Ten years later. Winter Solstice, 2065.
Shanghai never sleeps, but tonight it pretends to.
The city is wrapped in a rare, heavy snow that muffles even the neon.
Fu Zhijiang is thirty-five now.
Two metres tall in boots, shoulders that force doorframes to apologise, the left-ear scar long since turned silver.
He still wears only black—no tie, top button open, the city's most expensive ghost in human skin.
He stands on the 142nd-floor sky bridge of the new Shanghai Tower Two, a building he personally financed, designed, and named "Zero."
The entire floor is glass. Below his feet, the frozen Huangpu glitters like a black mirror.
Above him, the snow falls upward in the wind tunnels between towers, a silent white storm.
Zhijiang holds a crystal tumbler of 1964 Black Bowmore.
One glass costs more than most people's annual salary.
He hasn't taken a sip.
On the transparent table in front of him lies a single object:
a child's red scarf, hand-knitted, now faded to pink, still flecked with thirty-year-old blood that never quite washed out.
His own blood, from the night he was born.
A soft chime.
The private elevator opens.
A girl steps out.
Seventeen, maybe eighteen.
Long black hair, eyes exactly like his mother's when she was young—sharp enough to cut souls.
She wears the uniform of Shanghai's most expensive international school, blazer unbuttoned, tie loose, rebellion stitched into every seam.
She stops three metres away.
"Uncle Tang said you'd be here."
Her voice is steady, but her fingers worry the hem of her sleeve.
Zhijiang finally speaks, low, almost tender.
"You shouldn't have come, Lin An."
The girl—Lin An—lifts her chin.
"I'm not here as your niece.
I'm here as the last unsigned clause."
She pulls a black envelope from her blazer pocket, identical wax seal: knife through scales.
Zhijiang's knuckles whiten around the untouched whisky.
"Where did you get that?"
"Grandma gave it to Uncle Tang before she vanished.
He kept it locked for twenty years.
Gave it to me on my seventeenth birthday."
She breaks the seal, unfolds the paper, and reads aloud in a voice that doesn't shake once.
"To my granddaughter Lin An,
If you are reading this, I failed.
I tried to cut the chain with my own hand, but the city wouldn't let me.
Shanghai never forgives debt; it only inherits it.
Your father owes me a life.
I now pass that debt to you.
Do not let him pay it with blood.
Make him pay it with living.
That is the only interest I will ever accept.
—Lin Zhi, who loved you before you were born."
Lin An folds the letter, places it on the glass table beside the child's scarf.
"I'm not here to collect corpses, Uncle.
I'm here to collect you."
Zhijiang's laugh is soft, broken glass.
"You think you can drag the Ghost of the Bund into the light?"
"I don't need to drag you.
I just need you to look down."
She taps the glass floor with her shoe.
Far below, through the transparent bridge, the frozen Huangpu reflects the city upside-down.
And in that reflection, for a split second,
a woman in a blood-red qipao stands on the ice,
smiling the same smile from the night seven bodies floated.
Zhijiang's breath catches.
Lin An continues, voice suddenly small, seventeen after all.
"I found her, Uncle.
Not dead.
Alive.
She's been watching from the edge this whole time.
She said the only way to break the contract
is for the most expensive man in Shanghai
to choose something more expensive than revenge."
She reaches into her pocket, pulls out a second object:
a tiny, hand-carved wooden boat, the kind children sail in Luxun Park.
"Your mother made this the year you were born.
She kept one piece of herself soft.
She wants you to sail it.
On the Huangpu.
Tonight.
While it's still frozen.
If you can let it go without looking back,
the debt is paid."
Zhijiang stares at the little boat like it's a live grenade.
Decades of graves, of midnight executions, of whispered names in dark boardrooms,
all balanced on a child's toy.
Snow keeps falling upward around the tower.
He crouches, places the wooden boat on the glass floor.
Then he does something no one in Shanghai has ever seen the Ghost of the Bund do.
He cries.
Not the angry tears of a boy,
but the quiet, shoulder-shaking sobs of a man who finally understands
the difference between winning
and being free.
Lin An kneels beside him, rests her head on his shoulder.
Minutes pass, or hours.
Eventually Zhijiang stands.
He picks up the boat, walks to the edge of the sky bridge where a maintenance hatch opens to the frozen river 600 metres below.
He opens the hatch.
Wind screams upward, carrying snow and memory.
He looks once at the little boat.
Once at the city that owns him.
Once at the girl who might be his last chance.
Then he lets go.
The wooden boat falls,
spinning red against white,
until it lands soundlessly on the ice far below
and stays there,
upright,
waiting.
Zhijiang closes the hatch.
He does not look back.
Lin An slips her hand into his.
Together they walk toward the elevator.
Behind them, on the glass table,
the faded child's scarf flutters once
as if someone invisible just picked it up
and followed them out.
Somewhere on the frozen river,
a woman in black watches the tiny boat,
smiles the smallest, softest smile Shanghai has ever seen,
and whispers to the wind:
"Debt paid.
Interest accepted.
Now live, my boy.
Live expensively."
Snow falls.
The city exhales.
And for the first time in seventy years,
the Huangpu
doesn't claim a single corpse
on the longest night of the year.