Auditor General Wang Jun,
We thank you very much for your findings of corruption and incompetence in our family.
Those responsible have been advised to correct their actions and remove those responsible for the breaches. Though it is regrettable that these cases show up, it is inevitable for misdemeanors to worm their way into a large financial organization such as ours.
Your help will no longer be required on these cases. The board has decided to reject your request for reallocation of assets.
Wang Jun breathed deeply. Though he wanted nothing more than to throw a teacup across the room, it wouldn’t help his situation. It was unfair, of course; years of work, years of planning had done nothing for him. Though he hadn’t expected them to follow through on his request to confiscate assets, he’d expected some sort of reward for meritorious contribution, or a punishment for his opponent. It seemed like the elder council had opted to do nothing. That fact bothered him less than the implication that during the time he’d taken to grow his wealth, the elder council had fallen deeper and deeper into his brother’s pocket.
Though these reports had taken two years to write, it wasn’t as if he’d spent the entire two years on them. Most of the time, he’d been waiting on more information. He’d used this downtime to feed better information and better opportunities to Wang Bing and Elder Bai for processing. He’d smoothed out their management and supply chains and negotiated on their behalf. That was why, after only two years, they now possessed an astounding half a million top-grade spirit stones in net assets.
Still, what did it all matter? The game was rigged against him. He wagered that his brother would succeed even if he accumulated enough wealth to physically smother the entire Wang family manor. He’d known from the start that it would be difficult, but he’d severely underestimated his opponent.
I can only go in for the kill, Wang Jun thought. These petty squabbles on the side would only result in slaps on the wrist. He needed something big, something irrefutable. Something that, if leaked, would ruin the family. And the contents of his black folio, the document that never left his storage ring, was just the thing. The Red Dust Pavilion’s offer happened to coincide with his objectives. It was a godsend that made him reevaluate his own past karma. Had he been virtuous in a previous life after all? No, he decided. If he had been, Wang Hua wouldn’t have died.
Disappointed, he casually picked up the black coins on his desk. He tossed them several times but to no avail. The Red Dust Pavilion. The Spirit Temple. His brother. Everything worth divining couldn’t be divined in the slightest. It was as though everything he touched no longer fell within the bounds of predictability.
Hours passed as the sky darkened. Finally, Wang Jun got up, brushed himself off, and prepared to see his master. His door creaked shut as it locked with a click, his runic wardings activating as it did. He walked past vacant office desks and desks where people were still quietly working. They didn’t have to, of course; working from home was allowed. But some people just couldn’t concentrate with their family around, so working at the office was their only option.
Wang Jun entered the large circular hallway in the main family dwelling and made his way toward the dark corridor no one else knew existed. No one save the Patriarch, of course. Just as he was about to enter, he heard a soft voice.
“You never come visit,” a man said from behind him.
Wang Jun looked back at the man, who coughed lightly due to his poor health. The man was his father, and Wang Jun had visited him a total of four times since his sister’s death.
“I saw no need to visit,” Wang Jun replied. “Ling is clearly the only family you recognize.” His father was the current Patriarch’s brother. Wang Ling and Wang Jun were competing for the family leadership because the Patriarch’s wife had died young, and he’d refused to remarry. They’d never borne any children, and the Patriarch preferred to commit himself to running the family.
“There are things that are beyond me,” his father said.
“You’re the chairman of the family,” Wang Jun said blankly. “You can do pretty well anything you like.” He got the implication, of course. His father’s hands were tied because of the family patriarch. Or quite possibly the grand elder.
His father sighed. “You need to stop competing for the family leadership. You won’t succeed, and you never could. It’s something no one else wants to tell you, because they fear you. But as a father, I need to say it.”
“This is why I don’t visit you,” Wang Jun said. “You always favored Ling over Hua and me. When Hua died, you swept her death under a rug and erased all traces of her. But I remember. I remember who she was to us. I remember who she was to me. When she died, you hid all the evidence. For a much. Lesser. Man.”
A pained expression appeared on his father’s face. “I just don’t want to lose you too,” he said softly. “I’ve already lost one child, and I don’t want to lose another.” He broke into a coughing fit and kneeled to recover.
Wang Jun didn’t budge to help him. He did, however, wait patiently as the coughing receded.
“Fine, I won’t waste my breath. Just be careful. I love you both, so I won’t pick sides. But I will tell you this: He doesn’t play fair. The game is rigged, and you can’t win with their rules. If you continue down the path you’ve chosen, you’ll fail. And judging by your stubborn personality, you’ll do something desperate, and losing
