Crossing the Line – Chapter 85
by Little PandaWife, Please Inspect 0v0
The autumn auction moved into its second phase, and the first session belonged to the Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Department.
With that department’s manager already “skipped town,” the rout was easy to imagine.
That night, CEO Gu’s face was black as thunder; President Yan simply hadn’t gone at all.
When Manager Wu sat down to eat with Duan Ning and Jiang Siyi, she said the managers’ group chat already had the news: Oliver had thoroughly done himself in this time, and President Yan had personally ordered him transferred out.
They called it a lateral transfer. In truth, it was banished to Ningguta1.
Duan Ning: “See, this is why my mouth is a weapon. Say a thing, and the thing comes true.”
Wu Yilu’s attention drifted, following her words, onto Duan Ning’s lips. She stared, lost, for a moment — then pulled herself back, cleared her throat for no reason she could name, and returned to the matter at hand.
“Vice Manager Yao has toiled faithfully all these years — she’s finally getting her shot at the top seat. Xiao Jiang, if you go over, you’ll likely be stepping into Vice Manager Yao’s old post. Vice Manager.”
Duan Ning went “wow” and slapped away at Jiang Siyi’s thigh.
“Insane! The youngest vice manager in Jiashibi — and vice manager of the Chinese Painting and Calligraphy Department, no less! Siyi, you’ve finally made it!”
Jiang Siyi was a little pleased, but she set the vice manager business aside for now.
Tomorrow was her solo session, and she wanted only to see it through.
Future things she left to the future, to be enjoyed or worried over then.
The day of the solo session.
Jiang Siyi was in the waiting room getting her makeup done when she heard someone at the door call out “Teacher Bo.”
She looked over. Among the flower baskets sent by Jiang Siyi’s family and friends, Bo Ting was adding one more.
“Teacher Bo.”
Jiang Siyi hadn’t expected her to come deliver a basket.
“You look like you’re holding up well.”
“The weight on my chest is gone — I actually slept a little last night. Thank you, and thank Glenda, for your help. Otherwise the Oil Painting Department’s autumn sale might have been a very different disaster.” A faint smile touched the corner of Bo Ting’s mouth. “Good luck.”
“Thank you, Teacher Bo.”
Plenty of Jiashibi colleagues witnessed the scene, and they were baffled.
Everyone had assumed this pair of Twin Stars reeked of gun powder — a rivalry in the flesh, certain to loathe each other on sight, kings who never meet.
Who could have guessed that the famously solitary Teacher Bo would come deliver a flower basket of her own accord? Unheard of. A first.
And the atmosphere between the two of them… was that something like friends?
As a rising star of the industry, Jiang Siyi’s themed solo auction had drawn plenty of media.
As the family and friends filed in, someone in the self-media zone at the entrance recognized Lin Ji and came over, camera in hand, asking for an interview.
Lin Ji assumed they’d clocked her as chairman of Huanwei Technology and prepared to politely decline.
Then the person said, “Excuse me — are you Teacher Jiang’s wife?”
Teacher Jiang’s wife — AKA the Vinegar Jar Wife who insisted on wedging herself into the fan group photo at Forest Park.
That photo had already made the rounds through half the auction world.
Lin Ji had already taken a step away. She stepped back, arranged a warm and gracious smile, and faced the camera head-on:
“I am.”
Fan Qing, who had already been moving to block the interviewer: …
Her hand rose — then, in midair, closed around itself and withdrew.
BOSS truly was — harder to guard against than any contingency on earth.
As chairman of Huanwei, Lin Ji was a hell-tier booking. As Jiang Siyi’s wife, she was free for any random self-media interview?
This self-media person ran in auction circles; they only knew Lin Ji as Jiang Siyi’s wife and didn’t recognize the tech luminary — perfectly normal.
“Are you here today to support Teacher Jiang’s solo auction? You two seem so close — what are your hopes for her performance today?”
Lin Ji: “As Teacher Jiang’s wife, accompanying her to every major auction goes without saying. However my wife performs, as her wife I am proud of her. And as her wife, I have absolute faith that my wife is the most brilliant, the most special, at any given moment. The result doesn’t matter — as the wife who will support her forever, I only hope my wife enjoys this moment.”
Self-media reporter: …
The reporter listened, utterly lost.
Good grief — was she practicing a tongue twister, or playing “guess how many ‘wife’s and ‘missus’s are in this sentence”? Just showing off like that, straight to camera?
Looks like the nickname ‘Vinegar Jar Wife’ wasn’t wrong at all…
By the time Jiang Siyi mounted the auction podium, Lin Ji had only just taken her seat.
Lin Xuebo asked her, “Where did you run off to? It’s about to start.”
Lin Ji: “I was off being Jiang Siyi’s one and only true wife.”
Lin Xuebo: ?
When Jiang Siyi finished her opening remarks, she searched the crowd for Lin Ji out of habit.
No matter how many people, how chaotic the setting, she could lock onto that familiar figure at a glance.
Their gazes met across the crowd as if no one else existed.
Lin Ji, legs crossed, winked at her — and a reassured smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.
The solo session’s mood was relaxed.
Every lot today was one Jiang Siyi had signed back in herself, piece by piece.
The young auctioneer on the podium held the room’s rhythm as ever, introducing each lot with easy warmth — and the story of how they’d found each other.
Every lot carried a memory, a thread of fate.
Together they traced the road she’d traveled.
What makes a collector’s piece interesting — what gives it value — is the years and the craftsmanship engraved into it.
Jiang Siyi thought of what Lin Ji had once said:
Treasures belong with the people who understand them and cherish them.
And suddenly she understood why she could never bring herself to treat any lot carelessly.
However unremarkable, however overlooked a piece might be at present, some part of her always hoped that one day it would meet a collector who saw its worth and chose to love it.
Jiang Siyi wanted, with everything she had, to see every lot fate had put in her path find a buyer who understood it, loved it, and treasured it forever.
Free of pressure tonight, she deliberately slowed her pace, spending more time on each piece’s investment potential, the history folded inside it, the art settled into it, and the story of its long journey to this room.
The story of how Huang Qingzheng first fell into ink-wash painting moved the room — it left Huang Qingzheng herself, sitting in the hall, with reddened eyes.
In the end, every lot in the session sold.
She’d used hardly any bid-coaxing tricks, yet every hammer price came in above estimate.
Huang Qingzheng’s painting hammered at a staggering 260 million.
It set the highest record of this year’s autumn auctions across every auction house in APAC.
It was also a record high for any work of Huang Qingzheng’s.
At the fall of the hammer, Jiang Siyi felt perfectly calm.
Before an audience of family and friends, she had carried her first solo session — and the whole of the autumn auction — to a flawless close.
Even as she breathed out, she could see another road.
When she’d entered the trade, her only ambition was to stand on the auction podium, to become a true auctioneer.
Today, her footing on that podium secure, she raised her head and saw a longer road — higher, farther, one she could walk for the rest of her life.
— to use everything she had to find every artwork its Bo Le2.
Not an easy road. A meaningful one.
Jiang Siyi’s solo session closed to perfection.
Two days later came the Oil Painting Department’s marquee sale — Jiashibi’s grand finale.
This year’s autumn auction had been one upheaval after another.
The Oil Painting Department’s blue-chip anchor piece was swapped out right before the sale, and the new catalog was rushed out overnight, the printers nearly smoking.
The hair-raising maneuver nearly scared the entire department half to death.
On the surface, everyone cheered each other on — “steady, we’ve got this” — while privately plenty feared they’d go down in flames like the Calligraphy Department.
No one imagined that Bo Ting — skipping Paris, skipping London — would sign, right at the deadline, none other than a new work by Glenda, the leading light of modern art who’d made her name in the West 5th District years ago.
The Oil Painting Department’s auctioneers were baffled enough; even CEO Gu was puzzled, and privately asked Bo Ting how she’d gotten a line to a titan of Glenda’s caliber.
Bo Ting had nothing to hide and told him the truth.
“Xiao Jiang made the connection.”
CEO Gu was more baffled still.
On paper, the two of them were rivals through and through, mortal enemies fighting to the death over performance figures.
Losing a blue-chip anchor out of nowhere was enough to wreck the Oil Painting Department’s entire autumn sale — and, quite possibly, Bo Ting’s precarious career with it.
If Bo Ting had gone down, Jiashibi’s future would surely have belonged to Jiang Siyi alone.
And yet… at the critical hour, it was Jiang Siyi who reached out and pulled her up.
By all rights, with her Glenda connection, Jiang Siyi could have made a killing putting the new work in her own session.
Huang Qingzheng and Glenda — two blue chips in one hand — would have set the entire auction world buzzing.
And she’d handed it to Bo Ting instead.
It was the first time CEO Gu had ever truly laid eyes on someone who, with stakes on the table, still helped a competitor — sincerely, and with her whole heart.
CEO Gu chuckled. “You two are something else.”
Something else indeed was the performance ranking after the autumn auction.
Ranked on raw numbers, the total hammer prices of Jiang Siyi’s two sessions would have left everyone in the dust.
Even with Bo Ting’s final, heaven-defying 300 million for Glenda’s new work, she couldn’t have caught up.
But Jiang Siyi had no interest in the cheap win.
“Two of my sessions against one of Teacher Bo’s — that would be a victory without honor.”
Besides, for private reasons, Teacher Bo hadn’t been at her best, and Jiang Siyi knew it.
Taking first place under those conditions would have meant nothing.
Bo Ting said her piece too. “If you hadn’t helped this year, I wouldn’t have had a finale blue chip at all. That performance was rightfully yours.”
Jiang Siyi and Bo Ting looked at each other and smiled.
“Next year, we settle it.”
Marvelous, as far as CEO Gu was concerned — he was thrilled beyond measure.
This year, Jiashibi’s J City branch already stood first in APAC on total performance.
And the two trump cards were only now starting to push each other. What would next year bring? Wouldn’t they bring home a global number one?
That year, Jiang Siyi and Bo Ting finished in a tie for first at Jiashibi J City.
The Gold, Stone, and Jade Department’s performance overtook the Calligraphy Department’s too, standing historically in second place.
The Calligraphy Department didn’t even manage third.
Before Jiang Siyi’s transfer to the Calligraphy Department, Oliver had been named personally by President Yan and transferred out — and the uncle who’d always backed him didn’t dare let out so much as a fart.
Just as Manager Wu had said, Jiang Siyi’s transfer to the Calligraphy Department came with the vice manager’s seat.
The former Vice Manager Yao took over from Oliver.
Manager Yao was a woman in her forties — older than Oliver, deeper in seniority. For years Oliver had ridden over her head on the strength of his uncle’s connections as a company partner, and it had left her seething.
With that mountain finally lifted off her head, Manager Yao knew full well the bastard’s departure was thanks to Jiang Siyi, and she remembered the debt of gratitude in her heart.
The moment Jiang Siyi arrived in the department, Manager Yao threw her a raucous welcome party.
That night at the party, Jiang Siyi snapped a photo of the glass in her hand to show Lin Ji.
Daizhuang Tusi: 【Cola — the sugar-free kind, at that. Wife, please inspect 0v0】
Lin Ji did not, upon receiving this WeChat message, die on the spot from Jiang Siyi’s cuteness.
Full Stop: 【Such a good meimei.】
Standing in the corner, Jiang Siyi saw the address “meimei” and could no longer think of a single decent thing.
Her face flushed red without a drop of alcohol in her.
Full Stop: 【No rush. I have things to handle tonight too — I’ll need to put in a little overtime. See you at home this evening.】
Seeing that message, Jiang Siyi slowly deleted the words she’d already typed: “I’m heading home right now.”
Xiao You is working overtime — well then, tonight it’s my turn to pick her up from work.
It wasn’t even nine when Jiang Siyi announced she had to go, and her new colleagues were curious.
“Leaving this early? The night’s barely starting.”
Jiang Siyi said, a little sheepish, “I’m going to pick my wife up from work.”
A chorus of envious “ohh—” went up.
“So jealous. You two are so good together!”
“See you tomorrow, Little Manager Jiang!”
Nearly everyone in the department was older than Jiang Siyi; “Little Manager Jiang” came off no one’s tongue with any strain, and it was rather affectionate at that.
Jiang Siyi said her goodbyes, hailed a car, and headed for Huanwei headquarters.
A large supermarket sat at the base of Huanwei’s headquarters, and the outermost stall was a flower shop of impeccable taste.
Jiang Siyi walked past it — then doubled back.
The Black Baccara roses — dark crimson edging into black, with a velvet texture — were stunning, singular. Lin Ji was sure to love them.
Today wasn’t any special occasion.
Even so, she wanted Lin Ji to have the pleasure of being surprised.
She chose seventeen stems, picked out wrapping paper, cradled the black roses in her arms, and swiped the access card Lin Ji had long since given her to enter the tower.
The Huanwei receptionist saw Jiang Siyi and lit up.
What a gorgeous young woman — why did she look familiar?
It clicked, and she gasped in delight: “It’s the Boss’s Wife!”
Jiang Siyi: “…Hello.”
She actually recognized her.
How could she not? Everyone knew how clingy their ice-cold BOSS was with her wife in private.
Even those who didn’t know BOSS was a devoted wife-guy could never forget the benefactor responsible for this year’s extra long weekend.
Coming to see BOSS, and bringing flowers.
No holiday, no occasion — how romantic.
Clearly a very gentle sort of person.
The receptionist warmly escorted her toward Lin Ji’s office.
Lin Ji was always the one picking her up from work, and this stretch had been unusually eventful — come to think of it, this was Jiang Siyi’s first time ever setting foot in Huanwei headquarters.
Huanwei was even bigger than she’d imagined — a very young tech company. She remembered Lin Ji saying her office was on the first floor.
The receptionist led her toward the end of the first floor.
“Chairman Ji is meeting with an investor right now. Have a seat in her office for a moment — I’ll go let her know.”
Jiang Siyi smiled. “Don’t disturb her. I’ll just wait for her to come to me.”
She sat down at Lin Ji’s desk, squared the scattered papers that hadn’t yet been tidied and set them aside, gathered the stray pens and dropped them back in the cup.
A little tidying — Lin Ji liked things neat.
Several photo frames stood on the desktop.
All of them of the two of them together.
And one photo of Jiang Siyi as a child, sitting at a piano, smiling at the camera.
A reprinted one.
Jiang Siyi set the flowers at the corner of the desk and picked up the frame.
When had she secretly had that reprinted? She’d had no idea.
Every photo sat where it could be seen at a glance, without a speck of dust.
One look told you the owner of this desk loved her wife very much.
The funny thing was, beyond the glass curtain wall directly facing the office, there really was a dry landscape garden.
Jiang Siyi was smiling out at the view when the receptionist poured her tea and was about to say something else — and a colleague came striding up to the doorway, bristling, and asked the receptionist:
“Is that person surnamed Zhou here making trouble for BOSS again? Where is he?”
Jiang Siyi looked over, startled. Making trouble for Lin Ji?
In a flash, her mind conjured what Lin Ji had told her about the car accident overseas.
The receptionist first told Jiang Siyi, “The tea’s a bit hot — take it slow.”
Then she turned and steered the colleague back out the door, murmuring something Jiang Siyi couldn’t quite catch.
“Again.”
So this wasn’t the first time. Who was this person?
Even as she puzzled over it, Jiang Siyi suddenly noticed a familiar bottle on the credenza beside the desk.
The label was all in English — identical to the one she’d seen on their honeymoon.
…
This “person surnamed Zhou” remained the leading man of Huanwei’s most recent acquisition saga, and his obstinate, one-track ways hadn’t changed a bit. He’d come to raise hell at Huanwei many times — smashing things, hitting security guards. Hauled to the police station and detained, he’d shown no repentance whatsoever; released not long ago, here he was again today.
He’d learned his lesson the hard way, though: this time he didn’t riot. He simply planted himself at Huanwei’s front gate, glaring murder at anyone who passed, feinting lunges at them.
All of it theater to frighten Huanwei’s staff and business partners.
Security moved to drag him off again, but Fan Qing stopped them.
The previous times, it had been Fan Qing who’d had him hauled to the police station — clearly it hadn’t taken.
For a permanent cure, they’d need BOSS’s dirty tricks.
Lin Ji had been preparing for a meeting. She got Fan Qing’s WeChat, pulled up the security feed, and saw President Zhou planted at the entrance in a down jacket.
She set the air conditioning in President Zhou’s zone to maximum heat.
Lin Ji: “Leave him alone until I’m back.”
Fan Qing: “Yes, BOSS.”
The meeting ran two full hours.
When it broke, Lin Ji shed her blazer down to a short-sleeved shirt, grabbed a few cans of chilled soda from the vending machine, and walked out to the gate.
President Zhou had already peeled off the down jacket in the heat; the back of his fleece-lined shirt was soaked through, and he was mopping his brow with his sleeve.
Lin Ji walked up, said nothing, and handed him a drink first.
To a President Zhou stewing in his own heat, the ice-cold fizz was irresistible — he downed two cans in a row.
“What is it you want, President Zhou?”
Lin Ji cracked open another can and kept handing them over.
This President Zhou had sold his company — and then, with rotten timing, the industry had begun to rebound. Convinced he’d sold cheap, he’d decided to demand the company back, and so he came to Huanwei day after day to raise hell.
President Zhou played the shameless rogue to the hilt. “I want my company back. That’s what I want. That company was my life’s blood.”
“I seem to recall that you came to me with the sale in the first place, President Zhou. Volunteered for it, even.”
“The market was different then! I regret it. Who goes through life getting every single step right? A man’s entitled to room for regret, isn’t he?”
Wound up and parched, he drained another can without noticing.
Lin Ji said nothing, and slowly, unhurriedly, kept opening cans for him.
Talk as he might, President Zhou couldn’t hold it anymore — ready or not, he had to get up and go hunting for a restroom.
With the man finally off the front gate, Lin Ji asked Fan Qing behind her:
“Isn’t the men’s restroom door on this floor broken?”
Fan Qing thought for a moment, then smiled. “Understood. It’s broken.”
Noted: for dirty tricks, you watch the BOSS.
When President Zhou finished his business and tried to leave, he found the door locked.
He hammered on it for a good long while before several people filed in.
The general manager of the Investment and M&A Department, the lead on the acquisition, a few security guards.
And Lin Ji’s assistant, Fan Qing.
They ringed him around in the restroom, and he backed step by step into the corner, spooked.
“You — what are you going to do to me!”
The assistant with the scar over her eye smiled.
“Our audit team, while going through the old books, turned up a few… legacy irregularities of yours, President Zhou. For instance, the handling of those transfers to Shuntong three years ago, and the pricing on that related-party transaction with your brother-in-law’s company. You remember those, don’t you.”
President Zhou’s face went instantly, hideously sour. He’d never imagined Huanwei would dig up something buried that deep.
“…If these issues were pursued, they might go beyond a mere commercial dispute. There’s no telling whether they’d trigger a tax audit. Huanwei, for our part, would be perfectly happy to cooperate with any investigation — we can keep our losses to a minimum. You’re a different story; you have elderly parents above and young children below.”
President Zhou’s legs kept going weak under Fan Qing’s meaningful gaze.
…
When Lin Ji finished with the investor and came out of the meeting room, a message from Fan Qing arrived.
【President Zhou wants to apologize to you in person.】
Lin Ji gave a cold snort.
So it was settled.
She’d rather not have seen him — but she’d already caught the soul-drained President Zhou in the glass reflection ahead.
President Zhou, who could see only Lin Ji’s back, shrank at the very sight of her.
This woman — young as she was, her methods were truly ruthless. She struck people precisely where it hurts most3.
He had no cards left to play, and the bitterness ate him alive.
President Zhou fought to keep the loathing off his face, groping for the right words of apology — if Lin Ji held the grudge, and he went in, his life was truly finished.
Lin Ji was about to turn when, in the reflection, she suddenly saw Jiang Siyi.
A beat of stillness.
She thought she was seeing her wife in every face, the way you do when someone never leaves your mind.
But there was no mistaking her.
That really was Siyi.
What was Siyi doing here?
Lin Ji raised a smile and turned — only to find Jiang Siyi wasn’t looking at her at all.
That face, usually pure poise and grace, had gone taut with fight-or-flight. She strode up fast, hoisted a trash can in those slender arms, and brought it down hard on President Zhou.
CLANG—
The entire office flinched as one and turned to look.
Ten minutes earlier.
In Lin Ji’s office, Jiang Siyi had searched up the recent bad blood between President Zhou and Huanwei on her phone.
The news said this person surnamed Zhou had been harassing Lin Ji for a long time — detained, and still daring to come back.
Lin Ji’s overseas brush with danger and the childhood ordeal of being trafficked set off every alarm in Jiang Siyi’s head in a single second.
She went to find Lin Ji at once. She needed to be at Lin Ji’s side this instant.
From a distance she saw it: that person surnamed Zhou standing soundless at Lin Ji’s back, his face carved deep with venom.
There was no time to consider that this was Lin Ji’s company, that Fan Qing and the other guards were sure to be nearby — Jiang Siyi moved at once.
She watched that person surnamed Zhou take a step toward Lin Ji, and her mind held one thought only: he’s going to hurt Xiao You.
All those months of combat training, the moves she’d drilled into credible form in class — not one of them came to mind in the crisis.
She didn’t even register that what she’d grabbed was a trash can.
CLANG CLANG CLANG CLANG—
Down on that person surnamed Zhou, blow after blow, each one harder than the last.
Lin Ji: ?
Fan Qing: ??
The whole company: ???
President Zhou, flattened by the surprise trash-can offensive, howled on the floor.
Zhou Ni, standing at the fire escape door, for the first time in her life had no idea whom she was supposed to save…
Jiang Siyi’s delicate face had flushed scarlet from exertion and fury.
Panting, she planted herself in front of Lin Ji, her whole body trembling — but she leveled the trash can at President Zhou and said, in a tone of command:
“Stay back.”
She threw everything she had into looking ferocious — no one would get past her guard to harm the person behind her.
Even Lin Ji was seeing this Jiang Siyi for the first time.
Her heart pounded wildly; she entirely forgot to explain.
President Zhou, wads of paper still stuck to his head, didn’t dare get up. He pressed his palms together, face crumpled, and whimpered:
“Wh-where… where exactly do I have to stay back to, so I can apologize to Chairman Ji?”
Jiang Siyi: ?
The author has something to say:
Lin Ji: Today was the day my wife pampered me to a resounding CLANG-CLANG.
Footnotes
- 发配宁古塔 | fa pei Ningguta | Ningguta was a frigid penal outpost in China's far northeast where the Qing dynasty exiled condemned officials and their families into military servitude; in modern office slang it means being punitively transferred to a desolate, dead-end posting.
- 伯乐 | Bo Le | Bo Le was a legendary judge of horses in the Spring and Autumn period, famed for spotting a thousand-li steed hidden among common nags; his name became the byword for a discerning patron who recognizes overlooked genius.
- 卡人七寸 | ka ren qi cun | Literally gripping a person at the seven inches — from the folk belief that a snake's fatal point lies seven inches below its head; the idiom means attacking someone at their single most vulnerable, unanswerable weak point.
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