Yang Ruoqian found the new enemy at breakfast.
It was not Moon Mansion.
It was not the system.
It was not even finance, though finance remained under suspicion by habit.
The new enemy was a sentence.
Before money moves.
The system had used it yesterday.
Yang had slept badly because of it.
Money was supposed to move first.
Badly.
Messily.
Into the wrong venue, the wrong promise, the wrong preparation, the wrong little pit that would require more money to climb out of.
Now venue owners were correcting files before Xplendi could spend anything.
They were doing unpaid labor outside his balance sheet.
That was intolerable.
At nine, he called the assistant team.
"Stop owners from self-checking."
The assistant lead blinked.
"Stop them?"
"Yes."
"Before submission?"
"Especially before submission."
"Boss Yang, we cannot prevent a venue owner from reading their own file."
"Tell them not to read it."
The room went quiet.
