Chapter 3: Notes on a Villain (Empirical Observations, Day Two)
The notebook had twelve sections.
Xie Yu did not know this for certain. He had not read the notebook. He had not, technically, seen the inside of the notebook for any sustained or intentional period of time. But he had a postgraduate degree and functional eyes and he had been in the same room as the notebook for approximately three hours yesterday, and he was reasonably confident, based on the number of times Shen Cixi had turned the page while appearing to look at the textbook, that there were at least twelve.
Possibly thirteen.
He was thinking about this at seven in the morning while standing in the kitchen of the penthouse suite holding a cup of coffee that had gone cold while he was thinking, which was how 006 found him when it finished its morning initialization sequence.
"Good morning, host. You appear to be standing still."
"I'm thinking."
"About the notebook."
Xie Yu drank his cold coffee. "No."
"The host was muttering something about sections."
"I was not muttering."
"The host's lips were moving."
"I was breathing."
006 made the noise it made when it had decided to accept something for the sake of forward momentum. "Today's schedule: study session at the main house at nine. The Original Host also has a prior social commitment in the evening — a gathering at a venue called Eclipse, which appears to be a club, with associates named—" a brief processing sound, "—Brother Long, Little Fatty, and someone the contact list identifies only as Shark."
Xie Yu looked up from his coffee. "Shark."
"Yes."
"These are the Original Host's friends."
"The Original Host's social circle, yes. Based on available data, they have been expecting him. Canceling may raise questions about behavioral inconsistency."
Xie Yu considered this. A villain's social circle, composed of people named Shark and Little Fatty, at a club called Eclipse. This was, objectively, more in the character outline than anything he had done so far. Arrogant rich second-generation scions did not sit in libraries getting studied by their tutors. They went to clubs with people named Shark.
"Fine," he said. "We'll go."
"The system would also note," 006 added, "that the Original Host would typically bring a companion to such events."
A silence.
"No," Xie Yu said.
"The source material suggests—"
"I'm not taking her to a club."
"It would be consistent with the character outline—"
"She has a grandmother with a chronic illness and works three jobs and just signed a contract that is mostly mosaics," Xie Yu said flatly. "She is not going to a club with people named Shark."
006 was quiet for a moment. "...Acknowledged," it said, in a subdued tone that somehow conveyed approval while technically conveying nothing at all.
Xie Yu went to order breakfast.
The minimum order amount had not changed overnight. It was still forty yuan. This continued to require, through no intentional design of his own, a fruit plate and toast and a second coffee and, this morning, something called a garden harvest crepe that turned out to be very thin and very good and which he placed on the far end of the table with the practiced casualness of a man who had absolutely not planned this.
Shen Cixi emerged at eight-twelve.
Today she was wearing the white shirt again — the more faded one — but she had rolled the sleeves up twice, neatly, at exactly the same height on each arm. Xie Yu noticed this the way he had been noticing things about her since yesterday, against his intentions, the way water found cracks in things that were supposed to be solid.
She sat down. She looked at the garden harvest crepe.
"Minimum order," she said.
"Forty yuan," he confirmed.
"The crepe is fourteen yuan."
"The eggs were twenty-two."
"That's thirty-six."
"There's a service charge."
Shen Cixi looked at him. He looked at his coffee. A beat passed in which the city outside did its morning business entirely unaware of the fictional economy being constructed on the fourteenth floor of a five-star hotel.
"Thank you," she said, and pulled the crepe toward her.
"Minimum order," he said.
"Of course," she said.
She opened the notebook.
Xie Yu, in an act of profound personal discipline, did not look at the notebook. He looked at his phone. He looked at the Jiang City skyline. He looked at a small decorative object on the side table that turned out, upon examination, to be a very expensive paperweight shaped like a river stone.
He did not look at the notebook.
He lasted six minutes.
The notebook was open to a page that was divided into two columns. The left column had a header he could almost make out — two characters, possibly three — and the right column was dense with her small handwriting. She was adding to the right column now, her pen moving in quick precise strokes while she ate the crepe with her other hand with the multitasking efficiency of someone who had been eating and doing other things simultaneously since university orientation.
He looked away.
"We leave for the main house at eight-forty-five," he said.
"I know." She turned a page. "You said yesterday."
"I'm reminding you."
"You don't need to."
"I'm reminding you anyway."
She looked up at him then, briefly, over the edge of the notebook. The morning light caught the angle of her face and the specific quality of her attention, and Xie Yu had the sudden and unwelcome sensation of being a problem she was in the process of working out.
Then she looked back down at the notebook and kept writing.
In the car, she opened the notebook again.
Xie Yu had made a decision. He was not going to look at the notebook. He was going to sit across from her and look out the window like a man who owned this car and found the journey unremarkable, which were both technically true, and he was going to do it without once glancing at whatever was written on those pages.
He lasted approximately four minutes into the drive.
"What are you writing," he said.
"Notes," she said.
"You said that yesterday."
"It's still true today."
"Notes about what."
She looked up. Her pen paused. Something moved in her expression that he was beginning to recognize as calculation — a brief and private arithmetic that happened behind her eyes and produced, on the visible surface, only steadiness.
"Academic material," she said.
"For who."
"Myself."
"You're taking notes about academic material for yourself while riding in someone else's car at eight-forty in the morning."
"Yes."
He looked at her.
She looked back at him with the expression of a person who has said something completely true and finds the follow-up questions both predictable and manageable.
"What subject," he said.
A pause. Small. Controlled. "Behavioral psychology," she said.
Xie Yu looked at her for one more moment.
Then he turned back to the window.
006 said, in a very quiet voice, directly into the center of his brain: "Host."
"Not now," Xie Yu said, under his breath.
"The system feels it is important to note—"
"Behavioral psychology," Xie Yu said quietly. "She's studying behavioral psychology."
"Yes."
"And she has a notebook."
"Yes."
"With sections."
"The system cannot confirm the number of—"
"With my name at the top of a page."
A silence that lasted exactly long enough to be meaningful.
"The system," 006 said carefully, "may have understated the observational capacity of the protagonist."
Outside the car window, Jiang City moved past in its morning configurations — commuters, storefronts opening, the particular organized chaos of a city getting started. Xie Yu watched it and thought about the fact that in protagonist-abuse novels, there was typically one person conducting the surveillance.
He was increasingly certain it was not him.
The library session lasted three hours.
In that time, Xie Yu successfully pretended not to understand: integration by parts, the fundamental theorem of calculus, and a passage from an economics textbook that he had, in his previous life, taught a seminar on.
His performance had improved. He was fairly confident of this. He had developed a system of strategic hesitations — a pause before answering, a slight furrow between the brows that suggested effort, the occasional look at the wrong section of the textbook before being corrected. It was, objectively, better than yesterday.
The problem was that Shen Cixi had also improved.
She had stopped trying to catch him in direct contradictions. Instead she had moved into what Xie Yu was privately classifying as Phase Two, which involved asking him questions that had no wrong answers — questions about what he found interesting, what he thought about, what he remembered — and then writing things in the notebook while appearing to look at the textbook.
"Did you study abroad?" she asked, at one point, completely unprompted, while he was staring at a practice problem.
"No," he said.
"Your pronunciation is interesting."
"I watch foreign films."
She wrote something.
"What kinds."
"Various kinds."
"Do you have a preference?"
He looked up. "Why?"
Shen Cixi looked back at him with the full flat sincerity of someone asking about film preferences. "I'm making conversation," she said. "We're going to be spending a lot of time in the same room."
This was reasonable. This was an entirely reasonable thing for a study companion to say. It was also, Xie Yu was almost certain, not the reason she was asking.
"I don't watch films," he said, in his best bored-rich-person voice. "I have other ways to pass the time."
She nodded and wrote something.
"What did you write," he said.
"Notes."
"About my film preferences."
"About the session," she said, without looking up.
"I didn't say anything about the session."
"You said you have other ways to pass the time." She turned a page. "That's relevant to structuring effective study approaches."
He stared at her.
She continued writing.
"You're very thorough," he said.
"Thank you."
"That wasn't a compliment."
She looked up. "I know," she said pleasantly. "But I chose to receive it as one."
Xie Yu leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling of the Xie family library, which was paneled in dark wood and had a light fixture that probably had a name and a country of origin. He thought about the character outline: arrogant, frivolous, condescending. He thought about what a genuinely arrogant, frivolous, condescending person would do when their study companion told them, with complete composure, that they had converted an insult into a compliment by personal executive decision.
"Six hundred," he said.
She paused. "Sorry?"
"The light fixture." He pointed at the ceiling without looking at her. "It's a Venetian glass chandelier. Custom-made. Six hundred thousand yuan." He dropped his gaze back to the practice problems. "Since you're taking notes on the environment."
A silence.
"I wasn't taking notes on—"
"You looked at it for approximately four seconds when we walked in," he said, "and then you wrote something."
She was quiet.
He picked up his pen and drew a completely wrong answer on the practice problem, because he was supposed to be bad at this, and also because it gave him something to do with his hands.
After a moment, she said: "You're more observant than the file suggested."
"There's a file."
A pause that was just slightly too long. "The student affairs office keeps records," she said.
"About my observational habits."
"About general student profiles for companion matching."
Xie Yu looked at her. She looked back at him. Across the library table between them, the notebooks and textbooks and practice problems were arranged in the organized geography of someone who planned things in advance, and he thought about twelve sections, and behavioral psychology, and a notebook with his name underlined twice.
"Shen Cixi," he said.
"Yes."
"What's in the notebook."
She held his gaze for three full seconds. Then she closed the notebook, placed her pen on top of it, and folded her hands in the way she did when she had made a decision.
"Study materials," she said.
"For whom."
"For myself."
"About what."
"Various subjects."
He was doing her sentence construction back at her. She noticed this — he could see her noticing it, the slight recalibration behind her eyes — and something happened at the corner of her mouth that was not quite a smile and not quite not one.
"You can look at it," she said, "if you want."
This was the last thing he had expected her to say. He had expected deflection or redirection or another layer of the careful architecture she built around every direct question. He had not expected an offer.
He looked at the notebook.
"No," he said.
She tilted her head a fraction. "Why not?"
"I'm not interested."
He said it in his best flat voice, the one that went with the slightly contemptuous expression, the one that said this does not register as significant. He had been practicing it since seven in the morning and it was currently his best available tool.
Shen Cixi looked at him for a long moment.
Then she pulled the notebook back toward herself, opened it, and picked up her pen.
"All right," she said, and started writing again.
Xie Yu looked at his wrong answer on the practice problem.
006 said nothing. It had developed, over the past two days, a sophisticated vocabulary of silence — there was the silence that meant the system agrees, the silence that meant the system is processing, and the silence it was currently employing, which meant the system is watching this unfold with feelings it was not designed to have.
He picked up his pen and wrote another wrong answer.
Eclipse was loud in the specific way that places designed for loudness were loud — not chaotic but engineered, the sound calibrated to prevent thought while allowing movement. The lights were blue and shifting, the kind of light that turned everyone's face into an abstraction. Xie Yu stood in the private section on the upper level with his third glass of something expensive and surveyed the situation.
Brother Long was exactly what the name suggested: a tall person of cheerful menace who had greeted him with a handshake that lasted slightly too long and three different references to events Xie Yu had no memory of attending. Little Fatty was, confusingly, not particularly little or particularly fatty, but rather a compact and energetic person who spoke at the speed of someone who had somewhere more important to be. Shark had introduced himself only as Shark and then stared at Xie Yu for ten seconds before nodding once and returning his attention to the lower level.
They were all, he was fairly sure, operating under the assumption that he was the same Xie Yu they had always known.
He was doing his best.
"You're quiet tonight," Little Fatty said, appearing at his elbow.
"I'm thinking," Xie Yu said.
"Since when do you think?"
"New habit."
Little Fatty squinted at him. "Did something happen? You look—" a pause, "—different."
"I got new clothes."
"It's not the clothes." Little Fatty looked at him with the surprisingly perceptive attention of someone who had known the Original Host long enough to notice when the variables had changed. "You're standing differently."
"How am I standing."
"Like—" Little Fatty waved a hand, "—like you're watching something. The old you would be down there already." He gestured at the main floor below, which was full of people and music and deliberately atmospheric fog.
Xie Yu looked at the main floor. He looked at the shifting lights and the crowd and tried to imagine what the Original Host had done here — what arrogance looked like in this environment, how someone spent money performatively in a space like this, the specific social vocabulary of a scion who used places like this the way other people used breathing.
"I had a long day," he said.
"Because of the tutor thing?"
Xie Yu looked at him.
Little Fatty held up both hands. "Your dad mentioned it before he left. Said he'd arranged someone to come in." He made a face. "Some top student from University A. How bad is it?"
"Manageable," Xie Yu said.
"Uncle Xie really went through with it." Little Fatty shook his head with the expression of someone observing a mild natural disaster. "So what's she like? Boring? Does she wear those little glasses? Brother Long said—"
"She's fine," Xie Yu said.
Little Fatty stopped.
"Fine," he repeated.
"Yes."
"The Xie Yu I know would have said something much worse than fine."
"I'm in a generous mood."
Little Fatty stared at him. Behind them, Brother Long was conducting some large and complicated conversation that occasionally produced laughter. Shark was still looking at the lower level with the focused attention of a person professionally committed to looking at things. The lights shifted from blue to violet to something in between.
"She must be something," Little Fatty said slowly.
"She's a study companion," Xie Yu said, flat and bored, voice number three. "She explains the chain rule and takes notes."
"Takes notes about what?"
"Academic materials."
"During the sessions?"
"Yes."
"And you let her."
"She's a study companion. Note-taking is—"
"The old you," Little Fatty said, with great care, "would have taken the notebook and thrown it in the garden pond."
Xie Yu looked at him.
Little Fatty looked back with the expression of a person who has accidentally arrived at a truth he didn't know he was looking for.
A silence fell between them that had nothing to do with the music.
"The pond," Xie Yu said finally, in his flattest voice, "was recently restocked. I didn't want to disturb the fish."
"You hate fish."
"I've developed new feelings about fish."
"Yu-ge," Little Fatty said, slowly and with great seriousness. "Are you okay?"
Xie Yu picked up his glass. He looked at the lower level, at the crowd moving in the engineered light, and thought about a notebook with twelve sections and the specific quality of being watched by someone who wrote things down.
"Get me another drink," he said, in the Original Host's voice as best as he could produce it. "And stop asking me questions."
Little Fatty opened his mouth.
"Fish," Xie Yu said.
Little Fatty closed his mouth. He got the drink. He returned to Brother Long's large conversation and didn't ask further questions, but twice during the rest of the evening Xie Yu caught him looking over with the expression of someone who had filed something and intended to return to it.
006 said, in the back of Xie Yu's skull, at midnight: "The host performed adequately this evening."
"Adequately," he said into his glass.
"The host successfully maintained the character outline for approximately four hours."
"Minus the fish comment."
"The fish comment was unusual," 006 agreed. "But the host recovered."
Xie Yu looked at the lights. "Is she awake?" he said, and then immediately: "Disregard that."
"The system cannot monitor the protagonist's—"
"I said disregard."
"Disregarded," 006 said, with the tone of something that had been neither disregarded nor would be.
He went home at one. The penthouse suite was quiet and dark, except for the skyline coming through the windows in its permanent amber insistence. The door to Shen Cixi's room was closed. There was no light underneath it.
On the kitchen counter, there was a glass of water and two tablets of what appeared to be headache medication, placed together with the deliberate tidiness of something left on purpose, and next to them a small note written in handwriting he recognized immediately.
For after.
Nothing else. No explanation. No signature. Just three characters, in her small precise hand, arranged on a piece of paper torn from the corner of something and left on a hotel kitchen counter at what must have been, based on the angle of the ambient light, somewhere around eleven.
Xie Yu stood in the kitchen for a long moment.
He looked at the water and the tablets and the note.
He thought about behavioral psychology. He thought about twelve sections. He thought about a notebook full of observations about a villain who kept ordering breakfast and lying about minimum order am