely and go somewhere else entirely if you wanted…”

Saying all this was futile. He knew it even as the words came out, as if speaking of their own accord.

Yan Zishu knew that everyone had their own plot, and he had never let a single hint of it slip to anyone in this world. Somewhere deep inside, there was a fear of being swept along by fate. But in this moment he wanted to try — to see whether he could drag Fu Jinchi, by force, out of the trajectory of his destined disaster.

He even thought: if Fu Jinchi, in some uncharacteristic fit of something, actually said yes — he was probably capable of dropping everything and leaving with him.

Even if it meant, as in some film, escaping one catastrophe only to be struck by another. At least it would be a choice they had made themselves.

But he also knew that Fu Jinchi would have to be genuinely out of his mind to suddenly find it in himself to relinquish a vendetta in the middle of a mountain road.

Letting go was easy to say. Far harder to mean.

Sure enough, Fu Jinchi said, with flat calm: “Yan Zishu. You’re supposed to be an intelligent person. How are you capable of saying something this naive.”

Addressing someone by their full name always carries something in it — a kind of accusation, or a warning.

Fu Jinchi was, in fact, suppressing a surge of irritation.

He called Yan Zishu intelligent often — half as a kind of teasing, but half because it was true: the man knew his limits. He knew when not to overstep. Never told people what was none of their business.

Now, all of a sudden, Yan Zishu had started lecturing him.

Mildly disappointing.

The mountain road at midnight was empty and still, darkness ahead. Fu Jinchi kept his focus and turned through another bend.

But Yan Zishu was not someone who left things half-finished. He knew how to stay in his place — and when he had genuinely decided to step out of it, he may as well step all the way out: “If you were willing — I could resign. We could go somewhere else, a different city…”

Fu Jinchi decelerated, applied the brakes, pulled over, and unlocked the doors.

“Get out,” Fu Jinchi said.

Yan Zishu was briefly stunned.

Fu Jinchi repeated: “Out.”

Yan Zishu said nothing, looked at him once, and got out of the car.

The red tail lights disappeared around the mountain. He had been left by Fu Jinchi on the side of a winding mountain road — no village ahead, no shelter behind.

Yan Zishu looked around. The mountain wind was cold. At this hour, in this place, the road stretched blankly in both directions — sheer cliff face on one side, a drop on the other. Even the ride-hailing app showed no drivers within five kilometers. No heaven to call on, no earth to appeal to.

He gave a wry smile, shook his head, and buttoned up his coat. He opened the navigation app and began walking in the direction of the base of the mountain, hoping to reach a road with some traffic, or to find someone willing to give him a lift.

His luck was, evidently, not at its best. Though engines did approach in the distance, by the time he registered them, a white Xiali was already racing past him down the mountain at a speed that left no room for a conversation. Shortly after, another, same story — moving too fast to flag.

Yan Zishu suddenly stopped.

Something had been wrong about those two cars.

…

In the rearview mirror, Fu Jinchi watched the headlights behind him with cold eyes.

He had detected them some time earlier — a subtle light and sound telling him someone was following at a distance.

So he had put Yan Zishu out of the car.

The driver of the red Xiali apparently had no regard for the dangers of a mountain road, and closed the gap at high speed. First driving parallel with him, then, when a white Xiali caught up and joined them, both cars moved to box him in.

Fu Jinchi’s expression was dark; his gaze was steady. He pressed the accelerator further down.

The two cars stayed with him, quickly overtook, and positioned themselves — one on the left, one in front — the lead car snaking back and forth in a Z-pattern, toying with him the way a cat toys with a mouse, making it nearly impossible to break out in any direction.

An ordinary driver in this situation would have been unnerved enough that the interference with their driving could cause a collision with the barrier — a crash into the mountain.

Below the barriers: steep terrain, sparse vegetation, high and sheer.

Fu Jinchi’s expression was contemptuous. He hit the accelerator harder. Rather than evading, he drove straight at the car in front.

Bang.

The driver in front had apparently not anticipated encountering someone even more reckless than themselves. There was a shudder through both vehicles, then a rear collision.

A second impact. A third.

The driver swore under his breath with considerable feeling.

Mountain roads demanded complete concentration for every bend. As the next sharp curve approached and the other car came at him again, Fu Jinchi turned the wheel hard without hesitation — a suicidal move — and drove into the car on his left.

The left car’s nose was forced sideways; it tried to push him against the barrier but took another violent blow.

Around the bend, tires squealing, all three vehicles spun and slid through multiple full rotations before losing all control and crashing into each other.

The mountain erupted with a tremendous roar.

*

Yan Zishu began to run.

He had finally understood what had been wrong about those two Xialis — their plates had been blank. Cloned plates on both.

He tore open his coat and ran flat out along the road, a thin sweat breaking through his clothes. He heard the enormous sound from ahead, and the understanding hit him like a blow; he ran harder, until his breathing was ragged and his lungs burned.

His eyes had adjusted to the dark, and making out the road was no problem. On the ground, tire marks multiplied, twisting into strange, tangled patterns — like fuses pointing him toward where it had happened.

What met him left him unable to speak.

A section of distorted railing had been compressed for a short stretch, and then roughly three to four meters of it had simply vanished — knocked away, fallen into the valley below. The gap was enormous, like a gaping mouth, and several tire tracks ran directly into it.

But Fu Jinchi’s car was still there. Every window shattered, the front end buckled. It had slid diagonally and wedged itself in the break in the railing — but half the car had already passed beyond the edge and was hanging over the drop, rocking faintly, held in place by nothing but the torn stump of railing and whatever contact that produced: a fragile triangle, maintaining a balance that could dissolve at any moment.

Seeing this, Yan Zishu didn’t even notice his own body was shaking badly.

If he himself had been the one in danger, he doubted he would have been this afraid.

Right now, he was frightened in a way that was simply not like him.

Under the compulsion of pure will, he kept his legs from giving out, stumbled forward, and tried to stabilize the car with his hands. But what could a human body do against this, and Yan Zishu was even terrified that calling out Fu Jinchi’s name would send sound waves through the air that would push the wreckage past its tipping point and send it over the edge. As he got close enough, his mind caught up belatedly: right, he should first check where the person was.

The airbag on the driver’s side had deployed, but the driver’s seat appeared to be empty.

Where was Fu Jinchi?

Yan Zishu reached out to grab the railing, then pulled his hand back sharply. He looked down over the edge. The darkness of the drop made his head swim — not that it was surprising; accident scenes always looked like this. There seemed to be a red car that had gone down. It was hard to make out clearly.

He lost his sense of time. It could have been several minutes, or it could have been a few dozen seconds — until two hands pushed under his armpits and pulled him back from the broken railing, away from the gap: “I’m still alive. Don’t stand there. It’s not safe.”

“One went down. One drove off. I climbed out through the window.”

Yan Zishu was pulled backward two steps, then found his footing, and let out a breath.

Controlling the trembling in his muscles, he turned and put his arms around Fu Jinchi, and patted his back slowly — in what was, technically, a gesture of comfort, though not a particularly practiced one.

Everything that might have been said reduced itself to this: “As long as you’re all right.”

Fu Jinchi lowered his head, buried his face in the crook of Yan Zishu’s neck, and kissed him there. Then let out a soft, strange laugh.

Yan Zishu immediately let go. Even through the winter coat, the warmth of the contact remained.

Fu Jinchi had a cut on his head; thin lines of blood tracked down his face. Of course — an accident this severe, and still walking away — it wasn’t possible to come through unscathed.

In that instant, the roiling confusion in Yan Zishu’s mind reorganized itself into clarity.

What needed to happen next sorted itself into a sequence — one, two, three, four, five — and arrived in his head in order. He was already reaching for his phone when the injured man beside him, apparently untroubled, pushed his hands into his coat pockets and said, almost idly: “You told me to put everything down. Tell me — how exactly does one do that?”

“Don’t talk.” Yan Zishu steered him to the side of the road. “I’m calling the police now.”

He called an ambulance as well. Fu Jinchi leaned against a tree in silence and watched Yan Zishu settle back into composure and take charge. The precise, economical language as Yan Zishu gave the location and the facts over the phone. Whatever loss of control there had been just before was already gone — as briefly present as a night-blooming flower.

It was enough to make you wonder whether it had appeared at all.

That composure — mountains falling in front of him without a change in expression — landed differently when Fu Jinchi was the one observing it.

He knew this was just how Yan Zishu was. He could manage any sudden situation because every should and shouldn’t had a predetermined procedure inside him. The phrase panic in proportion to love had never been written for someone like this.

Only someone whose emotions had overrun their reason could truly lose their footing.

Fu Jinchi even found himself regretting it, a little. This person’s capacity for feeling was, in the end, so sparse — gathering drop by drop to this point, and still only a very small cup.

*

The first day of the new year passed in a flurry of activity. An ambulance took Fu Jinchi to the hospital emergency room, and from his bed he cooperated with the police to give a statement. Traffic officers and a rescue team went to the scene. The driver who had gone down the cliff had died at the scene.

As for the white Xiali — there were insufficient security cameras along the mountain road, but between the tire marks at the scene, the cloned plate details, and surveillance footage from nearby areas, tracking down the driver was not particularly difficult.

And so it proved — forensic capabilities had advanced considerably in recent years, and fleeing the scene of a crime was no longer as easily achieved as it had once been. The driver maintained, however, that he and the red car driver had simply agreed between themselves to waylay a luxury vehicle for the purpose of robbery. No one had instructed them. There was no one behind it.

An unsurprising claim.

Fu Jinchi did not contest it.

Without further breakthroughs, this would probably be where the case closed.

Yan Zishu asked the officer who took his statement about this, and was told the white Xiali driver would be referred to the judiciary for standard processing.

The accident left Fu Jinchi with multiple contusions and impact injuries throughout his body, a concussion, and two stitches along his temple. The doctor said that with proper care, no significant scarring would remain — and at worst, once healed, could be treated. Given the circumstances, this outcome was nothing short of extraordinary luck.

The family physician arranged for Fu Jinchi to be transferred to a familiar private hospital.

As it turned out, the private hospital was an excellent choice — with strict admission protocols, it kept out most of the people who had heard about the accident and wanted to show up and look. Yan Zishu gave Fu Weishan a cover story about leaving the estate early, and in practice spent the remainder of the holiday at the hospital caring for Fu Jinchi.

Caring for was something of an overstatement. The nurses did everything, and did it thoroughly, which justified the fees. The private ward was arranged like a hotel room, and there was an unexpected quality of unhurried ease to the days.

The evening before they were due to return to work, Fu Jinchi was holding a remote control and turning through channels. Yan Zishu came and sat beside him.

Fu Jinchi’s gaze shifted to him: “Starting tomorrow you won’t be coming, I suppose?”

Yan Zishu made a sound of agreement. Then, after a moment, he took Fu Jinchi’s hand and wrote a complex string of numbers in his palm.

Fu Jinchi looked down without speaking. The writing hand withdrew. He closed his fingers loosely over the warmth remaining in his palm.

“That’s the commercial bid price for Yinghan.” Yan Zishu’s voice was low.

“If all you want to achieve is bid-rigging, that’s enough.”

“If you want to make it more convincing, you already know the brand and model of the company’s printer.”

“I still want to tell you not to do this. But if you’re determined — I’ll help you. As I said.”