Fu Yechuan stared at the screenshot on his phone screen for a full four minutes.
Su Ran knew it had been four minutes because she was sitting right across from him.
A clock hung on the wall of the fast food restaurant, missing its hour hand. The second hand did not run properly either. It paused every three ticks, twitching like it had a nervous disorder.
She counted two hundred and forty beats.
In those four minutes, he neither spoke nor smashed anything. He did not even stand up.
His thumb rested on the screen without moving. Even the rhythm of his breathing remained unchanged.
That was far more frightening than losing control.
Su Ran had seen what Fu Yechuan looked like when he lost control in the novel. He flipped tables, smashed bottles, and once grabbed a man by the collar in front of a floor to ceiling window on the twenty eighth floor and asked, “Do you want to fly?”
Those incidents all happened later.
They were performative. They were meant for his enemies to see.
When something truly hurt him, he made no sound.
Just like now.
“Found something?” Su Ran asked, even though she already knew the answer.
Fu Yechuan turned the phone over and placed it face down on the table.
The movement was light.
Abnormally light.
“Zhou Zhe’s distant uncle is called Niu Defa.”
When he said the name, the corner of his mouth twitched downward. It was not a mockery. It was instinctive disgust.
“He’s worked at the district planning bureau for twelve years, a minor official with barely any authority. Three years ago, the Bai family helped him push through a compensation payment related to a demolition project. Since then, he’s belonged to them.”
Su Ran did not interrupt and waited for him to continue.
“When the approval documents for the Nanan Project reached his level, all he was supposed to do was stamp them and pass them along. There was no reason for him to read them.”
Fu Yechuan tapped the table twice with his index finger.
“But he read them anyway. And after he did, the information appeared on Bai Weiwei’s desk with perfect accuracy.”
“There was only one person in between,” Su Ran added.
Fu Yechuan looked at her.
“Zhou Zhe.”
Su Ran nodded.
At that moment, the restaurant’s air conditioner suddenly made a loud click. The cold air stopped, replaced by room temperature air.
The owner stuck half his head out from the kitchen and cursed. He whacked the outdoor unit twice with a broom handle, and the air conditioning began working again.
Fu Yechuan remained silent through all the noise.
He pulled up the screenshot again, looked at it one last time, and deleted it.
Not to the recycle bin. Permanently erased.
“What are you thinking now?” Su Ran asked.
“I’m thinking about one thing.”
His voice was flat.
“Five years. He followed me for five years. He came to me when I was the least valued member of the Fu family. No one wanted to work with me back then. He did.”
He never finished the sentence.
But Su Ran heard the rest anyway.
So I never doubted him.
“Have you considered another possibility?”
Leaning back in her chair, Su Ran slipped her feet partially out of the new flats to give them some air.
The wound on her heel had started bleeding again from rubbing against the shoe.
“That the Bai family didn’t place this piece on the board five years ago.”
Fu Yechuan’s fingers stopped moving.
“They started much earlier.”
Su Ran met his gaze.
“While you were still in the Fu family, they were already looking for someone who could get close to you.”
“Zhou Zhe didn’t come to you on his own.”
“He was sent.”
The damage done by those words was ten times greater than the screenshot.
The screenshot only proved that Zhou Zhe had leaked information once.
What Su Ran was saying now invalidated an entire five years.
Five years of loyalty. Five years of standing together through hardship.
Every heartfelt conversation he had ever had with Zhou Zhe.
All of it had been spoken to a one way mirror.
And behind that mirror stood Bai Weiwei.
Fu Yechuan swallowed.
“I don’t have proof,” Su Ran said honestly. “But you can think back on yourself. Over the last five years, how many of your major decisions ended up benefiting the Bai family?”
She stopped there. The seed had been planted.
The rest was for him to uncover.
A long silence followed. Long enough that Su Ran thought he might never speak again.
“I’m not killing him.”
Her fingers tightened beneath the table.
“At least not yet.” Fu Yechuan slipped his phone back into his pocket and stood up. “He doesn’t know that I know. That’s more useful than killing him.”
The tension left Su Ran’s hand.
Her greatest concern was that he would act impulsively.
In the novel, after discovering Zhou Zhe’s betrayal, Fu Yechuan’s first reaction had been to tie him up in a warehouse and beat him for three straight hours.
During that three hour window, the Bai family received the news and struck directly at the foundation of everything he had left, nearly driving him to ruin.
But this Fu Yechuan had not acted recklessly.
He had chosen the smarter option.
When they passed a convenience store, Su Ran stopped.
“I’m buying water. Want one?”
“No.”
She went inside, bought two bottles of mineral water, and handed one to him when she came back out.
He glanced at it, accepted it without saying thanks, twisted off the cap, and drank half the bottle in one go.
The tendon along the side of his neck stood out clearly as he swallowed.
Su Ran looked away and drank from her own bottle.
“Have you found somewhere to stay?” Fu Yechuan asked.
“Not yet.”
He took another drink.
“There’s a serviced apartment in East City. Twelve hundred a month. They don’t check IDs.”
Su Ran looked at him.
“How do you know about a place like that?”
Fu Yechuan crushed the empty bottle and tossed it into a roadside trash bin.
“I lived there for two months.”
Su Ran asked no further questions.
She could imagine the rest.
After the fall of the Fu family, he had moved from a villa to an apartment, then from an apartment to a rented room. Each move had taken him another step downward.
That serviced apartment in East City had probably been the stop between a respectable life and a cramped rental in the urban village.
Two months, long enough.
“Alright, I’ll go take a look.”
“I’ll take you there.”
“No need…”
“I’m not taking you.” Fu Yechuan started walking. “I need to move too. You were right. Zhou Zhe knows the rental address.”
Su Ran quickened her pace to follow him.
Getting to East City required the subway.
The nearest station was two blocks away, roughly a seven or eight minute walk.
There were not many people on the street. Occasionally a delivery rider sped past them, the electric motor humming.
As she walked, Su Ran suddenly thought of something.
“Fu Yechuan.”
“Hm?”
“You told Zhou Zhe someone tipped you off. He’s going to investigate who that someone is.”
Fu Yechuan kept walking.
“Let him.”
“You’re not worried he’ll figure out it was me?”
“So what if he does?” Fu Yechuan tilted his head slightly, his gaze brushing over her. “You’re my ex girlfriend. Passing information to me would be perfectly natural.”
Su Ran stumbled mentally over the phrase ex girlfriend.
Strictly speaking, she was the original owner’s ex girlfriend, not his.
But there was no way to explain that to Fu Yechuan.
She noticed that after saying it, his pace unconsciously quickened for a moment, as if he were avoiding something.
“What I mean,” Su Ran said, changing her approach, “is that if Zhou Zhe realizes I’m the one advising you, he’ll report that to Bai Weiwei as well. She’ll reassess how important I am.”
“And?”
“And she might come after me.”
Fu Yechuan slowed down.
He did not stop, but his pace noticeably decreased.
“Bai Weiwei wouldn’t do it herself,” Su Ran continued. “Her image doesn’t allow her to get blood on her hands. But the Bai family has people who handle those things. She has an older brother…”
“Bai Jingshan.”
Fu Yechuan supplied the name himself.
Su Ran turned to look at him. “You’ve dealt with him before?”
Instead of answering directly, Fu Yechuan pulled his right hand from his pocket and unconsciously clenched it.
Su Ran noticed a faint scar at the base of his thumb.
The novel had never mentioned that scar.
Whatever “dealt with him before” truly meant was probably hidden in that mark.
“Bai Jingshan never knows when to stop,” Su Ran said, choosing not to ask about the scar. “If Bai Weiwei decides I’m a variable, she’ll send Bai Jingshan to handle me.”
Fu Yechuan said nothing.
But at some point, he had switched positions and moved to the side closer to the road, placing himself between Su Ran and the traffic.
Su Ran noticed. She said nothing.
The green sign above the subway entrance glowed in the night, looking from a distance like a half open eye.
There were not many people inside. The last train would arrive soon, and only a scattering of passengers stood on the platform, all staring at their phones.
Su Ran leaned against a pillar.
Fu Yechuan stood about a step to her right, hands in his pockets, silent.
When the train arrived, a gust of wind swept through the station, lifting the loose strands of hair across Su Ran’s forehead.
She boarded and found a seat in the corner.
Fu Yechuan remained standing beside her, one hand gripping an overhead strap.
The fluorescent lights inside the carriage cast a sickly pallor over everyone’s face.
Across from them, a middle aged woman was dozing. Her head kept bobbing forward, and the plastic bag in her hand looked ready to fall at any moment.
Su Ran closed her eyes briefly.
She was tired.
Ever since transmigrating into this world, her mind had never stopped working. Every step required calculation. Every second demanded another plan.
She was walking a tightrope supported only by her knowledge of the plot.
And there was no safety net beneath it.
The farther events drifted from the original storyline, the less reliable her foresight would become. She had already changed too much.
Tearing up the check. Exposing the bad check.
Revealing Zhou Zhe’s betrayal ahead of schedule.
Every move pushed the timeline farther into unknown territory.
When she spoke to Fu Yechuan earlier about future developments, she had said she was “not sure whether they would still happen.”
What she had not said was that she was becoming uncertain about more and more details.
The timeline of the novel was breaking apart.
And it was happening faster than she had expected.
How much longer could she rely on her memories?
She did not know. Her phone suddenly vibrated.
Su Ran opened her eyes and looked down. A text message from an unfamiliar number.
Just four words.
Miss Su Ran.
No signature, no follow up.
No punctuation.
Su Ran stared at it for three seconds, then turned the phone face down onto her knee.
The back of the seat felt cold against her spine.
She glanced sideways at Fu Yechuan.
He was looking down at his own phone and had not noticed anything unusual.
Su Ran looked away and studied her reflection in the subway window.
The woman staring back looked pale beneath the fluorescent lights.
But her eyes were clear.
She did not tell Fu Yechuan about the text. Not because she did not trust him.
But because she needed to determine one thing first.
Did that message come from a plotline that already existed in the original story—
Or from a completely new variable she herself had created?