"Everything," Guiying said. "But if you are asking specifically, it is the legal framework you built around pheromone harassment in the workplace. Most activists approach it from an emotional angle. You approached it as a structural problem with a structural solution. You did not ask anyone to feel differently. You gave them no choice but to act differently."

Bai Feng looked at him.

"Most people at these events know the foundation’s name," he said. "They do not know the work."

"I have followed your cases since I was seventeen," Guiying said. "The Omega Employment Protection Act alone changed the material conditions of more lives than most people realize. People talk about it as a policy. You built it case by case over six years."

The group had shifted almost imperceptibly, the way groups shifted when a conversation became more interesting than expected.

Bai Feng was quiet for a moment, studying him with those sharp, assessing eyes.

"You are not what I expected," he said.

"I hear that sometimes," Guiying said pleasantly.

One of the Omegas in the group, the young woman in the green dress, leaned forward slightly. "If you are a lover of art, what is your favorite piece? I am always curious what people who study beauty are actually drawn to."

Guiying turned to look at her.

He thought about it for a moment, turning the champagne glass once in his hand.

"Xu Beihong’s Foolish Old Man Removes the Mountains," he said. "I have known it since I was a child. I did not understand it then, not really. I thought it was simply a story about stubbornness."

He paused.

"But the longer I studied it, the more I understood that it was not about stubbornness at all. It was about the refusal to accept that the obstacle is permanent. The old man in the story is mocked. He is told he is foolish, that the mountains cannot be moved, that he is wasting what little time he has left." He looked at her steadily. "And he says, " I will not finish this work. But my children will. And their children after them. The mountain does not need to move in my lifetime. It only needs to move."

The group had gone quiet.

"What strikes me every time I return to it," Guiying continued, "is not perseverance. It is the clarity. The old man does not delude himself about the size of the obstacle. He sees it completely, exactly as it is, immovable and enormous, and he picks up his shovel anyway. Not because he believes he will win. Because he has decided that the alternative, which is to stop, is worse than any amount of failure."

He stopped.

The group was still quiet.

The young woman in the green dress exhaled slowly.

"I thought," she said, with great honesty, "that you were going to say something about the brushwork."

Several people laughed, including Guiying.

Bai Feng was looking at him with the particular expression of someone who had just reassessed something they thought they had already assessed correctly.

"How long have you been studying it?" he asked.

"Most of my life," Guiying said. Which was true, in every sense of the word.

Bai Feng was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and produced his phone.

"I want to be friends," he said simply. "WeChat."

Guiying reached into his bag for his own phone, opened the alias account he had set up for Tang XiaoYu, and held it up for the scan.

Bai Feng scanned it. He looked at the username. Then at Guiying, with a small, knowing expression that suggested he had noticed it was a separate account and had chosen not to comment on it.

Guiying met his gaze evenly.

The green dress Omega stepped forward immediately after. "I want it too. I am Shen Mingzhu by the way, I work in publishing." She scanned the code before Guiying had fully agreed.

The Omega beside her followed. "Lin Rouyi. I am a doctor." Another scan.

Then the third. "Cao Jingwen. I run a nonprofit in the education sector." Scan.

Guiying stood in the middle of it with the composed expression of someone managing a situation that had moved faster than expected and found it more pleasant than most situations that moved fast.

"We thought," Shen Mingzhu said, looking at him with frank appreciation, "that you were just another pretty face that Liu Liuxian had brought along for decoration." 𝚏𝕣𝕖𝚎𝚠𝚎𝚋𝚗𝐨𝐯𝕖𝕝.𝕔𝐨𝕞

"Mingzhu," Lin Rouyi said.

"What? It is a compliment. He is very pretty and he is clearly not a decoration." She looked at Guiying. "How do you know Xu Beihong?"

"I had a lot of time alone as a child," Guiying said. "Books were easier company than people."

Shen Mingzhu looked at him for a moment with the particular expression of someone who had heard something that resonated somewhere specific.

"I like you," she said decisively. "You are staying in this circle for the rest of the evening."

Bai Feng smiled, quiet and genuine, watching all of this unfold with the easy patience of a man who was rarely surprised and had just been surprised pleasantly.

"I second that," he said.

The evening continued to unfold pleasantly enough that Guiying found himself genuinely enjoying it, which was not something he had anticipated when he put on the Louboutins.

Shen Mingzhu was loud and funny and entirely without pretense. Lin Rouyi was quiet, precise and occasionally devastating. Cao Jingwen had strong opinions about everything and stated all of them with complete conviction.

Bai Feng moved between conversations with the easy authority of a host who was also genuinely interested in everyone he spoke to.

Guiying held his own.

More than held his own, if the way the conversation kept gravitating back toward him was any indication.

At some point Liuxian appeared at his shoulder, exchanged brief greetings with Bai Feng and the others with the composed courtesy of a man who had attended enough of these events to know exactly how long to stay in a conversation before it became an obligation, and placed a hand briefly at the small of Guiying’s back.