Read Chapter 9: — THE MAN WITH THE BOTTLE

Fear did not make Mufeng retreat from work. It made him reckless.

He started taking long walks alone after midnight and spending his days pretending nothing had changed. When Bu Suyu, the collector from Yiding Garden and one of the Hua family's oldest confidants, tried to see him, Mufeng avoided him.

One evening Mufeng went sketching beside the Yantie Canal. A stranger fishing nearby offered him a bottled tea.

Mufeng drank it.

Within minutes the world tilted.

He remembered cold water, darkness, and the sensation of sinking without enough strength to understand why. Someone dragged him toward the bank. When Mufeng regained consciousness, his rescuer was already running away.

At home, Qian Duoduo took one look at him and insisted he had been drugged.

Mufeng refused the hospital but quietly sent what remained of the bottle for testing.

A sedative was found.

This was no accident.

The earlier garage crash returned to him with new force. So did the flying bowl at a hotpot restaurant months before, when he had thrown himself in front of Yonghe and suffered burns to his arm. At the time he had wondered whether she was the target.

Now he was less certain.

He confronted Bu Suyu.

"Stop acting," Mufeng said. "If the Hua family brought me into Huashi for Jiazhen, say it. If somebody is trying to kill me because of it, say that too."

Bu's face changed, but he did not answer the accusation directly.

"You are in danger," he said. "That much is true."

"From whom?"

"I don't know."

Mufeng laughed without humour. "Everyone around me knows half the truth and thinks that makes them innocent."

He left.

By the time he reached Qinghe Gallery, he noticed a man following him.

Yonghe was there, arranging a new exhibition.

"You look terrible," she said.

"You always know how to flatter me."

She studied him. "What happened?"

He almost told her everything.

Instead he gave her a gardenia he had stolen from a roadside planter.

"Evidence of my criminal life."

She took the flower and smiled.

For a few minutes, the danger receded.

Then Mufeng looked through the gallery window.

The man who had followed him was gone.