The afternoon before the board meeting was unseasonably warm. The mist had burned off completely by eleven, leaving a sky so pale and cloudless it seemed almost white, and the lake had flattened to a mirror. Lin Fan spent the morning in the study, reviewing the Lingyun Group evidence one final time. The golden phone had offered no new occupation—the Corporate Strategist card remained active until the takeover was resolved—and the Beta Protocol was quiet, waiting for the moment when the moral threshold would tip. The only sounds were the rustle of paper and the occasional cry of the heron, which had moved from its usual spot at the lake's edge to a new perch on the wooden bridge, as if it too were waiting for something.
At noon, the daily sign-in chimed. Seventy-two million yuan. He didn't look at the screen.
His mother had taken Lin Xiaoyue into the city for shopping—a rare outing, funded by the allowance Lin Fan had quietly deposited into his sister's account. The villa was empty. He stood in the kitchen, the God‑Level Culinary skill humming beneath his thoughts, and considered what to make for dinner.
The board meeting was tomorrow at ten. Zhan Bingxue had called that morning, her voice tight but steady. "The Chens have requested a private meeting with me beforehand. They want to negotiate. I told them no. We're taking it to the full board." She had paused, then added, almost reluctantly, "I'm scared, Lin Fan. I've been fighting so long I forgot what it felt like to have someone on my side."
"You have someone," he'd said. "Tomorrow, you'll have the truth. That's enough."
Now, in the quiet kitchen, he thought about fear. His mother had spent years afraid—afraid of debt, afraid of sickness, afraid of the landlord's knock and the bill collector's call. His father had been afraid too, though he'd hidden it behind a gentle, stoic silence. The man had worked in a textile factory for thirty years, and in the end, what killed him wasn't the work but the cost of being sick. The medical bills that had followed him into death, a shadow Lin Fan had only recently lifted.
There was a dish his father used to love. It wasn't a special occasion dish, nothing elaborate or expensive. It was a simple Jiangnan home-style recipe—braised pork ribs with fermented black beans and bitter melon—that his mother had made on ordinary weeknights, the kind of meal that required no celebration, only the steady, patient work of slow cooking. The bitterness of the melon, his father used to say, was the point. It reminded you that life wasn't always sweet, and that bitterness had its own kind of flavour.
Lin Fan hadn't made the dish before. The God‑Level skill could reconstruct it from memory—the exact proportions, the precise timing, the way the fermented beans should darken the sauce without overwhelming it—but cooking it felt like an act of memory, not of technique. He gathered the ingredients. Pork ribs, cut into inch-long segments. Bitter melon, pale green and ridged, the seeds scooped out and the flesh sliced into crescents. Fermented black beans, rinsed and lightly crushed. Garlic. Ginger. A splash of Shaoxing wine. A pinch of sugar to balance the bitterness, but not too much—never too much. His father had always insisted.
He worked in silence. The ribs went into a pot of cold water, brought to a boil, then drained and rinsed. The wok heated over a steady flame, oil shimmering, ginger and garlic hitting the hot metal with a hiss. The ribs went in, browning slowly, the Maillard reaction transforming their pale surface to a deep, caramelised gold. The fermented beans followed, their salty, earthy aroma filling the kitchen. Then the wine, the sugar, the soy sauce, a cup of water. The lid went on, and the heat reduced to a bare murmur, the ribs simmering in their dark sauce.
The bitter melon went in last, when the ribs were nearly tender. It needed only a few minutes—too long and it would lose its shape, too short and the bitterness would be sharp rather than mellow. Lin Fan watched the slices soften in the sauce, remembering his father at the dinner table, picking out the melon slices with his chopsticks and chewing slowly, his eyes half-closed. *Good*, he would say, every time, as if it were the first time he'd tasted it. *Very good.* He had never been a man of many words.
The rice cooker clicked off. Lin Fan set the table for three—his mother, his sister, himself—and waited.
They returned at five, laden with shopping bags and the particular exhaustion of a mother and daughter who had spent too long in air-conditioned malls. Lin Xiaoyue immediately disappeared upstairs to try on her new clothes. His mother stopped in the kitchen doorway, her eyes going to the covered dishes on the counter.
"You cooked again," she said. Not a question.
"I had time."
She lifted the lid of the braised ribs. The steam rose, carrying the dark, fermented smell of the black beans, the slight bitterness of the melon. She didn't move for a long moment.
"This was your father's favourite," she said.
"I know."
She set the lid down. Her hands were trembling, just slightly, the way they'd trembled when she'd held the note from the safe. "I haven't made this since he died. I couldn't. The smell alone—it brings him back too sharply."
"I can put it away."
"No." The word was firm, almost sharp. "No. You made it. We'll eat it."
Dinner was quiet. Lin Xiaoyue, oblivious to the weight of the meal, chattered about her new shoes and a boy in her economics class. Lin Fan answered in monosyllables, his attention on his mother, who ate each bite with a deliberation that was almost ceremonial. She took the bitter melon first, as his father always had, and closed her eyes as she chewed.
Halfway through the meal, the tears began. They were silent, the kind that came without warning and without permission, sliding down her cheeks and into her rice bowl. Lin Xiaoyue stopped mid-sentence. "Mom? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." His mother wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. "It's just—this dish. Your father. He would have loved this. He would have loved to see you like this, Lin Fan. Successful. Calm. Cooking his favourite meal as if you'd been doing it your whole life."
Lin Fan set down his chopsticks. "I wish he were here to eat it."
"He is," she said quietly. "In some way. When you eat something that someone you loved used to love, they're at the table with you. That's what my mother used to say. I never believed it until now."
The tears kept falling, but she kept eating. Lin Xiaoyue reached over and took her mother's hand. Lin Fan sat still, the God‑Level Culinary skill quiet in his mind, offering no guidance on what to say. Some things couldn't be cooked or strategised. Some things just had to be felt.
After dinner, his mother helped him with the dishes. They stood side by side at the sink, the way they'd done in the old Suzhou apartment when he was a child, her hands in the soapy water, his hands on the drying towel. The silence between them was comfortable now, the weight of the meal having passed.
"I'm scared too," Lin Fan said. "About tomorrow. The board meeting. If things go wrong, the woman I'm helping could lose her company. The people trying to take it are powerful. They've been doing this for generations."
His mother didn't look up from the dishes. "Your father was scared every time there were layoffs at the factory. He never let us see it, but I knew. He'd sit in the kitchen after dinner, staring at the wall, and I'd know. But he went to work anyway. Every day, for thirty years. Not because he wasn't scared. Because he had people who needed him."
"What if I fail?"
"Then you'll fail. And you'll get up, and you'll try again. That's what he would have done." She passed him a wet plate. "But you won't fail. You're more like your father than you know. And you have something he didn't have."
"What's that?"
"Options. Resources. A way to fight. Your father fought with his hands and his patience. You have... more. I don't know where it came from, and I'm not going to ask. But use it. Use all of it. Don't let those people take what isn't theirs."
Lin Fan dried the plate and set it in the rack. The golden phone was silent in his pocket, its secrecy a familiar weight. He couldn't tell his mother about the System. He couldn't explain the skills that had been downloaded into his mind or the red envelopes that appeared when he did the right thing. But he could do what she asked. He could use what he'd been given.
"I will, Mom."
She nodded, turned away from the sink, and put her wet hand on his cheek. "You've been a good son. You were a good son when you had nothing. Now you have everything, and you're still a good son. That's all I ever wanted."
She went upstairs to bed. Lin Fan stood alone in the kitchen, looking out at the lake. The heron had returned to its usual spot, a grey shape in the gathering dusk. Tomorrow morning, he would put on his dark suit and drive to the Lingyun Group headquarters. He would sit in a boardroom filled with powerful, hostile people, and he would present the evidence that could bring down a century-old aristocratic family. He would do it quietly, precisely, without drama. The way his father had worked. The way his mother had endured.
He thought about the dish he'd made—the bitterness of the melon, the richness of the pork, the salt of the fermented beans. His father had been right. Bitterness had its own kind of flavour. And sometimes, when you balanced it with patience and care, it became something nourishing. Something that could make a person cry not from sorrow but from the overwhelming recognition that love persisted, even in absence, even in grief, even across the divide between the living and the dead.
He went to bed early. In his dream, his father was sitting at the dinner table, holding a pair of chopsticks, smiling at a bowl of ribs. *Good*, he said. *Very good.* And when Lin Fan woke, the smile was still there, a ghost at the edge of his vision, steadying him for the day ahead.