Read Chapter 5: — THE OLD GUARD

Mufeng's first reforms were not elegant.

He punished lateness, required managers to sign meeting actions, reopened neglected quality reports, and insisted that northern-market furniture be tested for dry heated interiors rather than assuming that products behaved the same in every climate.

Lu Yong, the production chief, threatened to resign.

"Fine," Mufeng said. "Human Resources can prepare the paperwork."

Lu stared at him.

Nobody had ever accepted his resignation threat before.

He did not resign.

Linda later asked how Mufeng had known.

"He bought a new apartment last month," Mufeng said. "His mortgage is too large for theatrical unemployment."

"You investigated him?"

"I listen. People tell you what matters when they think you're not paying attention."

The changes made him enemies, but they also made the company faster. Mei Hongfeng, who had initially treated him as an insult to seniority, began bringing problems directly to him rather than using meetings as artillery practice.

Cai Jiahan remained polite and cold.

Linda nicknamed him "London Fog" because his arrival seemed to lower the temperature of every corridor. Mufeng prohibited the nickname. By the end of the week, half the building was using it.

Outside Huashi, Mufeng's life was no quieter.

He saw Yonghe often—at gallery events, at Duoduo's restaurant, sometimes by accident and sometimes because neither of them made much effort to avoid an accident.

She drove him home one evening after noticing his injured arm. They discovered they lived in the same residential compound: Mufeng in a modest apartment with his father, Yonghe among the villas on the other side.

"Left or right?" she asked at the gate.

"Left," he said. "The proletarian quarter."

"Right," she answered, smiling. "Apparently I am the class enemy."

Their humour worked because neither pretended money did not matter.

Mufeng's father, Li Mingtao, made the situation worse by appearing from the shadows with his girlfriend, Wang Jianglan, and immediately deciding Yonghe must be Mufeng's company driver.

Mingtao was a rideshare driver in his late fifties, a former mechanic, a compulsive talker, and the man who had raised Mufeng alone after his wife died when Mufeng was one.

Mufeng loved him with the embarrassed devotion of an adult child who had never fully escaped being twelve.

That night, lying awake in the apartment they had shared for years, Mufeng realised something uncomfortable.

Huashi was taking his sleep.

Yonghe was taking his attention.

And the mysterious cough behind the screen had not left his mind at all.