The villa was quiet in the late afternoon, the winter light slanting through the windows in long amber rectangles. Lin Fan sat at the kitchen table, a half‑finished cup of tea cooling beside him, reviewing the security upgrades that Wang Feng had proposed for the institute. The confrontation with the fake journalist was two days behind him, but its implications lingered. Blackstone Research Group had tested his defences twice and retreated both times. The silence that followed was, he suspected, not surrender but recalibration. The next attack would be subtler, harder to detect, aimed at vulnerabilities he might not even know he had.
The golden phone rested on the table beside his tea, its screen dark. He had been waiting for the next occupation card, but the System had been quiet since the second skirmish. Perhaps it was waiting for something. Perhaps it was simply giving him time to prepare.
The doorbell rang. Lin Fan was not expecting anyone. He crossed to the entrance and opened the door to find a young woman standing on the doorstep. She was in her early twenties, dressed in a crisply pressed navy suit that marked her as a professional, but the faint tremor in her hands suggested something else. Her face was earnest and open, the kind of face that inspired trust. She carried a slim leather portfolio and wore a visitor's badge from the Shanghai Municipal Government.
"Mr. Lin? My name is Huang Yifei. I'm a policy analyst with the Municipal Health Commission. I was hoping to speak with you about the Linfloxacin clinical trials. The Commission has been following the preliminary results with great interest."
Lin Fan stepped back to let her in. "The Health Commission. I wasn't aware we had submitted any documentation to your office yet."
"You haven't. That's partly why I'm here." She smiled, a practised, self‑deprecating expression. "I'm afraid I'm jumping the queue a little. The preliminary data from the compassionate use case has been circulating—hospital records, mostly, nothing official—and my supervisor wanted me to get a sense of the timeline before the formal review process begins. It's a bit irregular, I know."
Lin Fan gestured toward the living room sofa. "Please, sit. Can I offer you tea?"
"That would be lovely. Jasmine, if you have it."
He brewed the tea, his God‑Level Culinary skill making the motions automatic, while his mind worked on the visitor. Something was off. Not in her story—the Health Commission did indeed have reason to be interested in Linfloxacin, and a preliminary, informal inquiry was not unusual. It was something in her demeanour. The tremor in her hands, which she was trying to hide by clasping them together. The way her eyes moved around the villa's interior, not with the simple curiosity of a first‑time visitor but with the rapid, cataloguing assessment of someone searching for something specific. The slight hesitation before she answered questions, as if she were consulting an internal script.
The golden phone in his pocket vibrated once—so softly that only he could feel it—and then went still. He didn't need to look at the screen. He already knew what it was telling him. The Alpha Sonar had detected something. Not a threat, exactly, but an anomaly. A lie, or the potential for one, pulsing faintly in the space between her words and her intentions.
He set her tea on the coffee table and sat in the armchair across from her. "What specifically is the Health Commission interested in?"
"The timeline for Phase I trials, primarily. And the safety data from the compassionate use case. If Linfloxacin is as effective as the hospital reports suggest, the Commission may want to fast‑track the approval process. We've been seeing a rise in antibiotic‑resistant infections across the city's hospitals, and the current formulary isn't keeping up." She opened her portfolio and produced a thin folder. "I've brought some preliminary questions from my supervisor. They're fairly standard."
Lin Fan took the folder and flipped through it. The questions were indeed standard—trial protocols, recruitment criteria, manufacturing capacity. The kind of thing any regulatory body would want to know. But as he read, he became aware of a strange sensation. The God‑Level Card Playing skill, which had been dormant since the warehouse poker game, was stirring in his mind. But it was not just the card‑playing skill. Something else was integrating with it—the Passenger Intuition from his driving occupation, perhaps, or the Enhanced Diagnostic Instinct from the emergency room. The System's skills were not isolated modules; they bled into each other, combining in ways he was only beginning to understand.
And what this combination was telling him, with a clarity that felt almost physical, was that Huang Yifei was lying.
Not about everything. The job title was probably real. The Health Commission probably did employ a policy analyst named Huang Yifei. But the purpose of her visit was not what she claimed. The tremor in her hands was not nerves. It was the tremor of someone who had been given a task she was not comfortable carrying out. The portfolio she carried was genuine, but the questions in it had been provided by someone else. Someone who was not her supervisor.
He set the folder down. "Ms. Huang. Who sent you here?"
Her smile flickered. "I'm sorry?"
"You're not here from the Health Commission. Not primarily. You do work for them—your badge is genuine, and your name is probably real. But the questions in this folder were written by someone else. Someone who understands regulatory procedure very well but isn't actually interested in the answers. They're interested in how I respond. Whether I'm cooperative or evasive. Whether I have something to hide."
Her face went very still. The tremor in her hands stopped, as if she had suddenly become aware of it and clamped down. "Mr. Lin, I assure you—"
"You don't need to assure me of anything. I'm not angry. I'm curious." He leaned forward, his voice calm and steady. "You're not a spy. You're not a corporate operative. You're someone who was asked to do something she's not comfortable with, and you're doing it badly because your conscience is fighting your instructions. That's not a criticism. It's a compliment."
She stared at him, her mouth slightly open. The mask was gone now—the professional smile, the practised ease, the confident posture. Underneath, she was young and frightened and very, very tired.
"He said you wouldn't notice," she whispered. "He said you were just a businessman who got lucky. He said the drug was probably a fluke, and I just needed to get a sense of whether you were serious about the trials or just looking for attention."
"Who said that?"
"My—the man who gave me the questions. His name is Dr. Su. He's a senior researcher at the Health Commission. He said he was acting in the public interest. He said if the drug was real, we needed to know, but if it was a fraud, we needed to expose it before anyone got hurt." She swallowed. "He said there were powerful people who wanted to know the truth."
Lin Fan nodded slowly. Dr. Su. A new name, but the pattern was familiar. Blackstone Research Group had been repelled, but the pharmaceutical industry's network extended far beyond a single investigative firm. They had contacts in regulatory agencies, in government offices, in the hospitals that would one day administer Linfloxacin. Dr. Su was one of those contacts—a respectable public servant who had been persuaded, with money or favours or simple appeals to professional caution, to do a favour for Johnson & Johnson. And he had sent Huang Yifei to do the actual work, not because she was the best person for the job, but because she was young and inexperienced and unlikely to be suspected.
The lie‑detection sense hummed in his mind, quiet and certain. Everything she had said was true—the tremor, the guilt, the confession. She was not the enemy. She was a pawn, and she knew it.
"Ms. Huang. I'm going to give you a choice." He met her eyes, and his voice was gentle. "You can go back to Dr. Su and tell him whatever you want. Tell him I was evasive. Tell him I was cooperative. It doesn't matter. But if you choose to do that, you'll be working for people who don't have your interests at heart. They used you. They sent you here without telling you what you were really doing, and if things had gone badly, they would have let you take the fall."
"And my other choice?"
"You can tell me everything you know about Dr. Su's contacts. Who he's been meeting with. What he asked you to look for. Anything that might help me understand who's behind this. In exchange, I'll make sure your career is protected. I have friends in the municipal government. I can guarantee that you won't lose your job, and I can guarantee that Dr. Su won't retaliate. Whatever you decide, I won't hold it against you. But I think you want to do the right thing. Otherwise, you wouldn't be so bad at lying."
She looked at him for a long moment. Her hands were clasped tightly in her lap, and her eyes were bright with unshed tears. Then, very slowly, she opened her portfolio and pulled out a second folder—thinner than the first, tucked behind the official documents.
"I wasn't supposed to bring this. Dr. Su wanted me to observe you and report back verbally. But I copied his emails. I didn't know why—I just felt like I needed some kind of protection. In case things went wrong."
Lin Fan took the folder. Inside were printed emails between Dr. Su and a contact identified only as "M.C." The messages were brief and careful, but the pattern was unmistakable. M.C. was providing Dr. Su with specific questions to ask about the Linfloxacin trials—questions designed to probe for weaknesses, to identify regulatory vulnerabilities, to gather intelligence that could be used to delay or derail the approval process. The signature at the bottom of one email read: "Regards, M. Chen."
Marcus Chen. The same vice president at Johnson & Johnson who had dispatched Blackstone Research Group. He was not relying solely on private investigators. He was cultivating sources inside the Shanghai regulatory apparatus, laying the groundwork for a prolonged bureaucratic war.
"Thank you, Ms. Huang." Lin Fan closed the folder. "This is extremely helpful."
"What are you going to do with it?"
"I'm going to use it to protect the drug. And I'm going to make sure that Dr. Su understands the consequences of acting as a corporate proxy. But I'm not going to involve you. As far as anyone at the Health Commission knows, you came here, asked your questions, and left. Your career is safe."
She exhaled a breath she seemed to have been holding for a very long time. "Why are you being so kind to me? I tried to spy on you."
"You were sent here by someone you trusted. You felt uncomfortable, and you acted on that discomfort—you brought those emails not because you were ordered to, but because your conscience told you it was the right thing. That's not spying. That's integrity. The world needs more of it."
She left a few minutes later, walking down the gravel path with a lighter step than she had arrived with. Lin Fan watched her go from the window, the folder of emails in his hand. The golden phone vibrated once against his thigh—a soft, private pulse.
`[New Skill Integration Detected: Lie‑Detection Sense — Advanced. This ability combines elements of God‑Level Card Playing (bluff detection), Passenger Intuition (emotional state reading), and Enhanced Diagnostic Instinct (physiological anomaly recognition). It allows the host to detect deliberate falsehoods with high accuracy. Permanent.]`
`[Moral Event: Protected a vulnerable intermediary from exploitation. Offered clemency and protection in exchange for truth. This is the compound interest of decency, still accruing.]`
He put the phone away. Outside, the heron stood motionless at the lake's edge. Huang Yifei's car was pulling through the compound gates, disappearing onto the road. She would go back to her office and continue her work, but she would no longer be a pawn in Marcus Chen's game. She would be something rarer: a person who had been given a second chance, and who would not forget who gave it to her.
The lie‑detection sense was quiet now, a new layer of awareness woven into his perception of the world. He could feel its potential, the way it sharpened his attention to the tiny signals that people gave off when they were trying to deceive. It would be useful in the battles ahead. But it was also a burden. Knowing when someone was lying meant knowing when they were afraid, when they were ashamed, when they were trapped. It meant seeing the cracks in people's armour and having to decide, every time, whether to exploit those cracks or to protect them.
He had chosen to protect Huang Yifei. He would choose to protect others, as long as they were not the ones actively trying to destroy what he was building. But for those who were—for Marcus Chen, for Dr. Su, for the shareholders and executives who valued profits over lives—he would use every weapon at his disposal. The lie‑detection sense was just the latest. There would be more.
He went back to the kitchen, brewed a fresh pot of tea, and sat down with the emails. The next step was clear: contact Minister Gao, share the evidence, and discuss how to handle a corrupt regulatory official who had been feeding intelligence to a foreign corporation. The political machinery of Shanghai was about to feel the weight of a minister's life‑debt.
Outside, the winter sun was beginning to set. The heron stirred, took a single step into the shallows, and then was still again. The world was quiet. The war was far from over. But tonight, Lin Fan had turned another pawn into an ally, and gathered another piece of evidence against the people who wanted to stop him. That was enough. That was more than enough.