Yan City is presented as more than a destination on the map. It is a contested threshold where Lu Xun’s attempt to recover Su Xiangwan, Lin Yanche’s rivalry with Su Qingrou and Jin Zhengnan, and Chu Fei’s expanding power converge. Its importance lies in the way distance changes the balance of control: people who appear reachable in Cloud City become difficult to retrieve, while the city’s territory, loyalties, and hidden bases turn intimate conflict into an organized struggle.

A Territory of Separation and Pursuit

Yan City first functions as a place beyond Lu Xun’s immediate reach. After learning where Su Xiangwan is, Lu Xun intends to capture her and bring her back, but discovers that Su Qingrou is not in Cloud City either and that the two women have gone to Yan City together. The revelation transforms a personal search into a cross-city operation. Lin Yanche identifies Yan City as Jin Zhengnan’s territory and assumes that its protection will give them confidence, while Lu Xun treats the same fact as a challenge requiring direct intervention.

The city therefore gains its narrative force through separation. It is far enough away to interrupt established patterns of surveillance and authority, yet close enough to remain tied to the existing network of family, friendship, medical dependency, and romantic rivalry. The journey to Yan City is not voluntary travel in the ordinary sense. It is a pursuit driven by uncertainty, with Su Xiangwan’s location functioning as the immediate objective and the competing claims over Su Qingrou and Jin Zhengnan supplying the deeper stakes.

Arrival and the Airport Confrontation

Lu Xun and Lin Yanche fly directly to Yan City at night. Their arrival is met immediately by Chu Fei’s men at the airport, who appear to have calculated the time of their landing. The welcome is consequently an ambush-like display of advance knowledge rather than hospitality. Lu Xun has brought many people with him and does not initially fear that his safety will be threatened, but the appearance of Chu Fei’s forces confirms that the opposing side has prepared for their arrival.

This airport encounter changes the city from a refuge into a monitored battlefield. The men waiting there reveal that movement into Yan City can be observed and answered before the newcomers have established themselves. The protagonists’ confidence is also corrected: they have underestimated their opponent. The airport becomes the first visible line between competing networks, showing that Yan City is governed in practice by information, preparation, and access to organized manpower as much as by formal geography.

Chu Fei’s Concealed Base

Chu Fei operates from a house converted out of an old abandoned factory. From the outside, the building appears dilapidated, hidden, and unremarkable; inside, it is described as an entirely different world. The contrast identifies the site as one of Chu Fei’s likely bases of operation in Yan City and gives the city a second spatial identity: beneath its ordinary surface lies an infrastructure of concealed power.

The abandoned factory is especially significant because its previous industrial function has been replaced by covert organization. Its worn exterior helps it evade attention, while its transformed interior supports Chu Fei’s men and his control over the surrounding conflict. Yan City is thus not merely a setting through which characters pass. It is a produced strategic space, divided between visible public routes such as the airport and concealed interiors where authority is concentrated and outsiders can be watched.

Alliances, Stakes, and Returning Conflict

Yan City gathers several relationships that elsewhere remain more dispersed. Lu Xun travels there with Lin Yanche, despite their hostility and the damage that separates their personal interests, because the immediate threat posed by Chu Fei makes cooperation necessary. Chu Fei’s forces, meanwhile, use the city as a base from which to control access and exert pressure. Jin Zhengnan’s local position gives the city an additional protective dimension, especially when Lin Yanche threatens Su Qingrou through Jin Zhengnan’s hospitalization if she leaves the manor.

The city is also connected to the commercial and emotional bargaining that surrounds Su Xiangwan. Lu Xun’s negotiation with Lin Yanche links an East District land deal to the demand that Lin Yanche stop interfering in his affairs with Su Xiangwan. That bargain shows how the conflicts associated with Yan City are never purely military. Land, medical vulnerability, romantic possession, and family alliances circulate through the same network. A place identified as another man’s territory can therefore become the scene where Lu Xun attempts to reclaim authority by combining personal force with economic leverage.

The City’s Aftermath and Narrative Significance

When Su Xiangwan later sees a black truck arrive at the villa, Chu Fei and Lu Xun step out together, followed by Lin Yanche. The arrival brings the distant Yan City conflict back into the domestic space. Lin Yanche is no longer encountered as an abstract rival or a voice transmitted through threats and negotiations; he appears visibly unshaven, unkempt, and extremely thin. Yan City has consequently produced a changed human figure as well as a changed political situation, making the cost of the confrontation legible on the body.

Su Xiangwan’s reaction suggests that the city’s consequences cannot be contained within its own borders. What happens there returns with the travelers, reshaping the emotional atmosphere of the villa and forcing hidden damage into view. Yan City’s narrative role is therefore that of a pressure chamber. It separates characters from their familiar protections, exposes the reach of Chu Fei’s organization, intensifies the alliance between Lu Xun and Lin Yanche, and converts private obsession into a struggle over territory, movement, and survival. Its concealed factory, watched airport, and returning convoy form a spatial pattern in which every apparent passage is also an assertion of power.