Double evil in the business district

Chapter 430 Xiao Yue Breaks the Situation: Initial Investigation of the Financial Crisis

The neon lights outside the glass curtain wall turned into hazy spots in the rain. Xiao Yue placed his palm on the cold financial report, and the sharp edge of the A4 paper scratched his fingertips, leaving a white mark.

The hem of the dress, which had been adorned with champagne droplets three hours earlier, was now sweeping across the dusty tiles of the finance department.

"The reserve fund expenditure increased by 300% month-on-month in the fourth quarter of 2023?" She pushed the report in front of Ma Dechang, and her crystal nails made crisp sounds on the abnormal data column.

The hum of the printer spooling paper suddenly stopped, and all twenty-seven swivel chairs in the office stopped turning at the same time.

Ma Dechang slowly twirled his wedding ring, his gold-plated cufflinks gleaming coldly under the overhead light. "Miss Xiao, you're so diligent to come check the accounts right after the celebration party." He deliberately pronounced the words "Miss Xiao" lightly and giddily, as if weighing a rather unpresentable title on his tongue.

Xiao Yue felt the thin layer of sweat on the back of his neck evaporating.

She thought of the canceled contract she'd found in the archives three days earlier. The amounts, altered in pencil and then erased, revealed shallow marks like snake skin in the bright light. "I want the original voucher." She took a half step forward and smelled the agarwood scent mixed with the other person's cologne, like a warning of decay.

Suddenly, there were shuffling footsteps in the corridor.

Liu Yun, holding the coffee cup, staggered at the door, and the mug lid rolled to Xiao Yue's feet with a "clang".

The cashier, who always tucked his hair behind his ears, was now staring at the toes of his worn-out shoes, as if a poisonous mushroom had suddenly grown there.

"The raw data is being sorted." Ma Dechang suddenly raised his voice, making the filing cabinet glass buzz.

The shadow of the money tree behind him cut diagonally across the back of Xiao Yue's hand, like a fresh scar.

As dusk began to gnaw at the window frames, Xiao Yue felt for the spare key in the fire escape.

Auditor Huang blinked five times quickly behind his glasses. This was the secret signal they agreed upon during lunch break.

In the third compartment of the iron cabinet in the archive room, inside a brown paper bag labeled "2019 Team Building Photos," lay a bank statement still warm from the printer.

"Has Manager Ma seen this?" Xiao Yue slapped the document on the conference table when she heard a gasp from somewhere.

The numbers with wet ink showed a strange blue light under the projector. The disappeared decoration payment in 2019 was now lying quietly in an offshore account.

Ma Dechang's Adam's apple rolled up and down twice, and he suddenly reached out to grab the receipt.

Xiao Yue took a half step ahead and pressed the paper against his chest. His back hit the whiteboard stand, and the markers rolled to the ground with a crackling sound.

She smelled the lingering scent of celebratory champagne in her hair, fermenting into a sour aroma from the air-conditioning vents.

"Ms. Xiao is quite resourceful." Ma Dechang sneered, turning around and causing the gust of wind to blow the calendar off the corner of the table.

The pages flipped back to three months ago, and the date of the shareholders' meeting circled in red was now oozing with an ominous scarlet.

The sudden rain outside the window had just stopped, and the neon signs cast distorted reflections in the puddles.

Xiao Yue rubbed the back of his stiff neck and turned around. He vaguely saw a shadow swaying at the corner of the corridor - like the hem of a suit blown by the wind, or like someone hastily looking away.

She took out her vibrating phone and saw 18:07 on the lock screen. There were still twenty-three minutes until Shen Ting said "I'll pick you up in half an hour."

Outside the glass curtain wall, the last ray of sunset is slowly falling along the steel jungle.

Xiao Yue tucked her hair behind her ears and suddenly found a trace of ink embedded in the cracks of her nails, like a curled-up black centipede.

She rubbed it hard, but the centipede burrowed into her flesh, snaking itself into an unsolvable knot between her fingerprints.

(End) As dusk cast its last touch of rose gold on the tempered glass, the blinds of the Finance Department suddenly trembled.

Xiao Yue was leaning over the conference table checking his bank statements when he suddenly felt a warm sandalwood scent on the back of his neck.

The hem of Shen Ting's silver-gray suit brushed against her bare arm, cutting a warm gap in the air-conditioning.

"Auditor Huang said you were looking at vouchers from three years ago?" He took the red annotation pen from Xiao Yue's fingers and tapped the pen cap lightly on her earlobe.

A neon sign lit up outside the glass curtain wall, making the obsidian on his tie clip flicker, like some kind of silent promise.

Xiao Yue was about to speak when her eyes were suddenly pierced by the platinum cufflinks on Shen Ting's cuffs, forcing her to squint. Unlike the pair of gold-plated cufflinks that Ma Dechang wore in the afternoon, this geometrically cut piece of metal was coldly reflecting the blue light of the computer screen.

She remembered that three hours ago when Ma Dechang said "Miss Xiao has good tricks", the frequency of his Adam's apple rolling was strangely similar to the buzzing sound of the air-conditioning vent at this moment.

"Be careful with the tea." Shen Ting suddenly stretched out his hand to block the coffee cup that Liu Yun almost knocked over.

The new cashier bowed hurriedly, his hair brushing across Xiao Yue's open account book, leaving a few dark brown spots on the 2019 decoration fee figures.

Xiao Yue stared at the gradually spreading coffee stain, and suddenly discovered that there seemed to be another layer of digital outline hidden under the soaked ink.

As soon as Shen Ting's footsteps disappeared in the elevator, Xiao Yue immediately grabbed the ultraviolet light pen.

As the blue beam swept across the account book, the areas covered with coffee stains showed traces of pencil revisions - exactly the same as those on the canceled contracts in the archives.

She felt her temples throbbing, and out of the corner of her eye she saw Liu Yun hiding behind a filing cabinet, frantically wiping the label on the side of an account book with an eraser.

At one o'clock in the morning, the Finance Department seemed to have been muted.

Xiao Yue spread out the thirty-seven vouchers in a fan shape and suddenly discovered that there were tiny burrs on the edges of each binding hole.

These financial files, which should have been straight, seemed to have been disassembled and assembled repeatedly.

She grabbed a magnifying glass and took a closer look, and found a piece of paper the size of half a grain of rice in the groove of a binding clip - it was cyan toner from a color printer.

"Teacher Huang, please help me check the system log." As she spoke into the phone, her fingertips unconsciously stroked the pen left by Shen Ting.

The residual warmth on the metal pen reminded her of the hug two hours ago. The man's thumb, covered with calluses, had briefly rested on the back of her neck, like some kind of encrypted Morse code.

The printer suddenly makes a sharp sound of paper jam.

Auditor Huang came trotting over, his glasses pushed up, holding half a sheet of A4 paper he had just rescued from the shredder: "They have modified the depreciation period." On the jagged piece of paper, the service life of a certain equipment in the fixed assets list was hastily changed from "10 years" to "5 years", and the amount corresponding to the depreciation rate suddenly doubled.

Xiao Yue's fingers trembled slightly as he grabbed the calculator.

When she entered the correct parameters into the reconstructed spreadsheet, the red loss numbers on the screen suddenly began to shrink, like ice crystals melted by the sun.

Auditor Huang suddenly patted her shoulder heavily, and the constantly jumping green numbers were reflected on his age-marked lenses.

"careful!"

The moment the glass door was knocked open, Xiao Yue instinctively protected his laptop.

Accountant Chen's figure holding the file box was distorted into a strange silhouette under the emergency light, and half of the torn transfer voucher leaked out from the gap between the cardboard boxes.

As she rushed over, her high heels got stuck in the seam of the carpet, and she fell on the lid of the box, her cheek rubbing against the cold shredder feed port.

"Miss Xiao, you're meddling too much." Accountant Chen suddenly grinned, his cigarette-stained teeth glistening like moss under the green light of the emergency exit.

His left hand was still clutching a crumpled bank statement, but his right hand quietly reached for the shredder's power button.

Xiao Yue saw a strange ring on his little finger - the ring face was a rusty gear with dark red star-shaped dots on the edge.

As the shredder made its dying hum, Xiao Yue dug her nails deep into Accountant Chen's wrist.

The torn scraps of paper fell on their overlapping shadows like the first snow in winter.

She suddenly saw the logo printed on the scraps of paper - it was not the paulownia leaf logo of the Xiao Group, but a familiar hexagram totem.

She had just seen this pattern this morning, on the cover page of the merger and acquisition plan handed to her by Shen Ting, with a matte gold glow.