Chapter 7

The anonymous message sat in the middle of my screen like a medical examiner's scalpel, peeling the Fu family's festered sore skin and bone into the open in front of me.

Around eleven, I changed into a dark-gray tracksuit, slipped both halves of the broken chain into my pocket, and slipped back under cover of night to the rear wall of the Fu family's old mansion.

Before setting out I had Zhao crack her permissions and unlock a cheat for me. She grumbled the whole time, but for the sake of Su Nian's child, she reinforced my body.

The daytime media storm had left Fu Group's PR and legal departments in all-night meetings. The front building blazed with lights—which made the east side courtyard behind it feel cold and deserted.

Withered creepers left long shadows in the corner of the wall. The late-autumn night wind chilled my ankles, and the courtyard was thick with a bitter, cloying smell of gloomwood.

The patrol schedule in the message was accurate to the second. The moment two flashlights rounded the moon gate, I slipped sideways into the third cellar entrance.

The heavy iron door stood ajar; half a thin steel wire jutted from the brass lock—clearly an escape route left in advance by that mysterious inside man.

Down the damp stone steps, one by one. The air at the bottom was colder than outside by several degrees.

A dim incandescent bulb hung overhead, lighting up a crude camp cot in the corner.

Curled at the edge of it was a gaunt woman, wrists thin as dry twigs that would snap at a touch. She was coughing hard, a frightening smear of dark red at her lips.

Meng Xin. To the whole internet, the woman Fu Jingchen cherished as his white moonlight, the beauty he kept hidden away—and here she lay like a used-up rag, discarded alone in the depths of a moldy cellar.

At the sound of my footsteps she struggled to lift her eyelids. Her dull pupils flashed with instinctive fear—then, seeing my face, she froze solid.

"Su Nian? Why would it be you..."

Her voice was a rasp, like coarse sandpaper dragged over concrete:

"Didn't Fu Jingchen say you ran off with the money? Why would you dare come here... Go, quickly. This place drinks people's lives."

I hurried over, crouched, and caught her wrist.

The skin under my fingers was cold, without a trace of living warmth. Script View unfolded instantly in my mind:

Meng Xin had been an actuary returned from overseas. Three years ago Fu Jingchen deceived her into the Fu family with a "devoted proposal." Six properties and two family funds in her name were all taken into "managed custody" and drained; then, on the pretext of a mysterious illness, she was locked away here, her life force siphoned day and night as fuel for the luck-harvesting sub-censer.

"Don't believe his nonsense. The one who ran off with the money is him." I twisted open the thermos I'd brought and held it to her cracked lips.

"Miss Meng. The devoted man you speak of—the one who loved you for three years—locked you in a sunless cellar as a blood bag and spent your remaining years filling his family's treasure pot. And you're still covering for him?"

Meng Xin's whole body trembled, despair and deep pain churning in her eyes:

"I don't want to believe it either... But when my family went bankrupt, he paid off my father's debts—ten million. He brought me hot congee every day. He remembered everything I liked... I thought he was the rope that saved me..."

"That wasn't a lifeline. That's called playing the long line to land a big fish."

I cut through her self-deception with a cold laugh: "The congee was ordered by the script. The ten million that 'saved' your father was his commission—a cut from the very fund that shorted your family into the ground."

"As for what you thought was the grace of a savior—the wool comes off the sheep. It was your money all along."

Meng Xin's withered fingers clenched the bedsheet, knuckles bloodless. In the depths of my mind, Su Nian sighed as if the pain were her own, and laid her warm consciousness gently over Meng Xin's frozen fingertips.

Su Nian said to me, quietly: "So we were fish caught in the same net all along. He acts that convincingly—anyone would have fallen for it."

"Seeing it now is better than never."

I took the photocopy of the birth-post I'd scanned that day out of my pocket and spread it before Meng Xin's eyes.

"Look at the wax seal. Do you recognize it? Tonight Fu Jingchen switched the shrine incense to gloomwood. In seven days at most, once the last two-tenths of your luck is drained, you'll 'die of a sudden heart attack'—and then he'll turn around and start drinking from the baby in my belly."

Meng Xin stared fixedly at the wax-sealed birth-post. The cowardice and confusion in her eyes cracked apart bit by bit, replaced by a flood of hatred—the hatred of someone driven to the very edge:

"The study on the second floor... everything he's hiding is in a secret compartment in the second-floor study! The original fund flows from my company and your grandfather's company are in there, and the ledgers he uses to report upward... The password is the date I entered the Fu family!"

"Hold on here. In ten minutes someone will come to move you somewhere safe."

I lit up my phone and sent a confirmation of the coordinates back to the anonymous sender, then slipped out of the cellar and, silent as a shadow, climbed the drainpipe on the outer wall up to the balcony of the second-floor study.

The study was thick with the sharp bite of sandalwood. Behind the solid-wood antique shelf directly ahead, I could just make out the faint click of a mechanism.

Following the date Meng Xin had given me, I punched the eight digits into the keypad at the base of the rosewood shelves, fast.

A soft clunk, and the shelf slid half a foot to the left, revealing a dark-gold safe set into the wall.

Inside, dozens of black encrypted files stood in perfect order, each cover embossed with that scepter wound in thorns.

I flipped open the topmost one. The itemized assets swallowed from Su's Pharmacy, the original agreements gnawing through Meng Xin's family trusts—all of it there. And every stream of harvested luck ultimately flowed into a transnational outfit called [Abyss Capital].

The panel in my mind strobed wildly, and for the first time Zhao's voice carried undisguised horror:

"Ruan Ying, forget Fu Jingchen's books—look at the appendix at the bottom of the compartment! Now!"

I reached into the lowest layer of the safe's hidden slot and pulled out a yellowed hardcover ledger. The first page slammed into my eyes in machine-printed scarlet:

[Luck Harvesting Bureau, On-World Field Project Registry: Top-Priority Subject Archive]

My gaze ran down the column of cold ID numbers—and when it reached the familiar face, my fingers locked mid-air and every drop of blood in my body froze to ice.

In the center of that page was a one-inch ID photo, blue background: a girl with a clean ponytail, smiling with crinkled eyes. Me, in my first year of university, a lifetime ago.

Below the photo, a rectangle of glaring red ink, the characters laid down with bureaucratic neatness:

[Subject ID: A-019]

[Host Name: Ruan Ying]

[Luck Rating: Maximum—Heaven Grade]

[Lead Operator: Yu Shen]

[Status: Project closed. Reclaimed luck routed and merged into the Purification Nexus]

At the very end of the remarks column, in that familiar, elegant hand, Yu Shen had written a single line:

Subject's will is resilient. Recommend preserving residual consciousness for inclusion in the secondary reclamation reserve.

My knuckles went white around the file. Rage and absurdity boiled up in my chest like a tide.

So my death, my seven years, my parents' dispersion was never the greed of an ordinary cheating boyfriend. In this cold, merciless assembly-line ledger, the price had been tallied long ago.

Out here in the living world, Fu Jingchen devoured dead men's households—most likely as nothing more than a small franchisee in Yu Shen's man-eating supply chain.

Heavy, jumbled footsteps suddenly sounded in the corridor outside, along with the beep of an electronic lock disengaging. Fu Jingchen's voice, sinister and glacial, cut through the study door:

"Did you find out? Who the hell took Meng Xin?!"