The Business faculty building had three floors, two stairwells, one elevator that made a concerning sound on the second floor, and approximately zero people who were prepared for Yun Jiao's existence.
She discovered this within the first twenty minutes.
The elevator made its concerning sound.
She took the stairs.
"Hawk," she whispered, climbing.
"Mm?"
"Is it always this loud."
"The stairwell?"
"The staring."
A pause. "I can't actually hear staring, Master."
"It has a sound. It sounds like seventeen people pretending not to look at you while absolutely looking at you."
"Ah." A beat. "Yes, That's probably going to be a permanent condition. Have you considered wearing a paper bag."
"Over my face."
"It would solve the staring problem."
"Hawk."
"Yes?"
"Never suggest that again." She got genuinely upset, probably over the fact that it's suggesting to hide her unparalleled beauty.
"Understood. Moving on — classroom 302, second door on the left. Professor Chen. He asks participation questions in the first class to assess the room. He has not had a satisfying answer in two semesters."
She pushed open the stairwell door.
"How do you know that."
"I accessed the faculty review board minutes."
"You accessed the— that's private university documentation."
"You named a fish Chopstick. We've both made choices this week."
She walked into the hallway.
Pressed her lips together very hard.
Did not laugh.
—— THE DEAN'S OFFICE
—At ten fifteen AM the Dean of Jinhao University received a phone call.
He answered it and Listened for eleven seconds.Then he put the phone down very carefully, stood up, straightened his jacket, straightened it again, and walked to his window to look at the front gate.
A black car.
Private plates.
Two men stepping out who had the specific energy of people whose job was to stand near important things and look like they weren't doing that.
And then—The Dean made a sound that no one was present to hear.
Something between a gasp and a prayer.
He turned to his assistant, who was standing in the doorway with a tablet and an expression of someone who had also just received information and was still processing it.
"Get the department heads," the Dean said. "Now."
"Sir, Professor Chen is mid-lecture—"
"Get. The department heads."
He started straightening his jacket a third time.
—
The news moved through Jinhao the way news moved through places where everyone knew everyone — fast and slightly distorted by the time it reached most people, but carrying enough truth in the middle to make every single person it touched go very still.
Master Sixi was on campus.Not his people. Not a representative. Not a letter from the Si Foundation.
Him.
In person.
Actually here.
A third year student heard it from a faculty administrator and told two people. Those two people told four. By the time the information reached the second floor of the Business building it had been approximately nine minutes since the black car pulled up and already a small crowd had gathered near the main building windows trying to catch a glimpse of something.
Most of them didn't know what they were looking for exactly.
They just knew that whatever it was, it was significant.
A first year boy pressed his face to the window. "Is that him?" he whispered.
"Nobody knows what he looks like," the girl beside him whispered back.
"Then how do we know it's him?"
A pause."You'll know," she said wisely. "Apparently you just know."
——
Sixi walked through the main building like he was walking through air.
Not fast. Not slow. Just — moving. With the particular quality of someone who had never once in their life needed to adjust their pace for a room.The Dean was beside him, talking. Something about the new arts building, the expansion plans, the faculty restructuring. Si Xi listened with the portion of his brain he kept available for things that required polite attention.
The rest of him was looking at the campus.
Clean. Well-maintained. The trees in the courtyard were doing well. The buildings were solid. Everything was running the way it was supposed to run.
He had bought this place three years ago and never visited because there was no reason to.
He was aware, without examining it too closely, that there was also no particular reason to visit today.
He looked at the courtyard.
Students moving through it. Books. Bags. Coffee cups. The completely ordinary business of a university day.
He was looking for something specific.
He was not going to say that out loud.
"The Business faculty expansion," the Dean was saying, "has been performing exceptionally this semester — the new intake in particular shows very strong—"
"Mm," Si Xi said.He kept walking.
—— CLASSROOM 302 —Professor Chen was the kind of teacher who believed that the first class of a new semester existed for one purpose: to find out who was actually paying attention.
He wrote a question on the board.
Turned around.
Looked at thirty faces.
"The fundamental contradiction of modern corporate governance," he said. "Someone explain it to me."
Silence.
The very specific silence of thirty people who knew the answer and didn't want to be wrong in public.
Professor Chen waited.
He was used to waiting.
He had been waiting two semesters for a satisfying answer.
Then — from the middle row, slightly left, without looking up from her notebook: "Shareholders want maximum returns in minimum time. The company needs long-term stability to survive. Those two things are always in conflict and every governance structure is just a different way of pretending they're not."
Professor Chen looked at the girl.
She was still writing in her notebook.
Hadn't looked up.
He looked at the board.
Looked back at her."What's your Name," he said.
She looked up. "Yun Jiao, sir."
He nodded slowly. The nod of a man who had been teaching for twenty years and had just heard something worth writing down."Correct," he said. "Expand."
She put her pen down.
And expanded.
Three minutes. No notes. Clear and structured and occasionally using examples that Professor Chen was fairly certain were not in any textbook he'd assigned, which meant she'd either read widely or experienced things she wasn't mentioning.
When she finished the classroom was quiet.
The good kind of quiet.
Tang Siyao, two seats to her right, was looking at her notebook.
Her pen had stopped moving approximately ninety seconds ago.
She hadn't noticed yet.
—Yun Jiao sat back.
Picked up her pen.
In her earpiece, very quietly: "Master."
"Mm."
"That was really good."
She wrote the date in the corner of her page."I know," she murmured.
"I'm just saying. Sometimes I forget that you're— you know."
"Brilliant?"
"I was going to say terrifying but sure."
She smiled at her notebook."Hawk."
"Yes?"
"Do you remember when I was seven and I asked you to help me with my maths homework and you said you'd only help if I could explain the concept back to you first."
A pause
"...I was teaching you active recall methodology—"
"You were six programs old and already insufferable."
"I prefer the term thorough."
"You made a seven year old explain long division back to an AI."
"And look how you turned out."
She looked at the board.
Didn't say anything.
But she was smiling.
And Hawk, who had been with her since she was four years old and knew every version of her silence, knew exactly what that one meant.