The morning after the alleyway confrontation, Su Yang arrived at Celestial Code Innovations to find a small, unexpected object placed with meticulous care in the center of his otherwise barren desk.
It was a simple, stacked lunchbox, made of pale blue plastic. It was not new; faint scratches and microwavable wear patterns were visible on its surface. But it was clean, and placed with a certain deliberate tenderness that made it stand out starkly against the sterile, impersonal landscape of the office.
He didn't need to open it to know what was inside. His enhanced senses could discern the layers: freshly steamed rice on the bottom tier, a simple stir-fry of vegetables and egg in the middle, and a few pieces of lightly seasoned chicken on top. It was humble, home-cooked food, prepared not by a professional chef, but by someone with limited time and a tight budget. Yet, it carried an intangible ingredient his spiritual perception could taste clearly: care. A sincere, grateful intention had been folded into every grain of rice.
He knew instantly it was from Wang Lihua. Her residual energy, now faintly harmonized with his own Yang Qi, was all over the container.
Across the room, Lihua was pretending to be utterly engrossed in her monitor, her ears tinged a faint pink. Her grandfather's insistence that she "repay the young man's kindness" had left her flustered. Money was out of the question. A gift was too formal. So, she had woken up an hour earlier, in the pre-dawn quiet of her tiny kitchen, and done the only thing that felt genuinely sincere: she had cooked.
It was a nerve-wracking endeavor. Would he think it was foolish? Unprofessional? Would he even eat it? She watched from the corner of her eye as he picked up the lunchbox. He didn't open it. He simply held it for a moment, a faint, almost imperceptible smile touching his lips. Then, he placed it carefully to the side of his desk and gave a small, acknowledging nod in her direction. A wave of relief and inexplicable warmth washed over her. The exchange was silent, unnoticed by anyone else, but it felt like a significant, secret bridge had been built between them.
This tender, domestic moment was violently juxtaposed by the atmosphere in the corner office.
President Leng Xue's presence had cast a permanent frost over the department. That morning, she had summoned Manager Li. He stood before her massive glass desk now, sweating despite the arctic blast of the air conditioning.
"I require a list," Leng Xue stated, her voice as crisp and cold as the lines of her white marble desk. She didn't look up from the financial report she was scrutinizing. "A list of employees whose performance is subpar. Redundancies. Inefficiencies. This department's output-to-payroll ratio is unacceptable. I intend to streamline."
Manager Li's heart hammered with a mixture of fear and opportunity. This was his chance. He could eliminate the threats, curry favor by showing decisiveness, and blame it on the new president's cold efficiency.
"Of course, President Leng! Right away," he simpered, pulling out his tablet. "There's Jenkins in networking, constantly late. And Miller in QA, her error rate is…" He listed off a few easy, non-controversial targets, people he personally found annoying.
Then, he took a breath. "And… well, it pains me to say it, but we have two more significant issues." He infused his voice with false regret. "The new permanent assistant, Wang Lihua. While she shows… flashes of competence, her work is inconsistent. Prone to cutting corners, I suspect. And the intern, Su Yang." He sneered slightly. "His attire is a public spectacle, a disgrace to our corporate image. And his work… it's too fast. No one can produce code that quickly without it being riddled with deeply embedded flaws. He's a ticking time bomb, a liability waiting to explode during a critical client demo."
He finished, expecting a curt nod of approval.
Leng Xue finally looked up. Her icy gray eyes pinned him to the spot. She said nothing for a long, uncomfortable moment, her gaze boring into him as if reading the petty, fearful thoughts scurrying through his mind like rats.
"Su Yang," she repeated, her tone unreadable. "The individual whose attire you find… disgraceful."
"Y-yes, ma'am."
"And his work is… too fast." It wasn't a question. It was a statement laced with a skepticism that made Li's blood run cold.
"And Wang Lihua. Inconsistent." Leng Xue leaned back in her chair, steepling her fingers. "Describe an instance of her 'corner-cutting'."
Manager Li floundered. "Well, I… it's hard to pinpoint a single instance, it's more of a pattern of…"
"I see," Leng Xue cut him off, her voice dripping with disdain. She had seen his type a thousand times: small men who used their meager authority to crush potential threats. Her initial plan for swift, brutal efficiency halted. This was no longer about trimming fat; it was about understanding an anomaly.
Su Yang was an enigma. His calm defiance, his impossible speed—it intrigued her on a level she couldn't explain. And Wang Lihua, according to other, more reliable metrics she'd already pulled, had near-perfect accuracy and her productivity had recently skyrocketed. Inconsistency was the opposite of what the data showed.
A public spectacle? A liability? Or was something else entirely going on?
"The list is tabled for now," she declared, her voice final. Li deflated like a punctured balloon. "I will make my own assessments. Send Su Yang and Wang Lihua to my office. Now."
Minutes later, the two of them stood before the vast glass desk. Lihua looked pale and nervous, her hands clasped tightly in front of her. Su Yang stood beside her, his posture relaxed, his gaze calmly meeting Leng Xue's, showing no trace of the fear or deference she was accustomed to.
"Your manager speaks highly of your… unique qualities," Leng Xue began, her words a carefully sharpened blade. "He believes your work is either a public relations nightmare or a technical disaster in waiting. I prefer to form my own opinions."
She slid a single data stick across the polished surface of the desk. "This contains the specs for the 'Project Aether' demo for OmniCorp. Our most important client is visiting next week. The project is, according to the lead team, plagued with a critical, deeply embedded flaw that causes a cascade failure in the core architecture. They've hit a wall."
She paused, letting the weight of the task sink in. "I am reassigning it to the two of you. Consider it an… evaluation. I want a full diagnostic report and a viable solution proposal on my desk by 5 PM tomorrow."
It was an impossible task. A project that had stumped a team of senior engineers for weeks, given to an intern and an assistant to solve in a day. It was a blatant setup for failure. Manager Li, listening at the door, allowed himself a smug smile. The president was even more ruthless than he'd hoped.
Lihua's face fell. The pressure was immense. "President Leng, with all due respect, the senior team—"
"—has failed," Leng Xue interrupted coldly. "Perhaps a fresh perspective is needed. Or perhaps Manager Li's assessment is correct. This will determine which it is. You are dismissed."
Back at their cubicles, Lihua was on the verge of a panic attack. "This is insane! We can't do this! She's setting us up to fail! This is Li's doing, I know it!"
Su Yang picked up the data stick. His expression was unreadable. "We will see," he said calmly.
He inserted the stick into his computer. The code for Project Aether loaded. It was a sprawling, complex beast of a program. To Lihua, it was a impenetrable jungle of tangled logic.
To Su Yang, with his mind expanded by cultivation, it was a map. He closed his eyes. The Harmonic Convergence Art hummed within him. The code wasn't just lines of text; it was a flow of energy, a structure of light and data. He could *see* it.
And he saw the flaw immediately. It wasn't deeply embedded. It was a simple, elegant, and devastating error in a foundational algorithm—a single wrong variable that propagated like a cancer through the entire system. It was the kind of mistake a tired senior engineer could make and then overlook for weeks.
"Here," he said, opening his eyes and pointing to a line on Lihua's screen before she'd even fully loaded the file on hers.
She stared. "What? How could you possibly know that? You just looked at it!"
"The logic is incorrect," he said simply. "It creates an infinite loop under specific input conditions, overloading the core processor."
He began to type. His fingers flew, not just fixing the error, but optimizing the entire algorithm, streamlining it with a breathtaking elegance that made the original code look clumsy and archaic.
Lihua watched, her earlier panic transforming into sheer, unadulterated awe. It wasn't just that he was fixing it; he was transforming it into something beautiful and infinitely more efficient. He was rewriting the laws of their digital universe as if they were mere suggestions.
"You…" she whispered, her fear of Leng Xue and Manager Li completely forgotten in the face of this impossible display. "You really aren't… normal, are you, Su Yang?"
He didn't answer. He just continued to work, the lunchbox she had made for him sitting quietly on his desk, a testament to a simple human kindness that now felt a world away from the divine-level test they were being put through. The evaluation had begun, but not in the way President Leng had anticipated. She had intended to expose incompetence. Instead, she had unintentionally created a stage for a revelation.