Chapter 10: What Kind of Person Are You

Zhong Qing went with Shi Yani to see the apartment the next day and fell in love with it immediately. The small bungalows in the urban villages lost their appeal the moment she walked through the door. The location was good, the light was good, the building had a property manager on duty around the clock. This was a different category of place entirely.

That evening she went back to the suburbs to talk to Yi Chengcheng. She explained what she had in mind — move closer to the office during the week, come back on weekends, Aunt Liu would be there every day. Yi Chengcheng still didn't speak. She reached out instead and touched the dark circles under Zhong Qing's eyes, and nodded.

She understood everything. She understood what the commute was costing Zhong Qing, and she understood that if she refused, Zhong Qing would stay anyway and say nothing about it. She wasn't going to let that happen.

Zhong Qing held her for a while. Then she packed — a bag of clothes, a few necessities — ran out to buy a large bag of fruit, and after Yi Chengcheng fell asleep, took the bus back into the city.

Shi Yani was already waiting at the entrance to Jinjia Apartment when she arrived. She had come down to help carry things up.

Zhong Qing felt something warm move through her chest.

Shi Yani looked at the single bag and the fruit and widened her eyes. "That's it? That's all you brought? How are you honoring your youth living like this?"

Zhong Qing smiled a little sheepishly. "No rush. I'll earn more money, and then I'll give my youth a proper celebration later."

She knew, without saying it, that youth as an experience belonged to people whose lives weren't complicated by necessity. Hers was. Yi Chengcheng came first. The rest would follow when it could.

With so little to unpack, the room was organized quickly. Shi Yani pulled her into the living room afterward, cut up some of the fruit, and handed Zhong Qing a plate.

"You brought all this fruit — heavier than your actual luggage — I'd feel terrible not eating it properly."

They sat on the sofa and talked, the way people do when they have just moved in together and are discovering each other, covering everything and nothing in particular. At some point the conversation arrived, with no special direction, at the apartment across the hall.

Shi Yani lowered her voice slightly, as though sharing intelligence. "The apartment across the way is one of the big ones. And the person who lives there is — very easy on the eyes, and very capable."

Zhong Qing arranged her face into appropriate curiosity. "How do you know who lives across the hall, Sister Yani?"

Shi Yani selected a piece of apple with the satisfaction of someone about to deliver good news. "Because I know him. And so do you, actually."

The bubbles started forming — it can't be, can it — and Zhong Qing said, with what she felt was a well-calibrated expression of mild disbelief, "I know him too? Who?"

"Silly." Shi Yani was clearly delighted by this reaction. "It's President Qiao."

Zhong Qing let her eyes go wide at exactly the right moment — surprised, not performed. "President Qiao? He lives right there? What a coincidence!"

It really was him.

Shi Yani reached for a banana and explained, unhurriedly: "It's not quite a coincidence, actually. I moved in first. After a while, President Qiao decided that his commute was too long and wanted to find somewhere closer to the office. So I helped him look, and he took the big apartment across the way." She paused. "And then not long after that, he decided he liked it here, so he bought it."

Zhong Qing absorbed this.

Of course. She'd known it couldn't really be coincidence. When something lands that perfectly, someone arranged it.

She put down her fruit plate and asked, with the earnestness of someone asking a practical question, "Sister Yani, isn't it awkward living directly across from your boss?"

What she was actually asking was: what is he like when no one from work is watching. Does he have people over. What kind of person is he away from a conference room.

Shi Yani looked at her expression — open, genuinely curious, a little bit guileless — and reached over to pinch her cheek.

"Awkward? It's the opposite. If he ever needs a document at an odd hour, I can have it to him immediately. I don't have to wait until the next morning. It's the most convenient possible arrangement."

Zhong Qing nodded as though this answered something.

Internally, she registered that this was how modern work had restructured what people considered an advantage: living across from your boss meant being available to him at any hour, and this was described as convenience. Society had done something very thorough to everyone's expectations.

"What are the big apartments like?" she asked, arranging her face into the expression of someone curious about floor plans rather than the occupant.

Shi Yani considered the question honestly. "Truthfully? Even living this close for as long as I have — I've never actually been inside. He has a very strong sense of personal space."

"Personal space," Zhong Qing repeated, with feeling. "Isn't that something giant pandas have? Does that mean if you cross the line, he roars and bites and—" She gestured vaguely.

Shi Yani tried to hold the image of Qiao Mingxuan roaring in her mind and failed to contain what it produced. She started laughing.

"Your imagination is something else. And I'm something else for enjoying it. We're both a little unhinged."

---

They talked until one in the morning.

When they finally stopped, Zhong Qing genuinely could not have said what time it had become. The next morning both of them surfaced with the eyes of people who had made a decision they understood was questionable and made it anyway. Shi Yani's makeup skills salvaged the situation.

---

At the office, the project continued to move.

The third-party due diligence on Kangping Medical came in, and Zhong Qing worked with Shi Tao to review the report. The investors flagged several issues; she and Shi Tao went back to Kangping and worked through each one until they had solutions. Once everything was resolved, Cangshi Medical submitted its letter of intent, and Xinxing Capital began the work of mediating terms between the two sides.

Zhong Qing had understood, in theory, that a financial advisor sits between investors and financing parties. In practice, she discovered this meant being pressed from both directions simultaneously, with no wall to stand against.

Investors wanted maximum equity at minimum valuation. Financing parties wanted maximum capital for minimum dilution. Neither side needed to manage the other. The advisor needed to manage both, at once, while maintaining the trust of each.

It was, she thought, a job specifically designed to produce shrewd people through sustained discomfort.

When the two sides reached an impasse — which happened — Qiao Mingxuan stepped in directly. Zhong Qing watched him do it several times: walk into a room where the atmosphere had gone cold and unproductive, and leave it moving again. She didn't always understand exactly what he had done. She watched carefully each time.

What he was in meetings was not what he was internally.

She found this out through a sequence of experiences that shared the same basic structure: she would do something slightly too slowly, or submit something with a flaw in it she hadn't caught, and Qiao Mingxuan would address this without modulating his tone for her benefit. At first she felt it as something targeted. Later, having watched Shi Tao receive the same treatment for the same reasons — Shi Tao, who had been here for years and who Qiao Mingxuan clearly respected — she revised her understanding.

He applied the same standard to everyone. There was no special version for newcomers.

The department should have been a tense place to work. By conventional logic, a boss who criticized sharply and held a consistent high bar would produce people who were watchful and anxious. Instead, Zhong Qing noticed that his team was, if anything, relaxed around him — and more than that, seemed to have genuine regard for him, the kind that doesn't come from obligation.

She found a quiet moment with Shi Tao and asked about it. "When he criticizes people the way he does — does no one ever hold it against him?"

She didn't say Stockholm syndrome out loud. She thought it.

Shi Tao turned the question back to her. "When he criticized you, did you hold it against him?"

Zhong Qing paused, then waved her hand. "No, no. I wouldn't dare."

Shi Tao grinned. "Why not? Aren't your generation supposed to be reforming workplace culture?"

"I'm saving that for after I'm officially hired."

He laughed harder. "Keep that thought internal. Don't let it out."

"It does sound a bit calculating when I say it out loud," Zhong Qing admitted.

Shi Tao settled into something more measured and told her: Qiao Mingxuan was, as a general rule, composed and even-tempered. What changed when work was at stake wasn't his personality — it was his standard, which he didn't lower for anyone. Hence Gentle-Faced Demon King, which was not an exaggeration. But outside of that, he was someone genuinely worth working for — the kind of person whose judgment you trusted, whose ability was visible and not performed.

Then he said, with more seriousness: "You're lucky, actually. Most people's first project doesn't involve someone of his caliber. Following him through this, you've compressed what would normally take years. Every time he criticizes you hard, the person being criticized tends to make fast progress. The ones who get criticized the most are usually the ones who move the furthest."

Zhong Qing thought about it and decided he was right. She had learned more in the past several weeks than she had expected to learn in twice the time. Not everything she'd learned came from watching the client meetings.

---

When the funds finally transferred from Cangshi Medical to Kangping and the deal closed, the company sent the routine internal congratulations — Department Three, successful completion, Qiao Mingxuan, another substantial result for Xinxing Capital.

The project bonuses went out to the team.

Zhong Qing, as a probationary employee, received nothing. She knew the rule and had been prepared for it. She told herself, with some effort, that what she had gained was worth more than what could have been deposited in her account, and she believed this about sixty percent of the way.

She silently noted what the bonus would have been, for reference purposes, and moved on.

She was still mentally tidying herself up when Ling Na appeared to congratulate her, followed immediately by Lü Pengshan, who offered his congratulations in the specific way that wasn't congratulations.

"All that work, no bonus at all, and you're still happy?" He said it like a finding.

"We're probationary," Zhong Qing said. "No bonus during probation. Did you get one working with Boss Ou?"

"No bonus," he said, "but Ling Na and I both got double travel and meal allowances, which basically functions as one. What did you get? I heard Department Three is extremely strict about expense reimbursement."

Zhong Qing felt the hit land.

She had indeed gotten nothing of that kind. She kept her smile in place and told him: "My luck is coming. It just hasn't arrived yet."

After he left, the smile dropped.

She allowed herself, privately, to criticize Qiao Mingxuan for a few minutes. Strict was one thing. Denying reimbursements on a technicality when someone had been working beyond what the job required was another category of thing. It was rigid in a way that felt, on the receiving end, like indifference.

She worked late. By the time she got back to the apartment it was past ten.

Her phone buzzed.

She looked at the screen and her expression went still.

A bank notification. A sum had been deposited to her account. Listed reason: project bonus.

She stood in the middle of her room and stared at it.

Xinxing had a clear policy on this. Probationary employees did not receive project bonuses. The rule was not ambiguous.

She went out to the living room, where Shi Yani was doing yoga, and asked whether there had been some mistake — whether the transfer had been intended for a senior colleague and landed in the wrong account.

Shi Yani unfolded herself from the pose, sat up, and looked at Zhong Qing with the expression of someone watching a person fail to arrive at an obvious conclusion.

"It's yours."

She explained: the company couldn't send it through official channels because of the probationary rule. But both Qiao Mingxuan and Shi Tao had assessed her work as strong, with fewer errors than they'd expected from someone at her stage. So Qiao Mingxuan had made the decision to give her a bonus regardless.

Zhong Qing worked to keep her face from doing too much. She almost managed it.

Then Shi Yani added: "Since it couldn't come from the company account, it came from President Qiao's own bonus."

The expression froze.

She stood there in the middle of the living room, looking at nothing in particular, not entirely sure what to do with her face.

---

That night, she opened her diary.

She wrote slowly, working through each thing in order:

He seemed to dislike you, yet he put you on his project.

He seemed to keep you at arm's length, yet he gave you every opportunity to show what you could do.

He seemed genuinely dissatisfied with you, criticized you in front of everyone — yet praised your work behind your back.

He seemed rigid and unmovable on every point — yet he used his own bonus to give you one.

She stopped and looked at what she'd written.

Qiao Mingxuan. What kind of person are you.

She would find out. She was certain of that much.