The name Hou Mingzhi had been sitting in the back of my mind since Cen Bosheng's proceedings began. He was the missing piece — not absent from the picture, but present in it in a way I had not yet been able to fully locate. He moved in the same circles as Cen Bosheng and the southern consortium, but he did not appear in any of the documentation we had gathered. He was always one remove away.
That kind of careful distance was not accidental.
I had spent the first weeks of winter gathering information about him through Shen Bao's network and through contacts inherited from the household's older correspondence archives, and what I had gathered was partial but suggestive. He had business interests in four southern provinces. He had no official title, no ministry affiliation, no registered guild membership. He existed in the documentation as a private citizen with substantial wealth and no obvious source for it.
