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 screening room had stayed silent enough to look like failure. 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 silent room could still be explained as ordinary process, this could remain an awkward film experiment rather than another Xplendi miracle.
He liked the shape of the spending. Slow post-production, awkward scenes, reworked music, and promotion that refused to behave like promotion sounded like exactly the kind of heavy, slow burden that could drag a project below the settlement line.
