Chapter One: The Heiress Reduced to Zero

Between eleven yuan and thirty million lay not a step, but a cliff. Yet the people most desperate to be persuaded often stood at the edge of one. Yanqiu found the list of advisers attached to Hengchuan's distressed assets. The final name was Lu Jiming, once Haicheng's youngest mergers-and-acquisitions partner, blacklisted three months earlier for alleged project fraud. In the news photograph, he descended the courthouse stairs with debt collectors behind him and an unfinished Hengchuan restructuring plan in his hand. Using the convenience store's free internet, she called him. He answered on the seventh ring, his voice tired and cold. “If you're collecting a debt, take a number.” “I'm not.” “Worse. I don't accept sympathy either.”