Chapter Text
The summer afternoon lay over the city like a sheet of plastic ironed too many times—thin, glossy, and airless.
Sunlight struck the glass walls of the office towers and broke into hard strips of glare, slicing across the corridors until every white tile seemed to shine too brightly. Yet the air-conditioning had no mercy. Cold air curled from the vents, gathered in the corners, slipped under sleeves, and crept down people’s backs. Heat and cold fought on the same floor, like an argument that had gone on too long and would never come to a conclusion.
It was Friday afternoon. Everyone in the company was waiting to leave. Even the clatter of keyboards had grown lazy.
Li Ruyun did not have the right to wait.
She sat at her desk, watching rows of data surge across the screen like waves, then withdraw again. She had long since learned to wrap herself in efficiency. The faster she worked, the cleaner she was. The cleaner she was, the fewer cracks she left for anyone to pry open.
For nearly a year, she had lived like that.
It was not the workload that wore her down.
It was people.
When she first joined the company, she was the kind of woman people noticed. Not because she tried to stand out, but because she did not have to. A task was thrown at her; she caught it steadily. A matter fell into disorder; she could take it apart and put it back together piece by piece. On the same project, others buried time under overtime. She found the method.
Her excellence was quiet.
Quiet enough to sting.
In a place like an office, quiet excellence often drew more hatred than loud ambition. It gave people no easy excuse, no simple story to explain how you had risen.
In her third month after becoming a full-time employee, one evening near the end of the workday, the sky had just begun to darken. The light outside the windows looked as if it were sinking into the narrow gaps between the buildings.
Her department supervisor, Yu Zhi, stopped her and said he wanted to “encourage an outstanding employee.”
His tone was weightless. Almost casual. Like a passing act of concern.
Or a line he had prepared in advance.
The moment the office door closed, the world seemed to lose its sound.
The air-conditioning inside was colder than the corridor. Cold enough to keep a person awake. Yu Zhi stood beside her and began by praising her ability. Her drive. Her future. Then he praised her looks and said she had “an advantage.”
He lingered over that word.
Advantage.
As if he had rolled it around in his mouth before letting it out.
She listened without changing expression, but her fingers tightened before she realized it. Her body had understood before her mind allowed itself to name the danger.
Then Yu Zhi’s hand came over.
It landed on her shoulder as if he were testing the temperature of water. Then it slid lower. Not quickly. That was the uglier part. There was a calmness to the movement, a leisurely certainty, as though he believed he controlled the pace of what happened next.
In that instant, many things passed through her mind.
The joint locks she had learned. The counters she had practiced. The simple fact that, with the right angle, she could make him hurt so badly he would not be able to cry out.
But in that same second, she saw another picture.
Herself labeled “emotionally unstable.” Herself accused of attacking a superior. Herself dragged into HR. Herself sentenced by a hundred mouths before she could speak a word.
The real world did not reward self-defense.
It rewarded obedience.
A wave of nausea rose in her stomach.
She did not use her fists.
She merely turned aside, coldly, and shook off his hand as if flinging away a strand of sticky web. She left him no explanation. She looked straight into Yu Zhi’s eyes.
There was no pleading in her gaze.
No embarrassment.
Only contempt, clear enough to cut.
Then she turned, opened the door, and slammed it behind her.
The dull sound of the door rebounding in its frame struck her ears like a short gunshot.
She walked down the corridor outside his office. The lights retreated behind her, square by square. Her steps were steady. Her back stayed straight, as though she feared that if she bent even once, that hand would reach for her again.
After that night, everything began to rot.
Yu Zhi’s hints and advances, both open and hidden, spread over her days like layers of glue. Not enough to hold her still, but enough to make every step feel filthy.
At the end of meetings, he would keep her behind for one extra second and say, “Wait a moment.”
In the group chat, he would tag her with words edged like needles, while dressing his tone up as concern.
When she passed by, he would lower his voice on purpose, as if speaking to the air: “This girl is too stubborn.”
Every time, she refused in the simplest, most proper, most faultless way possible.
No explanations.
No struggle.
No stage for him to perform on.
She thought that would be enough.
She had underestimated how ugly a rejected man could become.
She had also underestimated how fast rumors could breed in an office.
Yu Zhi began to “tell stories.”
He never said outright that he wanted to have her. That would have sounded too crude, too easy to prove. He was cleverer than that. He said her past work experience was “unclear.” He said a woman that beautiful could not possibly have come this far on ability alone.
He took her performance, her results, her efficiency, and shoved them all into a dirty frame that required no evidence: sleeping her way up, flirting, playing games, using men.
Once those words were thrown into the air, someone would always pick them up.
Like spectators grabbing snacks before a show.
At first, her colleagues did not believe him.
Or rather, they pretended not to.
Her results were there, solid and undeniable. But Yu Zhi was patient. He knew how to grind doubt into fact.
He began setting traps under harmless excuses, forcing her in and out of his office more often. Sometimes it was a project report. Sometimes an “urgent adjustment.” Sometimes he found fault with the wording of her emails and said she did not show enough “respect for leadership.”
Each time, she went in and came out quickly.
So quickly it was almost like a brief fight.
But to the people outside, the fact that she kept entering the supervisor’s office was already enough.
The so-called promotions were even more ridiculous.
They always came at just the right time. On the surface, she was given “more important” work. In reality, she was moved away from the position where she could produce visible results and pushed into something harder, messier, and thankless. Then, when she had no choice but to ask for resources, the rumors upgraded themselves.
See?
She’s going to him again.
The way people looked at her began to change.
When she passed the pantry, laughter would cut off for half a second, then resume as if nothing had happened—only faster now, and lower. When she returned to her desk, the person beside her would shift their chair slightly away, as though afraid of being stained by something dirty.
Someone in the group chat would send a meme. It was not aimed at her, not openly. But she could always smell the familiar malice in those clever little hints people mistook for humor.
The most disgusting thing was not an open blade.
It was that everyone left themselves an escape route.
I didn’t say it was you. I was just talking.
She did not break down.
She worked harder. Cleaner. More like a machine. Her face showed less and less. Her smiles grew thinner. She refused to give anyone the chance to call her emotional. She refused to look as if she were begging for understanding.
She was only tired.
Not tired in the body.
Tired as if an invisible rope had tightened around her heart, so that every breath required effort.
By Friday afternoon, the sunlight outside had grown softer, but the office only seemed colder.
Her resignation letter lay printed on a sheet of A4 paper, painfully white.
When she carried it toward Yu Zhi’s office, there was no turmoil in her heart. She had walked that corridor countless times. Each time had felt like going to receive a sentence.
Today, she had simply come to cross her name out of the play.
The door was not fully shut. From inside came the slow tapping of Yu Zhi’s keyboard. He looked up when he saw her. One corner of his eye lifted, as if he had guessed it already.
Or as if he had been waiting.
She placed the resignation letter on his desk.
The movement was light, but it felt like driving the final nail into a plank.
Yu Zhi glanced at it and gave a cold laugh. That familiar sense of superiority sat inside the sound.
“You’re resigning? Fine. You’re the one quitting. Don’t expect the payout.”
When he mentioned what she would not get, his eyes pressed down on her face, provocative and expectant. He wanted to see if she would panic. If she would soften. If, at last, she would lower her head the way he imagined she should.
Li Ruyun looked at him the way one might look at old paint peeling from the corner of a desk—cracked, stained, rubbed over by too many hands, unable to grow any new grain.
Her voice was calm.
So calm it was like tossing a coin back onto the tabletop.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Yu Zhi’s smile froze for a moment.
Perhaps he had prepared more humiliation. More threats about how she would never survive in the industry. Perhaps he had meant to drag her back into the little script of power he knew so well.
But with three words, she tore a hole through his lines.
No argument.
No defense.
No pleading.
She simply withdrew.
Then she turned and left.
The door closed behind her. It was not loud, but it sounded as if a road had been sealed for good.
The corridor was cold and white with office light. A faint smell of disinfectant hung in the air. She walked across the carpet, and her footsteps were swallowed almost completely. She knew there must be people watching behind her, as if watching a show finally reaching its end.
Back at her desk, she began to pack.
There was not much in the drawer. A cup. A pen. A few sticky notes. A cheap enamel pin from the company anniversary, the kind they had handed out to everyone.
She looked at the pin for two seconds.
For some reason, she found it funny.
For some reason, she could not laugh.
She dropped it into the paper bag too, as if taking away one more piece of evidence from a time not worth remembering.
The whispers rolled behind her like sand carried in the wind.
Someone pretended to type, but the keystrokes sounded harder than usual. Someone walked past with a coffee cup, not looking at her, back held too straight, performing a kind of righteous distance. Someone said something in a low voice, and the person beside them let out a short, eager laugh.
Li Ruyun did not look back.
She picked up the paper bag and walked to the elevator.
The moment the doors slid shut, the outside voices were cut off. The world quieted. Only then did she hear the breath she had been holding for too long inside herself.
It was not crying.
It was not anger.
It was a hollow place.
The air-conditioning in the lobby was even colder. Beyond the glass doors, summer stood like a wall of heat. She walked out into it, and the hot air rushed at her. Sweat gathered on her skin at once.
The sky was blue.
Shamelessly blue.
The city kept moving. Traffic kept shouting. Nothing paused for even half a second because she had left.
She wanted to cry.
She could not.
When she got home and closed the door, silence pressed a hand onto her shoulder.
She set the paper bag on the floor and stood in the entryway, her back against the door, barely keeping herself upright. Her chest felt tight, as if a wad of cotton had lodged in her throat. She swallowed hard, but the sourness would not go down.
She walked to the computer as if walking toward the only place that had never betrayed her.
When the screen lit up, there was light in the room.
She clicked the familiar icon. The loading screen appeared slowly. She looked at those words, and her fingers did not hesitate.
Red Dead Redemption 2.
She had spent more than eight hundred hours in that world.
There, she had walked with Arthur Morgan through snowfields, grasslands, swamps, and towns. She had seen wind and snow grind men’s eyes red. She had seen sunsets turn the grass gold. She had also seen how men in respectable clothes could hide filth behind their smiles.
Again and again, she had finished the story.
Again and again, she had pressed its ending back onto the same track.
Each time, it felt as if she were sitting in a chair outside the screen, watching a good man get dragged away by fate, inch by inch.
Countless times, she had wanted to rush through the glass.
To grab Arthur by the arm.
To pull him out of all that rot.
Don’t trust them.
Don’t keep carrying it alone.
Don’t spend yourself on people who will let you bleed.
But the game would not allow it.
Neither would reality.
At least here, for a little while, she did not have to be Li Ruyun.
The loading finished.
The opening chapter spread across the screen.
Snow. Wind. White mist.
The sound of hooves seemed to come from very far away.
She stared at the screen as though staring at a road home.
Night deepened.
The noise outside the window was held back by the curtains. Only the low hum of the computer fan remained, mixed with the faraway wind inside the screen.
She did not know how long she played.
Sometimes her fingers pressed the keys. Sometimes they hovered in the air, as if she had forgotten what came next.
Her eyes were dry.
There were no tears.
At last, she could not hold herself up anymore. Her forehead began to sink, little by little. At first, it was only a brief daze, an extra second caught between blinks. Then that second lengthened into darkness.
Her hand still rested on the keyboard.
Her shoulders had already gone loose.
Like a machine drained of power, she folded slowly and silently onto the desk.
Somewhere between sleep and waking, she felt cold.
Maybe the air-conditioning was too low, she thought vaguely.
She would turn it up tomorrow.
Tomorrow.
The word surfaced, then seemed to sink beneath snow.
The cold burrowed deeper.
It was not the thin chill of an air conditioner. This cold had weight. Dampness. The smell of snow.
She frowned and tried to pull a blanket over herself.
Her hand would not move.
She tried to lift her head.
Her neck felt frozen in place.
She opened her eyes.
What she saw was not the ceiling.
Not the glow of the screen.
Only white.
White without boundary.
No wall. No window. No line by which a person could tell direction.
She stood as if at the center of a sheet of paper scrubbed clean, while every sound in the world had been swallowed.
Her breathing grew terribly clear in her ears.
Clear enough to frighten her.
A cold wind came from somewhere unseen and brushed across her skin.
Her heart gave a hard, sudden beat.
A tiny breath caught in her throat.
So faint she could barely hear it herself.