Chapter 53#

Whether a man’s words could be trusted was still open to debate. What was not open to debate was that Fu Jinchi’s performances were never to be taken at face value.

Yan Zishu had made one miscalculation, and it was forgetting this.

If a mutual attraction could be a passing game, why not a rupture and a breakup?

Fu Jinchi had never truly considered letting go of the things he wanted.

To think back on it: the moment Fu Jinchi had uncovered those small hidden maneuvers of Yan Zishu’s, everything small and incongruous about him suddenly snapped together.

The perpetual emptiness of the apartment. Personal belongings so minimal they were barely there. Asked why, Yan Zishu would say enough is sufficient — never investing in property, never building up any real savings. Because Yan Zishu had been planning to run all along.

But what Fu Jinchi cared about wasn’t the purpose behind this — that was ordinary thinking, how ordinary people processed things.

The problem was that Fu Jinchi was not an ordinary person. His first response was simply: How does he dare.

Yan Zishu had been secretly engineering an escape route behind his back.

New grievances layered over old ones — there was no possibility of tolerating this slipping out of his grasp.

When he wanted a person, it was best to obtain them. If he couldn’t have them, the next option was to destroy them — and then obtain what remained.

That was Fu Jinchi’s philosophy.

What followed: Fu Jinchi didn’t actually tell Fu Weishan about the Yan Xin identity. That was a secret he intended to keep for himself alone.

He only passed Fu Weishan the results of the asset investigation in a light, offhand way, and watched with full satisfaction as Fu Weishan erupted.

Fu Jinchi’s most developed craft was stirring the pot and embellishing facts.

He was exceptionally skilled at it.

*

After several rounds of internal audit, nothing particularly damning had been found on Yan Zishu’s side. The thinness of his personal accounts, and the transfer of assets abroad, were suspicious — but they fell outside the scope of company matters. Looking closely enough, some work missteps could always be found; this was natural, the more you did, the more you got wrong. But people who had once been on the receiving end of his authority, or who had grievances, now used the opportunity to come forward with their complaints.

Collective opinion shapes its own verdicts: whether any of it constituted real evidence was one question, but in Fu Weishan’s mind the judgment had already been delivered. He regarded Yan Zishu as a traitor and an enemy, and would neither trust him nor employ him again — and used all of the above as his pretext for pressing him toward a resignation under duress.

At the height of his anger, Fu Weishan was further egged on by Fu Xiaoyu, who said something to the effect of: how could cousin let someone like Yan simply resign on his own terms? That was far too lenient. Tomorrow he might just walk into a competitor and draw a high salary, living comfortably without a shred of consequence.

This inflamed things further. So Fu Weishan did something particularly vindictive: he put word out through the industry, announcing that this person had been dismissed for betrayal of his employer, that there were questions about his conduct, and that anyone considering hiring him should think carefully first.

The result was that most companies who had been considering reaching out to him quietly backed away.

In the short term, Yan Zishu would find the doors in this city largely closed. More broadly, unless he changed fields entirely, his professional reputation would bear the mark of this for some time.

In reality, Fu Xiaoyu’s intentions hadn’t changed at all.

His idea was to leave Yan Zishu no options, so he would have nothing to do but come back to be handled as Fu Xiaoyu saw fit.

After some time had passed and Fu Xiaoyu judged the moment right, he even went to the apartment address registered in the company’s files, hoping to see how far Yan Zishu had fallen. He knocked for a long time without any response from inside.

Without any working brain to tell him: this had been a company-subsidized apartment. The person left when he resigned.

Yan Zishu didn’t even know he’d come to perform this little spectacle.

For practicality’s sake, Yan Zishu had moved somewhere nearby — a small residential estate not far from the old apartment, the buildings old but well-maintained inside. He had quietly settled in with minimal notice, and almost no one knew where he was now.

He didn’t feel particularly low, all things considered. What he hadn’t expected was that Ben was still passing him information.

The Yan faction appeared to have taken firm and permanent root.

Even Yan Zishu was surprised by the loyalty.

Ben maintained contact through the private app, quietly feeding him information about the company, and keeping him updated on Fu Weishan’s latest efforts to blacklist him: “Is this going to be a real problem for you? What are you going to do? Move to another city?”

Yan Zishu heard it all without any particular reaction. He wasn’t planning to look for a new job, so he wasn’t in any rush. “I’ll sit tight. Take a rest for a while.”

Ben was worried he was putting on a brave face: “How did it come to this with CEO Fu? Is there really no room for a reconciliation?”

Yan Zishu thought privately: cannon fodder outcomes were not something to hold much hope for. “It’s complicated. I’ll tell you about it properly another time.”

Ben considered this, then said: “Maybe it’s actually better to change places. You don’t know how chaotic the company is right now.”

Yan Zishu asked, as if he didn’t know: “Really? What happened so suddenly?”

With Fu Jinchi openly confronting Fu Weishan directly, the veil of pretended civility had been torn — a declaration of open war.

“Oh please, what’s so sudden about it? You know what the boss’s family situation is like. Now you’re gone — even I’m thinking about leaving.”

Ben’s words were not an exaggeration.

*

In Ben’s view, the storm had started after Yan Zishu left.

Though the signs had been building since the shareholders’ meeting last year, when the boss’s brother joined the board. That one had trouble written all over him from the start — arrogant, disruptive, nothing good had followed. Ben had thought things might settle back down when Fu Jinchi stopped coming to the office around the holidays.

Then Yan Zishu was shown out, and Fu Jinchi came back — and now every day it seemed like the two of them were fighting about something.

What was known was that Yinghan Group’s board was splitting along factional lines in a most turbulent fashion.

Every branch office and every department was caught up in it — some trying to stay neutral, some scrambling to pick a side.

Based on Ben’s account, Yan Zishu amused himself by sketching out the board on an imaginary chessboard: Fu Weishan’s side, the protagonist’s camp; Third Uncle and Fu Jinchi’s side, the antagonist’s camp — the latter apparently gaining ground, though even within the antagonist camp there were divisions and undercurrents of betrayal.

Yan Zishu knew that everything he had gone through was, by any objective measure, merely a minor episode in the story. As the protagonist and the villain moved into open confrontation, the truly consequential plot was beginning to unfold — and its intensity was something no disturbance a minor figure like himself could generate would ever match.

He was, at most, a fuse.

With a click, the white queen knocked the black king over, which rolled off the board and onto the floor.

Yan Zishu bent down, retrieved it, wiped it clean, and set it on the corner of the board. Then checked the time and concluded it was probably time to start dinner.

He used this king to represent Fu Jinchi. Something about the small crown kept reminding him of the man dressed up like an elaborate peacock.

But the battles on the chessboard, for now, had nothing to do with the idle person he had become.

He could only investigate, in the physical sense, the kind of battles you played out with plastic pieces.

In the company flat before, it had only ever been a place to sleep, and he had rarely bought anything he didn’t strictly need. Now, in this small one-bedroom rental, perhaps because he was for once not perpetually running at full tilt, he had acquired a few things with no practical function.

The chess set had come from the small bookshop at the estate entrance. He had stopped in front of the display window for a while, and the owner had emerged to pitch him. “There’s a children’s enrichment class upstairs. Do you have children? Developing interests and building intelligence!”

Yan Zishu said: “I’m not married.”

The owner persisted: “Adults can learn too! It’s cultivating the mind. Not difficult.”

Yan Zishu looked at the dusty packaging: “Not selling well, are you?”

The owner dropped into unexpected candor: “Too niche. The class upstairs is relocating — every set I sell counts!”

It wasn’t expensive. Yan Zishu smiled and scanned the payment code.

He had studied the instructions, and the extent of what he’d mastered was knowing where the pieces went at the start of the game. He had to admit, even to himself, that he was not omnipotent.

Or perhaps he should also acknowledge: outside of work, he genuinely didn’t know what to do with his time.

And once he was idle, Yan Zishu found pointless thoughts multiplying.

Whether, at some moment in all of this, he had felt something like regret. Whether, in making the choice he had made, there had been some element of anger toward Fu Jinchi underneath it. And whether that anger existed because of a foolish, lingering hope — hoping that Fu Jinchi would need him, would be willing to stand with him come what may — which had then gone unfulfilled.

One afternoon he went back to the bookshop, having been given a loyalty card by the owner.

The shop had an unassuming frontage, but was larger inside. Before he even got to the door, a small girl of five or six called out and asked to borrow his phone. Her mother had told her to wait after class until an adult came, but no one had arrived.

Yan Zishu dialed the number she had memorized, which turned out to be disconnected, and brought the child inside the shop to wait. With time on his hands, he accompanied her through the children’s section, and found that many familiar titles existed in this world too.

He bought her Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It felt like greeting an old friend.

The little girl’s eyes lit up. Yan Zishu sat on a small stool, spread the book on his knee, and read aloud in his steady, unhurried voice. She mostly couldn’t follow the words — she was more interested in the illustrations. “The Duchess looks like my grandmother.”

Yan Zishu pointed at the Cheshire Cat, with its smile that suggested and concealed. “This cat looks like a friend of mine.”

“That’s the Cheshire Cat.” The child giggled.

He came back to himself, and silently reproached his own inability to let it go.

Looking at everything and seeing Fu Jinchi. Fu Jinchi had become a kind of spell, the net of his own making that kept tightening.

After about half an hour, the child’s guardian finally arrived, offered thanks, and led the little girl away, the book tucked under her arm.

Yan Zishu bought a copy of Alice for himself and carried it home.

He sat on a bench in the small square nearby, turning the pages, and had gotten through about half when a shadow blocked the light.

Fu Xiaoyu’s face, pleased with itself, soured his mood instantly: “Well well, what are you doing sitting out here? Hit the wall, have you?”

Fu Xiaoyu had come looking for him before and found nobody home. This time he had driven by and spotted Yan Zishu, looking solitary on the street, almost by chance.

Yan Zishu glanced up at him, then suddenly smiled. “Haven’t you had enough of your little surveillance operation?”

“You—!” Fu Xiaoyu’s mouth ran ahead of him. “Don’t get smart! Look at the state of you, you pathetic stray!”

“I’m out of a job, which means I’d suggest not coming to provoke me. It’s not very wise.” Yan Zishu let the smile cool by degrees. “When I was working at Yinghan, I gave you some latitude because of who your father was. Now that I’m not — I have considerably more options for dealing with you.”

“Big talk. Try something if you’ve got the nerve.” Fu Xiaoyu didn’t believe a word of it. “Let’s see if you dare — or whether my father crushes you with one hand. You’ll be on your knees before long—” He reconsidered and rephrased: “— begging my father’s forgiveness.”

Yan Zishu almost laughed out loud. “So young Master Fu still needs to go crying to daddy. Please, go right ahead.”

He got up to leave. Fu Xiaoyu followed him, mouth running, then suddenly called out: “You just wanted to climb higher by attaching yourself to Fu Jinchi, that’s all. Take a look at yourself. You think he actually sees anything in you? He’s a lunatic! You think you can handle him?” He rolled his eyes. “You know you’re heading nowhere good with him — why not come to me instead…”

This was too much noise. Yan Zishu turned around. “Where exactly does your confidence come from?”

Fu Xiaoyu: “Go ask around the circles who I am.”

“I have, actually.” Yan Zishu said, with cool disinterest. “Lots of people say you’re particularly fast.” Before Fu Xiaoyu could explode, he continued: “You see — if you didn’t come bothering me, I would have no reason to say things like that. Do you want to hear more?”

…

That evening he was watching television alone when his phone rang. One look at the name on the screen, and Yan Zishu’s expression dimmed slightly.

Fu Jinchi’s voice: “What happened with Fu Xiaoyu this time? He’s come back throwing a fit about needing to deal with you.”

Yan Zishu answered politely: “A chance encounter with something unpleasant. I find it most annoying.”

Fu Jinchi seemed to be suppressing a laugh: “He wants me to find out where you’ve rented, so you’ll have nowhere to live.”

Yan Zishu felt a strange echo — a momentary return to the days when Fu Jinchi had passed him information in secret.

But this time, he suspected Fu Jinchi might be favoring Fu Xiaoyu’s side, trying to force him out for the sake of the alliance with Third Uncle.

He had actually prepared for this before moving in: the lease was formally drawn up, with a proper copy registered on the official housing authority platform. If the landlord were pressured to break it, Yan Zishu could collect a substantial penalty fee. But that wasn’t the point. What he felt, in this moment, was a clear and steady irritation.

He found Fu Jinchi’s descent into acting on behalf of this kind of person disappointing.

“You and Fu Xiaoyu can discuss that with my landlord directly.” Yan Zishu said. “Have her come negotiate with me.”

Fu Jinchi tried a different angle: “I have an empty place. You could move in temporarily—”

“No.” Yan Zishu said. “If you want me out, say it plainly. Mr. Fu operating through these back channels — that’s beneath you.”