By noon, the long-tail problem had already travelled through three internal chats. The matter itself was simple: the settlement had approached. The dangerous part was that everyone at Xplendi had begun discussing it with bright eyes.
Yang Ruoqian's first concern was not whether settlement day sounded embarrassing. Embarrassment was acceptable. What mattered was that this still looked like a small follow-up nuisance, the kind of normal business trouble that could swallow money without asking for applause.
The expenses were especially comforting because they looked ordinary: maintenance work, internal queues, small cultural credit, and reputation that did not arrive as clean cash. A normal boss would ask whether those costs could be recovered. Yang Ruoqian only cared that the receipts were real.
