Later, I arranged Old Feng’s funeral.

His ex-wife and daughter were abroad and were unwilling to come.

His hometown was in a impoverished mountain village in Sichuan. His elders had all passed away, and he had long since lost contact with his relatives.

As for friends, he had a bad temper, was petty-minded, and didn’t treat people with much loyalty—he had no friends.

Only I remained.

I didn’t make it a grand affair either—wild beasts had devoured his body until nothing was left, so what could I do?

I just chose a very expensive burial plot and secretly burned some paper money for him.

“Nowadays they emphasize civilized memorial practices. If I get caught, I’ll be fined,” I squatted there muttering. “But I still have to burn some. If you hadn’t kicked me off that vehicle back then, the one lying here today would be me.”

When Chi Na had just escaped, he was full of murderous rage seeking revenge. If I had been in that vehicle, I wouldn’t have survived either.

Those ash-gray paper bills flew up into the sky, burned out, turned to ash and scattered away. I still spoke the words.

“Master, do you think your life was worth it?”

After he died, the company uncovered his improper operations, acceptance of bribes, and a whole series of other problems, initiating a major personnel purge.

Therefore, none of his former subordinates came.

Not only did this fire not burn me, I was successfully transferred to headquarters, as manager of Project Department Two. The oldest person under me was twelve years older than me.

Everyone thought it was because I had truly, in the physical sense, completed this project by risking my life.

Only I knew in my heart that it was actually because I had sided with General Manager An very early on.

Sixty percent of those materials were provided by me.

If on that afternoon with good weather, we had smoothly boarded the train.

I wouldn’t have felt there was anything wrong with me at all.

This is the workplace. When your own people kill their own, naturally you must strike to kill with one blow. This was a principle he had taught me.

But he was dead.

At the last moment before death, he roughly kicked me off the vehicle, letting me escape.

I felt I was truly fucking disgusting.

The flames licked at the yellow paper, burning higher and higher, making my eyes sting.

I wiped my face, stood up, and said for the last time: “Master, I’m leaving now.”

In the black and white photograph, he stared at me with a stern face. He would never trip me up again.

In the future if I caused trouble, there would never again be anyone to protect me.

Chi Na died in the great fire at the mine shaft.

Actually, the call he made to Yu Shixuan went through. Yu Shixuan kept asking how I was, so he hung up.

Then he decided to take me to die with him—yes, you can never understand the thinking of a psychopath.

But it was also because of this call that his approximate location was confirmed, so the police were able to rush to the area.

This time I recuperated in the hospital for two months. When I returned, I officially went to work at headquarters.

Headquarters was in a very upscale complex with tulips and fountains, across from a large shopping mall.

It was just that the building itself was a bit old. The glass on the exterior walls was always dirty, always making the weather seem gloomy.

Everyone in the office graduated from top-tier universities. Everyone did their own work at their workstations. Unless necessary, no one would speak. Apart from the sound of the printer running, there wasn’t a single sound in the entire office area.

No one got close to you, but no one excluded you either. Everyone ate together in the cafeteria, made coffee in the break room, occasionally gossiped, but beneath the enthusiasm always maintained distance.

This was quite good, except I occasionally thought of Old Feng. When was the first time he used the coffee machine?

Was he also tactfully reminded by HR about his attire, and then threw away the LV shirt he bought at the night market?

Did he also feel like a groundhog in the urban jungle?

These questions would never have answers.

Old Feng’s former office was upstairs from me. The new director was an engineer who had returned from Sweden, surnamed Jiang. Different from all the superiors I had dealt with, very academic, with an effortless ease toward subordinates.

He didn’t frequently hold meetings, didn’t pump people up with motivational speeches, and likewise didn’t particularly like me.

Once when I urgently needed materials from another team, I pressed them a bit too hard. The other person was a post-2000s graduate who refused to give me the materials, with the reason: “Today our team is doing team-building.”

What the fuck…

If I were at a construction site I would have cursed at them, but here there were rules. I could only say: “This deadline wasn’t set today. You said you’d deliver it to me by Friday.”

“The team-building was set by Director Jiang.” She said very arrogantly and coldly: “Team Leader, if you have an opinion, you can talk to Director Jiang about it.”

Then there were no more messages on DingTalk.

I was dumbfounded. Then after Director Jiang heard about this matter, he smiled slightly and said: “But Team Leader Ren, sometimes you push yourself too hard.”

“Yes, I may have too much rough edge. I need more guidance from leadership.”

I worked hard to adapt to this place.

Before, I had to use gestures and words at the construction site, racking my brains to make the workers understand what I meant.

And now, it took me quite a while to keep up with my colleagues’ train of thought.

In the past, because we had to rush the schedule, the most important quality at the construction site was working desperately hard.

But now there was no need to work desperately. What was important was following procedures step by step, handling the myriad small matters day after day.

I had to use all my strength just to maintain the same efficiency as others—which meant my advancement path was basically closed off.

That day after finishing work, I went to find Yu Shixuan.

At that time her awards hadn’t come through yet and finding work wasn’t going smoothly. She could only take some drawing commissions online.

But she wasn’t lacking for money either.

Although her parents were heartbroken and refused to see her again.

They still had her older sister transfer over to her the dowry they had originally prepared for her.

Living absurdly for half a lifetime, she returned still a young and beautiful little rich woman—children from wealthy families always had the cost of making mistakes.

“So what makes you sad is that you feel your leader doesn’t like you?” She poured me a glass of whiskey with an ice cube shaped like a sunken ship in it.

“Not exactly. Mainly, I feel like I’m not the same kind of person as them.” I lay back on the sofa looking up and said.

“You feel your battlefield is at the construction site.” She said: “Because among a bunch of rough men, you were the smartest, the most meticulous, but among them, you feel like you’re nothing now, right?”

I didn’t say anything.

She wore a champagne-colored camisole, leaning gently against me, saying: “But darling, you have to know, work is never perfect. Doing physical labor is dangerous, exhausting, and people look down on you.”

Yes, I was already “General Manager Ren” now. When I went to the client’s office to deliver things, the young secretary lady said: “Hey, can you guys leave things at the door next time? You track it so dirty, we still have to clean it.”

After fighting for so many years, what I wanted was nothing more than—

“Clean, respectable.” She said: “Frankly speaking, didn’t you want to be a white-collar worker? Now you already are one.”

I was speechless.

—Although this term sounded like an adulterous young wife from last century’s gossip magazines, it had truly once been my dream.

Now, I was no longer responsible for the construction frontline, but for early-stage project strategy.

My daily work was sitting in the office writing project proposals, listening to subordinates’ reports, attending meetings.

No longer did I have to run to construction sites through wind and rain, rush schedules risking my life, always disheveled, always tense, waiting for the next disaster to occur.

I could be like other girls, go shopping, do skincare, buy expensive high heels, wait in line for an hour to eat at a trendy hotpot restaurant.

And, walk around carrying coffee.

“The thing I like most about the current company is that coffee machine,” I said. “When I used to be a factory girl, my ultimate imagination of white-collar workers was holding an Apple phone, carrying a Starbucks.”

Yu Shixuan rolled her eyes, raised her wine glass to toast me, saying: “So, Miss Ren, in order to be able to walk around carrying Starbucks, are you willing to work hard to adapt to the environment?”

“Don’t! Don’t talk to me about ‘working hard.’ I’m particularly afraid of that word now.”

After this near-death escape, I seemed to have lost something—vitality, drive, or whatever it was I relied on to survive…

The doctor said it might be post-traumatic stress disorder from excessive stimulation.

I didn’t know. I was now afraid of overly intense emotions.

Don’t work hard, don’t “fight desperately,” and especially don’t fight to the death.

Just like this, faintly, it was actually quite good.

Near the end of the year, Grandma insisted on going back to the Northeast to pay respects to my grandfather, then do a shamanic ritual—she firmly believed that the reason I kept having bad luck must be because I was haunted by some karmic creditor.

The news said quite a few people had the flu. I didn’t let Grandma go back to the Northeast, planning to just spend New Year’s in S City.

The old lady wasn’t happy and threw tantrums for several days. She felt that New Year’s should be lively and bustling.

I said: “With this flu being so serious, what if you catch it? Don’t give me more trouble.”

Only then did she reluctantly give up, still unhappy.

On New Year’s Eve, after finishing my last day of work, when I got to the underground parking garage, I saw a woman waiting by my car.

Thin, tall, wearing a gray suit overcoat, sharp and spirited.

“You are?”

“You’re Ren Dongxue, right?” She said: “I’m Old Feng’s wife. Oh, ex-wife.”

I panicked a bit, hurriedly shaking hands: “Ah, hello, I couldn’t contact you before.”

Actually I had contacted her; she had refused to come.

“There are some property matters that need to be handled here.” She said: “Also, I felt I should come see you.”

See me for what? You should go see your ex-husband’s grave instead, shouldn’t you?

I felt inexplicably nervous, opening the car door for her, saying: “It’s cold, please get in the car to talk.”

She didn’t move, but instead looked me over carefully, then said: “No need. I just have one question I want to ask you. What was your relationship with Old Feng?”

“Master and apprentice, colleagues.” I said decisively: “That’s all.”

“Did you have feelings for him?”

This was the first time anyone had asked me this question so directly, including Old Feng himself.

I looked into her eyes, slightly sunken eye sockets, tea-colored pupils, very beautiful, and very kind.

“Yes.”

This was the first time I said it, and also the last time I would say it: “My dad was very chaotic, so for a period of time, I saw him as a father.”

This was the real reason I couldn’t become his mistress.

When I looked up at him commanding with authority at the construction site, when he made me handcrafted cabinets, when he argued against opposition to give me a chance to independently manage a project.

He had once been my admired spiritual father. But it couldn’t withstand the entanglement of interests.

“Romantic feelings?”

“No, I swear, not one bit.”

And the thought made me sick.

She seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, then laughed coldly: “I was just thinking about how you would answer.”

She looked at me with those beautiful, compassionate eyes and said: “If you said you liked him, I would be too pitiful. But if you say you didn’t like him, he’s too pathetic.”