Zhang Fang’s words left a deep impression on Zhu Yun — or rather, planted a seed of unease in her heart.

Zhu Yun went to Li Xun and tried to probe, sideways and obliquely, about how Dong Siyang intended to find Hou Ning and what he planned to do once he had him. Li Xun’s responses were halfhearted and dismissive, too indifferent to engage properly.

The Playboy project was moving fast. On one hand, Li Xun was producing enormous amounts of code every single day. On the art side, standards had improved dramatically with Tian Xiuzhu’s involvement. The originally sluggish Guo Shijie, now energized by the presence of someone he admired, was throwing himself into the work as if he’d had an injection of something powerful — painting every day with furious speed, the progress remarkable.

In the past, when Li Xun was entirely absorbed in a project, Zhu Yun would never have disturbed him. But this time she made an exception. Every few days she went and found him, wearing him down with patient persistence in her attempts to get information.

Li Xun’s temper when working was notoriously volatile. The first time or two he managed to brush her off with minimal effort, but after enough repetitions he started losing his temper outright — slamming the desk, shouting reprimands, stopping just short of flipping the table over.

Still Zhu Yun didn’t give up. No matter how he tried to deflect, she kept asking.

By the end, even Li Xun’s temper had been worn smooth. His fists kept finding nothing but cotton. What could he do — what could he actually do to her?

“Can’t you go ask Dong Siyang?” Li Xun said, at the absolute limit of his patience.

“I can’t reach him,” Zhu Yun said.

Dong Siyang hadn’t appeared at the company for several days running in order to track down Hou Ning, which only deepened Zhu Yun’s worry.

“Get back to your own desk — don’t you have work to do?”

“Let’s resolve this first.”

Li Xun shoved his keyboard away in frustration and pulled out a cigarette.

Zhu Yun asked him for roughly the twenty-thousandth time: “What is Director Dong’s plan for finding Hou Ning? And what’s going to happen after he finds him?”

Li Xun gave his twenty-thousand-and-first reply: “I. Don’t. Know.”

Zhu Yun: “Have you even tried calling Dong Siyang?”

“No.”

“You haven’t even tried.”

Li Xun slammed the desk. “Are you done?!”

His voice had grown increasingly vicious. Zhu Yun stood her ground.

“I need you to call him and get a clear answer.”

“All you ever worry about is things that don’t matter!”

“Who says they don’t matter?”

Their voices climbed higher and higher. The three remaining people in the office all turned to watch.

Li Xun sat in his chair; Zhu Yun stood. She was wearing heels, which gave her at least a slight advantage in presence. Then Li Xun stood up too, and her heels no longer quite cut it.

“This is your last warning.” Li Xun’s voice dropped lower as he fixed his eyes on Zhu Yun. “I’m in the final stretch. If you want to talk, fine — give me three days.”

Zhu Yun held his gaze without flinching. “If this isn’t sorted out first, you won’t be finishing any final stretch.”

After hearing that, Li Xun clenched his jaw, slowly closed his eyes, letting his fury mount by degrees. Just as the volcano looked ready to erupt, Zhu Yun said one more thing —

“It was like this last time.”

The lava held back for one more second.

Li Xun looked into the eyes of the woman in front of him. Whether it was because of the argument, her eyes were flushed with feeling, urgent with something she was trying to make him understand — things she hadn’t yet said aloud.

It was like this last time.

You’d get volatile and everyone would let you be volatile. You’d go to pieces and everyone would give you room. You’d go silent and no one would press you… And then by some twist of fate, six years were lost for nothing.

When there had been another way.

Li Xun looked away.

Zhu Yun said, “The project will always be there — if this one doesn’t work out, we do the next one. But people can’t be undone. Do you still remember what Teacher Lin told you?”

You must walk the straight path.

Li Xun flung the documents in his hand hard onto the desk, grabbed his cigarette, and walked out of the office. Zhu Yun went after him. As he walked, Li Xun said, “Dong Siyang said before he left that he knows what he’s doing.”

Zhu Yun: “Does his definition of ‘knowing what he’s doing’ match a normal person’s?”

Li Xun: “…”

Zhu Yun looked at him with a furrowed brow. “You didn’t hand things over to Dong Siyang at first because you were worried he’d go too far, weren’t you.”

Li Xun’s expression was grave. He leaned against the window frame and said, “I wanted him to go a little far.”

“What?”

“Hou Ning needs a lesson.”

Zhu Yun was taken aback. Li Xun took a drag of his cigarette. “I want to use him, but right now he’s too reckless — too drunk on whatever ability he thinks he has. Dong Siyang keeping him in line is exactly right.”

“But what if Dong Siyang goes too far…”

“He shouldn’t.”

“What do you mean, shouldn’t?” Zhu Yun thought it through. “No — you need to go with him. Better safe than sorry. If something goes wrong it’ll be too late. Call Dong Siyang.”

Li Xun: “You’re coming too?”

Zhu Yun looked at him. “Do you know how to drive?”

Li Xun called Dong Siyang, and in a few short exchanges had the location. After he hung up, Zhu Yun asked, “Why does the call go through when you call him, but not when I do?”

Li Xun: “Because he’s had your number blocked. Did you not know?”

Zhu Yun: “…”

Li Xun added, “Dong Siyang has already found Hou Ning.”

Zhu Yun’s eyes went wide. “He actually tracked him down? How did he find him?”

Li Xun gave her a look. “He has his methods. The world doesn’t revolve around computers.”

Zhu Yun clicked her tongue.

“You pulled one random business card that day and ended up with a whole company full of unusual characters. Dong Siyang must have been at it for days and nights on end to find him — quite a commitment.”

Li Xun: “Do you know why he’s so committed?”

Zhu Yun looked at him. Li Xun smiled. “He’s put all his chips on you and me. He’s more anxious than we are. We can fail a few times and start over, but he doesn’t have that kind of leeway. Win and he claws his way back. Lose and Jili grinds him into the ground.”

Hearing his tone, Zhu Yun got the sense that he was already placing the two of them in the same category. Though on the subject of Jili, she still felt a pang of guilt. She said to Li Xun, “The truth is, if it weren’t for us, Feiyáng wouldn’t have gotten onto Fang Zhijing’s radar in the first place.”

“What kind of talk is that?” Li Xun looked at her coolly. “Does tucking your neck in mean you get to live?”

Zhu Yun, chided again, instinctively lowered her head.

Li Xun: “Look at you — so much more charming when you’re being obedient.” He ground the cigarette out under his foot, hooked a finger under her chin, and forced her to look up at him. His eyes were cold and still as water.

“There are only two roads in this world. One where you wait to die, and one where you go out to meet it. Dong Siyang isn’t the kind of man who waits. Neither are you and I.”

Late at night, the lights along the second ring road’s elevated expressway blazed. The evening rush was long over, and traffic moved freely.

A car cut beneath a pool of streetlight and vanished into the dark, leaving a streak of white behind it.

Zhu Yun glanced up at the road signs, confirmed her route, and drove on. She looked over at the man in the passenger seat. After Li Xun had gotten Dong Siyang’s location, they had set off at once — one driving, one resting.

“Have you ever considered getting a driver’s license?” Zhu Yun said.

Li Xun: “No time.”

Zhu Yun: “You had time when you were technically on leave.”

Li Xun said nothing.

Zhu Yun added, “Though with your coordination, you’d probably take forever to pass anyway.”

Li Xun’s eyes finally opened. He gave her a single, expressionless look. Zhu Yun said, “Or am I wrong? You saw how you played volleyball.”

Li Xun kept watching her. Zhu Yun glanced at him. “I’m just saying what’s true.”

He smiled. The shadows of trees outside flashed across his face and were gone. Zhu Yun closed her mouth.

The road ahead fell into a deep quiet. It wasn’t long before they arrived at the address Dong Siyang had given. This was close to the outskirts of the city, a newly developed area. Zhu Yun had passed through it several times before, but had never stopped.

Following the GPS coordinates, Zhu Yun pulled up in front of a residential apartment building. It was tucked away at the very end of a street, with few people around and barely a sound.

When Zhu Yun first turned in, she thought she’d taken a wrong turn — but almost immediately she spotted two vans parked below the building. They were on the older side, their windows blacked out with dark tinting. The general feel of these vehicles was far too reminiscent of the van Dong Siyang had used to take everyone to the company retreat.

Moonless and windy, the sight of those two vans made Zhu Yun’s nerves pull tight.

“Li Xun — nothing’s going to go wrong, is it?” she asked quietly.

Li Xun was already awake. He opened the car door. “I’ll go check. You stay here.”

Zhu Yun watched Li Xun get out. At the same moment, someone climbed out of the opposite van — a scruffy-looking young man. Zhu Yun had already killed her headlights; she leaned in close to the window, using the faint light from the roadside to study him.

Li Xun went over and exchanged a few words with the young man, who raised his hand and pointed somewhere. Li Xun looked. Inside the car, Zhu Yun pressed herself against the glass and craned her neck.

The apartment building was roughly ten or twelve stories — a plain old public housing block with no elevator, external stairwells running up the side, and a long row of balconies on the outside.

Li Xun came back quickly and knocked on Zhu Yun’s window.

Zhu Yun lowered it. “What’s going on? Are they inside the building?”

“Yes.” Li Xun said quietly, “I’m going up. Wait here.”

Zhu Yun nodded.

The moment Li Xun left, her nerves wound tighter. He had barely entered the building when the young man by the van let out a low whistle. Zhu Yun’s heart jumped — she thought it was directed at her, but she looked up and saw he was whistling toward the balcony the young man had pointed to earlier. And it wasn’t just him — shortly after, five or six more people climbed out of the two vans, all of them looking upward like spectators at a show.

Zhu Yun lowered her window and looked out.

At first Zhu Yun had assumed the young man was pointing Li Xun toward the building to let him know Dong Siyang and Hou Ning were both inside — but now it clearly wasn’t that simple. Otherwise, what were they watching?

With that thought, Zhu Yun narrowed her eyes and began to study the building carefully.

She went up the row of balconies floor by floor, looking for anything out of the ordinary, and found nothing — until her gaze reached the rooftop, and her blood ran cold.

Up there, several silhouettes were visible, standing on the open, unguarded roof. One of them was standing very close to the edge. Zhu Yun looked for a few seconds and realized it wasn’t just one person up there —

The rooftop.

Dong Siyang stood with his suit jacket hanging open. The wind up there was fierce, and it caught the fabric and sent it whipping — making him look even more rooted to the spot. A cigarette sat in the corner of his mouth, and the smoke made him squint faintly, the corners of his mouth curved in a cold smile.

His hand had hold of Hou Ning — who looked frail to the point of seeming skeletal.

Dong Siyang was built like reinforced steel. The arm gripping Hou Ning by the collar was practically holding him up entirely, and didn’t move so much as a centimeter. Hou Ning was half a step away from the void behind him. He didn’t dare look back, didn’t dare struggle — one wrong move and Dong Siyang might let go.

And even now, he refused to back down.

“I know who you are,” Hou Ning said, his voice edged with a kind of manic energy. “You’re the owner of Feiyáng. Used to run with a rough crowd. Arrested for violent assault three times.”

Dong Siyang tilted the corners of his mouth. His expression made cold sweat break out across Hou Ning’s forehead. Hou Ning shouted, “You won’t throw me off! Let go of me! Do you want to go back to prison?!”

Dong Siyang looked at him. The curve of his smile deepened. He said, with absolute calm:

“Say that again — what exactly is it you think I won’t dare to do?”