Chapter One

September 15, 1979.

By September, Hong City was no longer unbearably hot — but inside the grand Jiang Family mansion, the people gathered there felt as though they were standing in the middle of a fire.

The younger generation stood in a neat row, heads bowed, silently sweating through their clothes.

Every fifteenth of the month, the Jiang Family dreaded this day.

It was the monthly report day — not a report on family business, but on the search for a missing person. The eldest son of the patriarch, Jiang Mingshan, had been separated from the family during the chaos of war and had not been found in all the years since. For the Jiang Family, the search had become the central task of their lives. Yet not a single trace had surfaced. Every lead, however faint, had eventually gone cold. So when they stood before the old man now, none of them could quite lift their eyes.

Jiang Lao Taiye looked at their cowering faces and grew only angrier. He struck his walking stick against the floor, his sharp eyes sweeping over his children and grandchildren like a hawk's.

'Not a single one of you is worth anything — you can't even find one person! How much longer is this going to take? Tell me — who can give me a straight answer? You can't expect me to... to leave this world without ever seeing him again!'

The Jiang Family ran on strict discipline. Even those younger members who cut fine figures in the outside world, who commanded respect wherever they went, dared not breathe a word of complaint here — dared not even meet Jiang Lao Taiye's eyes. And why would they? Never mind that he held the family's purse strings. The man had arrived in Hong City with nothing but nerve, had fought the local gangs blade for blade to carve out a place for his family, and the killing edge he'd honed in those years had never quite left him. That alone was enough to silence a room.

Jiang Minghe, the second son, who stood at the front of the line and bore responsibility for the search, was already past fifty — and yet his calves were trembling.

To win Jiang Lao Taiye's sympathy, Jiang Minghe resorted to something he hadn't done since childhood: he wiped at his eyes and let himself cry. Between sobs, he played the martyr: 'Dad, please, calm yourself — it's not that I haven't looked, I truly cannot find him. Steward Liu's home village was destroyed by the Japanese, the whole neighbourhood has turned over, nobody knows where Elder Brother went.'

'I spent months combing the Mainland on foot, walked my feet half to ruin. The Doctor said I nearly came away crippled. Not that I'm afraid of that — but you only have me left by your side now, and I have to be here to look after you.' As he spoke, the tears that had started as performance became real.

In his heart — and in the hearts of those around him — the conclusion had long been drawn: Elder Brother was almost certainly gone. The odds of an adult surviving those years were slim; for a child, slimmer still. He had almost no memory of his elder brother, but blood was blood, and the grief, when it came, was genuine.

Jiang Lao Taiye heard these words and fell still, his mind drifting to that eldest son lost in the war. After a long moment, tears traced down his old face.

Seeing this, Jiang Minghe set aside his performance and moved quickly to comfort him. 'Don't worry, Father — travel between the Mainland and Hong City is much easier now. Finding people will only get simpler from here. Steward Liu was a clever man; he would have protected Elder Brother. If you can't trust anyone else, surely you trust Steward Liu?'

Better to soothe him with kind words, at least until the old man's final days came. Better he not know the truth and be broken by it.

Jiang Lao Taiye pushed him away. 'Spare me the empty words. If you can't find him, I'll give the whole estate away to charity — not a coin to any of you!'

The Jiang Family members flinched as one.

Inwardly, they were speechless. The old man's favouritism had no bottom.

Jiang Minghe swallowed his resentment and said nothing.

Though in truth, this whole affair had something to do with him.

When he was small, he had fallen gravely ill and nothing could cure him. Someone had recommended a renowned physician — but that physician had already come to Hong City.

To seek treatment, his parents had brought him to Hong City, leaving his elder brother — still very young at the time — behind in their hometown in the care of their grandparents. Word soon came that the hometown had been caught in the war: the grandparents were dead, and Elder Brother had been taken away by the family steward.

In those years of upheaval, finding anyone was nearly impossible. His mother had given birth to him only months before, her body not yet recovered, and the blow of the news broke her — she fell ill with grief and died not long after. He himself, barely recovered from his first illness, was shaken by the upheaval and fell sick again. His father had no choice but to bring him to Hong City to convalesce.

After the founding of the new nation, his father returned to the Mainland to search — and found nothing. As the years passed and the world shifted, the search grew harder still.

Jiang Minghe turned these memories over in his mind, and the bitterness was almost more than he could bear.

On one hand, he was exhausted to his bones. On the other, knowing that all of this traced back to him in some way, he was eaten through with guilt.

Other men's second sons spent their days eating and drinking and enjoying themselves, sheltered by an elder brother above them. Only he could not afford to slacken.

More than anyone, he wanted Elder Brother found — if only so someone else could share the weight.

He would rather have been a carefree second son who answered to no one. Instead, at his age, he was managing the company, conducting the search, tending to his aging father, and disciplining the children below him. When Jiang Minghe thought about the miserable decades he had lived, the false tears threatened to become real ones. But he could not afford to truly break down — the younger generation of the Jiang Family was still green, and there was no one else to hold things together.

'Dad, don't worry. I will keep looking. I will find Elder Brother before my life is done.'

Jiang Minghe swore it to heaven.

But in his heart, he knew how impossible it was.

Elder Brother had been only three years old when he disappeared. Too many possibilities, too many years...

But for the sake of the old man's peace of mind, there was nothing to do but speak of hope.

Jiang Lao Taiye drew out a handkerchief and dabbed at his eyes, then took his younger son's hand. 'You cannot give up. You must keep looking. Otherwise I will have no face to meet your mother, or your grandparents, when I go. I don't even dare dream of them anymore — I'm afraid they'll ask me...'

Jiang Minghe gripped the old man's hand and set his jaw. 'I will find Elder Brother.' Dead or alive.

The old man's fury spent itself, and he was helped upstairs to rest.

Everyone breathed again.

Jiang Minghe's two children — a son and a daughter, both barely in their teens — seized the moment and ran off to play. Only a few cousins remained to receive his instructions and continue the search.

When everyone else had gone, Jiang Minghe's wife Lin Meilian gently wiped the cold sweat from his brow, her voice carrying a thread of complaint. 'Father-in-law is too harsh. It's not as though no one has looked — it's simply that no one can find him. You've done everything you could, and he still loses his temper at you.'

Jiang Minghe said, 'Enough. Is that something you should be saying?'

Lin Meilian said, wounded, 'I'm only saying it because I feel for you. After all these years watching you wear yourself down — don't I have the right to feel for you?'

Jiang Minghe sighed. 'I know you're all worried. But some things still have to be done. Father's health...'

Lin Meilian heard what he left unsaid: Jiang Lao Taiye did not have much time left. While he was still here, they had to give him something to hold on to.

She let her complaints go. She had always held the old man in genuine respect. Her own family had been ordinary, and yet Jiang Lao Taiye had never looked down on her for it the way some old families might. She had been treated well in this household, and she was grateful for that.

Still, there were things she felt the old man was simply asking too much of fate. Finding a person — it was like dredging a needle from the sea.

Then she thought of what Jiang Lao Taiye had said in his anger, and a new worry surfaced. 'I just... if they really can't find him — do you think he'd actually give the estate away?'

This was the family's livelihood at stake. The missing person might never come home, but life had to go on.

Jiang Minghe shook his head. 'I can't say for certain. The old man has carried this knot in his chest for years. Everything he built — in some ways, he built it so he'd have the means to keep searching. If it truly comes to nothing... I'm afraid he might.'

Lin Meilian pressed her palms together at once. 'Merciful Bodhisattva, please let them find him. Elder Brother, wherever you are — give us some sign, won't you?'

***

The Yau Tsim Mong Tai Kok Wharf was alive with noise.

Since the passenger route between the Mainland and Hong City had opened the previous year, the Wharf received visitors from the Mainland every single day.

And every day, a crowd gathered at the Wharf — people craning their necks, waiting for family.

From far off, the silhouette of the passenger vessel appeared on the water, and the waiting crowd surged forward.

On the ship, the passengers surged in kind, gathering their things and preparing to disembark.

Su Fuling released the hand of the woman beside her. 'Next time you're on a boat, just press here like this — it'll help.'

The woman, in a floral dress, patted her own chest with relief. 'Comrade, thank you so much — without you, I don't know how I'd have survived the trip. First time on a boat, and I was so seasick I thought I'd die. Worse than carsick, even. At least with carsick you can crack a window and push through it — with seasick there's nowhere to hide. What's this called? I want to teach it to others. How does it work so well?'

Su Fuling said, 'It's called the Neiguan acupoint. If you press it before you board a boat or get in a car, it can prevent the nausea before it starts.'

'Well, I'll be — it really works. I'll pass it on. You don't know what it's been like — there's no cure for it, and for years I'd rather walk than ride. This time I had no choice... I keep wondering when they'll invent a pill for it, something you just take and it's done.'

Su Fuling smiled. She actually had motion sickness tablets in her pocket. She simply hadn't taken them out — after all, they were strangers, and people wouldn't take medicine from someone they didn't know. Teaching the acupressure point had seemed the more practical approach.

As the woman's symptoms eased, Su Fuling received a light, cheerful chime in her mind: 'Treated a seasick patient — earned 1 Merit Point.'

The sound startled her for a moment before she remembered: that was the voice of the Merit System lodged somewhere in her head.

Then came a small wave of relief. Earning Merit Points wasn't so hard after all. Though the Merit System's method of calculating them was frustratingly vague.

'System, this arrangement won't do. Even when you take a job working for a capitalist, you agree on the wages before you start. Right now I'm treating people with no clear scale for how many Merit Points each case is worth, and no idea how many I need to accumulate in total. I'm working toward two targets I can't even see.'

The Merit System replied, 'That is a back-end setting. It cannot be changed.'

Su Fuling said, '...Really? Why not?'

The Merit System said, 'My master has a friend who is something of a universal charmer. That friend once built a System and issued tasks through it. The tasks could have been completed quickly, but the host found loopholes to drag things out and turned the System into a personal errand-runner. To prevent anyone from exploiting loopholes, my master decided to keep all control in their own hands.'

Su Fuling said, '...Who in their right mind would drag out a task on purpose?' If you stumbled into something like this, wouldn't you want to finish it as fast as possible, get what you came for, and be done? She was already half-worried this thing in her head was going to cause her harm.

The Merit System said, 'My master says: humans are the most covetous creatures alive. Blame your own kind.'

Su Fuling said, '...'

So here she was — no clear target, no fixed scale. How many Merit Points each rescue earned was up to the System. How many she needed in total was up to the System.

The one concrete function it offered was this: the System could identify people who needed help.

The seasick woman just now had been selected from among a whole shipful of candidates.

There was no shortage of people on board with chronic ailments — some were even travelling to Hong City specifically to seek medical treatment — but Su Fuling had weighed her options and decided that seasickness was the most treatable, and the most likely to be welcomed without suspicion.

Still, based on what the System had let slip about its own history, Su Fuling filed something away quietly. If someone had once gone looking for loopholes in order to hold onto a System, that meant these Systems had more to offer than they let on at first glance.

For now, she and the System were partners. She would do well to make full use of it.

'Oh, we're here — look how tall the buildings are in Hong City!' The woman beside her, now fully recovered, had found her energy again and was craning toward the skyline with delight. Then she turned back to Su Fuling: 'Comrade, let's go up front and see if our people are there to meet us. It's not safe in a place like this without someone to receive you.'

The deck was already packed.

From a distance, Hong City's towers rose against the sky. Many passengers were seeing them for the first time, and curiosity lit up their faces.

Unlike the wonder and anticipation around her, Su Fuling felt something more tangled.

The truth was, she hadn't particularly wanted to leave home and come to Hong City. She was the kind of person who loved where she was from, and travelling far had never appealed to her.

This trip had not been a choice so much as a necessity.

Su Fuling's maternal grandmother had died young in the war. Her maternal grandfather had been the village barefoot doctor, and her father — his adopted apprentice — had taken over his post at the village clinic. He had died in a landslide while making a house call.

Her mother, Su Yunying, had never taken to medicine. She had gone to work as a cadre in town, and after her husband's death in the line of duty, had applied to be transferred to the frontier to support construction there. So it fell to Su Fuling to take up the barefoot doctor's work, tending to the villagers at the clinic.

With her father gone and her mother away, only the two of them — grandmother and granddaughter — had remained at home. But life had not been hard. The Su family had built up goodwill over many years, and in that small patch of the world, they lived comfortably enough.

Perhaps because things were comfortable and she had little to worry about, she had, in her idle hours, taken up with a young man — an educated youth sent down from the city.

He was capable in every direction: he could follow her up the mountain to gather medicinal herbs, and he could play the harmonica for her in the evenings. They were well-matched in spirit, and her grandfather, on his deathbed, had looked at this young man and felt at ease.

And yet, in the end, they parted.

He had come to the village the year before last and returned to the city last year.

It was Su Fuling who had ended it. He had wanted her to marry him and move to the city; she had not wanted to leave home. So she had let him go.

In itself, this was nothing remarkable — people came together and drifted apart, and that was ordinary enough.

The trouble was that in the nearby town, there were women who had married educated youths only to be abandoned when those men returned to the city. The damage those cases had done was considerable, and people began drawing comparisons to Su Fuling.

Perhaps they thought: her father gone early, her mother consumed by her career, she was like a small, defenceless creature with no one to stand up for her. And so the well-meaning matchmaking began. In the past year alone, she had lost count of how many introductions she had sat through. The candidates were, by all accounts, decent — the effort was genuine. But she had no intention of marrying, not yet.

Weighed down by the village's enthusiastic matchmaking, Su Fuling received a letter from her maternal uncle in Hong City — Su Jueming.

Su Jueming had left home years ago to study medicine and never returned. It was only through letters in recent years, passed back and forth through circuitous routes, that the family learned he had ended up in Hong City.

As communication between the two places eased, they had kept each other informed. When Su Jueming learned that things at home were not going well, he had been planning to find an opportunity to return for a visit.

But before that opportunity came, the old grandfather passed away.

Now that travel between the two places was easier, Su Jueming knew his father was gone, that his sister had thrown herself into building the nation and left her daughter alone in the old village. He found it too bleak to bear, and wrote asking Su Fuling to come to Hong City and live with him. Since he could not come in person to fetch her — work would not allow it — he arranged for the village cadres to escort her south to the port, and he would cover all the costs.

The letter arrived like rain after a drought. Su Fuling made up her mind at once, packed a bag, and slipped away. She had followed her grandfather around treating patients since she was small — she had no fear of the road, and certainly no need of an escort. She gathered a few changes of clothes and set off on her own.

Originally, Su Fuling had planned to stay in Hong City only a few days before returning home. She would tell everyone that her uncle had found her a match in Hong City, and that would be enough to stop the introductions.

But plans rarely survive contact with life. She had barely dozed off on the boat when her life took a turn. Something called the Merit System had found her. Its master wished to do good in the world but could not act directly — and so had built a System to find someone to act in their place. The System had chosen Su Fuling to be that person.

Su Fuling had not wanted anything to do with something so strange. But the Merit System offered too much to refuse.

For one thing, it could give her access to far greater opportunities to study medicine. For another, if she accumulated enough Merit Points, she would receive a sum of money. Su Fuling had long held a dream: to one day open a school of traditional Chinese medicine, invite every elder practitioner she could find to teach, cultivate the next generation of healers, and learn alongside them. What a beautiful thing that would be. The reality was that her medical knowledge was limited, and she had no money. Her grandfather had taught her a great deal, but he had always said that what he knew was only the surface of the surface — that the truly gifted physicians were the ones who could wrestle a soul back from the gates of death. Such people were far beyond Su Fuling's reach, let alone her ability to study under.

Now here was a chance to learn medicine properly, and to receive the funds to open a school of Chinese medicine. The temptation was simply too great.

And most importantly, through the System, Su Fuling had learned a secret.

It turned out that the world she lived in was, in someone else's eyes, a novel.

And she herself was nothing more than a supporting character in that story.

Her former sweetheart was the male lead. Having been 'abandoned' by her, he had driven himself forward with furious ambition, always nursing the fantasy of returning in triumph to watch her regret.

This was one of the novel's most important hooks — the thread that kept readers turning pages.