Chapter 51#

Yan Zishu looked at the television screen, avoiding Fu Jinchi’s eyes directly. Fu Jinchi had said his eyes were different when he lied.

But beyond that, he was confident there were no other significant flaws in the performance.

He had missed Fu Jinchi’s expression in that moment, but even if he had seen it, he wouldn’t have changed his mind.

What came next was in the hands of whatever governed such things.

*

On the first day back at work after the holiday, the returning employees were still riding the buoyant mood of the season, going around in groups to pay New Year’s respects to managers of all levels and receive their red envelopes. The generous ones stood in their office doorways, holding up QR codes for people to scan.

Yan Zishu handed out a pile of red envelopes in the secretarial office — some from himself personally, some on Fu Weishan’s behalf.

People received them with cheerful faces and wished him a Happy New Year, a prosperous New Year.

He smiled back, and let some of the cheerfulness touch him.

Then he turned, and it dissipated as quickly as it had come.

The closer the bid submission deadline drew, the heavier the shadow of anxiety and unease across his thoughts.

Yan Zishu’s work efficiency had dropped considerably. Coming back to himself at one point, he noticed he had written the character 傅 on a piece of paper and drawn a question mark next to it.

His head was full of competing things — Fu Weishan’s mother at one turn, Fu Weishan at the next, a tangle and a nuisance.

In the end it always came to rest on the image of Fu Jinchi sitting in a hospital room watching television.

*

The Treasure Pavilion project opened its bids on the procurement platform on schedule.

The night before, Yan Zishu had trouble sleeping. Since the Spring Festival holiday ended and work resumed, he hadn’t found a real opportunity to see Fu Jinchi. He knew Fu Jinchi had things to deal with on his end — cooperating with the follow-up investigation into the car accident, giving statements. But if he was being honest, that was an excuse. The more central reason was that Yan Zishu couldn’t quite face him, and had been avoiding the confrontation.

He lay in bed, completely wakeful. In the early hours of the morning he finally fell asleep, then opened his eyes at three a.m.

He closed his eyes again, drifted in and out, convinced it was nearly morning — looked at the time: still barely past four.

So it went, shallow dozing with periodic waking, until at around five or six in the morning he finally sank down again and dreamed a disordered dream — in it, he asked Fu Jinchi once more whether he would be willing to leave everything behind and go.

The setting was back on the rooftop garden, the small planting beds, Fu Jinchi sitting on the bench with his legs crossed.

Fu Jinchi didn’t even look at him: “Not until the day I die.”

Yan Zishu woke again.

*

That morning he rose as usual, washed, ate breakfast, got everything in order, and arrived at the office early.

A little after ten, the head of the bid team forwarded him the announcement of the opening results with evident excitement.

The announcement had an attachment — downloading the spreadsheet showed more detail.

Exactly as anticipated: the preliminary qualification round had screened out a large number of under-qualified small companies, clearing out every player who had entered on opportunism alone.

Among those remaining: Yinghan Group had passed the qualification round and proceeded to the subsequent evaluation stage.

On the other side of the ledger: Yan Zishu found, in the attachment, the names of the three small companies Fu Jinchi had been secretly controlling. These three companies’ bids had been flagged — their commercial figures were identical, and other matching patterns were present — and they had been disqualified on suspicion of coordinated bid-rigging.

Specific pricing figures wouldn’t be made public, but in all likelihood these were the numbers he had written in Fu Jinchi’s palm.

Coordinated bid-rigging from small companies was, when all was said and done, widely understood to be a common if improper practice. These three companies had no particular profile. No one was going to look twice at them. This was something Yan Zishu had considered long in advance.

As long as no connection was established to Yinghan, Fu Jinchi could have fielded five or eight small companies to no consequence — no one would have any reason to trace who was behind them.

No scrutiny, no exposure.

He had deceived Fu Jinchi. One could say he had protected the company’s interests. But he had also destroyed Fu Jinchi’s declaration of war.

Yan Zishu closed the browser window and sat at his desk from noon to late afternoon without moving.

The day was very long and very uncomfortable.

That evening, when he was back at his apartment, he finally received a call from Fu Jinchi.

The call connected. The other end was silent for a long stretch. Only the sound of the line and breathing confirmed they were still connected.

Yan Zishu felt he should break the silence: “You saw the announcement?”

“I did.” Fu Jinchi spoke with unhurried calm, and not a trace of anger in his voice. “Do you have anything you’d like to explain?”

In television dramas, when characters had a falling-out, someone would typically say: I’m sorry — I didn’t mean to deceive you.

Yan Zishu thought: in his case, it should be: I’m sorry — I did mean to deceive you.

Of course, he couldn’t say the second part aloud. He could only say: “I’m sorry.”

Light as air. Useless.

Yan Zishu had prepared himself for many possibilities: fury, interrogation, sardonic needling — he would have accepted any of them.

He thought he had been able to anticipate every possible reaction. What he hadn’t anticipated was that Fu Jinchi would say nothing further whatsoever, and hang up directly.

Yan Zishu set down his phone and drifted aimlessly around the apartment, gaze settling on the money-wort plant sitting on the windowsill.

The small white ceramic pot was round and pleasing. The leaves were a guileless, unbothered green.

Being a plant wouldn’t be so bad. You’d never have to participate in human scheming.

Let this be the end of it, then.

If he was forced to evaluate his own motivation, Yan Zishu thought that somewhere between noble and contemptible — foolish was the most accurate description. Foolish. Acting on nothing but his own wishful thinking.

But when he had watched that accident unfold on the mountain road, Yan Zishu had genuinely been afraid.

He didn’t know what had veered off track to cause it. It hadn’t been in the plot.

Yet it happened. And Yan Zishu was afraid that next time, Fu Jinchi wouldn’t walk away with the same extraordinary luck.

At the same time, he had been overtaken by a deeper helplessness: when Fu Jinchi had sensed he was being followed, he had said nothing, dumped Yan Zishu on the roadside, and dealt with it alone — rather than ask for so much as a word of help. Wasn’t that its own kind of foolishness? Its own brand of wishful thinking?

Fu Jinchi thought he would never be thrown off-balance by caring too much. He was wrong. If only Yan Zishu could have made him understand — if there had been any opportunity to say it — he would have said: I was completely at sea. I had lost all composure.

*

In the days that followed, the company ran without incident, everything moving in its usual channels.

The bid team leader watched the final evaluation results with close attention, refreshing the government website dozens of times each day, even knowing it was too early. Fu Weishan was expectant, and had sent a red envelope in the project group’s chat — for good luck, he said, and thanked everyone for their hard work; he’d send a bigger one when the contract came through. The replies below were a stream of excited thank-yous.

Inexplicable confidence. Everyone seemed to feel the outcome was already secured.

During this period, Fu Jinchi didn’t appear at the company once.

No one particularly noticed.

As for Yan Zishu — after the car accident, he had been quietly observing Fu Weishan’s reactions at the office. From Fu Weishan’s subtly unnatural manner — an excitement poorly suppressed — he concluded that Fu Weishan had probably not been the one who gave the order, but that the actual organizer had almost certainly told him about it afterward.

The reasoning was clear: on New Year’s Eve, Fu Weishan had acted entirely normally, evidently with no foreknowledge of what was about to happen. And when news of the accident reached him, his reaction had been one of satisfaction tempered by restraint — not the usual pattern of wearing his schadenfreude openly on his face. Just that barely-contained pleasure.

The sight of it left Yan Zishu with a particular distaste.

As a chief assistant, developing personal feelings of this intensity was a sign that his tenure here was genuinely drawing to a close.

With that awareness, when the time came to inform Fu Weishan that Yinghan Group’s bid had been disqualified, watching him recoil in shock and disappointment, brows knitting, thunder gathering — Yan Zishu felt, despite himself, a small thread of satisfaction.

Yinghan Group had passed the qualification round, received the highest evaluation score, and then lost — because of several complaint letters submitted during the public announcement period.

“This is the situation,” he explained. “We had been listed as the intended winning bidder. But during the announcement period, other bidders filed formal complaints alleging that certain qualifications in our technical bid had been deliberately misrepresented. On that basis, the entire technical bid was declared invalid…”

Fu Weishan’s eyes went cold. He gave an order: “Whoever was responsible for that section — get them in here.”

His fury was entirely foreseeable. There was nothing more unbearable than winning and then having it taken away.

The bid team leader stood in a cold sweat: “The qualifications in question — if I’m being completely candid — were a little on the borderline. Two or three of them. Nothing that should have been disqualifying, normally. One, though, had genuinely expired recently, and due to certain — circumstances, the renewal hadn’t been processed in time. We had thought, since we were already—”

Fu Weishan cut in sharply: “Expired means an error was made. What circumstances?”

The team leader thought privately: The circumstances are that too many people your family installed in various positions created all the administrative complications. But I can hardly say that out loud.

The more important question remained unspoken too: how had another bidder identified with such precision exactly which qualifications had gaps?

That wasn’t something ordinary competitive pressure would explain.

He could only drop the hint indirectly: “That’s our internal assessment. The question now is what the official determination criteria will actually be, and whether — if we could find appropriate channels to get some advance clarity on that — there’s a more targeted approach to the appeal.”

Under the relevant regulations, a party that had been flagged during the announcement period had three days from receipt of the formal complaint to file an appeal.

Three days was, by any measure, urgent.

The team leader’s reasoning was sound. The combined complaint letters, spanning well over ten pages, had been prepared with obvious care and covered an array of details. With limited time to respond, the best chance of a successful appeal would be to work through channels — find someone who could point them toward what mattered most.

Reluctantly, Fu Weishan thought of Miss Zhu.

Despite how badly that had ended, company interests outweighed his dignity. He swallowed his pride and reached out, asking if she could help.

Miss Zhu’s reply was polite and regretful: “My father’s work — even as his family, I wouldn’t feel right intervening.”

Three days later, the bid team submitted the most comprehensive appeal statement they could manage, and filed it into the system.

They waited anxiously.

The result came back: appeal denied.

The second-ranked competitor was awarded the contract.

This result sent morale, which had been running high, crashing. Scrolling back through the project group’s chat history, it was painful to read — Fu Weishan sending a red envelope for good luck, everyone congratulating each other on how well things were going, absolutely certain they were going to win. All of it now turned to hollow retroactive noise.

Two days later, Fu Weishan managed a perfunctory don’t lose heart, and the group chat immediately flooded with loyalty-expressing emoji from below, as everyone collectively helped find a way to save face.

Not that anyone had genuinely stopped losing heart. It was simply the art of being a leader — when failure was final, all you could do was display generosity.

In reality, Fu Weishan’s mood had been oppressively low for days, and anyone actually in his vicinity knew better than to provoke it.

One afternoon he called Yan Zishu into the office. The same aggrieved expression as before, but now with something darker, something more like festering anger.

Seeing that look, Yan Zishu already had a sense of what was coming.

“CEO Fu. You wanted to see me?”

“Listen to this.”

Fu Weishan said it coldly, then turned on his phone’s speaker.

The voice on the recording was slightly distorted, but recognizably Fu Jinchi’s. One clip ended and the next began automatically.

“Think of it as a lesson. Rather than blaming others for lodging complaints, it might be worth asking why your submissions weren’t airtight to begin with. Next time, remember not to leave openings for people to use against you.”

“How did I find out? Does that matter?”

“Fine, yes — I enjoy burning bridges. Here’s a tip: you might want to take a closer look at the people around you.”

“Who? If I tell you, you might not believe me anyway. Look into it yourself.”

“If you can’t figure it out, come back and ask me.”

Fu Weishan looked at Yan Zishu with examining eyes — as though trying to see straight through him, to find the evidence he was looking for.

“You and Fu Jinchi have been close lately, haven’t you.”

“There’s no need to look.” Yan Zishu closed his eyes for a moment. “It was me. I’ll suspend myself and accept the investigation.”