By noon, the pre-release mess had already travelled through three internal chats. The matter itself was simple: the numbers still had room to collapse. The dangerous part was that everyone at Xplendi had begun discussing it with bright eyes.
Yang Ruoqian's first concern was not whether the unfinished numbers sounded embarrassing. Embarrassment was acceptable. What mattered was that this still looked like a quiet pre-release mess, the kind of normal business trouble that could swallow money without asking for applause.
The expenses were especially comforting because they looked ordinary: argument, uncertainty, delayed conversion, and staff time spent on something that should have stayed cold. A normal boss would ask whether those costs could be recovered. Yang Ruoqian only cared that the receipts were real.
