Yang Ruoqian had learned one rule from repeated defeat: the smaller a matter looked, the more likely his employees were to turn it into a strategic monument. This time, the settlement had failed to give Yang Ruoqian the reward he wanted. He decided to treat it with proper suspicion.
He reviewed the logic once more with the caution of a man who had been betrayed by success too many times. If the not-quite-loss could still be explained as ordinary process, this could remain a small follow-up nuisance rather than another Xplendi miracle.
He liked the shape of the spending. Maintenance work, internal queues, small cultural credit, and reputation that did not arrive as clean cash sounded like exactly the kind of heavy, slow burden that could drag a project below the settlement line.
