Chapter 3: Handling It Like a Pro

 

Guilt had a way of making everything sound worse than it was.

Yun Li, standing there with her conscience quietly eating her alive, heard only threat and ice in his words. The effect was roughly equivalent to: I was going to kill you, but my knife needs sharpening. No matter — I have a gun.

What did he mean, straight-handled ones might have a chance? How did he know that? Had he — had he actually tested this?

Her thoughts were going to very dark places very quickly.

And then the man stood up and walked toward her.

Yun Li stepped back automatically, not sure what she was preparing for.

He didn't look at her. He walked past, picked up the remote from the desk, turned the air conditioning back up to thirty degrees, set it down, and went to the bar to pour himself a glass of water.

She had been overthinking, as usual. She needed to say something. Something normal, something that would reset the atmosphere, something—

"So for the straight-handled ones," she said, without filtering anything at all, "what kind should I buy to kill—"

She stopped.

He didn't look up. He drank his water.

"Um," Yun Li said. "What kind should I... avoid buying."

He looked at her then. His gaze dropped briefly to her wrists, the assessment taking less than a second. "You lack the strength," he said, in the flat tone of a machine reading a very obvious output.

"Hm?"

"It doesn't matter what you buy."

...

---

Back at the club, Yun Li sat with her face in her hands and replayed the conversation several times.

The more she replayed it, the worse it got.

A complete novice had walked up to an obviously dangerous person and asked, with genuine curiosity, what kind of umbrella would be most effective for killing someone. And he had answered. Helpfully. Empirically.

She remembered saying, as she left: "Thank you for the advice."

She wanted to get on the next available flight out of Nanwu.

The summer heat was thick even with the air conditioning going, and her ears were burning in the particular way they did when her embarrassment had nowhere to go. She pressed her hands over her face. Her hands were warm too, radiating the flush back at her.

"Teacher Xian Yun." He Mengjia's voice cut through.

Yun Li looked up.

The previously scattered group had gathered in the open rest area at the center of the second floor — a long curved sofa occupied by several people, a few more standing around the edges. The atmosphere was easy and social.

She walked over. He Mengjia tilted her head. "How'd you come up so fast? Did your phone charge?"

"More or less." A pause. "There was someone sleeping in the restroom."

"Sleeping? I didn't see anyone when we went."

"The person who picked me up yesterday."

He Mengjia turned. "Boss, who did you send to get her yesterday?"

Yun Li followed the look.

In the center of the sofa sat a man she hadn't seen before, but who was immediately, effortlessly noticeable. Light-patterned shirt, casual trousers, one leg crossed over the other. His eyes held a faint trace of amusement. Everything about him said young master — not in an overbearing way, just as a fact, the way some people simply occupy space differently.

The young master raised an eyebrow as if something had just occurred to him. "I'll go down for a bit." He said his goodbyes to the group and stood. Passing Yun Li, he stopped and extended his hand with easy politeness. "Nice to meet you. I'm Xu Qingsong."

She hesitated a moment before taking it. "Hello."

He held it briefly, released it. "I'm sorry for any trouble yesterday."

"It's fine," Yun Li said, which was almost true.

He left. The group dispersed naturally in his wake, the way people do around someone with that particular quality of presence.

The four of them regrouped. He Mengjia talked about Xu Qingsong with the sustained enthusiasm of someone who had found a new subject and intended to stay on it. Every third sentence.

They left before he came back.

---

On the way back to the hotel, He Mengjia mentioned the return flight. Yun Li had given a vague answer about staying in Nanwu a few extra days, promising to send the details later. That had been — a while ago, apparently.

He Mengjia didn't push. Just a reminder to let her know once it was booked.

Yun Li's mood dipped.

The work trip to Nanwu was real. The bigger reason for it was an argument with her father, Yun Yongchang, which had erupted when she finally, carefully, told him she'd been secretly admitted to Nanli Tech's graduate program.

At some point over the years, Yun Yongchang had become immovably opposed to her studying in another city. During college applications he'd been absolute about it — local universities only, no discussion. Yun Li had verbally agreed and quietly put Nanli Tech first on her application.

She had thought, at eighteen, that being officially admitted would change things. She had been wrong about that. He would have made her retake the exam. She was almost certain.

As it turned out, she'd missed admission by one point, which was either fortunate or not, depending on how you looked at it.

She had stayed in Xifu. She had set Nanli Tech as her target from the first day she started thinking about graduate school. When she passed the entrance exam, she hadn't told him. The words stopped in her throat every time.

His position at the dinner table, when she finally tried: You've always been close to home. As a girl, going that far would worry us. The older generation didn't understand these things. Xifu had good universities. Applying locally was just as good.

She had been using the same strategy as four years ago — preparing for a local program on the surface while planning to present it as a done thing — when the invitation from EAW arrived. Since it was in Nanwu, and she was already thinking about the city, she'd looked into it more carefully. Deng Chuqi had helped verify it was legitimate. The terms were good. Her initial instinct to decline had started to waver.

She'd mentioned it at dinner, casually, feeling out the temperature. Yun Yongchang had seemed mild about it. She'd taken that as an opening and told him the rest.

His face had changed immediately. No explanation accepted. The answer was no — find a job or apply locally.

The guilt she'd been carrying dissolved in the face of that. The years of swallowing it, of quietly rerouting around his opposition while he remained unmoved — something in her cracked open. She had said, this is my decision, which was the wrong thing to say if you wanted to de-escalate, and the only thing she could say.

The conflict had been instant and total.

She had accepted EAW's offer that same evening, before she'd thought it through, with the specific energy of someone who needed to do something irreversible before she changed her mind.

Her phone rang. Yun Ye.

She answered on speaker and tossed it on the bed. "Identify yourself."

A pause. "What?"

"Are you a messenger or my brother?"

A beat of silence. Then, slightly exasperated: "Your brother."

"Then speak."

"When are you coming back? And bring me Nanwu specialties."

"Tell me what you want and I'll mail it."

"What are you doing, running away from home?" Yun Ye said. "At your age, fighting with your parents and disappearing? Aren't you embarrassed?"

"Who would know if you don't tell anyone."

He had been absorbing the tension at home from both directions for days and was, predictably, done with it. He asked flatly: "So when are you actually coming back."

With over half a month before registration, Yun Li had no interest in going back early and walking straight into another argument. "I might not come back," she said.

"What?"

"Registration is soon anyway. Going back and forth doesn't make sense. I'll just stay here and get settled." The more she said it, the more reasonable it sounded. "Deng Chuqi is here too. I can see her for a few days."

"Are you serious."

"Actually — not might. I'm not going back."

Yun Ye absorbed this. "Aren't you afraid Dad will kill you?"

"I'd be in more danger if I went back now," she said. "Think about it."

He couldn't really argue with the logic.

---

Having made the decision properly, Yun Li slept better than she had in days.

She was up early the next morning. The energy in the hotel lobby was different — everyone had cameras out, filming, the kind of relaxed professionalism that comes from getting the nervous first day out of the way. Zhi Bule and Fei Shui came over and made a point of greeting her camera, which made her laugh and loosened something she hadn't realized was still tight.

EAW in full operation looked nothing like it had the day before.

The entrance design was striking — a fragmented, geometric aesthetic, white light cutting across a dark starry background as if the ceiling were about to split open and let you into something else. Above the entrance, in clean lettering: Enjoy Another World.

Everything was activated. The images competed for attention. You could feel the immersion before you'd even put anything on.

The program had a range: roller coasters that were entirely virtual, 5D cinema, multiplayer battles, puzzle-solving experiences. EAW had pulled in nearly twenty guests and organized them through a series of group projects. Idle staff had been temporarily recruited as camera operators, and drones had been sent up for overhead footage.

Yun Li had never filmed outdoors at this scale before. She watched a drone pass overhead and felt the particular pleasure of being somewhere unfamiliar where things were happening.

After the group projects, they moved to the second floor.

Smaller here, quieter — single-player pods, private rooms for gaming, a motion capture space, something called dark battle cars. Yun Li scanned the options and made note of what she wanted to try.

Before she'd decided, she heard greetings from behind her.

Xu Qingsong. And the man from the restroom, mask and all, easily recognizable anyway.

Yun Li did not look directly at either of them.

She had already spotted, not far from where she stood, a project called Extreme Bungee Jumping. She turned and walked toward it without making it look deliberate.

The setup was larger than it sounded — more of an elevator mechanism designed to simulate free fall, with full safety rigging. The name and the look of it were intimidating. There was no staff member nearby.

Yun Li read through the posted instructions, decided she wasn't going to touch anything without someone present, and set up her tripod while she waited. She checked the aperture, adjusted the frame, and told herself that standing here with a camera made her look intentional.

Several minutes passed. No uniformed staff appeared.

She was considering moving on when she heard Xu Qingsong's voice directly behind her: "Something wrong?"

She turned.

Both men had approached without her noticing. The familiar low-grade awkwardness returned.

"I wanted to try this one," she said, aiming for neutral.

Xu Qingsong raised an eyebrow and clapped a hand on the other man's shoulder. "Time to work."

The man's eyes looked tired. He didn't move immediately.

Xu Qingsong shrugged at her. "Short-staffed."

This was exactly what Yun Li had been hoping to avoid.

After a moment, the man walked to the rack, picked up the safety harness, and began inspecting it with the focused economy of someone who knew what they were doing. He wasn't in uniform — just a plain t-shirt and trousers — which left Yun Li uncertain of his actual role here.

Which led, naturally, to the question of whether he actually knew how to operate the equipment.

He came toward her with the harness, angling slightly to account for the height difference. "Step into the black loops," he said, his voice low.

They were close. Yun Li stopped thinking and followed the instructions.

She got both feet through. He pulled the harness up, guided her arms into the corresponding loops, adjusted the fit around her body, and had her sit. The shift from standing to seated changed the sensation entirely — something in her stomach registered the edges of where the ground was and wasn't, a low-level awareness of height that wasn't quite fear but wasn't quite not.

She watched his hands as he attached the clips, checked each connection in sequence, ran through the whole setup again. No rushing. No missed steps.

From behind them, Xu Qingsong said, with audible amusement: "Not bad — handling it like a pro on the first try."