Inside a private room at a certain club, the European-style décor made clear at every turn that the services here did not come cheap. A faint trace of high-end perfume drifted in with the warm air. A therapist carefully worked on He Zhengren’s lower back and legs, periodically reminding him to relax — yet he remained tightly wound, his body rigid with anxiety.

“Can’t get through.” After the Nth attempt, Li Haozhang delivered the news to He Zhengren with a look of regret.

He Zhengren turned to the therapist with a stiff expression. “You may step out for now. Come back in a moment.”

Li Haozhang made sure the door was firmly shut, then spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “By the time calculations, he should have returned from Yuzhu Peak to the western shore — or even Golmud — today. When I reached out at noon, his phone rang at least, even if he didn’t pick up. But for some reason, now…”

“What, has Yuzhu Peak turned into the Bermuda Triangle? Zhang Chenguang goes there once — gone. Ma He goes there once — gone too?” He Zhengren rubbed his knee. “If my legs weren’t giving me trouble, I’d honestly want to go up there myself and see if even I’d disappear into some alternate dimension where none of you could find me — hah!”

Li Haozhang said patiently, “Perhaps his phone died? Charging on the road is inconvenient, and he has to be careful around Little Ba. Please don’t worry just yet… He’s different from Old Zhang — he’s only been with you a short time, and you’ve never assigned him a transaction task. These past two years he’s been nothing more than an informant at Little Ba’s side. Even if something happened to him, it’s nowhere near as serious as Old Zhang going missing.”

“Has he recovered the thermos Old Zhang used for the transaction? Has he identified where the Yuzhu Peak photo was taken?” He Zhengren let out a cold snort. “Other than following Little Ba around and feeding us scraps of intelligence that may or may not matter — what exactly has he done?”

“He did at least provide the coordinates for Qiang Tang and Guniang Lake,” Li Haozhang said. “Old Zhang and Song Fan are both out of commission, you’re not in good health and can’t afford to show your face publicly, and Ma He is about the only person you have available outside. He’s hard to come by.”

“What use are those coordinates?” He Zhengren sighed. If Ma He hadn’t told him that Ba Yunye had three photographs left behind by Ba Xiye, he wouldn’t even have known those people had managed to do something like that before they died. Diao Zhuo was no easy mark to fool, but he had finally managed to make a breakthrough on Ba Yunye’s side through Ma He — yet what those three photographs actually meant remained an unsolved mystery.

The Jeep Wrangler’s trunk stood wide open. Ba Yunye sat to one side, dazed and deflated, head drooping. On her phone screen was a screenshot of a message Long Ge had just sent her —

Ma He: Long Ge I quit goodbye

So rushed he hadn’t even bothered with punctuation.

She had just turned the entire climbing pack inside out without finding the thermos, then in desperation searched through all her own luggage, every corner of the car — even rifled through Fu Yingtao’s pack that she had carried down alongside her own. Still nothing. It all felt like a dream. The Yuzhu Peak journey, which had seemed so full of gains, had in the end amounted to drawing water with a bamboo basket — like a roller coaster that had carried her from the lowest point all the way to the top, only to plummet back down again.

From the moment of descent she had never let anyone else touch her pack. From the South Slope Base Camp to Golmud, there had been only her and Ma He in the car. Ma He, who had always seemed cheerful and guileless — a man with barely any presence at the club — had, the moment Long Ge exposed his murky origins, vanished along with the thermos she’d found, the one that appeared to have been dropped by Zhang Chenguang, leaving behind a string of question marks and exclamation points.

Ma He and Zhang Chenguang may be connected — this conjecture left Ba Yunye so stunned she couldn’t collect herself for a long time.

Diao Zhuo pulled her into his arms. She held on to his waist with both hands and didn’t let go, as if seeking something solid to anchor herself to. He had never seen Ba Yunye this fragile and undone before, and he could not bear to see it.

“Losing the thermos — that’s entirely my fault.” When she was wrong, she owned it, without the slightest equivocation. “I got too smug. Long Ge had clearly warned me to watch out for Ma He, and I thought I was clever enough to handle it — figured that if I told him I’d found nothing, that would be the end of it. It never occurred to me to keep the thing on me at all times. And now… it’s been stolen, and he’s gone dark. I’m such an absolute idiot!!”

“Enough…” Diao Zhuo gently ruffled her hair. “Maybe it was just a three-thousand-yuan water bottle. Whether we earn that commission or not makes no difference to us.”

Ba Yunye stood up restlessly and paced in a small circle. “No, for you this isn’t about money — go ahead and yell at me, I absolutely won’t—”

“You came down from a summit. I haven’t even asked if you’re tired, if you’re hungry — and I’m going to turn on you over a thermos?” Diao Zhuo gave a quiet sigh. “Is that really the kind of person you think I am?”

“Then what do we do?”

“Check the security footage. Confirm he wasn’t acting under duress.”

“Right!! Come on, let’s go take a look at the footage!”

Diao Zhuo stopped her and told her to go back to the hotel and rest first. He would go deal with the surveillance himself.

“You went to all that effort to tell the thermos apart from the one Zhang Chenguang had — and you really don’t blame me?”

“There’s no point in blaming each other over something neither of us could have foreseen.” Diao Zhuo led her toward the hospital’s main entrance. “Just don’t go missing on me, Master Ba.”

“Since you put it that way…” She drew out the words leisurely. “Carry me on your back.”

Absolutely no logical connection whatsoever.

Diao Zhuo crouched down on the spot and lifted her onto his back without hesitation. She was genuinely exhausted — she draped herself over him quietly and obediently, none of her usual habit of finding ways to stir up little bits of mischief. Before they even reached the entrance of the nearby hotel, she was already drifting toward sleep.

Diao Zhuo laid her down gently on the bed, eased off her jacket and trousers, then tucked the blanket over her. He sat on the edge of the bed, watching her for quite a while, then reached out to pinch her cheek — damn, women really were baffling creatures. She had roughed it outdoors for days on end, and she still carried some inexplicable faint fragrance on her.

Right — he had work to do. Diao Zhuo pinched the bridge of his nose, exercised some self-restraint, and headed out.

Ba Yunye napped briefly and then woke up. She got up and went to take a shower. Only once she was under the water did she notice the damage — fine abrasions scattered across her shoulders, fingers, and ankles, some from where the backpack straps had dug in, others from handling the injured during the descent, sustained through her gloves by something she hadn’t even registered at the time. The water stung the cuts as it hit them, and she finally felt the sharp, concentrated pain. She lost her grip on the soap, and when she crouched down to pick it up, her left knee flared with a dull ache — she had sustained an injury there during her time in the military, and evidently the chaos of the descent had aggravated the old wound. Deep squatting was out.

She was the kind of person whose tolerance for pain was extremely high. Injuries like these might be the sort of thing another, more delicate woman would use to fish for sympathy and cuddles, but to her they weren’t worth mentioning. She stood under the shower and let the water run over her from head to toe. Scenes from these past few years running the road circuit with Ma He kept circling through her mind — his pair of wide copper-bell eyes, dark-skinned and lean, always looking so uncomplicated and artless. He had barely registered at the club, seemingly without any agenda. Yet the moment he made his move, it was something else entirely.

Damn it all to hell…

When she emerged wrapped in Diao Zhuo’s bathrobe, he had just come through the door. His expression was grave, and his mood appeared to have taken a turn for the worse. Before she could ask, he looked up, and his expression eased slightly, before he shifted his gaze away.

She combed damp strands of hair from her face and asked with concern, “What did you find out?”

Diao Zhuo shrugged off his black jacket and draped it over her shoulders. “Put something on first. Don’t tempt me.”

“Who’s tempting you?!” Ba Yunye shot him a look. Right now, her mind was entirely on Ma He — she genuinely hadn’t thought about anything else.

Diao Zhuo was quiet for a few seconds, as if choosing how to frame it. “He deliberately parked in a spot where the camera couldn’t catch the rear half of the car, so there was no footage of him opening the trunk. He left on foot through the main entrance, carrying one bag, right at the moment we received the keys and ran to look for the car.”

“Did he leave by car? A taxi, a rideshare? Or… did someone pick him up at the entrance?”

“All the footage shows is that he walked out the main entrance and turned right.”

Ba Yunye pressed further. “Can we file a police report? He stole my belongings!! Or… report him as a missing person?”

“I asked the officer still at the hospital. The case value doesn’t meet the threshold for filing. Besides, the thermos was something you picked up on the mountain, and he’s a long-standing partner you know well — it can’t be categorized as theft for the time being. And a grown man who left of his own accord with nobody coercing him, unreachable for less than two hours — reporting him as a missing person is a stretch. His phone running out of battery or heading off somewhere urgently are both entirely plausible.”

Ba Yunye let out a long sigh and sank onto the edge of the bed.

Diao Zhuo produced a hair dryer and proceeded to dry her hair, with the attentiveness of someone tending to their freshly bathed pet cat. He teased her while he worked. “So, miss — what kind of hairstyle are we going for today?”

She glanced at his reflection in the mirror. The hair dryer in his hand was spectacularly at odds with those solidly built muscles — in his grip, the thing looked like Thor’s weapon, ready to deliver a fatal blow at any moment.

She reached up to try to snatch it from him. She failed.

“Hello. I’ve just suffered a devastating blow, and I’d like to shave my head and immediately enter a monastery.”

He let out a cold huff. “Can you bring yourself to leave behind this world of earthly attachments, devotee?”

“I can.”

“Even leave behind men?”

“Form is emptiness.”

He deployed his trump card. “What about your car loan?”

She let out a dry laugh. “Never mind the shave. Just dry it while you’re at it.”

“How much is left on the car loan?”

“Over two hundred thousand.”

“That’s not much — I could help you pay—”

“No.” Ba Yunye rejected the offer instantly. “If I rely on a man for money, how could I ever call myself Master Ba with a straight face in the future?”

Diao Zhuo let the matter go and patiently continued drying her hair. Her hair was just like her — coarse and wiry, most likely because she had never put much thought into caring for it. The ends had a few split hairs. A naturally beautiful rough-and-tumble woman, clearly not the least bit appreciative of the fine looks heaven had gifted her.

Ba Yunye sat quietly for quite a while, gradually coming back to herself from the shock of Ma He’s betrayal. She gave a small laugh. “Tony the hairstylist, you’ve never dried a woman’s hair before.”

“Hmm?” She had called it correctly.

“This isn’t drying hair — it’s kneading dough.” She shrugged, then suddenly shifted into a documentary narrator’s voice: “Wheat flour — such an ordinary ingredient, yet in the hands of Stylist Diao from Xi’an, it is transformed into a round, unleavened bread. The people of Shaanxi call it a flatbread…”

Diao Zhuo couldn’t help but smile. He ran his fingers through her hair a couple of times, managing to make it look somewhat less wild. “…Old Fu’s case has been filed.”

She blinked. “That fast?”

“The police found search history on Jiang Ao’hang’s devices from the past few months — queries on ‘death from anaphylaxis,’ ‘high-altitude pulmonary edema,’ ‘vitamin overdose,’ and a search related to a specific cardiac and pulmonary condition. That last one matched the precise medical terminology the doctor used for Fu Xingyue’s diagnosis — the exact same medical term. This indicates that Jiang Ao’hang already knew about his wife’s hidden condition and his father-in-law’s allergens before the trip, meaning premeditated intent. During the background investigation, it emerged that Fu Xingyue’s previous relationship had been sabotaged by Old Fu, and it caused quite a scene at the time — she may have harbored a grudge against her adoptive father. “

“And what about ‘Ruirui’?”

“Both of them denied that ‘Ruirui’ exists. But the police’s working theory aligns somewhat with ours — neither of them has the medical or pharmacological background to have orchestrated this alone. There’s someone else behind the scenes who has a medical background. Everything stays confidential until the case is closed, so we’ll have to wait for the final verdict before we can learn more. As things stand, Ruirui may turn out to be the single most crucial figure in this whole case.”

“It sounds labyrinthine — looks like Jiang Ao’hang first married under false pretenses, then somehow stumbled upon the fact that Fu Xingyue intended to use him to get rid of Old Fu, deliberately played dumb to keep her off guard, then exploited both her physical condition and Old Fu’s allergy to eliminate them both and inherit those properties. For a gay man, those are some remarkably deep machinations…” She let out a cold laugh, then stood up, turned around, and took Diao Zhuo’s chin between her fingers. Her smile became something far more genuine. “There is a lot to be said for a straightforward man who doesn’t play games.”

Diao Zhuo smiled, pulled her in by the waist, and drew her close against him.