Lu Wenjing had always known the limits of his position within the Lu family, but it was only when he truly attempted to move against an entrenched corporate scheme that those limits became painfully tangible.
The investigation he had initiated quietly, cautiously, and with what little leverage he could gather dragged on for days with no visible progress. He combed through public disclosures, indirect shareholding structures, and the interlocking web of subsidiaries that surrounded Qin Yuwei's family enterprise. On paper, everything was immaculate. Audit reports were clean. Risk exposure had been neatly transferred. Any irregularity that might once have pointed back to the mother company had already been diluted, rerouted, or buried under layers of compliance language.
Every path Lu Wenjing followed ended the same way: a dead end disguised as transparency.
He sat alone in a small conference room at the edge of the Lu family's investment office, far from the main boardrooms, far from the inner circle where real decisions were made. The room smelled faintly of old paper and cold coffee. On the screen before him were transaction timelines he had annotated himself, arrows looping back on one another in frustration.
He exhaled slowly and leaned back, rubbing his eyes.
So this is how it feels, he thought bitterly. Knowing something is wrong, seeing the outline of it clearly and still being completely unable to touch it.
His surname carried weight outside. Inside his own family, however, he was a peripheral figure: useful for legwork, tolerated for curiosity, but never trusted with authority. The resources he could access were limited to secondary analysts, outdated internal databases, and favors from people who viewed him as harmless.
Still, he tried.
Through an old university senior now working at a regulatory consultancy, he quietly inquired about recent shifts in enforcement focus. Through a distant aunt who managed a minor trust fund, he gained indirect access to market sentiment briefings not meant for public circulation. Each fragment of information confirmed the same thing: the authorities' attention had been expertly redirected. The Qin Yuwei father's company had become the new focal point flagged for "structural anomalies," "risk concentration," and "historical inconsistencies."
On the surface, it looked like coincidence.
Lu Wenjing knew better.
What unsettled him most was not the elegance of the maneuver, but how completely Shen Yiqiao had vanished from the picture. No trace of her appeared in any document he could access. No informal mention, no rumor, no careless overlap. It was as though she had never existed within the operation at all.
The memory returned to him unbidden: the hospital corridor, the muted hum of medical equipment, and her standing outside the CEO's VIP room with her phone pressed to her ear. He hadn't meant to eavesdrop , only slowed his steps when he heard a familiar name.
His crush's name.
That single moment had lodged itself deep in his mind.
At the time, Shen Yiqiao's tone had been calm, efficient, almost bored. There had been no urgency in her voice, no hint of guilt or hesitation. Just a brief mention casual, controlled before she ended the call and walked away without sparing him a glance.
That was what disturbed him most.
She knew, he thought now, fingers tapping restlessly against the table. She knew exactly whose name that was to me.
And she had used it anyway.
His help to his crush's family had come instinctively, almost reflexively. When he noticed the pressure mounting on her father's company, banks suddenly tightening credit lines, long-standing partners requesting additional disclosures he acted before fully thinking it through. He leveraged the Lu family's reputation rather than its power: subtle endorsements, informal reassurances, quiet introductions to stabilizing investors.
It was not much.
But it was all he had.
And in the end, it changed nothing.
The scrutiny didn't lift. If anything, it intensified, precisely calibrated to appear fair, procedural, unavoidable. His efforts were swallowed whole by the scale of the machinery at work. He could stabilize sentiment, delay consequences, soften edges, but he could not alter direction.
By the time he realized this, exhaustion had settled deep into his bones.
Late that evening, he left the office alone. The city outside was restless, alive with motion that felt strangely detached from his own internal stagnation. His phone buzzed once with a message from an analyst apologetically explaining that there was nothing more they could find.
Lu Wenjing didn't reply.
He changed into running clothes when he got home, laced his shoes with mechanical precision, and stepped back out into the night.
He didn't have a destination in mind.
He only knew he needed to move fast and hard until the frustration burned out of his system.
As his footsteps echoed against the pavement, one thought repeated itself relentlessly:
In the end, I still couldn't protect anyone.
And worse—he had confirmed something he hadn't wanted to admit.
Shen Yiqiao had never once considered him an obstacle.
To her, he was exactly what she had always seen him as: inconsequential.