Night had fallen.

“Xiao Meng! Little sister! Liang Meng!”

Liang Xing was drenched in sweat, tormented by nightmares in her bed.

The scene in her dream had returned her to when she was twelve years old.

Longquan Group had just been founded, and her father and mother were busy every day, spinning like tops that never stopped.

So whenever they were occupied, they would rent out a small amusement park near the house and let Liang Xing take Liang Meng there to play.

Jiang Han was the son of Liang’s father’s driver.

At sixteen, he had already dropped out of school and spent his days drifting through society.

So his father sent him to keep an eye on the two sisters and be responsible for their safety.

At the time, Jiang Han was in the thick of his rebellious phase. His father could barely get him to do anything, but when it came to helping the boss watch over the children, he moved fast.

Liang Meng was six years old — soft and pudgy, round as a little dumpling. The moment she spotted her big brother Jiang Han, she would throw her arms wide open and demand to be carried.

Jiang Han, newly out in the world, had initially held small children in contempt.

But there was one time.

He held her just once, and after that he was hooked.

The faint, gentle milky scent on Liang Meng put him deeply at ease, like arriving inside some fairy-tale dream. It turned out that his hot-blooded, hard-edged heart still had a soft place hidden within.

Little Liang Meng had never been one to smile easily.

But as long as Jiang Han was holding her — whether he was carrying her around the streets or tickling and roughhousing with her — she would laugh like a skylark, bright and bubbling.

Trusting the Jiang family completely, Liang’s father and mother were able to pursue their careers with far greater peace of mind once they handed the two sisters over to Jiang Han.

The little amusement park became the place where Jiang Han, Liang Meng, and Liang Xing made many beautiful memories together.

Then came that one day.

Every attraction in the little amusement park had long grown stale. The sun was sinking in the west, and still no adult had come to pick them up.

Little Liang Meng wanted to play hide-and-seek.

Jiang Han and Liang Xing had no choice but to play along.

But the six-year-old had developed ideas of her own. Instead of hiding in her usual spot beneath the slide the way she always did, she had a sudden whim and slipped into an abandoned concrete drainage pipe at the edge of the amusement park.

A pale, blue-grey concrete pipe.

Back then, they were everywhere.

Their round, thick, squat shapes were forever etched deep into Liang Xing’s memory.

“Xiao Meng! Xiao Meng!! Can you hear your sister’s voice?!”

Little Liang Meng had been running so fast that she had lost one small shoe by the stream near the edge of the amusement park.

Jiang Han and Liang Xing searched frantically, their hearts burning with panic.

In the end, Liang’s father and mother, Jiang’s father, and every employee at Longquan rushed over in a flurry, and someone carried a fast-asleep Liang Meng out of the concrete pipe.

But right there on the spot, in front of dozens of people, Liang’s father delivered a ferocious slap to Liang Xing — then a sixth-grader.

That single blow knocked out one of Liang Xing’s teeth.

Blood, mixed with the iron taste of it, trickled in thin threads from the corner of her mouth.

Already shaken to the core by the terror of “losing her little sister,” Liang Xing was then publicly humiliated on top of it. She broke into a high fever the moment she got home.

It was after she recovered from that illness that the gossip of neighbours, relatives, and Longquan Group employees made her understand, once and for all, her true status — that of an adopted daughter.

“That Old Liang really had a heavy hand — split the eldest girl’s lip right open!”

“What do you women know? He lost a child — of course he hit her!”

“Still, he didn’t have to hit that hard. The eldest is still a child herself! If you ask me, it’s because she isn’t his own flesh and blood. A man couldn’t strike that hard against his own child.”

“That tongue of yours never stops flapping! What business of yours is it what goes on in the Liang household?! Mind your own affairs!”

“I just can’t bear to watch it. If it weren’t for that eldest girl, would those two Liangs even have children today…”

“Just shut that big mouth of yours right now!”

In the old days at Longquan, everyone knew why Liang’s father and mother had adopted Liang Xing.

Liang’s parents had been married five years, and Liang’s mother showed not the slightest sign of a growing belly.

People in business tend to be somewhat superstitious.

So Liang’s mother went to see a fortune teller.

The fortune teller said that Liang’s father and mother’s business would grow larger and larger in the years ahead — their fortune in wealth was so overwhelming that it had suppressed their fortune in children.

Liang’s mother, desperate for a child, gave the fortune teller a large sum of money and asked if there was any way to change her fate.

What she could not have imagined was that this single act of altering fate would alter the destiny of Longquan and everyone connected to it.

“By nature, the two of you are not fated to have children,” the fortune teller had said. “The only method is for you to adopt a child who carries a ‘sibling affinity’ in their destiny. This may, with luck, ‘bring’ a child to you. But this approach is particularly perilous. Once your fortune in children is awakened, your fortune in wealth will…”

The fortune teller was still shaking his head and clucking his tongue over the divination table when Liang’s mother had already turned and was hurrying to the orphanage.

The infant left abandoned in swaddling clothes — that was Liang Xing, the child whose destiny carried the mark of a “sibling affinity.”

“Liang Meng! Liang Meng! Where are you? Meng! Meng!”

She jolted awake from the nightmare.

Liang Xing reached up and pressed her palm to her forehead, feeling the cold sweat that had broken out in her urgency.

The scene in the dream had felt utterly real.

This nightmare — she had been having it ever since Liang’s mother struck her. Twenty years without a break.

Across the room, on the chaise longue, Jiang Han slept deeply in the dark of the night.

Liang Xing poured herself a glass of water, walked barefoot through the shadows, and made her way over to him.

She settled silently on the edge of Jiang Han’s couch, cradling the warm cup of plain water, and watched him in quiet stillness.

In the silver-white moonlight, Jiang Han’s pale and handsome profile was as sharply defined as ever, his bone structure distinct and clear.

At thirty-eight, asleep, he still looked very much like the boy he had once been.

Only his tightly curled posture and the faint, trembling furrow of his brow told Liang Xing that he, too, was being tormented by nightmares.

Inside Jiang Han’s dream.

A twenty-eight-story building was nearing the capping of its roof.

Pale blue-grey concrete cylindrical forms, each looking far newer than the ones at the amusement park, were stacked in long rows across the entire construction site of Longquan Group.

Jiang Han, a thin cigarette between his lips, was whistling and strolling with his hands in his pockets, ducking inside to wander around.

Everyone at Longquan knew that Liang’s father trusted Jiang’s father, and so Jiang Han was naturally the son of the “nine-thousand-year” man — he came and went as he pleased.

Though even setting that aside, the Longquan construction site by now had very few workers left, and the security presence was practically non-existent.

He made his way easily up the crane elevator and climbed to the top of the building.

Ducking behind a red brick column, Jiang Han overheard the final conversation between Liang’s father and mother.

“Old Liang, we need to stop! The bank called again to demand repayment!” Liang’s mother was on the verge of tears. “If we declare bankruptcy and let someone else take it over, maybe we can start over from nothing someday!”

“Start over?” The face of Liang’s father was written over with the desolation of a sun at dusk. “How do we start over? If we can’t repay the bank, the worst that happens is prison. But the loan sharks — what do we do about them? Right now, everyone out there has their eyes on us.”

“Whoever the cursed devil was who set this up — they clearly agreed that the government would develop this plot of land into a garden expo park, so how did it suddenly end up in Xicheng?”

Liang’s father sighed, tilted his head back to gaze at the bare, desolate landscape stretching into the distance, and said nothing.

He had gambled on this hand — and lost.

Calls demanding unpaid wages, calls threatening debt collection — one after another, they came pouring into Liang’s father’s flip phone.

In silence.

Then, suddenly —

Jiang Han saw Liang’s father take Liang’s mother by the hand. The two of them stood side by side, and then fell backwards.

The unfinished building had no safety measures to speak of.

Liang’s father and mother drifted out like two weightless paper cutouts into the clear blue sky, disappearing from Jiang Han’s watching eyes.

“Uncle Liang!! No!!”

Jiang Han didn’t manage to shout it in time.

Then came the sound — a heavy, hollow thud.

He stretched up on his toes and looked down from the concrete slab.

Beneath those two paper cutouts was a spreading pool of red.

The breath stopped in eighteen-year-old Jiang Han’s body.

After a long moment, he came back to himself and drove his fist into the ground with all his strength.

The rough concrete drew tiny beads of blood from his knuckles.

His regret was bottomless.

At that moment, the opening notes of Jay Chou’s Nocturne rang out, and Jiang Han, with a trembling hand, answered his new Motorola phone.

“Brother Jiang Han, those ten apartments in Xicheng — I’ve paid the down payments on all of them! It’s only been three days and the prices have already shot up hundreds of thousands! You’re incredible.”

The words from the lackey on the other end of the line made Jiang Han feel even more deeply ashamed.

Neither the Jiang father nor the Jiang son were simple people.

Jiang’s father may have served as Liang’s father’s driver, waiting on him hand and foot, bowing and scraping — but Jiang’s father was a sharp and clever man, and his idol was Li Ka-shing’s driver.

The story went that when Li Ka-shing’s driver retired, Li Ka-shing offered him twenty million Hong Kong dollars to ensure a comfortable retirement.

The driver was deeply moved, but declined, saying: “Chairman Li, it has been an honour to drive for you. I won’t take the twenty million — but I still have a net worth of five hundred million of my own.”

Li Ka-shing was taken aback. He said, “You’ve been driving for me all these years on a salary of one or two thousand Hong Kong dollars a month — how could you have several hundred million to your name?”

The driver replied: “I drove for you for thirty years. Whenever you said a stock would rise, I would buy a little. Whenever you said a neighbourhood had good potential, I would go and buy a little property there.”

Jiang’s father had always used this story to impress upon Jiang Han the importance of the circles one keeps.

“As they say — follow the bee and you’ll find flowers; follow the fly and you’ll find the toilet. Follow a millionaire and you’ll lose your millions; follow a beggar and you’ll end up begging.”

But Jiang Han had surpassed his father entirely.

Perhaps if he had simply done as his father said — been a quiet, obedient lackey — Liang’s father and mother would not have died.

“Uncle Liang!!”

In the dream, Jiang Han reached out one more time, helpless.

This time, he seemed to catch hold of something.

He had it! He had caught hold of it!

He had grabbed the black suit jacket of Uncle Liang as he fell.

But when he opened his palm again, all that remained was a black swallowtail butterfly, flying away.

Thud!!

Jiang Han jolted awake from the dream.

He was gasping, heaving breath after breath.

It was only when his eyes met Liang Xing’s gaze that he came fully back to himself.

Liang Xing quietly passed him the cup.

Jiang Han took a sip and set it aside.

Through the thin fabric of her sleeping dress, Liang Xing gently wrapped her arms around Jiang Han’s warm, trembling body.

After their marriage, the two of them slept in separate beds in this room — and yet suffered the same violent nightmares.

Jiang Han froze for a moment, then slowly extended his arms and held Liang Xing — cold sweat still condensed on her skin — giving her a gentle, comforting pat.

“It’s alright now.”

“It was only a dream.”

They comforted each other.

Outside the window, the moonlight was cold and pitiless, pale and utterly without warmth.

Just like Jiang Han and Liang Xing — neither of them could ever again possess lives that burned with radiant, dazzling heat.

The following morning.

Liang Xing woke again in her own bed.

Jiang Han had already gone downstairs.

Liang Xing sat before the dressing table and pressed blush firmly into both cheeks, working it in against the soft-lit mirror.

The rosy powder not only brightened her complexion but gave her the kind of allure one might carry after a night of intimacy.

She gave herself a twirl, and in her silk sleeping robe, made her way downstairs with unhurried ease.

At the reflective mirror by the staircase landing, Liang Xing deliberately tugged her neckline down a little further, and then, satisfied, walked toward the Xitu Lanya restaurant.