Chapter One: A Borrowed Life

When Lin Yan made his wish, he had exactly thirteen yuan and sixty cents in his pocket. It was eleven at night, and rain had polished Riverside Road into a sheet of black glass. He had just left the debt collector's office. Three missed calls waited on his phone: the hospital demanding his mother's deposit, his landlord's final warning, and another reminder of the compensation debt that should never have been his. Two years ago, Lin Yan had been the youngest project manager at Shengyuan Risk Consulting. Before the Haichuan Fund collapsed, he had circled seven fatal irregularities in his report. His superior buried the warning and replaced the signature page with Lin Yan's name. The firm kept its client.