The richest man started taking advantage of loopholes after joining Alibaba.

I woke up very early the next day.

I wasn't woken up by the alarm clock; I woke up from the cold.

Last night, after getting out of the car, I forgot to adjust the air conditioning temperature, and it was on 20-degree air all night. I also kicked off half of the blanket.

Lin Che glanced at his phone; it was 7:11.

No new messages.

Last night, Shen Nan's chat window was still displaying the words "Take care and get some rest".

I got up, boiled a kettle of water, and made a cup of instant coffee.

I took two sips while standing in the kitchen; the coffee powder hadn't been stirred properly, and there was still a layer of sediment at the bottom.

It doesn't matter anymore.

While I was washing up, I saw light coming from outside the window, but it wasn't the sun; the sun rarely shines in Hangzhou at the end of December.

It was that kind of grayish-white light that couldn't illuminate anything clearly, like looking through a layer of frosted glass.

It was very windy when I went out.

It wasn't the dry wind typical of Beijing; it was a damp wind blowing from the direction of the Qiantang River, carrying moisture and making my face feel sticky.

The branches of the roadside trees swayed from side to side in the wind, and the fragmented images I saw last night now seemed to come alive.

Drive to Weiguang.

There weren't many cars on the road; the morning rush hour hadn't started yet.

Late December in Hangzhou has a strange quietness, not desolation, but the kind of quietness where everyone is waiting for the end of the year.

I was waiting at a red light at an intersection when the bakery on my right had just opened, and the staff were wiping the glass slowly.

The headquarters of Weiguang is located in the west of the city.

There were only three or four cars parked in the parking lot downstairs. The security guard was a new face, but he recognized Lin Che's license plate and raised the barrier without asking any questions.

He parked the car, turned off the engine, and glanced at his face in the rearview mirror. He hadn't slept well last night; there was a dark circle under his eyes.

The air in the elevator smelled of disinfectant, so the property management probably cleaned it yesterday.

We arrived at his floor.

The corridor lights are always on, white LEDs, reflecting light off the floor.

The office door was unlocked.

That's not right.

He locked it before he left.

Pushing open the door, the first thing you see is the desktop.

There was something extra on the table.

A printed document, A4 paper, about seven or eight pages, clipped together with binder clips.

There was no cover, no heading, and no signature.

Place it directly in front of the keyboard, straight, parallel to the edge of the desk.

He didn't go to see it right away.

I first looked around the office.

The chair's position had changed; it wasn't at the angle he pushed it in before he left, indicating someone had sat in it.

The trash can was clean; there was nothing in it.

The temperature display on the air conditioner panel showed 24 degrees Celsius, but he had set it to 22 before he left.

Someone has been here.

I came, sat, adjusted the air conditioning, left a document, and left.

The lights and air conditioning weren't turned off when they left, as if they had stayed for a while, not just dropped things off and left.

There was a very shallow water stain ring next to the pen holder on the table, which was imprinted on the bottom of the cup.

His cup is in the study, not here.

That water stain was left on someone else's cup.

He sat down and picked up the printed document.

The first page is a table, manually formatted, with no trace of being exported from Excel. It looks like it was taken from the backend and then retyped and organized.

The title is: Summary of Ark Fund Account Status (as of December 25, 2022).

Seven accounts, seven lines.

Each row has four columns: Account Number, Jurisdiction, Status, and Remarks.

The status bars of the first four accounts all showed "frozen," consistent with what he saw on the Ark monitoring page.

The fifth and sixth are "normal".

The seventh one is the BVI one. The status bar says "normal", but the notes column is not empty.

The remarks column read: "Abnormal inflow".

He turned to the second page.

The second page shows the transaction details of the BVI account, also in a manually formatted manner, arranged in reverse chronological order.

The most recent deposit occurred on December 22nd, and the amount was not large, equivalent to approximately 12 million RMB.

The source field is marked "unknown".

It's not "pending investigation" or "under confirmation".

It is "unknown".

In Chen Wei's system, "unknown" and "to be investigated" are two different things.

"Pending investigation" means that the investigation has not yet been completed.

"Unknown" means that the search was successful but no results were found.

He continued flipping through the pages.

Pages three through six show the transaction records for the other six accounts; the transactions are normal and there are no markings.

Page 7 is a timeline that lists four unusual inflows into the BVI account over the past three months, ranging from 800,000 to 1.5 million, with all sources marked "unknown".

Four sums of money, over three months, totaling less than five million.

It's not a large number; it's not even a fraction of the $1.2 billion Ark's total size.

However, the sources could not be found at all.

The BVI account structure is a two-tiered holding arrangement, with a Hong Kong trust company within a BVI company, meaning there aren't many people who can actually deposit money into it.

Even fewer calls can get through without being traced back to their source.

He flipped the document back to the first page and looked at the cover again.

There is no cover.

No signature.

No date.

There is no label indicating "confidential" or "internal".

Then he saw the note.

A pale yellow square sticky note, about three centimeters square, was affixed to the upper right corner of the printed document.

There are two words written on it.

receive.

Lin Che stared at those two words for five seconds.

He recognized the handwriting.

It's not the kind of handwriting that looks nice; the strokes are stiff, the horizontals aren't level, and the verticals aren't straight, but each character is the same size and the spacing is the same.

It looks like it was measured with a ruler.

Chen Wei.

Chen Wei, who has been missing for almost a month.

After being permanently deleted by FA-R-2022, Chen Wei has not been contacted since.

There was no phone call, no message, and no explanation for why I've been gone for so long.

The return was in the form of an unsigned printed document and a note.

The note contained the two words he had said most often in his life.

receive.

Lin Che peeled the sticky note off the document.

There was a shallow crease in the lower left corner of the sticky note, as if it had been pinched and then put back.

The crease is located just below the character "收".

He pinched it.

I collected it.

It was pasted back on.

The crease indicates that Chen Wei hesitated before posting this note.

After he finished writing "Received," he peeled off the sticky note and was about to stick it on when he pinched the bottom left corner and paused.

I thought about it.

Then I still put it on.

Lin Che pasted the sticky note back into the upper right corner of the document.

The wind is still blowing outside the window.

The December wind blew across the river, slapping against the glass curtain walls of the office building and producing a series of low, buzzing sounds.

The sealing strips on the window frame are a bit worn out, and the sound of wind seeps in through the gaps, a faint, intermittent sound.

The air conditioning in the office was still on, set at 24 degrees Celsius, the temperature Chen Wei had set.

He picked up his phone and scrolled to Chen Wei's chat window.

The last message was from a long time ago, and he didn't check the exact date.

The last text in the dialog box was from Chen Weifa, and it also consisted of two characters.

"receive."

It's exactly the same as the note.

He didn't send any new messages.

I put my phone down.

The printed documents lay quietly on the table, the silver of the binder clips reflecting the light under the fluorescent lamp.

BVI, unusual inflow, source unknown.

Four sums of money.

Whose is it?