The Hammer Falls at Midnight
At the jade auction hall, Lin Jue is publicly sidelined by his own family and forced to watch Lin Weihao and Madam Tang stage his expulsion as if it were routine housekeeping. Instead of reacting, Jue quietly reads the room, recognizes the family’s thin liquidity cover, and is moved into a private suite where the formal exit papers are waiting. There, he spots a buried clause and a doctored audit trail inside the expulsion stack, revealing that the family’s legal attack is being used to conceal a capital shortfall. As the emergency vote closes and the gavel falls, Jue answers the forced-signature trap by sliding a sealed envelope to Madam Tang, signaling that he is not as cornered as they believe.