“Right here, Director Dong!” Zhang Fang appeared from some corner of the room. “I’m here, Director Dong!”

Zhang Fang had always had a certain scrappy, twitchy energy about him, and standing next to Dong Siyang only made him look even more scrawny.

The most physically imposing person Zhu Yun had known before this was Fu Yizhuo — but he would have to step aside now.

Director Dong wasn’t particularly tall, but he was massive. His entire body looked carved from stone, all raw, dense muscle. The bulk of it was packed beneath his suit jacket, each ridge and curve straining against the fabric without a single wrinkle to spare.

Dong Siyang’s kind of build was nothing like Fu Yizhuo’s.

Fu Yizhuo had a hard physique, but a gentler manner — and the refinement showed. Dong Siyang was hard in every sense, both in body and in bearing. There was something sinister and calculating in his face, most pronounced when he smiled. A prominent scar ran through his left eyebrow, cutting cleanly through the outer end and trailing down into his eyelid, making the whole face look all the more menacing.

Whatever he was wearing, this man did not look like someone who played by the rules.

Ah — wait.

Zhu Yun suddenly recalled something she had overheard Zhang Fang and Zhao Teng saying. Dong Siyang had, in fact, done time in prison.

What was the charge?

While Zhu Yun’s mind wandered off in various directions, the light in front of her dimmed. She looked up to find Dong Siyang’s imposing frame looming over her.

Dong Siyang fixed her with a sharp, probing stare.

“You’re new?”

Zhang Fang jumped in to introduce her: “Yes, yes, new employee — overseas background, solid work ethic.” He enthusiastically launched into a summary of Zhu Yun’s resume, but Dong Siyang glanced at him. “Did I ask you?”

Zhang Fang shut up.

Zhu Yun rose from her seat to greet him.

“Hello, Director Dong.”

Dong Siyang gave her a once-over and muttered under his breath: “Why’d they go and hire a woman…”

Zhu Yun hadn’t caught it clearly. “Pardon?”

Dong Siyang shook his head with a frown and continued on. He stopped again when he reached Li Xun’s desk. Zhang Fang whispered: “This one’s called Li Xun, also a new employee.”

Li Xun was reading.

The book was one Zhu Yun had brought in that morning. She had hauled in a stack of books and reference materials, most of them practical in nature — and yet Li Xun had singled out the one purely theoretical text in the pile. The book had been written by the developers of Unity and laid out, from first principles, the entire design philosophy behind the game engine.

He had started reading it first thing in the morning, and by noon had gotten through roughly one-sixth of it. For the Li Xun Zhu Yun remembered, that was an unusually slow pace.

But one thing hadn’t changed: when he was reading, his focus was absolute. An earthquake wouldn’t have roused him.

So naturally he hadn’t noticed Dong Siyang and Zhang Fang approaching.

Zhang Fang gave a light cough. Li Xun still didn’t stir. He sat with his cheek resting on one hand, expression dark, seemingly absorbed in thought.

Then the book was snatched out of his hand.

Li Xun’s expression grew darker… Dong Siyang flipped through the English-language original edition, then looked at Li Xun. “You can actually read this?”

Li Xun said slowly: “More or less.”

Dong Siyang tossed the book back at him and returned to his own desk. The desk was a disaster area. He shoved a stretch of it clear with one sweep of his arm, loosened his collar, and rapped on the surface.

“Hey!” Zhang Fang caught on immediately, hunched slightly, and began delivering his report.

Zhu Yun set down her work and listened discreetly as Zhang Fang gave his briefing. He brought out a laptop and walked Dong Siyang through the game, spending roughly half an hour on the presentation.

Around the ten-minute mark, Zhu Yun finally understood exactly where the problem with this company lay —

This Director Dong was a complete and utter outsider when it came to the industry.

Zhang Fang talked at length, throwing around a dizzying array of technical jargon, roughly seventy percent of which was used incorrectly, with the remaining thirty percent being pure filler. He demonstrated Unrivalled Warlords by showing Dong Siyang only a single character — Lü Bu — and spoke about it in such glowing terms that he seemed physically incapable of stopping. If Zhu Yun hadn’t already taken a thorough look at the game herself, she might have taken Zhang Fang’s presentation at face value and assumed it was some kind of masterpiece.

Zhu Yun glanced back at Zhao Teng and Guo Shijie. Guo Shijie sat rigidly in his corner, head bent over his work. Zhao Teng, for once, wasn’t playing games — he was watching Zhang Fang and Dong Siyang with the expression of someone enjoying a performance. He sensed someone looking at him, turned, and met Zhu Yun’s eyes. He gave her a lazy, sly smile that said you know and I know, then looked back down and tapped idly at his keyboard.

A private message popped up from Zhao Teng on the company chat. Zhu Yun opened it:

“Does this remind you of a tyrant and his court eunuch?”

“……”

Zhu Yun looked over at Li Xun. He was making notes in the margins of his book with a pencil, as though none of what was happening around him had anything to do with him whatsoever.

Dong Siyang gripped a pen that had long since run dry. His fingers were thick — the pen looked like a toy in his hand. He stared at Zhang Fang with cold, flat eyes.

“So what you’re telling me is that in all the time I’ve been away, of the two projects we have on the table, one has gone exactly nowhere, and the other hasn’t even lifted a foot.”

Dong Siyang might not have understood the technical jargon, but he hadn’t been thrown off by it either.

Zhu Yun could see Zhang Fang’s shoulders beginning to curl inward.

Dong Siyang slammed the pen down hard on the desk.

“Everyone — meeting!”

All five employees were called in, including Zhu Yun and Li Xun. This time they didn’t go to the small back room. The five of them lined up in a row and waited to be addressed by their superior. By some unspoken agreement, they arranged themselves in order of height. Zhu Yun, in her ten-centimetre heels, ended up slightly taller than the other three male employees and stood next to Li Xun.

Dong Siyang stood before them, one hand on his hip, the other pointing in their direction.

“It’s just these two paltry little games, and you’ve been dragging them out for months! How many people have I put on this? How much funding have I given you? And what do I get in return — nothing fit to show anyone! Tell me, do you all deserve to be fired?”

Dong Siyang moved to stand in front of Guo Shijie and pointed directly at him:

“Useless!”

Guo Shijie trembled from head to toe.

He moved on to Zhao Teng:

“Incompetent!”

Zhao Teng bowed his head and played dead.

When he reached Zhang Fang, Dong Siyang dispensed with words altogether. He grabbed Zhang Fang by the chin and hoisted him up a good five centimetres.

“Director Dong — Director Dong, I was wrong!” Zhang Fang rose onto his toes, pleading desperately. “I really was wrong, please, Director Dong, let me go!”

As Zhang Fang’s face turned an increasingly deeper shade of red, Zhu Yun began to debate with herself whether she ought to step in. Then she recalled how Zhang Fang had behaved at the interview, how he’d spent the past two days at work, and the performance he’d just put on to try to pull the wool over Dong Siyang’s eyes.

On second thought — let him get choked.

But Dong Siyang released him in the end. Zhu Yun snuck a look and noticed that only Zhang Fang’s chin had gone red where it had been gripped — not a mark on his neck. Dong Siyang had only been squeezing the bone. Just the bone.

“Tell me,” Dong Siyang said, stepping back to where he’d stood at the start of the meeting. “Are these two games actually fun?”

No one answered.

Finally, Zhang Fang mumbled something and broke the silence.

“I think they’re still kind of—” He started to answer, but one look at Dong Siyang’s expression and he immediately reversed course. “I think they’re not very fun…”

Dong Siyang erupted: “You don’t even find it fun yourself, and you think anyone else is going to play it?!”

Zhang Fang flinched.

Dong Siyang pointed at him. “When you were pitching the project, you could have made a rock sound like a work of art. Now look — you’re only halfway done and this thing is already unwatchable. What happened?!”

“The execution was too weak.”

The voice that cut in drew every eye in the room.

Five men stared at one woman as Zhu Yun spoke her piece steadily to the end.

“Both games had sound enough starting concepts, but the execution phase went badly wrong — delayed again and again.”

Silence fell.

Dong Siyang leaned back against his desk, reached into his jacket, and produced a cigarette. He lit it, then said to Zhang Fang: “I’ve said it before — don’t hire women for this company.”

Zhu Yun: “?”

Dong Siyang: “Business is a battlefield! What we’re holding right now is a war council! What general ever won a campaign with a woman sitting in his command tent?”

Zhu Yun: “……”

“Yes, yes,” Zhang Fang said, face grave. “That was an oversight on my part.”

Dong Siyang continued: “On top of that, you went ahead and brought in competition for yourself — one that does nothing but talk.”

Zhu Yun was left momentarily speechless by those few words. Before she had a chance to respond, Dong Siyang took a long drag and addressed everyone: “I know exactly what you lot are capable of. I don’t need any of you to come to me with proposals or presentations. All I need is for someone to step up and tell me — ‘This project? I can do it right on my own.'”

He pointed his cigarette at them.

“Is there anyone like that? Just tell me — is there anyone like that or not?!”

Not a sound.

Dong Siyang ground the cigarette out on the floor and spun around to rummage through his desk drawer.

“Where’s my knife?”

Everyone: “……”

While the others stood there in varying degrees of dread, Li Xun turned and walked back toward his desk.

Dong Siyang seemed to have eyes in the back of his head. He looked up instantly and called out to stop him.

“Stand still! Who told you to move? Did I say this meeting was over?”

Li Xun turned around and said, mildly: “Can this meeting actually produce any outcome?”

Dong Siyang paused. His eyes went cold.

Zhu Yun didn’t know what Dong Siyang’s background was, but she could tell that when he turned dark, it was a different kind of frightening. It wasn’t the ordinary intimidation of a superior over a subordinate — there was something else in it, something that went deeper.

Everyone around her had been cowed by Dong Siyang, everyone except Li Xun, who seemed already accustomed to this kind of feeling.

“If there’s no outcome, then stop wasting time,” he said, pouring oil on the fire.

Dong Siyang’s eyes darkened further.

If moments ago he had still been at the stage of simply losing his temper, that was over now. The flame had gone out, and what was rising in its place was something more like a killing intent. Zhu Yun heard Zhang Fang beside her whispering in the tiniest possible voice, over and over: “We’re done, we’re done, we’re done…”

Li Xun still showed no sign of backing down.

Dong Siyang began moving toward him. He had taken only one step when a voice broke through the tension like a blade:

“I can!”

Five men looked again at the only woman in the room.

Zhu Yun’s hand was raised, her dark eyes fixed on Dong Siyang. She made her promise in a clear, steady voice:

“I can make this project succeed on my own.”