After being selected for Qian Heng’s team, Cheng Yao had briefly been the envy of the other new hires. After all, the cases Qian Heng’s team handled involved larger amounts in dispute, bigger fees, and cases that carried more weight and prestige — even if she jumped ship later, having them listed on her resume would look impressive. And although Qian Heng had a notoriously difficult personality, his professional skill was rock solid; working under him meant more training and more growth.

But that was only how it looked from the outside. Cheng Yao walked out of the print room and glanced at the other new hires bent over their desks, hard at work, and sighed. Even though she’d been assigned to Qian Heng’s team, he hadn’t given her a single case to work on yet. Bao Rui had thrown her a few tasks, but they were things like printing documents and binding case files — nothing requiring any real skill. It was worse than being assigned to the other partners’ new hires — she watched some of them revising prenuptial agreements, others already participating in divorce cases…

As if in sympathy with Cheng Yao’s mood, the weather outside today was violent — wind and rain lashing down, a typhoon that had unexpectedly changed course and swept into City A. Luckily Cheng Yao had left home early; her shift started at nine, but she’d arrived at eight-thirty, narrowly escaping the worst of the storm.

Her colleagues weren’t so lucky. By nine-thirty, people were still trickling in.

“Cheng Yao, come to my office.”

Cheng Yao had spent all of last night reading through case files, hoping to discuss them with Bao Rui. But instead of Bao Rui showing up, it was Qian Heng.

The moment Cheng Yao stepped into the office, she decided to burn her bridges and strike first.

“Boss, I’d like to join the case we discussed before. I don’t want a share of the fee — I just want the chance to learn by following along.”

“Fine.”

Qian Heng sat behind his desk, eyes on the case file, not even looking up.

That was it? Where was the resistance she’d been bracing for? It was that easy?

“I — I can really join?” Finally free of the bench, about to get real experience, Cheng Yao was thrilled. “Thank you, boss! I knew my hard work would be noticed eventually! I’ll be even more —”

“I genuinely didn’t notice anything.”

“Huh?”

Qian Heng finally looked up, sweeping his eyes over her, and said unhurriedly, “When I let you join, don’t get carried away with yourself. Your foundation is on the weaker side compared to others at the firm, you have little work experience, you only interned at another firm for a year before this, you’ve never independently handled a case, and all you did was skim a case file last night. Don’t go around telling yourself you’ve been working hard, all right?”

As long as she got to work on the case, she’d have let him make her call him “Dad.” Being insulted a little was nothing.

“All right, out you go.”

“Wait, what did you actually call me in here for?”

“Oh. To tell you you’re joining this case.”

Cheng Yao: !!!

So even without her asking, Qian Heng had already been planning to bring her onto the case? Did that mean — even someone as sharp-eyed as him had spotted her potential at a glance? Recognized her as someone worth cultivating?!

“Wipe that self-satisfied look off your face. You’re joining because Bao Rui slipped on his way to work this morning and sprained his ankle.”

Even so, Cheng Yao’s heart still raced with excitement. “That’s fine — I’m happy to be Bao Rui’s understudy!”

“No. Bao Rui hasn’t withdrawn from the case. He just can’t come in to work, but he’ll keep following up by email and phone.”

“So I…”

“So don’t go inventing a bigger role for yourself. At most you’re a jack — you prop things up while he’s out.”

“…”

“He can’t go to the Administration for Industry and Commerce to pull the company records and equity information because of his leg. That falls to you now.” Qian Heng folded his hands over his chest. “Also — on Bao Rui’s behalf, thank you.”

Cheng Yao scratched her head, about to say helping a colleague out was only natural, when Qian Heng spoke again with the smile of an old fox—

“Thank you for volunteering to give up your share of the fee. Now Bao Rui doesn’t have to split any of his cut with you.” Qian Heng raised an eyebrow. “Wasn’t that what you swore just now? That as long as you got to join the case, you didn’t want a single cent?”

“…”

“So, per your own strong insistence, it’s settled. Out you go.”

Cheng Yao had lost that round to Qian Heng, but the thrill of finally being on a case was still there. Back at her desk, once she received the case information and materials Qian Heng sent over, she buried herself in study.

This time the materials were far more detailed than the handful of sentences from the earlier case discussion. Qian Heng’s client was named Li Yan — an ordinary enough name that Cheng Yao didn’t recognize. But Li Yan’s ex-husband was a household name: Xu Jun, founder of the well-known literature and video platform Tuantuan Online.

Cheng Yao herself was no stranger to watching comedy videos and reading novels on Tuantuan Online. But what she knew about Xu Jun came less from the business pages than from the entertainment ones.

He had, for a long stretch of time, been romantically linked to her favorite actress — Bai Xingmeng, who played Lingyao — right around when Bai Xingmeng was at the height of her fame. Paparazzi had soon broken the story of a romance between Bai Xingmeng and Xu Jun.

Tuantuan Online had still been a small website back then, and it was carried straight into the public eye on the wave of that scandal, soaking up all the attention it could. Bai Xingmeng and Xu Jun were photographed together again and again — holding hands while shopping, doing pottery together, traveling together… Eventually, the two had all but tacitly confirmed the relationship.

But after about six months of that whirlwind romance, their interactions dwindled, they were almost never seen together anymore, and Bai Xingmeng was soon linked to a popular boy-band idol instead. The gossip about her and Xu Jun gradually faded from public memory.

Cheng Yao printed out every piece of material Qian Heng had emailed her, then sat down to comb through it carefully. That was when she discovered that Xu Jun had actually married this Li Yan three years ago — and they’d already divorced over a year ago! Doing the math, that meant when he was carrying on with Bai Xingmeng, he’d already been a married man! He’d hidden it!

Damn it — what a scumbag! As a fan of Bai Xingmeng, Cheng Yao was instantly outraged. Flipping through the materials, she quietly vowed to help this cheated-on ex-wife, Li Yan, win back everything she deserved.

But the ideal was plump; reality was gaunt. Even a marriage that had lasted less than a year came bundled with a sea of scattered documentation vast enough to swallow a person whole. The materials Qian Heng had sent, plus Bao Rui’s investigation into several of Xu Jun’s companies, added up to over three hundred printed pages — and that was only the preliminary material. The more Cheng Yao flipped through it, the more her head spun.

She’d never handled a case involving so many facts before. Li Yan wasn’t a legal professional, so the materials she’d provided had no clear focus — often, reading through twenty pages yielded only a single page of useful information. Cheng Yao felt like she’d fallen into the ocean and couldn’t find a single piece of driftwood anywhere. She wanted to do right by this case, but untangling any kind of coherent thread from this mountain of material had defeated her.

The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak.

The realization hit her hard. She finally understood why Qian Heng hadn’t let her join a case before — because her abilities really weren’t up to it.

Cheng Yao had only interned at her previous firm for a year, had just gotten her bar license, and had jumped straight to Junheng — meaning she’d essentially never practiced independently. Bao Rui, meanwhile, had already worked at Junheng alone for four years. The gap between them was even wider than she’d imagined.

When she’d first gotten the materials, Cheng Yao had been brimming with ambition, even turning down her colleagues’ invitation to lunch together, insisting on finishing the documents first. So now she trudged out alone to find food, weighed down with disappointment.

It wasn’t as though she’d never had doubts before.

The path of a lawyer had never been an easy one.

She’d poured enormous effort into passing the bar exam — nicknamed “the hardest exam under heaven” — through sheer blood, sweat, and tears, only to find that her income in the early years of practice might amount to a fraction of what her peers in other industries were earning.

Most young lawyers just starting out might spend their first several years on a meager monthly base salary of only around a thousand yuan, with unstable bonuses, constantly worrying about where their next client would come from, working under intense pressure with no clear boundary between work hours and personal time, carrying enormous psychological strain — and on top of all that, law was a high-risk, high-intensity, fiercely competitive field.

It was like raising Gu poison — every new lawyer was like an insect tossed into the jar together with the others: the more poisonous devoured the less poisonous, the strong devoured the weak. You competed against lawyers who started the same year as you, and against seasoned veterans who’d been practicing for decades. The ones who survived in this profession, in the end, were the ones who’d been tempered through countless trials until their resolve was strong enough to endure.

And the cruelest part of this profession was that no matter how hard you worked, there was no guarantee you’d ever make it through.

In the end, Cheng Yao couldn’t help herself — she sent Qin Qin a WeChat message.

“Feeling low. Think I’m going to be one of those lawyers who burns out and switches careers within the first year.”

Her mood was genuinely low. After sending that, she followed it up with a string of crying emoji stickers.

Qin Qin was also busy enough to be run off her feet most days, so naturally she wouldn’t reply right away.

Cheng Yao trudged along, head hanging, and walked into a Japanese ramen shop beneath the office building.

She ordered a bowl of tonkotsu ramen, sat down, and buried herself in eating.

Since the area had plenty of office buildings and plenty of white-collar workers, the ramen shop was doing brisk business even at this hour. Cheng Yao got a bit lucky — after waiting a minute, a four-seat table opened up.

But not long after she sat down, someone took the empty seat across from her.

Too low in spirits to bother looking up, Cheng Yao just kept slurping her noodles.

“Is it really that good?”

It wasn’t until Qian Heng’s icy voice rang out that Cheng Yao realized the person sitting across from her was her own impossible-to-please boss.

Qian Heng had apparently just finished a meeting with a client, which was why he was only now coming to eat.

At his question, Cheng Yao nodded reflexively.

Sitting at the same table now, she felt she ought to say something to avoid the awkwardness — but before she could open her mouth, someone else called out to her.

“Cheng Yao?”

“Huh? Wu Chen?” Cheng Yao looked up to find the person calling her name was an old high school classmate, Wu Chen.

Wu Chen had apparently also just arrived to eat. “I was just worried there’d be no seats — is the spot next to you free? If so, mind if I share the table?”

Once Cheng Yao confirmed the seat was free, Wu Chen sat down. His noodles hadn’t arrived yet, and he seemed eager to chat. “I work at the Minsheng Bank branch nearby. What about you?”

“I work at Junheng Law Firm.”

Wu Chen perked up. “You’re a practicing lawyer?”

Cheng Yao nodded honestly. “Yeah.”

“Perfect, could you do me a favor?”

“Huh?”

“So there’s a manager at my bank — his mother put around two million-plus into a P2P wealth management product, and now that P2P company’s imploded, all the executives fled with the money. When they went back to look at the contract she signed, it turned out it wasn’t actually an investment contract at all — it was a contract for purchasing health supplements! They clearly tricked an old woman who didn’t understand contracts and didn’t read it carefully! I wanted to ask how they could get the money back. You’re a lawyer — can you walk me through how they should assert their rights? My manager’s mother is so angry she’s hospitalized, and my manager is losing his mind too…”

Faced with this deluge of questions, Cheng Yao felt deeply awkward — this was exactly the kind of situation she dreaded most.

People outside the profession had no idea how lawyers actually worked. They always assumed that after a few garbled sentences summarizing some third-hand “case,” a lawyer could just spit out a professional answer in ten seconds. They didn’t understand that every lawyer had their own specialty — Cheng Yao, for instance, was solid in marriage and inheritance law, but completely clueless when it came to financial fraud.

Cheng Yao decided to be honest. “I’m actually not very familiar with that area… I’d suggest your manager consult a lawyer who specializes in financial fraud.”

“Why’s your answer so ‘official’?” Wu Chen laughed, his tone half-joking. “I was asking you because you’re an old classmate — I trust you. Are you lawyers seriously unwilling to answer even a free question? It’s really just two or three sentences — just give me some rough pointers. Come on, that’s a bit much.”

“If your stomach hurt and you went to the hospital, which department would you register with?”

Just as Cheng Yao was weighing how to respond to Wu Chen, Qian Heng — who had been sitting silently across from her — finally looked up, and along with the motion came his cold, flat voice.

“Gastroenterology, obviously,” Wu Chen answered reflexively, before catching himself, a little startled. “Who are you?”

Qian Heng’s expression turned mocking. “So you do know a stomach problem means gastroenterology.”

Wu Chen stared at him like he’d seen a ghost.

“She already told you she doesn’t work in financial fraud, and you’re still forcing her to give you legal advice. So next time you have a stomach ache, why don’t you go see a proctologist instead?”

The comment was vicious enough that Wu Chen’s face flushed red instantly.

Qian Heng rarely bothered to strike, but when he did, he drew blood. Ignoring the way Wu Chen’s face was turning green, he continued, “A proctologist won’t diagnose a stomach patient, because that’s what it means to be responsible for your profession and your patients — the same goes for different fields of law. Besides, even to see a proctologist, you’d have to register and pay a fee first, wouldn’t you? And you — you haven’t paid a single cent, and you’re still forcing her to give you advice?” He pointed at Cheng Yao. “What debt does she owe you from a past life?”

Wu Chen had no comeback whatsoever for that. All he could manage, stiff-necked, was, “Who are you? I’m catching up with my old classmate — what business is it of yours?”

“My business, because I’m her boss,” Qian Heng said, utterly cold. “My business, because I pay for her time. I won’t allow her to waste it on someone like you.”

For some reason, in that moment Cheng Yao nearly held her breath, her heart pounding — from nerves, from surprise, and also… from a strange kind of satisfaction.

Since becoming a lawyer, this wasn’t the first time Cheng Yao had run into a situation like this — but she’d never had the nerve to refuse the way Qian Heng just had.

In China, most people were reluctant to pay for anything intangible — intellectual property, say, or the professional consulting services of lawyers and accountants. Many simply didn’t recognize the value of that kind of service; since they already knew each other, surely this sort of “just moving your mouth a little” work could be a favor between acquaintances — why would you charge for that?

“Free consulting? You’ve got some nerve asking that. Why not just tell Cheng Yao to go live on air while you’re at it? If everyone thought like you, the legal profession would go extinct.”

“Also — her specialty is family law. Whenever you’re ready to get divorced, feel free to come to her. As her boss, I’ll authorize a discount.”

At that, Wu Chen had nothing left to say. His noodles hadn’t even arrived yet, but he hastily invented an excuse about a meeting and slunk away in embarrassment.