The Nine-Meridian Physician

Chapter 6: The Brother's Bargain

Su Kang's office occupied the top floor of the Su Group tower, all glass and steel and the particular hush of a room built to make visitors feel smaller than they were. Chen Feng had been inside it exactly twice in three years, both times to be reminded, politely and at length, of everything he lacked.

This time he didn't wait to be announced.

"Kang." Su Wan pushed past her brother's startled assistant without slowing, Chen Feng a step behind her, Old Master Su trailing more slowly with a driver's arm steadying his elbow — insisting, over both their objections, that he was well enough to be present for this. "We need to talk. Now."

Su Kang looked up from his desk with the faint, practiced irritation of a man interrupted mid-triumph. "I'm in the middle of a call—"

"End it," Su Tianhe said, and something in the old man's voice — thin, but absolutely without room for argument — made his son's hand move to the phone without further protest.

Su Kang hung up, folding his hands atop a stack of documents with the wary patience of a man who could sense, correctly, that he was about to be ambushed and simply hadn't worked out the angle yet. "Alright. What's this about."

*Watch his eyes when you say the name,* Ye Chen murmured, cool and clinical now, the earlier alarm from Feng Lao's visit folded back into something more useful — focus. *A guilty man's pupils dilate differently than an innocent one's. Give him the name and nothing else. Let his own face answer the question.*

"Feng Lao," Chen Feng said.

For half a second — no more — something flickered across Su Kang's face that had nothing to do with confusion and everything to do with a man realizing a door he'd assumed was locked had just been kicked open. He recovered fast, professional mask sliding back into place with practiced ease, but half a second was more than enough.

"I don't know who that is," Su Kang said.

"You're lying," Su Wan said flatly. "I've watched you lie to Grandfather my entire life, Kang, and you're doing the exact same thing right now — jaw too still, hands too flat on the desk. Stop it. He was at the house an hour ago. He told us, very politely, that you and he have been in contact for months. Regarding, and I'm quoting him directly, a 'promising business proposal.'"

Su Kang's composure cracked at the edges, just slightly, just enough. "That's—that's an exaggeration. I had one meeting. One. A potential investor introduced through the Hengfeng Group, interested in pharmaceutical distribution rights for—"

"Pharmaceutical distribution," Old Master Su repeated, lowering himself into the chair across from his grandson's desk with the slow, deliberate care of a man conserving every ounce of remaining strength for what mattered. "Kang. Look at me. What, precisely, did this man offer you, and what did you offer him in return?"

*This is the moment,* Ye Chen said quietly. *Whatever he says next, listen to the specifics, not the excuses. Men like Feng Lao do not deal in vague partnerships. Every arrangement he makes has a precise, transactional shape, and that shape will tell us exactly what he's after.*

Su Kang's eyes moved between his father and his sister and, last, with something close to genuine hatred, to Chen Feng — as though this entire situation were somehow Chen Feng's fault for simply existing in the room while it unfolded.

"He approached me three months ago," Su Kang said finally, the words coming faster now, the practiced smoothness cracking into something rawer underneath. "Said his group had capital, serious capital, interested in a controlling stake in our pharmaceutical distribution arm. No questions asked about sourcing, no due diligence delays — the kind of deal that doesn't come along twice. I was going to use it to modernize the whole division, prove to the board I could expand this company beyond what Father built it into—"

"What did he want in exchange," Su Tianhe said, quiet and terrible. "Specifically."

Su Kang's jaw worked. "Access," he admitted finally. "To the family's medical records. All of them. Yours especially, Father — he said his group specialized in rare genetic research, that they were interested in longevity studies, that a man of your age and health history would be 'invaluable data' for something he called a legacy initiative. I thought—" He stopped, swallowed. "I thought it was strange, but harmless. Old men sell their medical histories to research firms for money all the time. I didn't think—"

"You gave a stranger my full medical history," Su Tianhe said, "without asking me. Without telling me. In exchange for money to expand a division you wanted to control without my oversight."

The silence that followed was worse than shouting would have been.

*He didn't want the records for research,* Ye Chen said, cold and certain now. *He wanted them to confirm what he already suspected — that Su Tianhe was dying, and dying of something advanced enough that a miracle recovery would be impossible to hide or explain through conventional means. He has been watching this family for months, Chen Feng, waiting for exactly the kind of anomaly your treatment is about to create. When Su Tianhe's health improves in ways no oncologist can account for, Feng Lao will already have the baseline records to prove it happened. He'll have proof, on paper, that something impossible occurred in this house — and proof is exactly what he needs to justify moving against you directly.*

Chen Feng felt something cold settle low in his stomach. "He's not researching longevity," he said aloud. "He's building a case file. On your father. So that when the treatment starts working — and everyone in this family already knows it's starting to work — he'll have documented proof that something outside normal medicine caused it. Proof he can use to justify whatever he decides to do next."

Su Kang's face had gone pale. "What treatment? What are you talking about?"

"Your father is dying," Su Wan said, each word deliberate, cutting. "Stage three lung cancer, six months ago you'd have called it terminal. He didn't tell you because he was afraid you'd use it to accelerate the succession fight before he was even in the ground. Does that sound like an unreasonable fear to you, Kang, given what you just admitted to doing with his medical records the moment a stranger offered you money for them?"

Su Kang looked, for the first time in Chen Feng's three years of knowing him, genuinely, completely lost — the confident businessman's mask stripped away to reveal something younger and far less certain underneath.

"Father," he said, voice cracking slightly. "Is that true?"

"It's true," Su Tianhe said, and there was no anger left in his voice now, only a deep, old exhaustion. "And it's also true that your son-in-law — the one you humiliated at my anniversary dinner three nights ago, the one you've spent three years calling worthless in front of this entire family — is the reason I might still be alive in six months instead of buried in it."

*This is the crack you can use,* Ye Chen said, thoughtful now, some of the earlier cold urgency softening into calculation. *He is ashamed. Shame is not trust, but it is a foundation trust can sometimes be built on, if handled correctly. Do not humiliate him further. You have wanted this moment for three years, and the temptation to make him kneel the way he made you kneel will be strong. Resist it. You need him now — not as an enemy nursing a fresh grievance, but as a man who might, if given the right reason, choose to fix what he's broken.*

Chen Feng crossed the room and sat in the chair beside Su Kang's desk, close enough to speak quietly, deliberately choosing to lower himself rather than stand over the other man's obvious shame.

"I'm not here to gloat," Chen Feng said. "I don't have time for that, and frankly neither do you. The man who came to your father's house this morning is dangerous in ways I don't think you fully understand yet, and he's already three months ahead of us because of a deal you made without knowing what you were really selling. I need to know everything about him — every meeting, every document you signed, every promise he made you. Not because I want to punish you for it. Because if we don't move fast, whatever he's planning next is going to hurt this entire family, and I'd rather stop it before it happens than clean up after it does."

Su Kang stared at him for a long moment — searching, Chen Feng suspected, for the mockery he'd have used in Chen Feng's position, the satisfaction of finally having something to hold over the brother-in-law he'd spent three years humiliating.

He didn't find it. Whatever he found instead made something in his expression finally, visibly break.

"There's a meeting," Su Kang said quietly. "Tomorrow night. He wants to finalize the transfer of distribution rights, wants me to sign over full access to our supply chain logistics — warehouses, shipping routes, customs contacts, all of it. I was going to do it. I was going to sign everything he asked for." He looked up, and for the first time Chen Feng saw something in his face that might, eventually, with enough time, become the beginning of an actual apology. "What is he actually going to use it for? If it's not pharmaceutical research."

*Tell him,* Ye Chen said grimly. *He deserves to understand exactly what he almost handed over. Full access to shipping routes and customs contacts, in the hands of an organization like Nightshade, is not a business deal. It is infrastructure for moving anything they want across borders without inspection — drugs, weapons, people, or something considerably worse. Whatever Feng Lao truly intends for this city, Su Kang was about to hand him every door he'd need to move it through unnoticed.*

Chen Feng leaned forward, and when he spoke his voice had dropped into something quieter and far more dangerous than anything Su Kang had ever heard from him across three years of dinner-table humiliations.

"He's not buying pharmaceutical rights," Chen Feng said. "He's buying a smuggling network, and you were about to hand him the keys. We have until tomorrow night to figure out how to stop that meeting from happening — or how to walk into it ourselves, and make sure he leaves with nothing at all."