The repercussion of Lu Boyan's excursion to City Z was the mountainous pile of work that had accumulated over the few days he had been gone.

Making full use of the time when Su Jianan was in the bath, Lu Boyan booted up his laptop and got to work. His slender and bony fingers flew across the keyboard as he typed and his eyes moved efficiently as he read the complicated graphs and words on the screen.

Such efficiency was by no means innate; it had been trained and ...