In a private suite high above Beijing's night traffic, the visiting executive Xin Ke-Baoluo lifted his glass and told the three regional chiefs what they already felt in their bones, that Audi could bully the B and C segments all it wanted, but the actual battlefield of luxury was still the D-class, where comfort, quiet, and the way a car pampered its owner decided everything.
They mulled it over and nodded. Sales of their midrange models had sagged under Audi's sudden glow, but their flagships had held steady. One of them frowned and said it out loud anyway. "What is that worth if Audi is about to unveil the A8?"
"So what if they unveil it?" Xin Ke-Baoluo stood, topped off everyone's wine, and spoke with the ease of someone whose entire career was made of product cycles and press stages. "A real luxury car is not a leader's chauffeured badge. It is ride quality, seat design, cabin serenity, materials you want to touch, the feeling that the car is thinking of you before you think for yourself. We have refined that for decades. Why should we be afraid of a new badge getting noisy for a year?"
He smiled as if sharing a trick. "I did not fly to China empty-handed. I brought our top limousine." His eyes slid to the other two. "And I doubt we are alone. You should be ready with your own D-class refreshes, perhaps something even higher."
The Mercedes-Benz China chief gave a rueful grin. "Yes. Our new S-Class program is through its redesign gate, and the halo model has a fresh design language end to end."
The BMW China chief shrugged as if to say there was never any doubt. "Same with us. The 7 Series is done, and the top trim has been re-skinned inside and out." He even raised a toast to an unlikely muse. "We should thank Heifeng for pushing headlight design. Our teams started treating light signatures as jewelry. It lifted the whole exterior."
They were not wrong. If Audi had not crashed into the market with crisp daytime running lights and bold DRLs, few designers in this timeline would have rallied around headlight identity so quickly. Now wave after wave of concept sketches had come back with new lamp graphics and slimmer lenses. Shells were changed. Grilles were tweaked. Flagships reborn. The three companies were already migrating the look downstream so their volume cars would feel fresher on first glance, because they had finally admitted what customers confess in showrooms all the time: people buy with their eyes first.
Glasses clinked. "Audi can be king of value in the midrange," Xin Ke-Baoluo said, savoring the line, "but in the high end, we are the ones who write the rules." He had done his homework. "I hear their conference is imminent. Likely the A8. Good. Then, a few days later, we hold a joint launch. We park our new flagships side by side, let journalists bathe in leather and quiet, and remind the world how luxury actually feels."
The plan triggered a vague déjà vu, a sense that they were stealing a page from someone else's playbook, but no one chased the thought. The Mercedes chief slapped the table, energized. "Fine. We release together. With our combined weight, their A8 will look like a class clown." The others grinned. In their minds, decades of D-segment craft beat any first-time wunderkind. If it came to a siege, they would be the walls Audi could not scale.
While the brands plotted upstairs, Heifeng stepped out of Paradise on Earth, the club whose gold-leaf name every Beijinger knew, even if they claimed they did not. The neighborhood was basically suburban, quiet at this hour. He had arrived earlier in Li Li's car, and she was in no state to drive now. He opened his ride-hailing app, thumb hesitating over the pickup pin, when the night ripped open with a hard throttle crack and a chain of exhaust pops.
It takes only one syllable of sound to separate a sports car from a tuner. This was the second kind, all bark and bright kits, and the note prickled the back of his neck with recognition. A car surged into view, wearing an aggressive body kit over a shape he knew as intimately as a signature. The lines were cute but coiled, a compact coupe that looked friendly from a distance and hungry when it drew near. Audi TT.
Even with the aero pieces and lowered stance, he could tell it was one of his, one of theirs. The red TT blasted past, and in the blur of glass, he caught a profile, short hair, a woman's cheekbone, the half-second of someone glancing at him and then away.
Then came the pack, a tail of sports cars and garage projects howling after the leader, rich kids chasing midnight bravado through the outer ring roads. Heifeng exhaled, half amused, half annoyed. "Go to sleep," he muttered. "You wake a city for this?"
He tapped the screen again. The tires sang. Brakes bit. The red TT swung in and stopped right in front of him, perfectly straight. The window slid down. A short-haired girl leaned over, eyes flicking from his face to the doorway behind him, then back again. "You are Lu Haifeng, right?"
He did not blink, but inside he winced. Of all places to get recognized. "You must have me mixed up," he said, masking his voice with polite bafflement. "My name is Wu Jing."
She stared, then laughed, delighted at the shamelessness. "It is really you, President Lu." Her smile had the mischief of someone who enjoyed being right. "What, embarrassed to be seen at Paradise on Earth?"
Heifeng kept his expression bland and patient, the way you keep stone over water. He knew her face from somewhere structured and fluorescent. Ministry corridors. Technical inspection teams. On his last audit walk-through, Wang Cheng had trailed a short-haired engineer who asked sharp questions and took cleaner notes than anyone else at the table. That was her. The name refused to surface, and now was hardly the moment to rummage for it.
She made it easier by refusing to pretend. "Men come here for the same reason," she said, lips quirking. "No point pretending otherwise."
He coughed into a fist, more to buy a heartbeat than to hide anything. "Truly, you have the wrong person. Wu Jing. See?" He motioned as if about to step away, to let her race with the pack and let the club's firelight swallow his silhouette.
"Hold on." Her tone was amused rather than sharp, but the engine behind it idled like a loaded spring. She looked him up and down with open curiosity, as if she were adding this sighting to the file in her head. The TT's tach shivered; the cars behind were growing restless, two of them blipping throttles to stay warm. The night smelled faintly of unburned fuel.
Heifeng recognized the fork in the road. Run, and she might chase, or worse, talk. Stay, and this turned into a conversation he did not want to have on a sidewalk lit by a club's neon. He shifted his weight, phone still in his hand, smile gentle and unwilling to stick. Somewhere above them in that hotel-club tower, men with crisp cuffs were plotting a show of force against the A8. Down here, next to a red coupe that wore his company's grin, a different kind of game was starting, one that could not be solved with a conference stage or a spec sheet.
He settled on small talk that did not concede anything. "Nice car," he said. "Drive safe. The city does not need a wake-up call at midnight."
"Spoken like a responsible executive," she said, and the way she said "executive" made it clear she had no intention of letting him slip away so easily.
He took one step back, then another. "Good night," he said, and the club's doorman, who pretended to see nothing, glanced at the TT's wheels and pretended to approve. The pack behind revved in impatience. The streetlight ticked from green to yellow and back again.
"President Lu," the short-haired engineer said, half-teasing, half-warning, "I will see you around."
Heifeng pocketed his phone, squared his shoulders, and walked into the night as if it were a corridor he had designed himself. The TT idled a beat longer, then flicked its indicator and shot off to catch the others, taillights skimming over the quiet road like a brushstroke of red.