The good news is that it provides some much-needed confirmation, alongside further clarity: they now know the trick and the twist as to how their current suspect is orchestrating a rather elaborate extortion scheme. The bad news is that Sui Zhou is poisoned.

The deluge of rain that sweeps the capital is sudden.

"Have you no care?" Tang Fan berates. "Or is this clumsiness?"

"I don't step beneath blades on purpose," Sui Zhou bites back, now sufficiently baited.

They say the nights on Lake Houhu will drive a man to madness.

Before Fujian, Tang Fan had only caught those turns in Sui Zhou's expression where it had made sense to conclude they were borne of irritation. He's since learned differently; been its witness and its inspiration enough to know that it comes when Sui Zhou is not expecting something to touch at where it does within the crux of man and malformation, where his pleasures have bled to pains have bled to perturbations.

Sui Zhou hears Tang Fan coming long before he arrives, because he knows intimately, resolutely, the shape that Tang Fan takes in his life.

“What else was there to do, hm?” Tang Fan tugs the records back, tucking them under his arm with a flap of his drapey sleeve and a jut of his chin. “Let him learn a hard lesson not to be so complacent in his obstinance towards you from now on. It wasn’t undeserved.”

People should apologise when they’ve done wrong, and he’s done more than wrong Sui Zhou over the past weeks.