Chapter Text
Sheng Industries did not build things so much as it built the ground other things stood on, you can name it, rail lines crossing provinces, highway networks feeding entire regional economies, subway systems engineered for cities of twenty million, bridges that popped up on vlogs or stock video website one that very sturdy & enhanced supporting China’s civilization, structurally sound, throughout generation. Roughly six out of every ten major infrastructure contracts awarded in the country that year ran through a Sheng subsidiary, and the ledgers of the company and the giants it partnered with, undercut, and occasionally swallowed outright moved something north of two point nine trillion dollars a year. The patron of this company usually heading the “Guest Speakers List” poster, delivering his vision of supporting national infrastructure and best practice, Sheng Boyou, the second generation leaders of Sheng Industry. Inheriting all his father’s legacy and make the most out of it, an S-Class Alpha in his bright 70 years, he has a remarkably strong obsidian agarwood scent, like an untouched forest in the dead of winter with a very authoritative notes.
Shen Wenlang had been Vice Marketing Director for two years and Acting Chief Marketing Officer for four months, since the previous CMO retired to be a fully pledged grandpop to his cutie grand son he is so proud of. This S-class alpha was thirty-two, his iris pheromones smells icy, powdery floral with a sharp, almost metallic that feels like a sharp blade, because it is as sharp as his demeanor. He ran brand and communications strategy for a company whose subsidiaries built things that outlived empires, and did it well enough that directors twice his age, those men who'd been laying track before he was born tidy their outer suit and make their button is in a right place. The board hadn't confirmed the title yet. That omission sat behind every decision he made: prove it, or watch someone else's name go on the door before the year was out.
Shen Wenlang did not raise his voice. He had never needed to.
"Explain to me," he said, standing at the head of the Q3 review table with a single printed page held between two fingers like something faintly contaminated, "why the Haicheng campaign underperformed its own forecast by eleven percent, when the forecast was written by the same team that is now telling me the underperformance was unforeseeable."
Nobody at the table moved. Director Peng, who had run the Haicheng account for six years and had, until roughly ninety seconds ago, been a man with a reasonably secure sense of his own competence, opened his mouth twice before anything came out.
"The market shifted faster than the model accounted for, Vice Director Shen. Consumer sentiment on—"
"Stop." Wenlang didn't raise a hand, didn't need to; the single word did the same work. "I've read the sentiment data. I read it before this meeting, which I would encourage everyone else at this table to start doing, because it would save us all considerable time. Sentiment moved two points in six weeks. Two. Your forecast missed by eleven. Explain the other nine, or don't waste my morning telling me about the two you can actually account for."
Director Peng's junior associate, seated two chairs down, made the mistake of glancing sideways at a colleague, a small, involuntary flinch of solidarity. Wenlang's eyes moved to her before she'd finished the glance.
"You. Do you have something to add?"
"No, Vice Director Shen."
"Then I'd ask you to keep your face still during a client accountability review. It's distracting, and it suggests to me that you find this funny, which I promise you, if this were your account, you would not." He turned back to Peng without missing a beat. "You built the model." Wenlang set the page down, precisely, corner aligned with the edge of the table, the way he did everything. "If the model can't account for the market it was built to predict, the model is wrong, and the person who built it is the person responsible for it being wrong. Not the market. The market doesn't work for me. You do." He looked around the table, unhurried, and the room seemed to physically contract under the attention. "This is Sheng Industries. Our name is on the building. When a client sees eleven percent underperformance with our logo stamped on the report, they don't remember that consumer sentiment was volatile that quarter. They remember that we told them a number, and the number was wrong. I will not have this department's credibility spent on excuses that wouldn't survive a first-year business student's questions. Rebuild the model. I want it on my desk by Thursday, and I want you to walk me through every assumption personally, because apparently I can't trust anyone else in this room to have checked them the first time."
Chang Yu, seated at his left hand with a tablet at his left and stylus at right giving a taping soft noise writing down a point from Shen Wenlang remarks, excluding the bitter notes out of it. In four years as Shen Wenlang's secretary, he had learned that the correct response to a dressing-down of this caliber was to keep writing or act as if he is writing something at exactly the same speed as before it started, as a kind of silent demonstration to the rest of the room that this was, in fact, a perfectly normal Tuesday. Y’all just need to breath signal.
"Anything else, Vice Director Shen?" she asked, when the silence had gone on a beat too long.
"Yes." Wenlang was already moving toward the door. "Someone tell HR we have three open reqs on this floor because apparently competence is now optional for employment at this company. I'd like that corrected before I have to start doing everyone's job as well as my own."
He left. The room exhaled in a choir. Director Peng put his head down on the table, very briefly, before remembering he was forty-four years old and a subsidiary director and sitting up again.
Two floors down, entirely unaware that any of this had happened, Xu Shaoyou was filling out his first-day paperwork with the wrong pen.
"You want the black one," said the woman across the desk, not unkindly, plucking the blue gel pen out of his hand and replacing it with a plain black ballpoint. "HR's scanner doesn't read blue ink half the time. You'll fill out four pages and then get told to do it again in three weeks when payroll can't process it."
"Oh thank you." Shaoyou took the pen, flustered, and smiled at her the specific, easy way he smiled at almost everyone, like meeting her was the nicest surprise of his day. "Sorry, I probably look like I've never filled out a form before."
"Everyone looks like that on day one. Mo Yuan." She held out a hand, firm grip, an alpha's confident handshake that Shaoyou returned with rather less confidence. She looked to be a year or two older than him, sharp-eyed, hair pulled back in, a very neat looking but still very human and rather kind look. "Marketing, second year. I got assigned to walk you through onboarding because apparently I complained the least the last time someone asked me to do this, which in this department counts as volunteering."
"Xu Shaoyou." He said it easily, without the flicker of hesitation he'd rehearsed in the mirror that morning, and was privately quite proud of himself for it. "Nice to meet you. Actually I’m very excited. I know that's a weird thing to say about filing HR forms."
"It's a weird thing to say about anything at this company, honestly." Mo Yuan slid the stack of forms toward him and nodded at the pen. "Sign there, there, and there, initial there, and then I'll take you up to the floor. Fair warning, Marketing's a good team. Marketing's manager is a different conversation."
"The Vice Director?" As Shaoyou ever try to probe from the HR before, who is going to be his literal boss, the HR said someone who is on his way be a CMO, so Shaoyou shall make sure his performance could support the soon-to-be-CMO-Vice Director.
"Shen Wenlang." She said the name the way some people say the name of a weather system. "You'll meet him today, probably. Everyone does, day one, whether they want to or not. Little advice, since you seem like a genuinely nice person and I'd hate to watch you get flattened without warning: don't take anything he says personally. It's not personal. You just need to breath, because that’s basically him, all the time, to everyone. He doesn't have a setting below 'exacting.' I've seen him make the head of Legal cry over a comma."
Shaoyou blinked. "A comma?"
"An Oxford comma. In a contract clause. It changed the legal meaning of the sentence, apparently, so I'll grant him that one was fair, but he didn't have to say it in front of the entire cross-functional team." Mo Yuan capped her pen, businesslike. "Anyway. Don't cry in front of him if you can help it. He doesn't do anything with it except get more clipped, and it just makes the rest of the meeting more awkward for everyone who has to sit there watching."
"I don't think I'm much of a crier," Shaoyou said, which was a rather blatant lie, because he is a true crying tap water, he cried at commercials, at other people's weddings, or when he walks past by a dog with striking resemblance as Hachiko, thru that unbothered confidence that Mo Yuan actually paused and looked at him for a second longer than the sentence warranted.
"Huh," she said. "Okay. We'll see."
The floor, when they reached it, had the particular hush of an office that had recently survived something. A few people glanced up as Mo Yuan led him past the rows of desks, expressions carefully neutral in the way of coworkers who had learned not to react visibly to new blood arriving on a day when the Vice Director was already in a “mood”, the mood. They’re secretly wishing for this sweet looking new blood a safe journey to the wolf’s den.
"That's Director Peng's team, they are from one of subsidiary, from floor 12, they had a rough morning, don't ask," Mo Yuan said under her breath, steering him past. "Your desk's here, next to mine. Chang Yu up front handles Director Shen's calendar, he’s actually quite amiable, don't let the resting expression fool you, he’s just efficient & sharp. If you ever need something signed off fast, go through him, not email."
Shaoyou set down his bag, the cheapest shoulder bag from Pedro, before anyone knows who he is by bringing Loro Piana to the office and reveal his true identity. He looked around at the floor that would apparently be his for the foreseeable future, it’s the no title on the door, no reserved parking, no assistant of his own, nothing that had followed him from the life he actually came from — and felt something in his chest settle, warm and pleased, the way it always did when he managed, even briefly, to just be a person doing a normal thing.
"It's a really nice office," he said, and meant it, and Mo Yuan gave him another one of those looks, like she was recalibrating some private assessment of him in real time.
"You're a strange one, Xu Shaoyou." She said it without malice, dropping into the chair at her own desk and spinning it to face him. "Most people walk onto this floor for the first time looking like they're about to be sentenced. You're looking around like someone handed you a puppy."
"Is that bad?"
"It's not bad. It's just, a bit unusual I might say. Where'd you work before this?"
"Nowhere, really. Some internships." This part, at least, was almost entirely true, if he didn't specify which family's foundation the internships had quietly orbited. "I've been trying to figure out what I actually want to do for a while. My family's kind of.. um.. traditional, I guess. There were a lot of opinions about what I should be doing instead of this. I sort of insisted."
"Rebelling by getting an entry-level marketing job." Mo Yuan snorted. "Bold strategy. What'd they want you doing instead, med school?"
"Something like that." Shaoyou smiled down at his bag, not quite meeting her eyes, and Mo Yuan with a typical Alpha trait, she is sharp, but not yet sharp enough in this particular direction to probe more, so she let it go, filing the small evasion away next to all the other small things she'd already started collecting about him without entirely meaning to.
"Well. Welcome to the trenches, then. Rebellion looks good on you so far." She nodded toward the empty chair beside her own. "That one's yours. Get settled, because in about ten minutes Chang Yu is going to come tell us both to get to a briefing, and I promise you it will not feel like a warm welcome."
Both of them only a three steps away from knowing what they are going to dealing with, because that was when Chang Yu appeared at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, and said, without preamble, "Xu Shaoyou. Vice Director Shen wants the new associates in the small conference room in five minutes for onboarding briefing. Don't be late. He counts."
The onboarding briefing was not, as Shaoyou had naively pictured it, a gentle welcome-to-the-team slideshow with a company history timeline and a stock photo of people high-fiving over a laptop. It was Shen Wenlang, standing at the front of a small glass-walled room with four new associates seated in front of him, running through department expectations at a clip that assumed everyone in the room already knew what half the acronyms meant.
Shaoyou had, of course, seen pictures of him, a face like that ended up in the company newsletter often enough, and sometimes on a random TV interview on Friday morning related to youth and business. But pictures had not adequately prepared him for the actual physical experience of being in a room with Shen Wenlang. He was tall, a full head above anyone else at the front of the room, close to 188 centimeters if Shaoyou had to guess, built lean and precise in a way that made an ordinary charcoal suit look like a Tom Ford ad. He had the kind of face that photographed well and, in person, was somehow more striking for how little effort it seemed to be making, sharp brows set low over dark, assessing eyes, a strong neck that support his sharp jaw, combine with his sharp mouth, those sharp feature could only cut the other counterpart. In Shaoyou’s judgment, Wenlang has the sort of handsome that sounds like warning alarm. He had the kind of stillness that read less like calm and more like coiled attention, eyes moving over each of the four new hires in turn with an assessment that instead of extending a welcome and he conduct an audit, a thorough one.
S-class, Shaoyou registered distantly, the way his omega instinct running in two different ways, one is a warning, one filled with a weird excitement. Actually it’s not a smell, the blockers saw to that on both their parts, but some old, unscientific instinct every omega was quietly trained to clock from adolescence. S-class alphas didn't just run hotter than everyone else; they ran narrower, wired from birth for command and precision at a cost most of them paid for in ulcers, insomnia, and a hum of tension that never fully left their shoulders even at rest. They were rare, and difficult to be around for long, without exception. Shaoyou had met exactly one before, at a business dinner years ago accompanying his dad in a very rare intensity, because he doesn’t like to show himself, not until he feels like strong enough to carry the “3rd generation” conglomerate badge. This felt different. He filed that observation away too, unexamined, next to all the others.
"You'll each be assigned to a senior associate for your first month," Wenlang said, not looking at notes, because he never seemed to need them. "That does not mean your work becomes their responsibility. Everything with your name on it is your responsibility, full stop, regardless of who reviewed it first. I do not accept 'my mentor said it was fine' as an excuse for an error, because your mentor is not the one whose name is on the file when it goes to a client." His eyes moved down the row. "This department does not have a culture of hand-holding. If you need to be told twice, you'll find this is not the right floor for you. Questions?"
Nobody had questions. Nobody in the room, Shaoyou suspected, would have had questions if the building were actively on fire.
"Good. Xu Shaoyou." Wenlang's eyes landed on him, and Shaoyou felt the full weight of that audit-gaze land somewhere just under his ribs, unfamiliar and not entirely unpleasant, which he filed away to examine later, privately, when he had more emotional bandwidth for it. "You're assigned to the Q3 retention deck refresh with Mo Yuan. It's due end of week. It is not complicated. Don't make it complicated."
"Understood," Shaoyou said, and smiled at him, an actual smile, warm and open, the exact smile that had disarmed teachers and security guards and, on one memorable occasion, a very stern tax auditor his whole life, it hadn't yet occurred to him that this particular audience might not smile back.
Wenlang did not smile back. He looked, for exactly one flat second, faintly puzzled by the smile, the way you'd look at a stranger who'd waved at you assuming you were someone else, and then moved on to the next agenda item as if it hadn't happened at all.
Mo Yuan, watching from the side of the room, filed that one away too.
It’s her second year here, yet she also got her own reminder of exactly who they were all dealing with about twenty minutes later, when Wenlang stopped by her desk on his way back from the briefing to review the mentor assignment paperwork.
"Mo Yuan." He didn't sit, didn't soften his voice for the fact that she'd been on this floor longer than the person he'd just finished intimidating. "Your Q2 self-review says you want to be considered for the senior associate track by year end."
"That's right, sir.”
"Then stop letting your mentees see you as a soft landing." He set the folder down, tapped it once. "Xu Shaoyou will learn faster if you correct him the way I correct people, not the way you'd want to be corrected. Kindness isn't mentorship, I've seen you confuse the two, with the Q1 intern who still can't write a headline without confusing the reader on what’s inside the actual report.”
"With respect, that intern also didn't have anyone above her willing to explain why a headline was wrong instead of just telling her it was." Mo Yuan didn't flinch saying it, which was, Shaoyou noted with something like awe, a genuinely rare skill on this floor. "Being hard on people and being clear with people aren't the same thing either, sir. You get results because you're clear, not just because you're hard. I'm allowed to want both without borrowing your whole personality."
There was a pause just long enough to register as one.
"Fine, fair point” Wenlang said, which from him, Mo Yuan would explain to Shaoyou later, was as close to losing an argument as the man was constitutionally capable of admitting in public. "Prove it thru him, then. If Xu Shaoyou is still making first-week mistakes by the time the Meiyuan pitch closes, it won't reflect well on your methods, senior associate track or otherwise." He was already walking away. "Consider that motivation."
"Consider it received," Mo Yuan called after him, and only once he'd rounded the corner did she turn to Shaoyou with an expression that mixed genuine irritation with something almost like relish. "See? Told you. Equal opportunity terror. At least he's consistent."
"You weren't scared of him at all just now."
"I was terrified," Mo Yuan said, picking her pen back up like nothing had happened. "You just have to not let it show. It's the only currency that works on a man like that."
Actually from that scene alone, Shaoyou already can tell that Shen Wenlang is a bully but with a sense of fairness and solidarity to his own team. It’s a rare character for someone in management level, that it seems like the entire floor perceived, they are afraid of Shen Wenlang, in undebatable sense, but also there’s respect doubling their attitude towards their boss.
The Q3 retention deck refresh was, as promised, not complicated. Shaoyou spent two days on it with genuine enthusiasm, cross-referencing last quarter's numbers, rewriting stale copy, running his drafts past Mo Yuan for sanity checks, and by Wednesday afternoon he was fairly proud of what he'd built. He submitted the file at 4:47 p.m., feeling, for the first time since accepting this job, like he had actually contributed something real.
At 5:03 p.m., his desk phone rang. Chang Yu's voice, flat and businesslike: "Vice Director Shen wants you in his office."
He walked in already smiling, because he genuinely hadn't considered that this might go badly, his years of learning business and sitting beside his dad during an ‘at home annual review’ gives him that confidence, his self-assurance cells simply didn't expect bad outcomes the way other people seemed to, the way Mo Yuan clearly did, judging by the look she shot him across the floor on his way past her desk.
Wenlang had the deck pulled up on his monitor, cursor hovering on slide four.
"'Q3 Retenton Strategy.'" He turned the monitor slightly so Shaoyou could see it. "You're missing an I. The lamest faulty someone as old as you can make.”
Shaoyou leaned in, saw it, This damn Retenton instead of Retention, sitting right there in forty-point header font, and felt his stomach drop the specific half-inch that came with catching your own mistake a beat too late.
"Ohm I'm so sorry, I must have autocorrected it wrong and didn't catch it when I—"
"I don't need to know why it happened. I need to know it won't happen again." Wenlang's voice hadn't changed register at all, the same pitch, surgical flatness he'd used on Director Peng that morning, and Shaoyou understood, distantly, that this was simply how the man spoke to everyone, which didn't make it land any softer. "This is a header. Headers are the first thing anyone reads. If I can't trust you to proofread six words in size forty, I have no reason to trust you with a paragraph, let alone a client deck. You had two days for this. Spell-check exists. Use it. Diligently” Stressing out the ‘diligent’ word as if he judge Shaoyou is not diligent enough.
"I will. I'm sorry, I'll fix it right now, and I'll go through the rest of the deck line by line before I resend it—"
“As you should.” Wenlang was already looking back at his monitor, done with the conversation in the particular way he seemed to be done with most conversations — abruptly, completely, no lingering. "And Xu Shaoyou."
"Yes?"
"This isn't a punishment. It's a correction. There's a difference, and I'd encourage you to learn it early, because you'll be corrected a great deal in this department before you're any good at your job." He didn't look up. "That's all."
Shaoyou stood there for a second longer than the dismissal strictly required, turning that sentence over — there's a difference — and then said, with a warmth in his voice that seemed to genuinely catch Wenlang off guard, because his eyes flicked up briefly, "Thank you for telling me. I mean that. I'd rather know."
He left before he could see whatever expression crossed Wenlang's face in response to that, which was probably for the best, because Wenlang himself spent a full fifteen seconds after the door closed trying to identify what exactly had just happened and coming up with nothing he had a name for. Because he feels nothing but tingle in his skin. This little omega seems like a nuisance already.
"He what?" Mo Yuan set down her chopsticks so fast they clattered against the takeout container. They'd claimed a table in the break room, the kind of low-stakes Wednesday dinner that happened when a deadline ran late enough to justify expensing food. "He told you it wasn't a punishment, it was a correction, and you said thank you, I'd rather know? Xu Shaoyou. That man made a thirty-two-year-old finance director apologize to a spreadsheet last spring. I watched him do it. The spreadsheet didn't even do anything wrong, the finance director had just built it badly. And you're sitting here eating fried rice like nothing happened."
"Nothing did happen, though." Shaoyou considered this honestly, chopsticks paused. "I made a mistake. He told me. I fixed it. That's — I mean, that's just how it's supposed to work, isn't it?"
"Most people cry a little first. Or spiral for the rest of the day. Or come find me to complain about how unfair he is, which, frankly, I'd have accepted as a totally normal response."
"I don't really see the point in that part." Shaoyou shrugged, unbothered, and there was something in the shrug, the easy, grounded, entirely without performance — that made Mo Yuan look at him the way you look at a puzzle you can't quite finish assembling. "Being upset about it doesn't fix the typo. And he wasn't wrong. I did miss it. I'd rather someone just tell me clearly than dance around it and let me keep doing it wrong."
"Okay, but — where does that come from?" Mo Yuan gestured at him with her chopsticks, half-exasperated, half-genuinely curious. "You've been here four days. You've been corrected, what, three times already? The email you sent to the wrong distribution list on day two. The meeting room mix-up yesterday. Now this. And every single time, you just — bounce. Like a rubber ball. I've worked with people who've been in this industry a decade who don't bounce like that. What's your secret?"
Shaoyou thought about it, actually thought about it, because it wasn't a question he got asked very often and he liked being asked real questions.
"I think," he said slowly, "it's because nobody's ever made me doubt that I'm fine. Underneath it, I mean. Like, whatever happens at work, whatever mistake I make, I still go home to people who think I'm — " he searched for the word, found it, looked slightly embarrassed by how earnest it sounded out loud, "—enough. Already. Before I've proven anything. So a bad meeting is just a bad meeting. It's not evidence about whether I deserve good things or not. Does that make sense? I don't know. My mom used to say it better than I just did."
Mo Yuan was quiet for a second. "That's either the healthiest thing I've heard all year," she said finally, "or you're about four rejections away from a complete system failure, and I genuinely can't tell which."
"Probably the first one," Shaoyou said, cheerfully, and went back to his fried rice, and Mo Yuan — who had grown up the only alpha daughter in a family that had wanted a son and had spent her entire career being underestimated in a department full of people who assumed alpha women belonged in operations, not marketing, and had built her considerable confidence the hard way, plank by plank, argument by argument — found herself, against her better instincts, deciding she liked this strange, soft, unbothered new associate quite a lot.
The typo was not, as it turned out, not the only anomaly from Shaoyou.
Thursday morning, Shaoyou booked Conference Room B for a 10 AM vendor call, as he wrote it correctly on his own calendar, and then, in a fit of enthusiasm about actually having a meeting to run, forgot to check whether the room was already held. It was. Director Peng's rescheduled Haicheng review — already a delicate subject after Tuesday — had claimed the same room forty minutes earlier, and by the time facilities sorted out whose booking held, Peng stood in the hallway with his materials in his arms like a man kicked from his bedroom by his wife.
Wenlang found Shaoyou at his desk before lunch, and this time he didn't summon him to the office; he simply appeared, which was somehow worse, because it meant the whole floor got to watch.
"Xu Shaoyou."
"Vice Director Shen." Shaoyou was already half out of his chair.
"Sit down. This won't take long enough to require standing." Wenlang's voice was pitched exactly for the two of them and yet somehow audible to the entire row of desks around them, a skill Shaoyou suspected was deliberate. "You informed a booked meeting room to a vendor and didn’t check again so you overlapped with Peng. Do you understand what that cost this morning? Not the fifteen minutes — fifteen minutes is nothing. It cost Director Peng, who is already on thin ice with a client relationship I am personally overseeing, the appearance of being disorganized in front of that client's assistant, who was standing in the hallway watching the whole thing. That's not your fifteen minutes to spend. It was his, and you spent it for him."
"I should have checked the room calendar before booking. That's completely on me. I'll apologize to Director Peng myself, and I'll double-check every booking from now on before I—"
"I don't need a list of what you'll do better. I need you to actually do it." Wenlang was already turning to leave, then paused, and added, without softening it at all, "Check twice. Not because I think you're careless. Because you're new, and new people who are actually paying attention check twice. The ones who don't are the ones who think they already know everything, and so far you haven't given me any reason to think that's you. Don't start now."
It took Shaoyou a full ten seconds after Wenlang walked away to realize that sentence had, technically, contained something almost resembling a gentle reminder with compliment, buried so deep inside the correction that he wasn't entirely sure he hadn't imagined it. He decided, on balance, not to mention it to Mo Yuan, who would either not believe him or read far too much into it, and he wasn't sure yet which outcome he dreaded more.
Friday came in at a dead sprint — two calls overlapping, a last-minute request from Chang Yu for revised talking points, and somewhere in the middle of it, Shaoyou grabbed the wrong file out of a folder with four nearly identical names and attached it to an email without opening it, something he'd later describe to Mo Yuan as "the single worst six seconds of decision-making of my professional life so far." It was an earlier draft, still marked with comments from department supervisor, one of which read, embarrassingly, this whole section reads like it was written by someone who's never actually used the product — a joke Mo Yuan had left during their Tuesday review that Shaoyou had never deleted, and it published with comment intact, to a mid-tier client's entire marketing team before he'd finished his coffee.
He found out from the client's assistant's reply-all fifteen minutes later, a single cheerful line — haha, love the honesty, is this the real version or should we wait for the polished one? — that made the fried rice he ate days ago feels like bubbling up.
"Xu Shaoyou." Wenlang didn't even look up from the email when Shaoyou appeared in his doorway, having been summoned by a two-word message: my office. "Do you understand what this comment tells the client about how this deck was built?"
"That we don't take feedback seriously and leave it in the final file. Yes. I understand. I'm mortified, honestly." Shaoyou did look mortified — flushed, hands twisting slightly at his sides — but his voice, underneath the embarrassment, stayed steady, warm even, like the mortification was a weather condition passing through rather than a verdict on his worth. "I've already called the client's assistant to apologize and confirm the corrected version is on its way. I wanted to fix it myself before telling you, but I should have told you first. That's on me too."
Wenlang finally looked up. There was something almost imperceptible in his expression — Shaoyou always has this trait as Wenlang understood of ‘i know im guilty, but guilt trip won’t work for me’, he scanned Shaoyou’s face again, only to find this omega had very soft, round cheeks that somehow made him want to pardon him faster than he could apologize. Underneath the recalibration, quieter, was something he would not have admitted to under any professional circumstance: a small, private flicker of interest, the same flicker a person gets watching someone walk straight into a tiger’s den an instead of getting scared, this soft white thing only wants to nudge the tiger. He’s been here for years, interns has come & go, every single one of them had gone pale, or quiet, or defensive. This one kept coming back for more like it hadn't occurred to him that there was another option.
"You called the client yourself. Before coming to me."
"I thought it'd look worse if I made you clean up my mess for me. I wanted to at least try to fix what I broke."
"That was either the right instinct or a very lucky one." Wenlang's eyes went back to the screen, but there was a beat, a small one, where he seemed to be deciding something. "Don't let it happen again. And Xu Shaoyou — next time, tell me first. Fixing your own mistakes is not the same as keeping me informed, and I need both, not just one."
"Understood. I'm sorry."
"You've said that four times this week." Wenlang sighed.
"I mean it four times this week." Shaoyou said it lightly, not defensively, and there was, again, that same small hitch in Wenlang's expression, gone almost before it registered — something in the vicinity of this employee is strange and I have not yet located the correct response to him.
"Get back to work," Wenlang said, which was as close to a dismissal without teeth as he was capable of producing that week, and Shaoyou left with the distinct, private impression that he had, somehow, not entirely lost ground.
Pin Ming had worked for the Sheng family for twenty-six years, long enough to have carried Shaoyou on his shoulders at the boy's first birthday banquet. Long enough to be trusted with things the Chairman told almost no one else, and to know exactly how to walk the floors of Sheng Industries without anyone questioning why the Director of General Affairs was doing a routine facilities inspection, three times a week on the marketing level three in the 15th floor of this 50 stories building.
It was, on paper, a perfectly logical assignment. General Affairs oversaw building operations, internal security, executive protocol, and conveniently, load-bearingly a sweet little omega trying to be a normal new kid instead with “special personnel considerations," a category broad enough to cover almost anything Pin Ming needed it to cover. He is so good at keeping a quiet, unofficial eye on the Chairman's only son without a single line of it ever appearing on an official report.
He found Shaoyou at his desk on Friday evening, alone, running one more check on a corrected deck before sending it out into the world for the second time that week.
"Xiao Xu," Pin Ming said, using the workplace name easily, the way he'd practiced doing for weeks before Shaoyou's first day, because a slip in front of the wrong person would undo six months of careful planning in one syllable. "Working late again."
"Un-- I mean Director Pin Ming..” Shaoyou's face lit up, his tongue almost slipped and called him Uncle but he was fast enough to revise it — genuine, unguarded, the smile he never had to perform for the one person on this floor who already knew exactly who he was. He caught himself, glanced around the mostly empty floor, and lowered his voice anyway out of habit. "I keep telling you, you don't have to keep 'checking the facilities' up here. I'm fine.”
"I know you're fine. I have eyes." Pin Ming settled into the empty chair at the next desk, folding his hands, the posture of a man who had all the time in the world and intended to use some of it here. "You look tired."
"It's been a week. I've made, akh.. I've lost count, honestly. A lot of small mistakes." He said it without self-pity, turning back to his screen. "Vice Director Shen doesn't let anything go."
"I've heard about Vice Director Shen." Pin Ming's tone gave away nothing, though he had, in fact, read Shen Wenlang's entire personnel file twice before the Chairman signed off on the department placement, and had opinions about the man that he was keeping, for now, to himself. "Your father asked me tonight whether he should be worried."
Shaoyou's hands stilled on the keyboard. "You talked to Papa about this?"
"I talk to your father every night. It's my job you little rascal.” Pin Ming allowed himself something close to a smile. "I told him you seemed happier this week than in the two years before it. Tired, but happier — that you told your mother on the phone about being corrected in front of four new hires like it was a funny story, not a tragedy. He found that reassuring. I can hear a clink of his favorite tea mug and a praise: 'good, let the man be strict, my son has been coddled his whole life and he's still turned out kind, let's see what he's made of when someone finally makes him work for something.'"
"That's a very Papa thing to say." Shaoyou smiled proudly and amused by his old man.
"It is." Pin Ming stood, straightened his jacket, glanced once more around the quiet floor with the practiced casualness of a man checking an exit he already knew. "For what it's worth — I don't think Vice Director Shen is being cruel to you. He's being exactly as difficult with you as with everyone on this floor, which is, in its own way, a kind of respect most new hires never get. He hasn't treated you like glass. He's treated you like someone he expects to be good, eventually." He paused at the edge of the cubicle. "Your father would like that part, if he knew it. I won't tell him. He'd start asking questions I'm not ready to answer yet."
Shaoyou watched him go, turned back to his screen, and sat with that for a long minute before he finally hit send on the corrected deck.
Pin Ming called the Chairman from his car in the underground garage, as he did every evening, engine off, phone on speaker, the habit of a man who had long ago learned not to have this particular conversation anywhere it might be overheard.
"He's thinner than when he started," Pin Ming said, without preamble, because Sheng Boyuan had never once in twenty-six years wanted small talk before the actual report. "Not badly. Just — working through lunch some days, forgetting to eat until Mo Yuan reminds him. I've had the kitchen start sending extra in his delivery orders under a different name so he doesn't ask questions about it."
"And the Vice Director?"
"Exactly as advertised. Strict with everyone, not just him — I watched him take apart a forty-four-year-old director this morning over a spreadsheet, and Little Youyou got the same treatment over a booking mix-up an hour later, same tone, same lack of patience, no difference in how he handles either of them." Pin Ming paused. "He doesn't know who he's talking to, sir. That much I'm certain of. If he knew, he wouldn't dare speak to your son like that in front of a full floor."
On the other end of the line, the Chairman was quiet long enough that Pin Ming checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped.
"Good," Sheng Boyuan said finally. "Everyone in that boy's life has been gentle with him since he was born, myself included, and it's produced a son I'm proud of in every way but one — he's never had to find out what he's made of when someone refuses to make it easy for him. If this Shen Wenlang is half as demanding as his file suggests, my son either breaks, in which case I have him out of that building within the hour, or he doesn't, and I finally get to see what he's capable of with nobody cushioning the fall." A pause, quieter. "Which is it looking like, Old Pin?"
"He's laughing about his mistakes at dinner, sir. Telling his coworker stories about being corrected like they're funny anecdotes instead of humiliations." Pin Ming allowed himself the smallest note of warmth. "I don't think he's going to break."
"No," the Chairman agreed, and there was something almost like pride in it, carefully restrained, the way the man restrained most things that mattered to him in front of anyone but his son. "I don't imagine he will. Keep watching anyway. And Old Pin — don't let him know you're watching. He'll only ask you to stop, and then I'll have nothing."
"Understood, sir. Goodnight."
He met Mo Yuan for a late dinner after, because she'd texted you survived week one, I'm buying you noodles, no arguing, and Shaoyou, who had never once in his life turned down free noodles or the company of someone who wanted to give them to him, met her at a place two blocks from the office. The old aunt wrinkled hand is faster than his finger on the keyboard, a perfect composition of broth, some sauces, and other seasoning. It feels like home already, hectic but comfortable, in a sense that it will bring ease to your mind and a week of corrections from Shen Wenlang.
"So," Mo Yuan said, once they were both a bowl deep and the day's adrenaline had finally started to drain out of both of them, "real talk. Is it true that you’re an Omega? I mean. I couldn't smell anything off you all week, which either means you've got very good blockers or you're a beta and everyone's been assuming wrong."
"Omega." Shaoyou tapped the patch behind his ear, mostly hidden under his hair. "Good blockers. My — someone in my life is very particular about them."
"Smart someone." She studied him for a second over her chopsticks. "You seeing anyone? Not that it's my business, I'm just building a full profile on my strange new coworker, purely for research purposes."
"No, nobody. Well—" Shaoyou's phone buzzed against the table before he finished the sentence, and he glanced down at it, and something in his face did a small, complicated thing — pleasant surprise layered over something Mo Yuan couldn't immediately name. "Oh. Speak of — sort of. This is actually kind of funny timing."
"Who is it?"
"Old friend from high school. Hua Yong — he was a senior when I was in my first year, we were in the same club." Shaoyou turned the phone so she could see the message, guileless about it in the way he was guileless about most things: heard from a mutual friend you started a new job. proud of you, xu shaoyou. we should catch up sometime, it's been way too long. i think about our old group a lot lately.
‘a mutual friend’? Shaoyou suspect the mutual friend is not really mutual but Hua Yong’s aide who ocassionally checking on him.
"He was always really nice to me back then. Looked out for me a lot, actually, when some of the other seniors gave me a hard time about being an omega who wasn't very — I don't know, aggressive about it, I guess. Confident in the wrong ways, some people used to say."
Mo Yuan read the message twice, something flickering behind her eyes that she didn't put words to yet. There was a specific weight to I think about our old group a lot lately that didn't quite match the breezy, casual tone of the rest of the text — a little too warm, a little too deliberate, the overdid attention behind the ‘missing old time’ pretext.
"You gonna text him back?"
"Of course." Shaoyou was already typing, thumbs quick, entirely unbothered. "He's a good guy. It'd be rude not to."
"Sure," Mo Yuan said, and left it there, because it wasn't her place yet to plant seeds of doubt in a friendship four days old, about a person she'd never met, based on nothing but a feeling, but she filed the name away anyway, the way she'd started filing away small things about Xu Shaoyou generally, in the back of her mind that maybe her Alpha’s instinct acting up, thinking this Omega should be protected.
"What was he like, back then?" she asked instead, because curiosity won out over caution, as it usually did with her. "This Hua Yong."
"Popular. Good at everything, kind of effortlessly — student council, top of his year, captain of the debate team." Shaoyou said it fondly, stirring the last of his broth. "He used to walk me to my club meetings when some of the older boys were giving me trouble. I was pretty miserable that first year, you know too tall, perhaps. I wasn't like the other omegas in my grade, and some people made it very clear they thought there was something wrong with me for it. Hua Yong never once made me feel that way. He just showed up. Sat with me at lunch a few times when nobody else would. I always figured he felt sorry for me."
"Or he liked you," Mo Yuan said, watching his face for a reaction and getting, predictably, none at all.
"He was a senior. I was some awkward first-year with no friends. I don't think it was like that." Shaoyou laughed it off, easy and unbothered, already typing his reply to the text — of course! would love to catch up, it's been forever, glad you're doing well — and hit send without a second thought. "Anyway, it'll be nice to see him. It's been months.”
Mo Yuan didn't push it further, but she noted, privately, the particular quality of of course a senior three years older walked a first-year omega to his club meetings and sat with him at lunch out of pure disinterested kindness — noted that Shaoyou maybe not a really good one catching up feelings.
Shen Wenlang stayed at the office until nearly ten that Friday, which was not unusual, going through the week's final reports with the specific, joyless, rather ambitiously thorough. His believe is he believes almost nothing he hadn't personally verified. He got to the Q3 retention deck last — the corrected version, resent that evening, no typos this time, no lingering comment threads, copy tightened in three places Shaoyou hadn't even been asked to touch, the whole thing noticeably better than the file that had crossed his desk on Wednesday.
He read it twice. He did not, technically, need to read it twice. He told himself the second pass was due diligence.
Chang Yu knocked once and let himself in, dropping a folder on the corner of his desk. "Last thing before I head out. HR wants your sign-off on formal probation review dates for this week's new hires. Standard sixty-day check-ins."
"Fine." He didn't look up from the monitor.
He paused at the door, glancing at the screen he was still parked on. "That the retention deck? I thought that went out Wednesday."
"It did. This is the corrected version."
"Ah." Something crossed his face, brief and knowing, the particular expression of a secretary who had watched his boss review a great many corrected files over four years and had never once seen him linger on one past the point of professional necessity. "Anything wrong with it?"
Wenlang was quiet for a second too long before he answered.
"No," he said finally, closing the file. "It's competent. Better than competent, actually, for someone four days in." He said it the way he said most things — flat, factual, entirely without warmth, a data point rather than a compliment. "Persistent, if nothing else."
"High praise, from you."
"It's not praise. It's an observation." He was already reaching for the next file, done with the topic as far as he was concerned. "Add Xu Shaoyou to the Meiyuan pitch prep next week. Small role — research support, nothing client-facing. I want to see whether the deck was a fluke or whether he can actually hold a thought together under real pressure."
Chang Yu made a note, careful to keep his expression neutral, though privately he thought this was, for Shen Wenlang, roughly the equivalent of another man sending flowers. "You've never fast-tracked a new hire into pitch prep in their first two weeks. Not once, in four years."
"He's not being fast-tracked. He's being tested." Wenlang's eyes were back on his screen, tone closing the subject with the particular finality he used on conversations he had no further interest in continuing. "There's a difference. Goodnight, Chang Yu” clearly telling to get out just in a different style.
He left without pushing it, because pushing it had never once worked on this particular man in four years of trying, but he allowed herself, in the elevator down, a small, private smile — the kind reserved for information of his long time friend-now boss Shen Wenlang. He make sure next time Shen Wenlang tried to insist there was nothing unusual happening on the 15th floor.
Upstairs, alone in his office, Wenlang closed the file, closed the laptop, and moved on to the next item on his list with the same clipped efficiency he applied to everything else that crossed his desk. If some small, irrelevant part of his attention snagged for a moment on the phrase persistent, if nothing else and found it an insufficient description of what he'd actually meant, he didn't dwell on it long enough to notice. There was a pitch to prepare for. There were four other probation files still waiting on his sign-off, none of which required this much thought, and he intended to keep it that way.
He signed the Meiyuan pitch prep addition, added Xu Shaoyou's name to the research support line without comment, and went home.
Shaoyou found out about the pitch assignment Monday morning, in an email so short it took him three reads to be sure he wasn't misunderstanding it — You've been added to Meiyuan pitch prep, research support. Kickoff 9 a.m. Don't be late. — S.W. — and sat at his desk for a full minute afterward with a feeling in his chest he didn't quite have a word for yet, somewhere between nerves and something warmer that he wasn't ready to examine too closely.
"You've been here five business days," Mo Yuan said, reading over his shoulder without asking permission, the way she'd apparently decided was now allowed between them. "Nobody gets put on a live pitch team in five business days. Not even me, and I've been here two years."
"Maybe he just needs the extra hands."
"He does not, under any circumstances, 'just need the extra hands.' That man plans staffing three quarters in advance. This is deliberate." She studied him with the same recalibrating look she'd been giving him all week, equal parts fond and baffled. "I don't know what you did to end up on his radar, Xu Shaoyou, but for your sake, I hope it stays interesting instead of turning into a problem."
Shaoyou checked the conference room booking twice before he sat down.
The Meiyuan account was, Mo Yuan had explained in the elevator with the clipped urgency of someone briefing a soldier before deployment, one of the largest regional transit contracts up for renewal that year — a rail-and-bridge concession worth more than most countries' annual infrastructure budgets, currently theirs, currently at risk of walking to a competitor if the pitch team didn't convince the client's board the partnership was worth another decade. Six people sat around the table by 8:58 a.m.: two account directors, a strategist Shaoyou didn't recognize, Mo Yuan, Wenlang at the head, and Shaoyou himself, folder clutched like a shield, in the one open chair closest to the door — the unofficial seat reserved, everyone understood without being told, for whoever ranked lowest in the room.
"Research support will summarize the competitive landscape," Wenlang said, not looking up from his own notes, "then we move to positioning. Xu Shaoyou. Two minutes. Go."
Two minutes. Shaoyou had prepared four pages.
He got through the top three competitors cleanly enough — market share, recent contract losses, a rival's messaging misstep from the spring that had cost them a similar bid elsewhere — and then, reaching for something to close on, something warm and human to land the section the way he'd have closed any conversation in his entire life, he said, "And honestly, I think our biggest advantage isn't even the numbers. It's that people trust us. Sheng Industries feels like — like a name people grew up with. That kind of goodwill is hard to buy."
The room went very quiet in the specific way rooms go quiet right before someone senior decides to make an example of something.
"Goodwill." Wenlang set his pen down with exaggerated care and looked at Shaoyou the way you'd look at a puppy that had proudly deposited a dead bird on the good carpet. "Six business days in this building, and you'd like to tell a room full of people who've spent their careers on this account that we'll win a rail concession worth more than the GDP of several small nations because the client likes us. Warmly. The way one likes a name they grew up with." A beat, dry as chalk. "Shall I put that in the executive summary? 'Client goodwill: immeasurable, vibes-based, please renew.' I'm sure the board will be moved with your Gen-Z’s resolved?”
A strangled sound came from the strategist across the table, quickly converted into a cough.
"I meant it as context, not as the whole argument, I have three more pages of hard data after—"
"I don't need the three pages to know the first word out of your mouth on your first live pitch was goodwill." Wenlang's tone hadn't sharpened, hadn't risen; it never did, which was somehow worse, a scalpel instead of a slap. "This is not a client we charm. This is a client who runs numbers on our numbers before they let us finish a sentence. Bring them a feeling and they'll eat it and ask for the data as dessert. You're round, soft-spoken, and apparently constitutionally incapable of opening with anything that isn't sunshine — which might work delightfully on your coworkers, but this room isn't your coworkers, and I didn't put you on this account to practice being liked. Sit down. Let the strategist take it from here."
Shaoyou sat down. His ears had gone the particular, humiliating red they went whenever he was mortified in front of an audience that mattered, and for one full, terrible second, something in his chest cracked open exactly the way it had in the stairwell his very first week — before, unmistakably, he caught it, breathed through it, and put his face back together with the same stubborn, unshakeable warmth he brought to everything, because some things about him simply did not bend, not even here, not even now.
The meeting moved on. Wenlang did not look at him again for the rest of it.
Mo Yuan caught up to him at the elevator afterward, took one look at his face, and didn't bother pretending she hadn't watched the whole thing. "That was brutal, even for him."
"It was fine." Shaoyou pressed the button harder than it required. "He wasn't wrong. I should've led with the data."
"You don't have to be fine about it every single time, you know. You're allowed to just think he's an ass occasionally."
"Oh, I do." Something shifted in Shaoyou's face then — not the crack from the conference room, something else entirely, quick and sharp and a little bit delighted with itself, gone almost as soon as it appeared. "I'm allowed to think that and also come up with something better than 'goodwill' by tomorrow. Preferably something with a number in it. Preferably something that makes him work a little harder to find something wrong with it."
Mo Yuan looked at him for a long second, the elevator doors sliding open in front of them, and started, despite herself, to grin. "There it is."
"There what is?"
"Nothing." She stepped in ahead of him, still grinning. "Bring your A material tomorrow, Xu Shaoyou. I have a feeling this is about to get interesting."
— End of Episode 1 —