Day had barely broken when the black sedan Fu Jingchen sent was already blocking the gate of the side courtyard.
Lawyer Chen stood by the car door in a neatly pressed gray suit, holding last night's unfinished draft agreement, dark rings under his eyes.
Seeing me walk out with my belly, he hurriedly put on his businesslike smile and pulled the door open an inch. "Mrs. Fu, Mr. Fu has instructed that the old estate's belongings will be cleared out by his people. Why make this trip yourself in your condition?"
I gathered my old knit cardigan around me, my palm pressing against the two sections of ice-cold broken chain in my coat pocket.
"If I don't go myself, how will I know whether what my grandfather left behind has been donated into your Fu family's merit box as 'goodwill'?"
The smile froze at the corner of Lawyer Chen's mouth. His hovering fingers paused—then, in the end, he didn't dare stop me.
The car drove all the way to the Fu family's old estate on the city outskirts.
Layer upon layer of gray-green eaves pressed down low, and from deep in the courtyards drifted the aged bitterness of sandalwood.
Fu Jingchen had arrived a step ahead of us.
He sat at the long rosewood table in the main hall flipping through old ledgers. At the sound of us he raised his eyelids, his gaze steeped in a thin chill.
"I thought you had more backbone. All that talk of your grandfather's dignity—and you run back to the old estate first thing in the morning, still just to rummage through chests for anything valuable."
He rapped the solid wood table, a condescending sneer on his lips.
"Su Nian. So you were after our Fu family's money from start to finish."
Deep in my sea of consciousness, Su Nian's presence trembled faintly, like a small bird stung by a needle.
I patted her shoulder inwardly and walked straight into Fu Jingchen's gaze, pulled out a rosewood chair, and sat down, unhurried.
"You're so funny, Mr. Fu. Back then you swallowed my grandfather's thirty million with a bride price of five million. Now that I've come to take back my dowry, I'm the one after your money? Since you insist on pinning that label on me, I'd better strip this Fu family to the bare walls—otherwise I'd be carrying this bad reputation for nothing."
The chill in Fu Jingchen's eyes sharpened all at once.
The panel flickered up at the edge of my vision, Zhao's message glowing gold:
[Target emotional fluctuation intensifying. Anti-trope counter triggered. Jinx Harm Rating under sustained suppression.]
I paid no attention to Fu Jingchen's darkening face and turned to the old butler standing beside the curio shelf.
"Uncle Zhang. The twelve chests of ledgers and seals my grandfather left here—please bring them out."
The old butler instinctively looked toward Fu Jingchen, a sheen of sweat on his brow, feet nailed to the floor.
"Give them to her."
Fu Jingchen laughed coldly and dropped a ledger onto the table with a heavy thud.
"Let's see what waves a few chests of time-barred old accounts can stir up."
Before long, four camphor-wood chests, heavy as sin, were carried into the side hall; when the lids came up, a choking cloud of dust rose with them.
I put on the white cotton gloves I'd brought and went through the yellowed reconciliation statements one by one.
Script View unfolded beneath my eyes, and the tangled numbers threaded themselves into clean red lines through my mind.
Su Nian's grandfather's chain of pharmacies had been flush with cash right up to the brink of bankruptcy—and then, within three months, drained by seven overseas purchases, all remitted into an offshore account whose address matched a shell foundation under the Fu Group exactly.
More absurd still: every date on which funds were siphoned off corresponded, precisely as I'd predicted, to the great incense sacrifice at the Fu family's old estate.
I pulled out a dark-brown ritual ledger at random and let my fingertips glide over the neat brushstrokes.
"Look how coincidental the dates are, Mr. Fu."
I slammed the ledger down on the coffee table in front of Fu Jingchen.
"Five years ago, the third day of the third month: eight million in working capital drained from Su's Pharmacy. That same day, the Fu ancestral hall acquired a pair of pure-gold dragon candlesticks."
"Four years ago, the nineteenth of the ninth month: my grandfather's ancestral secret formula transferred to the Fu Group at a valuation of one hundred thousand. That same day, the Fu family hall was renovated, and the merit box took in exactly that amount."
Fu Jingchen looked down over the ledger pages. A flicker of panic crossed his eyes, gone almost before it appeared, pressed firmly back down.
"Commercial investments win and lose. Your Su family simply ran its business badly, and the Fu family took over trusteeship in good faith. Digging up old accounts and chasing shadows—do you find this entertaining?"
"In good faith?"
I stood and looked at him.
"Is that what you call good faith, Mr. Fu—taking an in-law family's luck and sewing it into your own wedding garments? Marry one bride, swallow one family business, then announce to the world that you were charitably helping the poor. You people keep exquisite books."
Lawyer Chen, wiping cold sweat from his forehead, rushed in to smooth things over.
"Mrs. Fu, all of these fund movements passed compliance audits at the time. Legally, there is no problem whatsoever..."
"No problem legally. And what about karmically?" I turned a cold gaze on Lawyer Chen.
"Shall we pull the other two prenuptial agreements while we're at it? Seven years ago, Mr. Fu's cousin married the Lin family's only daughter—the Lins went bankrupt within three years. And if I recall, five years ago the second uncle married the shipping magnate's niece; the magnate died of illness the very next year, and the whole estate went to the second uncle. Am I right?"
With each old story I recited, the skin of Fu Jingchen's face drew tighter.
These were no coincidences. This Fu family was a black-hearted workshop that devoured heiresses whole.
The Fu men used their gentle, refined skins to scout out heiresses with no one left to protect them, married them in as living storage vessels, drained their luck dry, and swallowed them down—skin, flesh, and all.
Inside me, Su Nian let out a long breath, and the consciousness that had curled into a ball slowly uncurled.
The self-blame and fear she'd carried so long were torn apart by the truth. She could finally see it: her plight had never been her own failure. From the very beginning, she had stepped into a trap built to devour people.
"Su Nian. Have you snooped enough?"
Fu Jingchen surged to his feet, his voice thick with the gloom of a man caught out. "Take whatever rotten ledgers you want and get out of this estate. Now."
"Oh, I'm leaving. But before I go, I should pay my respects to your honored ancestors." I rounded the long table and headed straight for the ancestral hall in the back courtyard.
"Stop her!" Fu Jingchen's face changed drastically and he barked the order.
I reached the heavy vermilion door of the ancestral hall and pushed it open first.
On the redwood altar at the center of the hall, the memorial tablets of generations of Fu ancestors stood in dense ranks.
And directly before them all sat an eerily shaped three-legged bronze censer, its body coiled in sinister chain-pattern engravings, a wisp of black-gray smoke rising from its mouth that would not disperse.
The moment I drew near, the two sections of broken chain in my pocket seared hot, burning my palm through the fabric.
The virtual panel in my mind flared violently, scarlet warnings flooding my vision:
[WARNING! High-tier luck-harvesting medium detected!]
[Target item: luck-harvesting sub-censer (replica).]
[Jinx Harm Rating in current world spiking abnormally—red line of ninety-five percent breached!]
Ignoring Fu Jingchen's racing footsteps behind me, I flipped back the deep-red silk cloth cushioning the bronze censer.
Beneath the silk lay a birth-post of yellow silk, blackened by incense ash.
The eight characters of birth written on it were not mine, nor Su Nian's, but a stranger's, circled again and again in cinnabar—and beside it, a line of exquisitely fine regular-script:
Storage host: Meng Xin. Luck-drain eighty percent complete. Awaiting transfer to secondary depletion process.
At the bottom of the birth-post, the wax seal bore the imprint of a black scepter wreathed in thorns—strikingly similar to the personal seal in the hidden compartment of Yu Shen's study in my past life.
Fu Jingchen burst into the hall and clamped down on my wrist, vicious murderous intent filling his eyes.
"Su Nian. Now that you've seen it, don't think you're walking out of this door alive."
I met his bloodshot eyes, and the corner of my mouth curled slowly into a cold sneer.
"What's the rush, Mr. Fu? I haven't nearly finished watching this fine production of yours—sustaining your lives on living people."