Chapter 8: Eclipsed Fury
"Are you menacing my existence?!" Ling Meixue's timbre cleaved through crepuscular vapours.
Jiang Feng's mirth curdled into vitriol. "Merely expounding upon mortality's caprice, Madam Ling. Which arrives swifter, daybreak or cataclysm? The cosmos keeps such mysteries close-breasted."
Gu Chen's ocular shards attained obsidian lethality. "Not trepidation, but fastidious contempt for rabid gutterlings obstructing thoroughfares. Parlaying with curs demeans celestial station."
"You equate my lineage with sewer-born parasites?!" Jiang Feng's veneer of civility shattered as he snarled at his mastiffs, "Apprehend this cloacal miscreation!"
Twin monoliths of muscle advanced. The stunted aggressor initiated a bull rush—intercepted mid-lunge by Gu Chen's scything palm strike. A sepulchral *wumpf* resonated through twilight's cathedral.
The assailant palpated his unblemished thorax. "Theatrical fakir's trickery! Where's the—"
"Consult the arboreal witness." Gu Chen inclined his chin toward a Quercus marred by five phalangeal craters ten meters hence.
"Jingang Boli?!" The enforcers recoiled in synchrony. Their prey had exercised homicidal restraint—that blow could've reduced viscera to chyme.
Gu Chen's sardonic curvature intensified. "Retracting my ornithological parallel. Even carrion crows merit nobler analogies."
"You'll sup brimstone for this effrontery!" Jiang Feng's digit quivered in apoplectic indignation. "The Jiang dynasty's retributive—"
His imprecations dissolved into hydrocarbon smog as Gu Chen shepherded Ling Meixue through nocturne's embrace, their silhouettes coalescing with umbral grandeur.
***
Within a lichen-stained byway, three auriferous wraiths congealed from gloom.
"Verification?"
"His palmar cadence mirrors archival combat holographs from the Tundra Purges."
"Surveillance asserts he's a *custodial sentry* now?" The neophyte's lip curled. "The Khalkhin Gol Reaper diminished to threshold guardianship?"
The alpha's cicatrix-webbed metacarpi blanched. "The existential query—is he our predestined prey or some more abyssal entity?"
"Jiangzhou's subcutaneous layers teem with our acolytes." The tertiary entity's tongue caressed canines resembling surgical steel. "Shall we... rouse the slumbering leviathan?"
Their harmonized rictus effaced lunar luminescence. Deep in the metropolis' chthonic recesses, dormant war gongs commenced their eschatological rhythm.
Veiled Sorrows
Their footfalls resonated through the parking labyrinth's concrete catacombs.
"Why incite the serpent?" Ling Meixue's murmur carried tungsten undertones. "The Jiangs' aristocratic lineage spans dynasties! Their retribution could eclipse Wang Fucheng's farcical demise."
Gu Chen's shoulders undulated like quicksilver tides. "Does ignoring vipers stop their venom? Recall yesterday's tragic opus—the scholar's daughter who embraced gravity's aria."
"The broadcasts attributed it to scholastic duress."
The tragedy had unfolded mere blocks from their marbled enclave—a seventeen-year-old prodigy's sunset swan dive. Postmortem revelations composed darker motifs: gestational secrets, uterine crimson tides preceding impact, and epidermal cartography of violet nocturnes.
"Her patriarch's nephritic symphony demanded costly cadenzas." Gu Chen's digits performed percussive poetry on the steering wheel. "Jiang Feng conducted a Mephistophelian rondo—monthly stipends for nocturnal duets."
Ling Meixue's smartphone illuminated her searching features. "The chronicle's evaporated! Yesterday's bulletins dissolved into digital ether."
"Jiang conducted a media eclipse for ten thousand taels." His grin frost-coated the luxury sedan's interior. "Merely a prelude to their eighty-billion-yuan financial requiem."
***
As tyres whispered against estate pebbles, Gu Chen's clandestine device vibrated with encrypted urgency. Bai Ruohan's tear-strangled supplication pierced the static:
"Elder Brother... her life-melody attenuates... the white-robed chorus intones elegiac plainsong..."
***
Jiangzhou Medical Citadel's critical care sanctum thrummed with mechanical dirges.
Bai Shanshan's berth resembled an alchemist's accursed canvas—crimson deluges pooling beneath her as nursing acolytes exchanged scarlet linens. Her latest haematogenic outburst had splattered abstract masterpieces across quarantine barriers.
Old Master Bai's cane tapped arrhythmic counterpoint to cardiographic monody. "The healer's counsel... opiate-laced twilight sonnets."
Gu Chen's entrance parted the sterile atmosphere like Damascus steel. Bai Ruohan anchored herself to his arm, her frame trembling like captured starlight. "They prescribe morphine's false lullabies. Yet you—you resurrected me from Hades' vestibule!"
His palm hovered above Bai Shanshan's alabaster abdomen. Infrared vision unveiled visceral wastelands—a carcinogenic pavane consuming cellular kingdoms.
"Fetch argent filaments and artemisia." His decree cleaved clinical sterility. "We shall recompose somatic harmonies."
The oncology hierophant scoffed. "When symphonic science falters, what hope in shamanic cacophony?"
Gu Chen's smile acquired a surgical edge. "You conflate celestial concertos with rustic jangles." From his sanctum, an inner pocket emerged with nine onyx needles thrumming with quantum antiphon—the Xuanwu Array, last deployed during the Red Cliffs' sanguine opera.
As the inaugural filament penetrated Bai Shanshan's Zhongwan portal, the flatline's monochromatic drone fractured into tremulous allegretto.
Simultaneously in Jiangzhou's fiscal heart, Jiang Feng's crystal chalice disintegrated mid-toast. The shattering's crystalline knell presaged his dynasty's impending ruinous crescendo.
Ancient Wisdom's Triumph
"We'd anticipated lunar respites, yet Chronos' crescent blade harvests without clemency," lamented a white-robed acolyte, adjusting fluoropolymer gloves.
Bai Shanshan's defiance against chemical sanguination had catalysed her corporeal dissolution—each melancholic paroxysm engraving deeper lithographs upon her failing physiology. Erebus-tinted sanguine tides now batiked her clinical linens with thanatopic artistry.
"Hippocratic savant! What thaumaturgy remains?!" The Bai patriarch's patrician facade fractured as he grasped the diagnostician's sleeve.
The iatros shook his crowned head. "Weave funerary vestments. Aurora may discern her transcending—"
Footfalls resonating like taiko war cadences were interrupted.
"A purulent ventriculi ulcer masquerading as carcinoma's terminal act?" Gu Chen's baritone sundered the aseptic penumbra.
The Bai gerontocracy surged like tidal devotees. "Asclepian Virtuoso! Your benediction—"
He elevated a quelling manus. "My presence answers solely to betrothal's covenant." His gaze dissected the deathbed tableau. "This ephemeral malady eschews metallic intervention."
Clerical script pirouetted across mulberry parchment. "Triquotidian infusions of these twelve phytological agents. Six Warring States-era numismatic relics in her podiatric carapaces—terracotta warrior's daily march. Within fifteen lunations, vis vitalis shall resurge."
"Goeteia!" The oncologist's cachinnation echoed hollowly. "Galvanic science capitulates, yet your agrarian potion proffers thaumaturgy? I shall ingest ramen through olfactory conduits should this prevail!"
Gu Chen rotated with glacieric deliberation. "What do you comprehend of Zhongyi's arcana? Allopathic chronology's infantile centuries pale before our aeon-spanning pharmacopoeia!"
A septuagenarian erudite in Song dynasty silks extended tremor-riddled phalanges. "Venerable Neophyte, might this humbled academician perlustrate your arcane formulary?"
The vellum traversed their interstitial space. The elder's respiration stuttered. "Draconis Osseous amalgamated with Spectre's Cymbidium? Phoenix Caudal Pteridophyte counterpoised—this alchemical concordance vanished during Yongle's biblioclasm!"
"Verily." Gu Chen's enigmatism gleamed with celestial insight. "Whilst your Occidental analogues butchered pestilent Europe, our progenitors charted meridian symphonies and subdued epidemic cantatas."
Biomonitors abruptly chorused an alarm. Bai Shanshan's kohl-rimmed labia transitioned to Prunus incolor's blush.
"Inconceivable..." The oncologist faltered as haematological metrics commenced alchemical transmutation. "Her leukocytic legion—renormalising?!"
Gu Chen secreted the wén coins Bai Ruohan pressed into his palmar sanctuary. "Mnemonically annotate, allopath—when performing nasal degustation, circumspect the capsaicin oleum."
Beyond clinical confines, six archaic qian bi commenced lambent pulsations within a custodian's satchel—their patina shimmering with primordial Wu Xing resonance.
Resurrected Legacy
Jiangzhou's Medical Citadel housed its pantheon of Zhongyi luminaries. Had ancestral alchemies truly conquered carcinoma's spectre, why would supplicants queue before Hippocratic altars?
Elder Pang—a diagnostician who'd weathered fifty monsoons in these halls—studied the vellum with hierophantic awe. His renown sprang from perceiving humoral imbalances through Shen observation alone, a gift that drew acolytes by the hundredfold. Yet even this oracle had deemed Bai Shanshan's case beyond salvation's reach.
"Incinerate this scripture after compounding its essence," Gu Chen decreed. "Arcane wisdom demands hermetic guardianship."
The elder's phalanges quivered like divining rods. "The Qiankun Draconic Palmar Formula! This belongs to Hua Tuo's Septuagint Arcana!"
"A true hierophant!" Gu Chen's gaze kindled with newfound regard. "Few recognize the Divine Physician's magnum opus in this profane epoch. Perhaps Zhongyi's sacred flame yet flickers."
The Septuagint Arcana—Hua Tuo's apocryphal grimoire of resurrection arts—had supposedly perished with its creator's martyrdom. Modern Huangdi neophytes boasting Hua Tuo's lineage typically grasped but fragmented glyphs.
"Yet the Arcana were consigned to history's pyre!" Elder Pang's timbre fractured.
"Not consigned—consecrated." Gu Chen's smile brimmed with dynastic secrets. "A disciple preserved fragmented codices through sanguinary epochs. What persists in vulgar circles are ten elementary incantations. I've assimilated one hundred eight."
The revelation struck like celestial thunder. Jiangzhou's Zhongyi archives sheltered vermiculated Arcana remnants—scrolls where scholars divined meaning from fire-licked margins. Yet even these cinders had birthed modern panaceas.
"Transcendent!" Elder Pang's cataract-clouded orbs ignited. "This formula channels military stratagems—alchemizing catastrophe into triumph! The dialectic between Radix Aconiti and Ginseng Radix... alchemical perfection!"
Gu Chen's palm descended upon the nonagenarian's stooped shoulder. "With three decades' further devotion, you might glimpse my present mastery's foothills."
Sacred silence consecrated the chamber. The audacity—a neophyite suggesting China's Zhongyi pontiff required thirty winters to approach his acme! Yet biometric sentinels chanted their digital hosannas as Bai Shanshan's corpus warmed with renascent shen.
In the infirmary's chthonic vaults, six Zhou-era numismatic relics within a custodial reliquary commenced subharmonic resonance—their vibrational frequencies entraining with Bai Shanshan's resuscitated qi meridians.
Ancestral Resonance
"A single colloquy with you transcends decadal study!" Elder Pang pressed palms together in monastic veneration. "Through seventy solstices of practice, never have I beheld materia medica pulsating with such vital force!"
Though anchored in Hua Tuo's Septuagint Arcana, Gu Chen's formula transcended ancestral dogmata—its alchemy honed through contemporary revelation. Like celestial geometers recalculating cosmic theorems, he had perfected antediluvian wisdom.
"Thus, you sanction this regimen?" Gu Chen's ocular arch conveyed Socratic inquiry.
"The symbiosis of Radix Stephaniae and Rhizoma Gastrodiae..." The elder's digit traced herbal sigils upon vellum. "Da Vincian brilliance! Fifteen lunar cycles of this tincture, conjoined with terpsichorean footwork to awaken plantar meridians—four-fifths restoration probability!"
"Octogesimal odds?!" The Bai progenitors exhaled collective stupefaction. Even the oncologist's derisive snort congealed mid-sneer—Hippocratic protocols seldom proffered tertial success rates for terminal diagnoses.
"Absurdity incarnate!" The albescent-coated iatros regained composure. "She lacks strength for terpsichorean trinities, let alone thirty chiliad steps! Your charlatanism may expedite her sunset!"
Gu Chen's ocular blades sharpened. "What gustatory notes shall accompany your rhinopharyngeal noodles, medicus? Zanthoxylum essence? Fungal consommé?"
The Bai patriarch's command cracked like a dynastic edict. "Decoct the herbs forthwith!"
As servitors scrambled, Old Master Bai intercepted Gu Chen in the hypostyle, tendering a vermilion-bordered cheque. "Ten million jiao—our inadequate tribute."
Gu Chen's gelid mirth crystallized the atmosphere. "Do you conflate me with necromantic peddlers hawking ancestral arcana?"
Behind their tableau, biometric sentinels chorused revitalized cadenzas. Bai Shanshan's phalanges fluttered—maiden autonomous motion since her descent into Thanatos' antechamber.
In the infirmary's subterranean sanctum, six Zhou-era numina intensified their vibratory hymn—patinated surfaces now irradiating like heliolatrous orbs.
Hierarchies and Hubris
Patriarch Bai recoiled as though singed by divine fire. "Asclepian Virtuoso, this unworthy soul dares not profane your sanctity! Should ten million jiao offend, fifty—"
"I mend flesh not for Mammon's trinkets," Gu Chen interposed, his timbre glacial as sepulchral jade. "Your scion's celestial meridians compelled my intervention. Let gratitude cascade upon her astral consonance with my dao."
He strode toward the infirmary's crystalline vestibule, humming a Li Bai quatrain, Bai Ruohan gliding in his wake like a lotus-bearing acolyte. The patriarch's frantic semaphore propelled the maiden in pursuit.
***
At Aurora's chrysoprase hour, Ling Meixue and Lin Shiyu cascaded downstairs, armoured in corporate carapaces.
"Ambrosial congee awaits!" Gu Chen proclaimed from the kitchen's vaporous arena, spatula dancing like Wang Xizhi's calligraphy brush.
"Chronos devours us!" Ling Meixue's stilettos tapped staccato distress. "Shiyu's scholastic symposium! My mercantile colosseum! Commandeer your two-wheeled relic!"
The Lamborghini's growling exhaust devoured his protest. "Consort! This desertion reeks of mercenary treachery!"
***
Astride his phoenix-branded velocipede, Gu Chen navigated Jiangzhou's miasmic thoroughfares. A ferrous cacophony shattered matinal serenity—mercurial steel embraced his rear wheel in violent congress.
"Pavement-dwelling helot!" A porcine-faced oligarch extruded from opulent coachwork, jowls aquiver. "Your plebeian scrap obstructs capitalist providence!"
Gu Chen surveyed the warped fender. "Your automotive oscillation technique requires refinement, plutocratic charioteer."
The tycoon's horologe-adorned fist hammered the klaxon. "Recognise Yang Kun—Suzerain of Human Capital! By meridian's zenith, you'll scour latrines with your tongue!"
A vibrating iPhone truncated his tirade. Yang's demeanour transmuted to unguent obsequiousness. "Venerable Chairman! The rabble's insurrection proves ephemeral!"
As the luxury leviathan submerged into subterranean docks, Security Custodian Wang Hu materialized, aquiver. "Elder Brother! That's Liu Yang's avuncular shadow—HR's stygian overlord! His last challenger purges effluvia in the Himalayan cloaca!"
Gu Chen's smile mirrored Tang dynasty jian blades. "Let him unsheathe his bureaucratic dao. Warlords boasting lesser comprehension of celestial hierarchy have crumbled before me."
***
Within the executive aeries, Yang Kun snuffled cognac while draughting proletarian death warrants. His monitor flickered—a digital clepsydra replaced spreadsheets.
Embedded in Gu Chen's security console, six Zhou-era numina pulsed with cryptic resonance, their patina glowing like miniature astral bodies.
"Corporate mandarins..." Gu Chen mused within his surveillance sanctum, digits pirouetting across firewalls. "...invariably forget true power flows through unseen meridians."
The HR Suzerain's printer abruptly disgorged obsidian ichor. Monitors displayed only the Qiankun Draconic Palmar Formula's esoteric sigils.
In Jiangzhou's fiscal labyrinth, Yang's Mercedes navigation system recalculated trajectories—direct course set for municipal cloaca maxima.
Within this mercantile colosseum, true hegemony often dons Savile Row armour. Yet as dusk's mantle descends, archaic numina and quantum cyphers prepare to inscribe new celestial ordinances.
Veiled Chains
Dawn's pallid fingers found Gu Chen enmeshed in cryptographic catacombs, tracing phantom trails of the schoolgirl's digital martyrdom. Erased forum epitaphs—"Elite Academy's Lotus Defiled by Plutocratic Scion—Dual Mortality Plunge!"—flickered briefly before dissolving into a binary void.
"The Jiangs' cephalopod grasp throttles even the aether," he murmured, Zhou dynasty coins clicking like abacus beads against his palm. Where Wang Fucheng's grubby capitalism ended, this dynasty's venomous influence pulsed through Jiangzhou's political acupuncture points like corrupted humours.
***
Within the sentinel's den, disquiet buzzed like provoked myrmidons.
"My coffers haemorrhage two thousand jiao!" A wraithlike guard glared at luminescent bank glyphs.
Wang Hu consulted his device, exhaling sepulchral vapour. "Count lunar blessings—my bimestrial stipend drifts through bureaucratic purgatory."
Gu Chen's boots cracked like magistrate's gavels against stone. "Fiscal deferment? Since which celestial alignment?"
"Since this humble one entreated Yang Kun's Benz to relinquish unlawful pavement dominion," Wang Hu thundered. "HR's celestial bureaucracy now channels retribution through payroll geomancy."
Grievances swelled—"My progeny's scholarly aspirations wither!" "My ancestral rice urn reverberates with famine's echo!"
"Assault the corporate ziggurat!" a voice ululated. "Confront the Frost Sovereign in her crystalline aerie!"
Wang Hu barred the oaken portal, his frame quaking like an earthquake-stricken pagoda. "Infants! Sans cryptographic sigils, you'll harvest only destitution! The leviathan of capital devours impetuous challengers whole!"
Gu Chen's mirth sliced tension like Damascene steel. "Why storm celestial battlements when we might melt their jade foundations?" His screen bloomed with Yang Kun's offshore coffers—fungal wealth proliferating in fiscal shadows.
***
Unaware in her vitrine throne room, Ling Meixue parsed surveillance scrolls. The Jiang clan's ultimatum blazed crimson upon her desk—surrender West District terrafirma or witness supply-chain decollation.
Her adjutant hesitated. "Ice Phoenix, the sentinels' silver..."
"Unleash the fiscal floodgates," she ice-carved. "I shall personally audit Yang Kun's paper fiefdom."
Too tardy. In the chariot crypt below, six Zhou-era numina wedged in a Mercedes exhaust conduit began irradiating cinnabar hues.
As payroll mechanisms underwent spontaneous rebirth, Gu Chen reclined like a Ming scholar-official, observing cryptocurrency serpents slither into Yang's clandestine coffers. "Modern satraps forget—even silicon shackles oxidize."
The sentinels' devices chorused celestial chimes. Wang Hu's oculars expanded—eight lunar cycles' arrears materialized with celestial interest multipliers.
Somewhere in the fiscal stratosphere, Yang Kun's ill-gotten bullion began sublimating like Himalayan hoarfrost, syphoned toward orphanage endowments. The true crusade for Jiangzhou's anima had commenced—not with boardroom broadsides, but through archaic metallurgy and algorithmic incantations.
Veins of Corruption
With silver streams dammed, the sentinels' vigilance corroded like neglected damascene steel. "How shall night guardians patrol corporate bastions with famine-gnawed entrails?" Gu Chen's mirth carried glacial undertones as he navigated toward fiscal catacombs.
The elevator's quicksilver surfaces reflected his vulpine grin. Fiscal clerks' susurrations enveloped him—"The Snow Phoenix's clandestine consort!" "A Cerberus elevated to courtier!"—until a rosy-cheeked scribe tapped quivering digits across luminous tablets.
"The sentinel cohort's financial sigils... vanished during last moon's accounting," the braided archivist breathed, her monitor radiating bureaucratic oblivion. "Their mortal coils dissolved from corporate scrolls, stipends diverted to Stygian coffers."
Gu Chen's phalanges tightened around Zhou-era numina, their patina murmuring of ancient palace machinations. "Does HR's alchemy now transmute ledger truths?"
***
Within Personnel's electrum-lit sanctum, Yang Kun guzzled Armagnac while digitally flaying dissenters. His Mercedes' exhaust conduit still bore six bronze relics' searing imprints—hieroglyphic admonitions from dawn's mechanical sabotage.
"Verifier of verifiers?" Yang sneered as Gu Chen materialized at his oaken threshold. "Know your caste, gatekeeper. These curs forfeited employment when challenging my chariot's divine right."
The atmosphere crackled with unspoken fulminations. Behind Yang's monitor, a cryptographic clepsydra hemorrhaged digits—Gu Chen's silent machinations redirecting purloined bullion to Himalayan sanctuaries.
"Contemporary mandarins..." Gu Chen traced the chamber's invisible qi channels, ancient coins thrumming in sympathetic resonance. "...invariably disregard data's quantum wraiths."
***
Twilight's embrace revealed security monitors charting Yang Kun's offshore vaults dissolving like mirage lakes. Sentinel devices chorused—eight lunar cycles' arrears resurrected with compound celestial interest, while Yang's Mercedes navigation array plotted courses toward cloaca maxima's digestive maws.
"Corruption's vascular network hemorrhages most freely when lanced with ancestral bronze," Gu Chen mused, observing Yang's frantic exodus through surveillance prisms. Deep within the mercantile ziggurat's foundations, six archaic numina pulsated like arrhythmic cardiac chambers—their vibrations rewriting fiscal algorithms and mortal destinies in equal measure.
The Shadowed Ledger
Adjacent to Financial Affairs, the Human Resources division stood in sterile silence. Gu Chen dispensed with formalities, shouldering through the frosted glass portal into the bureaucratic sanctum.
Twelve pairs of eyes snapped upward as frigid air trailed his entrance, office fluorescents glinting off monitor screens.
"You dare ascend here?" Liu Yang's venomous hiss sliced the tension, his pallid features twisting. The memory of scrubbing linens beneath junior guards' smirks still festered in his psyche—humiliation endured solely because that squalid security den answered to this upstart. Now the viper invaded *his* domain?
Gu Chen's attention drifted toward an auburn-haired clerk, his knuckles grazing her desk's polished edge. "Might I trouble you, fair scribe, to consult your chronicles? The watchmen's roster requires verification."
The woman's keyboard faltered mid-clatter. "I... certainly..." Crimson bloomed across her cheeks beneath his lupine grin—that careless magnetism disarming even seasoned professionals.
He observed her inept keystrokes with theatrical patience before sighing. "Permit me." His command brooked no refusal as he commandeered her terminal.
"This archive demands dual authentication," she protested weakly, "without proper clearance—"
"Clearance?"
Fingers became blurs across the keypad. Monitors plunged into an azure void before resurrecting as conquered territory, firewall sigils crumbling like ash.
A collective inhalation shuddered through cubicles. Before them sat no common sentry but a digital warlord breaching fortified systems with casual brutality—a skillset better suited to shadowed hackers than uniformed guards. Modern survival, it seemed, demanded arsenals beyond mere brute strength.
"Erased ledgers..." Gu Chen's murmur carried glacial fury. Twelve sworn protectors of these halls, eight now spectral entities—their severance executed through bureaucratic poison, unaware even in their professional death throes.
Pawns they might be, yet labour statutes shielded even the lowliest. Not even Ling Meixue herself could order such cullings sans due process, much less some paper-pushing functionary. Proper channels demanded writs, hearings, and golden handshakes—not this silent extermination. Wang Hu's crew still awaited phantom wages, oblivious to their corporate exsanguination. The ultimate treachery lay bare: payment portals rerouted, beneficiary fields declaring Yang Kun's dominion.
"A nest of adders," Gu Chen growled, the truth coiling venomous in his throat.
Liu Yang's clammy grip seized his shoulder. "Desecrating confidential records! By what authority—"
The security chief turned. No words passed—merely the glacial regard of tundra wolves sizing wounded prey. Liu Yang recoiled as though scorched, dress shoes squealing against linoleum.
Silence shattered. Leather soles echoed through ventilated corridors as Yang Kun materialized, cigarette ember flaring like a warning beacon. His serpentine gaze swept the tableau before anchoring on the uniformed insurgent.
The Usurper's Gambit
Yang Kun materialized in the arched portal, his Savile Row suit straining against corpulent arrogance. "Since when do sewer rats defile sanctified chambers?" he thundered, jowls aquiver with disdain. "Let scavengers root through dumpsters where they belong—this aerie tolerates no gutter-born stench!"
A mousy clerk adjusted her spectacles. "Director Yang, Security Officer Gu requested—"
"Request?" Yang Kun's crocodile smile revealed platinum-capped incisors. "Beggars merit no audience. Expel this offal at once! Burn whatever surfaces his filth contaminated!"
The air thickened with collective revulsion. Even Ling Meixue, architect of this corporate empire, addressed custodians with civility. Yet this dilettante director—whose sole contribution had been ancestral capital coerced during lean years—postured as a feudal overlord.
"Corporate bylaws grant access rights to—" A fiery-haired intern's objection died beneath Yang Kun's encroaching shadow.
"You mistake oxygen for entitlement, gutter spawn!" He brandished a Montblanc stylus like a dagger. "Gather your tattered dignity and crawl back to whatever favela spawned you!"
The girl's retreating chair squealed protest as Gu Chen's languid posture coiled into lethal grace. Yang Kun's vaunted "investment"—a usurious million RMB extracted during the company's vulnerable nascence—had purchased not loyalty but Ling Meixue's weary appeasement.
"Fascinating calculus," Gu Chen purred, orbiting the spluttering magnate. "Terminate eight sentinels through bureaucratic sleight of hand. Divert their sustenance into your gilded coffers. Declare yourself sovereign of shadow ledgers." His voice dropped to subzero precision. "Does the taste of stolen silver justify swallowing your own venom?"
Recognition ignited Yang Kun's porcine features. "You! The asphalt-stained cur who marred my Continental GT!"
"Ah, the hound barks first," Gu Chen mused, flame blossoming from his Zippo's kiss. "Tell me—when exterminators purge vermin, do the rats protest their pedigree?"
"Vermin dare lecture their bet—?" Yang Kun's roar dissolved into sputtered incoherence as suppressed titters rippled through the ranks.
"Self-indictment suits you," Gu Chen observed, smoke tendrils caressing recessed lighting.
Bedlam erupted. Yang Kun's lunge met Gu Chen's upraised palm—a silent command that froze aggression mid-spasm. A shrill whistle pierced the tension. From service stairwells rose thunderous cadence—Wang Hu's phalanx materialized, uniforms starched to military precision, calloused hands flexing like tribunal gavels.
"Traitorous curs!" Yang Kun retreated behind citrus-scented aerosol sprays. "I'll see your lineages erased! Your ancestral graves are salted!"
"Summon the gendarmes," Gu Chen invited, appropriating the director's ergonomic throne. Mud-caked combat boots settled atop teakwood archives. "Let forensic auditors feast upon your financial carrion." He inclined his chin toward Wang Hu. "Quarantine this den of thieves."
"Sealed, Commander!" Eight voices resonated like temple bells as Yang Kun's impotent shrieks echoed through sealed exits.
The Cipher's Revelation
Gu Chen's gaze lingered on the tremulous intern. "Where lies the serpent's sanctum?"
"Yonder chamber," she breathed, gesturing toward an onyx portal emblazoned with gilded serif script: *Director of Human Capital Development.
"Wang Hu."
"Command me, strategist!" The guard materialized instantly, battle-hardened posture belaying civilian attire.
"Establish perimeter protocol. No interlopers breach this threshold until forensic communion concludes."
Yang Kun's apoplectic roars reverberated through soundproofing. "Desecrate my archives, you binary vandal, and I'll flay your—"
"Muzzle the rabid hound," Gu Chen commanded, already crossing the antechamber's plush Savonnerie carpet.
Within the executive suite, mahogany panelling reflected the sterile glow of a triple-monitor array. Biometric scanners winked red beneath Gu Chen's appraisal—Yang Kun's pathetic attempt at digital absolution.
Fingers became blurs across the keypad, decryption algorithms unravelling firewalls like silken threads. Ten seconds. Fifteen. The system yielded its secrets with a submissive chime.
Audit trails gleamed immaculate—too pristine. Gu Chen's lips curved in predatory approval. "Even wraiths cast shadows, little emperor."
He unleashed forensic Lazarus codes. Azure command lines cascaded across screens, resurrecting digital phantoms—not merely embezzlement ledgers, but darker spectres. Procurement manifests for industrial-grade surveillance drones. Swiss account transcripts timed to lunar cycles. Clandestine imagery capturing board members in compromising tableaux.
The barricaded door shuddered under percussive assault.
"Madam CEO!" Wang Hu's basso profundo held reverent obstinacy. "By the Strategist's decree—"
"Your feudal theatrics end now!" Ling Meixue's glacial diction cut through protests. Louboutin stilettos struck marble like duelling pistols. "I'll not tolerate—"
"With profoundest regrets, *Goddess of the Ledger*," a junior guard interposed, ceremonial halberd (improvised from a coat rack) barring her path, "the Cybernetic Inquisitor's mandate supersedes earthly titles."
Beyond the battle lines, Liu Yang's simpering threats dissolved into white noise. HR drones feigned data entry, smothering giggles echoing Yang Kun's comeuppance. Months of suppressed outrage—lecherous "dinners" declined at career peril, colleagues vanished after resisting nocturnal "team-building"—erupted in silent solidarity. Female staffers' deliberate frumpiness (dowdy cardigans, unkempt tresses) stood as mute rebellion against predation.
"Where's your Yangtze River Delta machismo?!" Liu Yang shrieked at cowering male clerks. "Defend your patron!"
A paperweight missile found its mark. "Defend this, lickspittle!" a mousy archivist hissed, lobbing her ergonomic keyboard.
Amidst the digital exhumation, Gu Chen leaned back as terminal screens vomited their last secret—security footage timestamped midnight. Yang Kun's unmistakable silhouette directing black-market technicians to implant spyware in executive washrooms.
"Ah, little princeling," Gu Chen murmured to the flickering damning evidence, "your hubris architects exquisite ruin."
The oaken portal groaned under synchronised assault—corporate royalty versus data-driven insurgency.
"Shall we...?" A guardsman's hand hovered near deadbolts.
Wang Hu's scarred visage creased in rare amusement. "Let Olympus storm its own gates. Our covenant binds us to truth's quarantine."
The Gilded Betrayal
Ling Meixue's meticulously constructed corporate edifice trembled—her own vassals now bowed to a sentinel in weathered boots.
*Insistent trilling.
Gu Chen's neglected smartphone vibrated against his thigh, its summons drowned by forensic urgency. He documented digital sins with methodical clicks, camera flashes etching corruption into permanence.
*Thunderous percussion.
"Nine seconds remain!" Ling Meixue's diamond-edged voice cleaved through oaken barriers. "Your insurrection desecrates corporate law!"
Yang Kun rose like a desecrated gargoyle, features bloated beyond recognition. "Annihilate these mutts, Ling! Unless you crave anarchic precedent!"
"Mutt?" Wang Hu's combat boot pressed against Yang Kun's clavicle. "Reiterate that epithet—articulately."
Gu Chen materialized in the doorway, a hierophant emerging from digital catacombs. A flicked wrist stilled retribution.
"Illuminate this farce," Ling Meixue demanded, imperial composure fracturing.
Yang Kun spat crimson defiance. "Your rabid cur faces lifelong incarceration! I'll—"
"Cease your yapping." Gu Chen tossed his device to the CEO. "Behold your protégé's magnum opus."
The screen radiated damnation:
- **Fiscal vampirism**: Eight guardians exsanguinated through shadow-terminations, their lifeblood diverted to Bahamian coffers.
- **Predatory lexicons**: Midnight ultimatums to junior staffers—*"Silk stockings or unemployment lines." *
- **Corporate regicide**: Last quarter's intellectual heist—R&D schematics bartered for thirty pieces of silver, their patent throne usurped by rivals.
Ling Meixue's manicured nails carved lunar crescents into her palms. The competitor's product launch—precisely twenty-three hours ahead of theirs—now reeked of Judas kisses.
Gu Chen's smoke tendrils caressed the vaulted ceiling. "Your golden calf didn't merely pilfer crumbs. He auctioned your dynasty's keystone—then made you finance the demolition."
Yang Kun's lunge dissolved into Wang Hu's merciless armlock.
"Restrain this carrion bird," Ling Meixue decreed, voice quivering with epiphany. "Dissect every financial orifice since his coronation."
As titanium cuffs embraced treasonous wrists, Gu Chen's lips grazed Ling Meixue's earlobe. "When next vipers coil in your garden, beloved, trust the mongrel whose nose bleeds truth."
The bullpen erupted—not in obeisance to the throne, but in homage to the wolf who'd unmasked their gilded oppressor.
The Serpent's Surrender
Ling Meixue's glacial stare hardened into permafrost. "You dared cull my guardians?"
Yang Kun's split lips curled grotesquely. "Exterminating gatehouse rodents warrants no ceremony!"
*The crack of imperial justice.
Her palm met his cheekbone with dynastic precision. "From custodians to executives—all pulse with this enterprise's lifeblood. What fevered delusion anoints you executioner?"
The disgraced magnate lunged, only to dangle mid-air in Gu Chen's merciless grasp. "Industrial treachery demands decadal atonement," the sentinel lord intoned, catapulting Yang Kun across veined marble like a soiled rag.
"Convene the tribunal," Ling Meixue decreed, fastidiously cleansing her hands with monogrammed silk. "His corruption taints even vengeance."
"Your edict, my sovereign." Gu Chen's mocking genuflection sparkled with subversive glee.
Her frost thawed momentarily. "Gratitude...is warranted."
"Shall we invoice marital obligations?" His eyelid descended in conspiratorial semaphore. "How dreadfully provincial."
"*Still your tongue*, you irredeemable—!" Ling Meixue's reproach drowned in a symphony of stifled mirth.
Yang Kun grovelled forward, aristocratic pretence abandoned. "Clemency, Ling-zong! My progeny—"
The CEO faltered—her legendary resolve corroding at compassion's acid touch. Gu Chen recognized the fissure: a silk glove cloaking steel.
"Purge your scrolls," he interposed. "Relinquish dominion. Disgorge ill-gotten treasures."
"You gilded *paramour*!" Yang Kun venomously spat. "This chamber of kings suffers no concubine's—"
"His breath carries my will," Ling Meixue proclaimed, vaulted arches magnifying her ukase. "Engrave the abdication pact. Immediately."
The assembled courtiers inhaled as one—witnessing corporate cosmology rewritten.
As scribes scurried to illuminate legal vellum, Yang Kun's defiance disintegrated. "Compliance! Only spare me the gilded oubliette!"
Gu Chen reclined against bloodwood panelling, observing his consort's chrysalis. The unspoken evidentiary trove—those damning nocturnes of coerced congress—hung between them like Damoclean steel.
"Your mercy outshines the sun," he murmured as Yang Kun's quill scratched surrender. "Though I'd have let jackals sup on his entrails."
Ling Meixue's stiletto found his instep. "We erect civilisations", she hissed through bared teeth, "not barbarous colosseums."
The sentinel lord's laughter reverberated through corporate catacombs—a lupine rumble at mankind's papier-mâché proprieties.
The Exile's Oath
Ling Meixue had long endured Yang Kun's underworld affiliations—his lineage's nefarious roots permeating boardroom politics like miasma. A queen navigating viper nests required velvet diplomacy until this defiant hour.
Yang Kun's pen clattered against marble like a duelling gauntlet. "Savour this hollow triumph," he spat. "Epilogues remain uncharted."
"Tempests have broken fiercer than your bluster." Ling Meixue's poise mirrored jade, impervious to storm.
Gu Chen pantomimed digital absolution, fingertips dancing across screens. "Sins expunged," he declared, the ghost of backup servers twinkling in his gaze.
The fallen prince's retreat became a mortifying cortege—former sycophants averted eyes as he slithered through corridors that once genuflected. Liu Yang's ashen dread mirrored a eunuch witnessing his sultan's deposition.
Pandemonium erupted—save for one cowering figure clutching ruined ambitions.
"Festive convocation!" Gu Chen proclaimed, lounging against the rosy-cheeked clerk's terminal. "Let sentinels and muses convene for...cross-departmental harmony. Were I not shackled to celestial matrimony, I'd serenade you with sonnets."
"Insufferable rogue!" Her blush rivalled peonies in twilight. "Though certain unclaimed colleagues might endure your knights'...rustic gallantry."
Wang Hu's brigade exchanged knowing nods—their chieftain's brilliance transcended justice to orchestrate Cupid's ballet.
______
Beneath steel-and-glass battlements, Yang Kun's fury metastasised. His smartphone shrieked—a vulture's cry.
"Jiang-shao," he grovelled, spine curving despite deserted asphalt.
"Where festers my intellectual plunder?!" Aristocratic venom dripped through the receiver.
"The CEO's hound..."
"Bested by kennel trash?!" The line crackled with glacial fury. "Shall your spawn inherit only your shame?"
Yang Kun's knuckles bleached to alabaster. "This reversal is—"
"—your final reprieve." The connection died mid-snarl.
Above, Gu Chen's laughter cascaded through HVAC veins—a conqueror's carillon.
In her ivory tower, Ling Meixue monitored security feeds. "You archived the evidence."
"Merely relocated truth to...sanctified crypts." Gu Chen's smile promised poetic justice. "Let adders bask in false amnesty."
Tyres screeched asphalt hymns as Yang Kun's Mercedes fled—a wounded boar retreating to its thicket, tusks whetted for crimson reciprocity. The corporate chessboard had dissolved, revealing primal hunt beneath civilized veneers.
"..."
To be continuous…