Wei Chen woke at 6:15 AM without his alarm.
He lay in the dark and ran a quiet internal inventory. Nothing had transformed overnight. No golden core, no expanded meridians, no dramatic physiological indicators. His apartment was still small. The water stain above his bed still looked like a declining revenue chart. His body felt approximately the same as it always did — stiff, vaguely tired, constitutionally unimpressive.
But there was something.
It was subtle enough that he might have dismissed it on any other morning. A low, persistent awareness — like becoming conscious of your own heartbeat. The city hummed at the edges of his perception, not loudly, not with any intensity that would have satisfied a cultivation novel's description of awakening. Just present. The aggregate spiritual output of several million people moving through infrastructure designed to carry it away from them, filtered and channeled upward through qi-aligned architecture that had been doing exactly this for eighty years.
He had felt none of it three days ago.
He made coffee, opened the manual to Chapter Three, and read for forty minutes before getting dressed.
At 8:47 AM he was at his desk, task queue open, Gerald the shredder inert to his left. Liu Fang arrived two minutes later, sat down without greeting him, and began working with the focused efficiency of someone who had long since stopped expecting the job to be meaningful and had committed instead to doing it well regardless.
At 8:49 AM, Wei Chen closed his task queue and prepared.
The HVAC spiritual circulation cycle ran at 8:50 AM every morning, and he now understood exactly what it was — the building collecting overnight ambient residue and routing it upward through the organizational qi matrix for institutional consolidation. For three weeks it had passed through him like current through a wire, giving him a headache because it was moving through him rather than to him.
This morning he ran the classification redirect the manual had described. Not a meditation. Not a breathing exercise. A mental recategorization — shifting incoming energetic data from the default environmental label to provisional receivable. The manual's analogy had been precise: most employees couldn't harvest ambient qi for the same reason they couldn't expense personal meals. Not because the mechanism didn't exist. Because they'd never been shown how to submit the claim.
The cycle began. He felt it the same way he always had — the initial pulse moving through the floor's architecture, the current finding his meridians the way water found the path of least resistance.
Except this time, some portion of it paused.
It was not dramatic. It was the energetic equivalent of a checkbox being ticked in a system that had previously been routing his data to the wrong account. Small. A rounding error in the building's total circulation budget. But when the cycle completed at 8:54 AM, something remained that had not remained before.
The manual called it Stage Zero Residual. He ran a quiet internal check the way the manual described — no instruments, just attention — and found it. Not power. Not yet. More like the sensation of having eaten a meal slightly larger than expected. Marginal resource availability where there had previously been exactly zero.
He found it, against all rationality, motivating.
He opened his task queue and got to work.
At 9:02 AM a calendar notification arrived.
Mandatory Team Introduction Meeting — 9:15 AM — Conference Room 47-C
Organizer: Zhou, Mei — Senior Associate II, Director Development Track — SQ: 8.7
Please come prepared to discuss your current task queue and development objectives.
Wei Chen looked up Zhou Mei in the internal directory.
Her profile photo showed a woman in her early thirties with the composure of someone who managed a great deal of internal noise very deliberately. Credentials: top-third of her cohort at the AMG Corporate Cultivation Academy, three consecutive exemplary performance reviews, specialization in Organizational Flow Optimization — a discipline whose departmental description amounted to identifying inefficiencies in human capital allocation and resolving them.
In a traditional sect she would have been called a consolidator.
She had been assigned as his direct supervisor.
He put his phone down, cleared four more items from his queue, and went to the meeting.
Conference Room 47-C was midway between the window desks and the elevator bank — close enough to good real estate to imply status, far enough to acknowledge that nobody in this meeting had reached it yet. Six people were already present when Wei Chen arrived at 9:12 AM: Junior Associates Peng and Da-Yong, who communicated primarily through a shared vocabulary of sighs; Mid-Level Coordinator Sister Huang, eleven years at AMG, possessing the spiritual stillness of someone who had transcended workplace anxiety through accumulated exposure rather than enlightenment; Grade Zero recruit Little Zhang, twenty-one, still in the phase where he believed enthusiasm was a viable career strategy; and Liu Fang, who had clearly received the assignment without warning based on her expression when Wei Chen entered.
Zhou Mei was already standing at the head of the table.
She had positioned herself before the first attendee arrived. The manual had a term for this — Wei Chen hadn't reached that section yet, but he recognized the principle instinctively. Spatial positioning in a meeting room was not incidental. It was the first move.
She carried the ambient pressure of an 8.7 SQ practitioner effortlessly, the way a large object altered the light around it without trying. The room felt slightly different with her in it — not oppressive, but weighted. Calibrated.
She was watching him when he sat down.
Not with hostility. With assessment. The specific look a consolidator gives something before determining whether it represents an efficiency to optimize or an inefficiency to eliminate.
He met her gaze and held it without expression.
Three seconds. Then she began.
"Good morning. I'll be honest because I find it more efficient than performance." She paused precisely long enough for the word performance to land. "I've been assigned to lead the Document Flow Optimization Initiative on forty-seven as part of my Director-track development program. This team is my implementation unit for the quarter. The initiative's primary objective is identifying redundancies in the current workflow and eliminating them. Some will be process redundancy. Some may be resource redundancy."
Little Zhang had stopped looking enthusiastic.
Resource redundancy was corporate cultivation terminology for people when you didn't want to say people.
"I'll be meeting with each of you individually today to review task queues and skill assessments." She let the next pause do its work. "I've already reviewed all of your personnel files."
It was directed at the room and at no one. But her gaze rested on Wei Chen approximately half a second longer than on anyone else.
She had seen his score. She had seen Grade Zero. She had formed a conclusion and she wanted him to know she'd formed it, because that was how consolidators established the terms of an arrangement before anyone had agreed to them.
He wrote the date at the top of his notebook and waited for the meeting to end.
Individual meetings were scheduled in reverse order of organizational rank. Junior Associates first, then Sister Huang, then Liu Fang. Last — in the slot that communicated the least urgency and the most expendability — Wei Chen and Little Zhang.
Little Zhang's meeting lasted eight minutes.
Wei Chen's was at 3:30 PM. He had six hours.
He used all of them.
He processed his task queue down to twenty-five pending items. He ate lunch at his desk. And during the forty minutes he'd allocated for the manual, he read Chapter Four.
HOSTILE TAKEOVER MANUAL — Chapter Four: Target Assessment
The most common error in a first acquisition is premature action. The practitioner identifies a target, assesses their spiritual power, concludes they are outmatched, and decides to wait until their own cultivation is competitive.
This is traditional cultivation thinking. It assumes confrontation is the primary mechanism of acquisition.
The Framework does not confront. It structures.
Assess your target across four dimensions. First: organizational dependencies — what does their position require from others and what do others require from them? Every dependency is apparent strength and actual vulnerability. Second: political exposure — alliances, obligations, enemies not yet neutralized, superiors whose approval depends on outcomes the target does not fully control. Third: spiritual resource supply chain — how does the target access their cultivation resources and through what institutional mechanisms? Fourth: the gap between perceived and actual position. Every practitioner presents a professional self. Beneath that presentation is their real situation. The gap between the two is where the Framework operates.
You do not defeat your enemies. You restructure them.
Wei Chen set the manual aside and thought about Zhou Mei.
Senior Associate II, Director Development Track. Three exemplary reviews. SQ 8.7. The Document Flow Optimization Initiative was clearly her primary Director-track deliverable — the result she needed to demonstrate to whichever Director was sponsoring her advancement. Her promotion depended on measurable output from this initiative within the quarter.
She was under time pressure she wasn't visibly showing.
He wrote this down in small handwriting.
What he didn't know: who her Director-track sponsor was. What specific metrics she'd been assigned. Whether the forty-seventh floor's workflow had enough genuine inefficiency to generate real improvement numbers — or whether it was already relatively lean and she was going to spend the quarter squeezing a system that had little left to give.
The manual's Chapter Four had an appendix: Information Acquisition Without Direct Inquiry. He read it in the last ten minutes before his meeting, then closed the binder and went to Conference Room 47-C.
She was already seated at the head of the table. Same position. Same calibrated composure. A tablet open in front of her with his file visible on the screen — displayed deliberately, he noted, so he could see it was open.
He sat two seats from the head. Not at the far end, which would have been avoidant. Not at the nearest seat, which would have been aggressive. Two seats, which was direct without being threatening.
She looked up.
"Wei Chen. Grade Zero, Document Processing, three weeks. SQ 0.3." She recited it the way one cites a file number — confirming data, not conveying it. "Below division threshold."
"Correct," Wei Chen said.
She waited for the rest of the sentence. The apology. The self-deprecating acknowledgment. The performance of appropriate embarrassment that the situation implied.
He didn't provide any of it. He held her gaze with what the manual had described in a section he'd read that morning — Positional Neutrality: Occupying a Subordinate Role Without Projecting Subordinate Energy — and waited.
A fractional pause.
"Your task completion rate is above average for Grade Zero staff," she said, pivoting cleanly. "Fifty-one items cleared yesterday."
"Twenty-five pending as of twenty minutes ago," Wei Chen said. "I've cleared twenty-six today."
Another pause. Shorter, but present.
"The initiative's first phase is workflow mapping," she continued. "I need a complete map of the forty-seventh floor's document flow — origin points, routing pathways, bottlenecks, distribution endpoints. You and Liu Fang are assigned to the mapping team. Ten-day timeline."
Wei Chen wrote this down. "What's the target improvement metric for the initiative?"
She stopped.
It was one second. But he had been watching for exactly this — the micro-recalibration of someone who had not expected that question from this particular source. A Grade Zero document processor did not ask about target metrics. He received the assignment, confirmed understanding, and processed documents. The question wasn't insubordinate. It was simply outside the expected behavioral parameters of the role, and unexpected behavior, however minor, required processing.
"Fifteen percent workflow efficiency improvement minimum," she said. "Twenty percent to exceed expectations."
"And the current baseline?"
Two seconds this time.
"Still in progress," she said.
Which meant she hadn't completed it. Which meant she had assigned him to the mapping project — the project that would generate the baseline — before she had the baseline, because the timeline for her Director-track deliverable was tighter than she was showing, and she needed the data quickly, and the fastest way to get it was to put her lowest-ranked, most expendable team member on the preliminary work.
Wei Chen wrote baseline TBD and underlined it.
"Anything else you need from me to get started?" he asked.
She studied him with an expression that had shifted — not dramatically, but specifically. Assessment had moved into a new category. He didn't have a clean label for it yet.
"No," she said. "Project brief by end of day. Dismissed."
He stood, gathered his notebook, capped his pen.
"One thing," she said.
He turned.
"Your SQ assessment. You're entitled to one reassessment request per employment year. Given your current score is below division threshold, it might be worth pursuing."
On the surface: a reasonable suggestion. Helpful, even. The kind of thing a conscientious supervisor offered a struggling subordinate.
Beneath the surface: an attempt to close an open question. To confirm his low score administratively before he did something unexpected with the ambiguity.
He smiled — professionally calibrated, warm enough to be collegial, measured enough to reveal nothing.
"I'll take that under consideration," he said. "Thank you."
At 6:03 PM, after the floor had emptied, he ran the ambient absorption redirect through the evening consolidation cycle. The evening return was larger than the morning's — a full day's worth of accumulated practitioner output, the spiritual byproduct of hundreds of small professional acts, being collected and routed upward.
He intercepted a rounding error of it. Provisional receivable.
The second deposit compounded marginally with the first. Nothing dramatic. The manual had been explicit:
Accumulation is a function of consistency, not intensity. The practitioner who absorbs correctly every day outperforms the practitioner who achieves a single dramatic breakthrough and spends months recovering. The corporate world calls this compound interest. The Framework applies the same principle to spiritual capital.
Liu Fang was still at her desk when he packed up. She looked up as he passed.
"You know what the mapping project actually is," she said. It wasn't a question.
"Documentation for an initiative that will use our output to justify cutting at least one position from this floor," Wei Chen said.
"And you're fine with that?"
"I didn't say I was fine with it."
She looked at him for a moment with an expression he was beginning to recognize as her version of recalibration. "You're strange," she said, and went back to her screen. "Good night."
"Good night."
He took the elevator down and walked home through streets that hummed with the output of the Grand Conglomerate economy. The manual's framework made the whole architecture legible now — vast, elegant, eighty years of deliberate design ensuring that someone with a 0.3 Spirit Quotient next to a shredder named Gerald could not do what Wei Chen was, apparently, doing.
He thought about Zhou Mei's timeline. About baseline data and what it meant to control the frame of a measurement before anyone had defined it. About the gap between her perceived position and her actual one.
He thought about Chapter Five.
Controlling the Information Environment — How Data Becomes Leverage.
He had ten days.
He had a provisional receivable account that was no longer at zero.
And he had just been handed a complete map of the forty-seventh floor's power structure disguised as a document processing assignment.
He walked faster.
End of Chapter Two