First-Class Lawyer

In the morning, Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan walked through the doors to Southern Cross Law Firm one after the other, where they bumped into Ms Fizz in front of the staircase. She was carrying two cardboard boxes that were stacked together higher than her head, swaying dangerously.

In sharp stilettos, she carefully stepped towards the staircase, when a hand suddenly reached out from beside her to take the boxes from her. 

Fizz’s load was suddenly lightened. Before even seeing who it was, she was instantly effusive in her praise, “Oh my god, finally someone has come to help me, thanks! You have such attractive hands, let me guess who it is…”

Though, right after the words were out of her mouth, she ended up hearing the person behind her whip his head away and sneeze.

“Gu? Ruan?” Ms Fizz looked over at the sound and saw both Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan standing behind her, each wearing a mask, whilst Yan Suizhi was currently in the midst of his second sneeze with his head turned away.

The esteemed Professor Yan, who had sworn how good his immune system was last night, got faceslapped the very moment he woke up today, showing obvious symptoms of a cold. Naturally, the cause was obvious. 

But Ms Fizz wore her surprise on her face, poking this sore spot. “How did you also end up catching a cold when you were all fine and dandy before?”

Yan Suizhi’s words sounded slightly nasally and lazy. “I don’t know, maybe it was because I got bitten when teasing a cat last night.”

Ms Fizz, “Seriously? You should hurry and go get inoculated, then.”

Lawyer Gu’s face was silently paralysed beside him.

Yan Suizhi glimpsed it from his peripheral vision and, restraining a smile, said to Fizz, “No, I’m kidding. I just caught a cold by accident.”

Instantaneously, the glacial chill of peppermint candy shot up to the head.

Unable to keep listening to this nonsense, Lawyer Gu raised the cardboard boxes in his arms, asking Fizz, “Whose are these? I’ll bring them upstairs for you.”

“Special express delivery for Dane that came in ten minutes ago,” Fizz said. “It’s probably case-related documents.” 

“Dane?” Yan Suizhi questioned.

As he hadn’t spent much time in the office building of Southcross Law Firm, there were several lawyers that he had only glimpsed in passing, thus was unable to match their names to their faces.

“The round-faced lawyer from the third office,” Fizz explained. “He’s Miss Freida’s teacher.”

Yan Suizhi nodded. “He isn’t often in office.” 

Now that Fizz mentioned it, Yan Suizhi recalled that Freida had occasionally complained that Teacher Dane was different from other mentoring lawyers.

Other lawyers would bring their interns along from time to time when they made court appearances or went on business trips. Especially in the later periods, interns were more or less at the standard where they could take on some tasks and could basically be brought along anyway. However, Dane seldom brought her out, and the tasks he assigned to her were only those that could be finished in the office.

While it hadn’t been long since the start of their internship, Yan Suizhi had already been on several business trips and had even independently tackled a case. While Luke and the others weren’t brought on long-distance business trips, they had minimally made a trip down to the nearby detention centre and courthouse. She was the only one who was stuck organising files until today, and only once made a trip to the courthouse to file an application for a missing document.

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“Which case?”

“Have you heard of the elderly bobblehead case?” Fizz said. “It’s the one that everyone was discussing two months ago. The focus on the case now has been temporarily eclipsed by the recent outbreak from those genetic modification surgeries, but it’s still a very high-profile case.”

Yan Suizhi wasn’t yet awake two months ago, and naturally didn’t know anything of the case. But from the way Fizz spoke of it, this case seemed to be very high-profile, it would be more odd for him not to have heard of it. So he didn’t ask, nodding at Fizz as if he did know. 

Fizz gestured at an office somewhere overhead. “Actually, they approached Hobbes to take on this case at first, but this chap was hesitant to take it on. Afterwards, when he passed the preliminary review and got onto the publicised list of First-Class Lawyer nominees, he was all the more reluctant. He went to the hospital this morning, saying that he was showing signs of an early infection, which was convenient for him to push away the case, whereupon it got handed over to Dane.”

“Hobbes was infected?” Gu Yan’s brows furrowed.

Fizz said, “Yeah, I just got a call from him this morning. He said that he had a bit of a rash but hadn’t confirmed the nature of it. While I’m not too fond of him, I still hope that his results turn out negative.”

They each had their own work to do, so the three of them didn’t stop to chat for long. 

Yan Suizhi and Gu Yan brought the boxes up for Fizz. However, before they could even plant their feet on the ground, a senior manager waved at Gu Yan from downstairs. “Gu? If I can trouble you to come over, there’s a document that requires all lawyers to sign, but I wasn’t able to get hold of you yesterday.”

Yan Suizhi brought the boxes into the third office.

As he expected, Lawyer Dane wasn’t in office, but out and about after having received a new case. His intern, Miss Freida, collected it on his behalf. But Luke’s presence in the office surprised him.

“My teacher’s hospitalised and advised me to follow Lawyer Dane these next few days,” Luke said with a pained expression. “When Lawyer Dane left the office this morning, he gave us a portion of the case file—” 

He pulled his hands apart. “It’s this—much! I’ve never come across such a thick stack of documents for a case file before. And frankly, I don’t really want to touch this case.”

Luke pulled a long face. He was about to complain more when he saw a lawyer walk out from the next office and could only awkwardly swallow his words. “Uh… talk to you later, I’ve got to get back to work.”

Yan Suizhi waved at him, then went out and glanced down the handrail, waiting for a while. He didn’t see Gu Yan come up, so he entered the office of his own accord.

He hung his coat and scarf on the rack and was just about to sit down when Gu Yan walked in. 

Generally speaking, Lawyer Gu had sharp observation skills, always able to notice details that others missed and was especially adept at seizing key points.

And so, right as Yan Suizhi was about to say something or other to him, he saw Gu Yan sweep a glance towards his office desk, and his movements abruptly halted.

Following his gaze, Yan Suizhi caught sight of that pot of evergreen bamboo.

Before Gu Yan left on a business trip, that pot of evergreen bamboo was still full of vitality, its branches tall and straight, the foliage of its narrow leaves fluffy and jade green. But now, no more than a day and night later, it was slumping miserably to one side, its branches bent over and drooping, unable to support the weight of its leaves. It looked just like it had encountered a poisonous hand and was on the brink of death. 

Gu Yan, “…”

Yan Suizhi, in his head, Crap.

He covered his mouth and coughed, scanned his own table, and conveniently grabbed a glass cup, intending to abscond from justice with the excuse of ‘going to the pantry’.

Gu Yan braced both hands on the office desk, taking a good look at the tragic state of the evergreen bamboo, which pricked his sight so much that he averted his gaze, his eyes flicking over. “There are many potted plants that have died at Southcross, but this is the first one that has died so quickly.” 

The subtext—you have a real talent.

Yan Suizhi stuck a hand into his pocket, his other hand holding the glass cup, striding calmly towards the door as if he didn’t hear a thing.

“…”

Just as he reached the door, a startled shriek suddenly came from outside. 

From its direction, the sound should have come from the third office. Yan Suizhi stopped playing innocent, exchanged a look with Gu Yan, and said, “I’m going to check it out.”

But Gu Yan circled the table without a word, catching up in large strides to tug Yan Suizhi’s wrist. He said in a low voice, “I’ll go.”

The one who shrieked was the intern Freida.

But she wasn’t the only one shocked. While Luke didn’t cry out, his face was as white as a sheet. 

On the office desk in front of them, the cardboard box that someone had sent to Lawyer Dane lay open. In it, long metal nails, razor blades, and a few sheets of blotting paper were faintly visible. Invectives were scrawled across the blotting paper, each word stacked onto the next in a messy jumble of text. Most significantly, the strokes of the paper had turned rust-coloured, like dried blood.

“Is this some kind of… threat?” Freida’s voice was tense. This was the young lady’s first time seeing something like this, and, without mental preparation, she looked like she was on the verge of tears.

“Not quite,” Yan Suizhi said.

Threats came with demands. These two boxes didn’t; they seemed only to carry the intent of intimidation and venting discontent. 

But this wasn’t the first time that others in the law firm had encountered something like this.

Fizz and the others quickly gathered, a knowing look splashed across their faces the moment they saw the contents of the boxes. By now, the senior managers were very proficient in handling such situations. They cracked a few jokes to get Freida and Luke to smile, then had someone take the boxes away.

Freida and Luke slowly regained their composure, finally realising that the cause was actually none other than the case that Dane took on.

“What kind of case is the elderly bobblehead?” Yan Suizhi inwardly mumbled, his interest piqued by this. 

He dropped his gaze and, in passing, ran a search on his smart device. Articles were forthcoming the moment the keywords were entered. Yan Suizhi picked the one right on top and skimmed through it, only then finding out what this case was about.

Two months ago, an elderly man had disappeared for no apparent reason from a residence on Redstone, and was found two days later in an underground warehouse with signs of abuse marring his entire body. Astonishingly, the scars all seemed to be self-inflicted. When he was found, dementia had impaired his mind, and he was crouching in an iron cage, wailing and shaking his head rhythmically.

This was the reason that it had gained such a moniker.

This case didn’t spark large public discourse in the beginning. After all, with the size of the alliance and its many stellar systems, countless incidents and information were being disseminated every day. It was easy for a case that happened in a corner of the alliance to sink like a stone in the sea. 

But soon, the police found that the victims were far more than this one elderly man. They had discovered a total of seven remote and abandoned warehouses across various planets, with nearly three hundred elderly people afflicted with the same symptoms.

The elderly were mostly able to identify the suspect, which was a good thing. It was just that… their mental conditions were unsound.

Even before court officially opened, there were ongoing disputes revolving around this case across the various regions of the interstellar alliance. The appearance of the three hundred elderly victims was truly upsetting. Further, with the repulsive attitude of the suspect, it was obvious in which direction the debate skewed. At the end of the day, large controversies always needed to find a target to focus on, and the brunt naturally fell upon the representative, his defence lawyer.

Yan Suizhi read a few articles, his expression calm. 

However, there was an article that brought up several old cases that had likewise sparked controversy at the end of it. His gaze lingered on this article for so long that, when Gu Yan followed his gaze and swept a glance towards the hologram which didn’t have any privacy settings on, he happened to catch sight of a familiar case name amidst those old cases.

That was a case Yan Suizhi fought before he had reached his thirties. Gu Yan couldn’t be more familiar with it, because he had once spent a long time writing an analysis on this case, ultimately discarding the entire report when he was done with it…

When he glanced upon this case, the two of them had already returned to Gu Yan’s office. The door automatically latched close, locking behind them. Gu Yan’s gaze jolted, shifting from the hologram to Yan Suizhi’s face. From his angle, he could only see Yan Suizhi’s lowered lashes, but was unable to tell what emotions were written in the other’s eyes.

In the light of the hologram, Yan Suizhi’s expression appeared a little chilly. He seemed to be distracted. But Gu Yan couldn’t discern his thoughts or emotions from chancing upon an old case, one which had tarnished his name whilst being his claim to fame. 

After a moment, Gu Yan saw his eyelashes quiver.

Yan Suizhi suddenly raised his gaze from the hologram and smiled when he locked eyes with Gu Yan. “What are you peeking at my screen for?”

He was a master at playing deaf when drowning another’s potted plant to death, yet stuck unwarranted labels onto others like it was perfectly justified.

“…” Lawyer Gu’s lips twitched, but he didn’t respond. 

The corners of Yan Suizhi’s lips rose. He lowered his head again to glance through the article, then swiped the screen away and asked Gu Yan out of the blue, “I suddenly recalled this—you seem to have said that, at one point, you believed your ideologies clashed with mine?”