"It was just luck."
Wang Chen bowed slightly — a courteous, unhurried inclination that carried neither false modesty nor the performance of humility. His face was completely straight. The words had come out with the same calm, matter-of-fact delivery with which one might comment on the weather, as if the explanation were not merely adequate but genuinely complete.
The silence that followed was the particular kind that descends when a room full of people has heard something so absurd that the first collective response is simply the inability to produce any response at all.
Then it deepened.
