Chapter 2: The Villain's Morning Routine (A Disaster in Three Acts)
Xie Yu did not sleep well.
This was partly due to the bed, which was the most expensive mattress he had ever encountered in either of his lives, and which his body had apparently decided was suspicious. It was too soft. It was the kind of soft that felt like a trap. He had spent four hours lying in the center of it, staring at a ceiling that cost more per square meter than most people's monthly rent, composing and discarding villain strategies until somewhere around three in the morning his brain gave up entirely and dragged him under.
He woke at seven to 006 chiming pleasantly in his skull.
"Good morning, host. Today is day one of active plot progression. The system has prepared several suggestions for establishing the appropriate power dynamic with the protagonist."
Xie Yu put a pillow over his face.
"Host."
"I'm thinking."
"The system's suggestions are quite comprehensive. Shall I—"
"Give me five minutes."
"Of course." A pause of approximately nine seconds. "Has the host finished thinking?"
Xie Yu removed the pillow. He sat up. The Jiang City skyline outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was doing something unreasonably beautiful in the early light, all pale gold and grey, the city quieter than it had any right to be. He looked at it for a moment with the specific exhaustion of a man who had died, been recruited by a supernatural bureaucracy, transmigrated into a novel, and then offered a villain's love interest dinner within forty minutes of meeting her.
"Fine," he said. "Suggestions."
006 brightened audibly. "The system has reviewed available non-censored source material and compiled the following behavioral guidelines for playing a convincing arrogant scion. Point one: maintain an expression of mild contempt at all times, as though the world is consistently failing to meet your standards. Point two: issue requests as though they are obvious and their non-completion would be baffling. Point three: do not explain yourself. Villains do not explain themselves. Point four—"
"I offered her dinner last night."
A silence.
"Yes," 006 said carefully. "The system noted that."
"How bad was it."
"It was... not strictly in line with point two. Or point three. Or, the system would argue, points one through seven inclusively." Another pause. "However! The host did tell her not to touch things that weren't hers, which was adequately territorial."
Xie Yu stared at the ceiling. "Today will be better."
"The system believes in the host's potential."
"That was not convincing."
"The system is trying its best given available data."
He got up, washed his face, and stood in front of the mirror performing what he had privately begun thinking of as the villain calibration — chin up, eyes flat, that particular quality of boredom that said I have been disappointed by everything since birth and have made peace with this. He held the expression for thirty seconds.
Better than yesterday. Still slightly too human around the eyes.
He was working on it.
The suite's kitchen — because of course a penthouse suite had a kitchen, a full kitchen with appliances that had probably never been used — was empty when he walked out. The door to Shen Cixi's room was closed. He stood in the living area for a moment, recalibrating.
The Original Host, according to the non-mosaic fragments of the text, did not cook. He did not make tea. He did not do anything that could be interpreted as domestic, because domestic implied effort, and effort implied that something mattered enough to try for, and the Original Host was performatively above mattering.
Xie Yu stood in the kitchen doorway, thought about this, and then thought about the fact that he had woken up at seven in a hotel penthouse and there was no breakfast.
He picked up the room service menu.
"Host," 006 said.
"I'm ordering breakfast."
"For yourself."
"Yes."
"Only for yourself."
Xie Yu looked at the menu. He looked at the closed door of Shen Cixi's room. He thought about the white shirt washed until it was almost translucent. He thought about the bus.
"The system will note," 006 said, in the tone of someone watching a slow-motion incident they had already predicted, "that ordering breakfast for the protagonist would be, again, not in keeping with—"
"I'm ordering coffee," Xie Yu said. "For myself. One cup. Singular."
"Very good."
"And if there happens to be other items on the order, that is simply because the minimum order amount requires it."
"...The system will accept that framing."
He ordered coffee. He also ordered, due to the tyranny of minimum order amounts, eggs, toast, a fruit plate, a second coffee, and something described on the menu as a morning wellness bowl that turned out, when it arrived twenty minutes later, to be yogurt with honey and what appeared to be edible flowers scattered across the top.
He looked at the edible flowers.
He set the wellness bowl on the far end of the table, as far from his own coffee as the table's dimensions allowed.
He sat down with his coffee and opened his phone — the Original Host's phone, loaded with contacts he didn't recognize and a social media feed full of people who appeared to know him well and whom he had absolutely no memory of — and stared at it while waiting.
At eight-fifteen, the door to Shen Cixi's room opened.
She had changed into another plain shirt, this one slightly less faded than yesterday's, her hair pulled back in the same neat arrangement. She stopped when she saw him at the table. Then she looked at the spread of breakfast items. Then she looked at the wellness bowl with its edible flowers.
Then she looked back at him.
Xie Yu took a sip of his coffee with what he hoped was the specific negligence of a man who had ordered all of this accidentally and found its presence on his table slightly beneath his notice.
"The minimum order," he said.
"The minimum order," Shen Cixi repeated.
"Is forty yuan."
"I see."
"So there was excess."
She looked at the fruit plate. She looked at the toast. She looked at the second coffee, which was sitting directly across from his, in the spot where a person would logically sit if they were going to have breakfast across from someone.
"The wellness bowl," she said.
"Came with the eggs," Xie Yu said, which was a lie so brazen that 006 made a small distressed sound directly into his brainstem.
Shen Cixi sat down. She did not comment further. She pulled the wellness bowl toward her with both hands and ate three spoonfuls of yogurt in silence while Xie Yu looked at his phone and practiced not looking like a man who had deliberately ordered breakfast for someone and then constructed an elaborate cover story about minimum order amounts.
006 whispered: "That went better than yesterday."
"Thank you."
"You only lied about one thing this time."
"Progress."
"The system would still classify this as—"
"If you say 'not villain behavior' one more time," Xie Yu said very quietly, through the corner of his mouth, "I am going to find a way to get you wet."
006 fell silent.
Across the table, Shen Cixi ate her edible flowers without looking up. But Xie Yu noticed, because he was watching from the corner of his eye with the full dedicated attention of a man who had almost no other information to work with, that she had arranged herself at the table in a particular way. Angled slightly. Not fully facing him, but not fully turned away either. Like a person who wanted to be able to see without appearing to look.
She was watching him.
Not obviously. Not in any way that would register if you weren't paying attention. But the quality of her stillness had a direction to it, a subtle orientation, like a compass needle that kept settling on north regardless of which way you held it.
Xie Yu found this interesting.
He also found it slightly concerning, but he filed that under things to examine later and focused on his coffee.
"You'll need to be at the main house by nine," he said, in his best flat-and-bored voice. The main house was where Xie Yuanshan lived, where the fiction of the study companion arrangement was supposed to take place in view of the household staff. This much of the plot he had managed to piece together from the non-mosaic fragments. "The car will take you."
"I can take the bus."
"The car," he said, without inflection, "will take you."
She looked at him across her wellness bowl. He looked back at her over his coffee. The morning light came in sideways through the floor-to-ceiling windows and turned the room amber, and neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Fine," she said.
"Good."
Another silence.
"Thank you," she said, "for the breakfast."
"Minimum order," Xie Yu said immediately.
"Yes," Shen Cixi said, in the exact tone of a person who knows she is being lied to and has decided, for reasons of her own, to let it pass. "Of course."
The main house of the Xie family was the kind of building that announced its own importance from three streets away. Walls, gardens, a gate with a guard post, the whole vocabulary of old money speaking in full sentences. Xie Yu had been here — the Original Host had been here, technically — many times, but Xie Yu the transmigrator was seeing it for the first time and spent most of the car ride mentally cataloguing the architecture with the specific awe of someone whose previous apartment had featured water damage and a neighbor who played instruments at two in the morning.
Shen Cixi sat across from him in the car.
She had a notebook.
He noticed it because she had taken it out approximately four minutes into the ride and opened it on her knee, holding a pen in her right hand. She wasn't writing anything currently, just holding the pen, looking out the window at the passing streets. But the notebook was open, and there was writing in it already, in very small and very neat characters that he could not read from this angle.
"What's that," he said.
She glanced at him. "Notes."
"For what."
"Study." A pause. "I'm here as a study companion. I should have materials."
This was reasonable. He couldn't argue with it. He looked back out his window.
But six minutes later, when the car slowed at a light and Shen Cixi's attention moved to the window, he looked at the notebook again. The writing was too small and too angled for him to read any of it, but he could see that it was organized in some way — sections, maybe, or categories. Near the top of the open page, underlined twice, were three characters that he thought, at the wrong angle and in moving-car light, might be his name.
Xie Yu looked away.
"006," he said quietly.
"Yes, host."
"Is it normal for protagonists of these novels to take notes?"
"The system does not have sufficient unredacted data on the protagonist's specific behaviors." A thoughtful pause. "However, the system would note that the protagonist is, academically, in the top percentile of her university cohort. Note-taking is consistent with her established character."
"Right," Xie Yu said.
"Is the host concerned about the notebook?"
"No."
"The host looked at it twice."
"I was looking out the window."
"The notebook was between the host and the window."
"I have peripheral vision."
006 made a noise that, for a machine intelligence, conveyed an impressive amount of skepticism.
Xie Yu said nothing further. He folded his arms, leaned back against the seat, and deployed expression number three, which was the one that said I am a man who has four sports cars and I find this journey beneath me. He held it all the way to the main house gates.
When they got out of the car, he walked two steps ahead of her, because this seemed villainous, and 006 had approved it as being technically consistent with the character outline.
He made it four steps before he realized she was walking in the wrong direction toward the wrong entrance and turned back.
"That's the service entrance," he said.
Shen Cixi stopped. She looked at the door she had been heading toward, then at the main entrance, then back at him. A small thing moved across her face that he couldn't immediately name. Not embarrassment. More like someone who has just been reminded, unexpectedly, that they are allowed to use the front door.
"This way," he said, and walked toward the main entrance, and after a moment she followed.
006 said nothing.
Xie Yu was grateful for this.
The afternoon was educational.
The study companion arrangement required that Shen Cixi spend several hours each day in the Xie family's library, nominally tutoring Xie Yu through whatever academic material he had been avoiding. The household staff had been informed. There was a schedule. It was, from the outside, a perfectly reasonable setup.
The problem was that Xie Yu the transmigrator had a postgraduate degree and could, in his previous life, have tutored Shen Cixi.
He sat across from her at the library table with a textbook open in front of him and spent the first forty minutes trying to look like someone who did not immediately understand everything she explained, which turned out to require significantly more acting than he had anticipated.
"The derivative of this function," Shen Cixi was saying, her pen moving across the paper with the efficiency of someone who had explained this concept many times before, "follows the chain rule, which means—"
"Right," Xie Yu said.
She stopped. "Do you understand the chain rule?"
"Obviously not," Xie Yu said, one beat too late. "Explain it."
She looked at him. Then she looked at the textbook. Then she looked at his face, which he had arranged into what he hoped was the expression of someone for whom mathematics was a foreign and threatening landscape.
"Tell me what you don't understand about it," she said.
"...The chain part."
"The chain part."
"Yes."
A silence in which Shen Cixi appeared to be making several internal calculations that had nothing to do with derivatives.
"Okay," she said slowly. "Let's start from the beginning."
Xie Yu nodded. He leaned back. He arranged himself in the posture of someone tolerating an explanation they found tedious, which was the only villain-adjacent behavior he could currently produce in an academic setting, and watched Shen Cixi begin the explanation again from the top.
She was a very good teacher.
He noticed this the way he noticed things he wasn't supposed to be noticing, at a slight remove, cataloguing it without intending to. She didn't simplify things condescendingly or pad the explanation with unnecessary reassurance. She was just precise. Every word doing the work it was supposed to do. When she drew a diagram, it was clear without being oversimplified, and she moved through the steps with the particular rhythm of someone who understood not just the answer but the shape of why it was the answer.
She was explaining the chain rule to someone who was actively pretending not to know what the chain rule was, and she was doing it with the same focused energy she would probably give to a student who genuinely needed it.
Xie Yu thought about three part-time jobs. He thought about a grandmother and medical costs and six hours of sleep.
He looked at his textbook.
"I still don't get it," he said.
"Which part."
"The..." He pointed at a section of her diagram. "This."
She leaned forward slightly to see where he was pointing, which brought her closer to his side of the table, and he noticed that she smelled like something clean and ordinary — plain soap, maybe, or shampoo without any particular fragrance. Nothing like the Damascus roses of the hotel bathroom.
She tapped the diagram. "This is just the outer function. You differentiate it first, then multiply by—"
"Right," he said.
She stopped again.
"You keep saying right," she said.
"I'm agreeing."
"You said you didn't understand."
"I'm choosing to agree anyway."
Shen Cixi sat back. She looked at him with the notebook-and-pen expression again — that quietly orienting attention, the compass settling. He had the distinct sensation of being studied, which was an unusual experience for someone who was doing the exact same thing in the opposite direction.
"You're not bad at math," she said. It wasn't a question.
"I'm terrible at math," Xie Yu said, in his flattest voice.
"You looked at that problem and your eyes moved straight to the answer section."
"I was looking at the page generally."
"Your pen was already at the right line."
He looked down. His pen was, in fact, resting against the line that contained the answer to the sample problem. He had put it there without noticing, the way hands moved toward things they already recognized.
He looked up.
Shen Cixi was watching him with an expression he could now name, because he had seen a version of it in the car and another version at the breakfast table and it was, he was realizing, one of her primary expressions. It was the expression of a person adding information to a mental file that was already quite full.
"You don't need a tutor," she said.
"My father thinks I do," Xie Yu said.
"Your father thinks a lot of things." A pause. A very slight shift in her expression. "What do you think?"
Xie Yu looked at her across the library table.
He thought: I am a dead man who agreed to a supernatural contract without reading it, I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing in eighty-three point seven percent of this plot, and this woman who took the bus to a five-star hotel has been quietly and methodically studying me since the moment she walked through the door, and I am not entirely sure who is supposed to be the villain in this room.
"I think," he said, "that we should continue the lesson."
Shen Cixi looked at him for one more moment.
Then she nodded, and turned back to the textbook, and said: "Fine. Next problem."
But she had pulled the notebook out again and placed it beside the textbook, open to the same page as before, and the pen was moving in small, precise strokes, and he was nearly certain — without being able to prove it — that whatever she was writing had very little to do with calculus.
006 was very quiet all afternoon.
Only once, near the end of the session when Shen Cixi was packing up and Xie Yu was pretending to review the practice problems they had done, did the system speak.
"Host," it said.
"Mm."
"The system has been reviewing the available data from today."
"And."
A pause.
"The system would like to note," 006 said carefully, "that in protagonist-abuse novels, the protagonist is typically the one being observed."
Xie Yu looked up from the practice problems.
Across the room, Shen Cixi had paused in her packing to write something in the notebook. She was bent over it slightly, her handwriting small and rapid, and the afternoon light fell across her in a way that made the whole scene look still and focused, like a painting of a person thinking.
She closed the notebook and looked up, and caught him looking, and he glanced away.
"Yes," Xie Yu said.
"And yet," 006 said.
"Yes," Xie Yu said again.
Shen Cixi picked up her bag.
"Same time tomorrow?" she asked, in the pleasant, neutral tone of a tutor confirming a schedule.
"Yes," Xie Yu said, in the tone of a man who had absolutely nothing to add to this conversation and was comfortable with the silence that followed.
She left.
The library was very quiet.
Xie Yu sat at the table with the practice problems in front of him — all of which he had answered correctly while pretending not to understand, which had apparently not been as subtle as he'd hoped — and stared at the door for a moment.
"006," he said.
"Yes, host."
"What's in that notebook."
"The system cannot access external physical objects."
"Guess."
A long pause.
"The system," 006 said, very slowly, "would prefer not to."
Outside the library windows, the Xie family garden was going gold in the late afternoon. Somewhere inside the house, a clock ticked. In Xie Yu's chest, in the space behind his ribs that had apparently survived being transmigrated across the boundary of death into a censored novel, something was doing something quiet and unannounced