Chapter 58#

In the blink of an eye, Fu Weishan had been in custody for nearly two weeks.

Every morning in the secretarial office, the usual exchange had been replaced by: “So CEO Fu still can’t get out?”

The answer was always the same deflated refrain: “Not yet — the lawyers still haven’t heard anything.”

Fu Weishan had probably known, when he was taken away, roughly what he was facing — but had almost certainly not anticipated he’d be there this long. A gold-tier legal team was working hard to secure his release, but the tangle of relationships involved meant the process had been anything but smooth.

So it dragged on. And the Fu family’s collection of hyenas was circling.

During this time, Fu Jinchi had achieved a near-perfect disappearance.

Yinghan had run aground. Though nothing was established openly, once people came back to their senses, he was the primary suspect even by pure inference. And Third Uncle, at minimum, was certainly not in the dark. Yan Zishu had just been listening to Fu Xiaoyu calling him a tortoise who retreats into its shell in the office.

Cursing him out served no practical purpose, of course. The man in question wasn’t there to hear it.

Who knew which comfortable gap Fu Jinchi had found to watch the chaos unfold from, with private amusement.

Yan Zishu oscillated between a quick flutter of anxiety — hoping he wouldn’t see a news report about Fu Jinchi being in another car accident — and a harder, colder thought: he chose this path himself. He wanted this outcome. He has only himself to answer to. Looking at the scale and pace of Fu Jinchi’s campaign, it was becoming clear this was a rolling offensive — one thing released after the next in deliberate sequence.

He had always known, in a general way, that Fu Jinchi’s network was extensive and carefully cultivated. Without it, he couldn’t have stirred the water this thoroughly.

But that knowing had remained hazy and imprecise.

Like watching a vast shape moving under the surface — danger lurking in the depths, its outline sensed but never clearly seen.

With Yinghan Group leaderless and the negative press compounding, the formal charges of smuggling and money laundering had yet to be formally established — but it was as though someone were feeding oxygen to keep the story burning at exactly the right temperature. Exposés about Fu Weishan kept surfacing at an improbable pace.

Even eating takeout boxes at their desks over overtime, they would look up and find that another entertainment account had broken the story of some actress Fu Weishan had allegedly been involved with, left pregnant, and abandoned. Every story knocked down by the PR team was immediately replaced by another.

The pattern was consistent: as for a certain CEO surnamed Fu, I happen to have heard that he also has this piece of history — and the items kept surfacing in a steady stream, eventually extending to the broader Fu family’s conduct — extravagance, disorder, and, sprinkled in as spicy garnish, genuine documentary evidence of certain younger family members hosting private gatherings of a particular character.

Everyone in the know had quietly agreed to say nothing, and let the PR team busy itself with denials.

The public, not privy to the choreography, offered endless sardonic commentary — keeping up with all the revelations is already exhausting — and similar.

What the crowd didn’t understand was that dramatic revelations of this sort rarely emerged on this kind of schedule by accident. Someone had written the script. The audience was already inside it.

While the online spectacle played out, the offline reality was a special investigation unit taking up residence in the building — occupying conference rooms with serious faces, checking accounts, contracts, and records day after day, the atmosphere relentlessly tense. The secretarial staff handled them with painstaking care. The entire 25th floor was in disarray.

The investigators were, in fairness, reasonably courteous — but when they wanted specific documents, those documents had to be produced immediately, which required coordinating across multiple departments.

The problem was that the relevant departments were not all willing to cooperate, and there was no shortage of deflection and passing the buck. Being caught in the middle of it was the most exhausting position of all.

Director He was being worn down day by day, gradually running out of reserves. Occasionally, Yan Zishu and Helen were able to hold the line for him for a stretch.

Even so, each day was its own grind. Director He felt his hairline visibly retreating.

He sometimes wondered whether this promotion had been worth anything at all.

When HR received the first resignation letter, Helen offered a darkly humored observation: “There it is — what has to come always comes.”

Then it seemed to trigger a cascade. More people resigned, one after another. Ben eventually found his moment to move on as well.

The paperwork took some time, so the secretarial office managed a farewell dinner during a lull.

At the dinner, Ben had drunk enough to be loose about it and asked Yan Zishu directly: “You’re really not leaving?”

Helen glanced over. Yan Zishu’s expression was steady. “Once things wrap up, I probably will.”

She thought he must also be planning to resign, and said with a note of wistfulness: “That makes sense. Well then, let’s call this an early celebration for you too.”

Yan Zishu smiled and raised his glass to her. “Whatever happens to the company — I wish everyone here all the best in what comes next.”

*

As it happened, those who could leave easily were the smaller figures. Most at the middle management level and above were still watching and waiting. Whether Yinghan’s business had ever been entirely clean was a genuine question — Yan Zishu wasn’t positioned to render verdicts, but he could say that this particular investigation seemed like it was being conducted in earnest, and some people were probably going to be praying for help from above.

The teahouse again. Third Uncle. Yan Zishu studied the man’s expression and found it difficult to characterize in a few simple words — something like simultaneously furious and avaricious, with a layer of manufactured warmth carefully spread on top.

Third Uncle heard out the situation with the investigation team, settled into that expression, and reflected: “Ai — to think it’s come to this.”

This line had become, over recent weeks, the phrase Yan Zishu heard most frequently from every direction.

He gave his practiced reply: “Yes.”

“I’m getting old. Maybe I’m still thinking in the old way — fallen behind the times.” Third Uncle sighed again, with the air of a genuinely anguished elder. “I’ve always believed that blood brothers, whatever they quarrel about, share the same bones. Jinchi — that boy may have been difficult sometimes, but his heart was never bad. He and Weishan are both my late elder brother’s children. What I most wanted to see was those two brothers working together, standing united. Yet now — ai — when I try to reach him for a conversation, I can’t even get near him!”

Yan Zishu poured his tea, and said yes again — complaining along with him served no purpose, and he genuinely couldn’t reach the man either.

Failing on that front, Third Uncle tried a probe: “He sold off all his Yinghan shares. When did you find out?”

Yan Zishu’s hand paused. Outside, there was a low, muffled rumble — a sullen, pent-up sound of distant thunder.

He thought, with quiet bewilderment: I didn’t just find out late — I didn’t know about it at all.

Third Uncle seemed to perpetually believe he could deploy Yan Zishu as some kind of honeytrap for Fu Jinchi. He must be seeing clearly by now that that era was long past.

He had to admit: when it came to Fu Jinchi, he simply knew nothing.

*

Yan Zishu walked out of the teahouse into the scatter of children from a nearby primary school let out for the day. The sky was a thick grey, heavy with moisture — rain was very close. The forecast had mentioned an approaching low-pressure system, possibly bringing heavy rains over the next several days.

It was only then that a thought occurred to him: didn’t this make Fu Jinchi the shortest-serving director in Yinghan’s history?

So that was it. Fu Jinchi had gone to enormous effort to get onto the board, then immediately split his six-percent shareholding, sold it to other major shareholders without visible reluctance, and cashed out before the turbulence arrived. Third Uncle couldn’t believe he would do this — but he had. Movement below five percent didn’t require public disclosure; no one would know when or how he had arranged the private transactions. Everything completed inside the box.

Equally, you would never know what calculation had driven him, or when the planning had begun. Perhaps during your most intimate moments, he had already been thinking all of this through, and you had never seen a trace of it.

There was nothing useful to be said about any of this.

Yan Zishu exhaled, and was about to head back to the office when Director He rang — sounding exhausted, saying it looked as though the Fu Weishan bail situation, which had been close to resolution, had hit another obstacle. He hadn’t even finished explaining when another call came through — from someone he hadn’t heard from in so long he’d nearly stopped expecting it.

Ji Chen.

Seeing the name, Yan Zishu nearly slapped himself on the forehead. He quickly switched lines, and found himself confronted by the realization that he had forgotten the main characters’ storyline entirely.

“I’m sorry — I really couldn’t take it anymore, that’s why I’m calling.” Ji Chen sounded on the verge of tears, voice sticky and disjointed. “CEO Fu has been unreachable for half a month. There’s all kinds of things being said online. There keep being strange people nearby. What’s actually going on?”

“Don’t panic. One thing at a time.” Yan Zishu came down the steps. “Where are you? I’ll come to you first.”

On the way there, he reflected, and realized that since Fu Weishan had been taken in, nobody had thought to say a word to Ji Chen.

He wasn’t sure whether he should feel guilty about this. His own state of mind had genuinely not been good lately, and the thought simply hadn’t occurred to him.

Ji Chen, for his part: since the Spring Festival, with Yinghan in an unstable state and with fourth-year students needing to focus on their theses, Fu Weishan had simply stopped having him come in — the internship had, in effect, quietly ended.

But the two of them had still been living together. So from Ji Chen’s perspective: Fu Weishan had gone on a business trip and never came back. No one had given him any explanation. All he could see was a torrent of condemnation online. That was not easy.

Ji Chen was living in Fu Weishan’s city-center apartment. Yan Zishu had the company car today, and drove directly there. Half an hour later, he found a parking space in the underground garage. Ji Chen had buzzed him in from upstairs.

He took the building’s lift, watching the indicator light move floor by floor.

As the floor drew near, Yan Zishu looked away from the metal doors — and then silently swore at himself. Had he really let personal preoccupations crowd out his judgment so completely? He had walked past a discrepancy that should have been obvious:

Fu Weishan had been gone for half a month. Why was Ji Chen only calling now?

What did it mean that nobody had given Ji Chen an explanation? Fu Weishan had been taken away without coming home. The internet had been in an uproar about it. Even if Ji Chen was no longer doing his internship at Yinghan, he was a full-grown adult — why hadn’t he simply gone to the office himself and asked what was happening?

The thought passed too quickly, with no time to process further. A soft chime, and the elevator doors slid open.

All Yan Zishu had time to see was several men in the corridor outside who had the build and manner of bodyguards — large, each one wearing a hat, sunglasses, and face mask. One of them reached out to hold the door and gestured for him to step out.

He exhaled slowly, and stepped out. There were no other options.

Then he saw Ji Chen.

Ji Chen was standing between two men, his gaze avoidant, visibly anxious and guilty.

The two men — their expressions hostile — had positioned themselves to keep Ji Chen partly behind them. It was impossible to read whether this was a threat or a form of protection.

It had been a while since he’d last seen Ji Chen, but the moment Yan Zishu registered that innocent, slightly hapless expression, hovering on the edge of tears, familiarity returned immediately. This was the protagonist’s love interest he had always known. The situation was another matter entirely — most ordinary people never encountered anything like this.

“Is there something I can help you with?” Yan Zishu said.

No one answered him. The man who appeared to be in charge looked at Ji Chen and pointed toward Yan Zishu. “Is this him?”

Ji Chen’s eyes registered pain. He didn’t quite dare look at Yan Zishu directly, but he gave a definite answer.