I set the laser pointer down and let out a quiet breath.
My palm was slick.
I was already moving into the exit posture—bow, not too deep, not too shallow, one step back. One foot hovered at the edge of the stage.
In the front row, someone clicked a pen shut.
In the back, chairs shifted in a soft ripple.
A few people closed their laptops, like they could finally file this away as done.
The moment the chairman walked out, I honestly thought it had been stamped and approved.
I was wrong.
"Before we end,"
Her voice lifted, and the room snapped back into place.
"I had two things to say."
My body went rigid.
For a split second, I lied to myself.
Maybe it was praise.
Maybe it meant it wasn't bad—and I should revise it.
God, I was naïve.
"First."
She tapped the tabletop twice, smiling warmly. "Our new colleague's on-the-spot reaction was… pretty decent."
Someone chuckled.
That obedient chuckle—management said decent, so you agreed.
I stood there onstage, still caught in a half-bow.
"Thank you, Director Wang," I said, keeping my voice down.
"But—"
Her tone shifted with no warning.
The tapping stopped.
Her hand rose.
"IT. Put this up."
A young guy in the back blinked. "Huh? Which file…?"
"The attachment I just emailed you."
She didn't glance at me. "The title was: 'XXX University PhD Dissertation Abstract.'"
My heart dropped.
A blade of ice slid across the back of my neck.
The screen went black.
My deck closed.
And then an image—blown up to brutal, unforgiving clarity—hit the wall.
The first page of my dissertation abstract.
University name.
Department.
Advisor.
A dense wall of English and technical terms—an entire field of old scars dragged into the light when it was already too late to cover them.
Someone murmured, half-reading.
"Wow… that title's long."
Someone laughed before they could stop themselves. "This gets into SCI journals?"
The laugh got smothered by a few coughs.
Only then did Wang Fan lift her eyes—slow, lazy—to me.
"Liu…" She stretched it out on purpose. "Ke-ying. Right?"
"Yes." I stared straight ahead. Not at the screen.
"This was your dissertation title?"
A question she already knew the answer to.
"Yes."
"And your research direction was…" She narrowed her eyes, pretending to search. "Ah. Here."
She read it out loud.
Every term sounded like she stepped on it with her heel.
"It sounds very… high-level."
A pause.
Then the smile changed.
"Except—"
Her gaze swept the room. "It doesn't seem to have much to do with our business."
She bit down on the words.
A few people traded looks.
Some dropped their heads to their phones. Some flipped through documents like they'd suddenly discovered urgent reading.
The room tilted as one.
So this was what they meant by academic disconnect.
All theory.
No ground contact.
No one said it out loud.
They didn't have to.
The words were already queued in everyone's head, waiting their turn.
Wang Fan kept going.
"Recently," she said, conversational, "I've been reading journals too. And I noticed something interesting about certain publications."
She smiled.
"Pay a publication fee, and you could publish anything."
Then—finally—she looked at me.
In her eyes: clean, casual contempt.
"Yours… wasn't that kind, was it?"
The room didn't fill with sound.
It filled with weight.
Heads lifted to me.
And the first reaction in those eyes wasn't That's too far.
It was calculation:
Was my dissertation actually questionable?
Was it padded?
Was it garbage?
This wasn't professional critique.
This was public stripping.
Taking the one thing I'd spent more than a decade building—the only credential I could hold up without flinching—and hanging it under fluorescent light like wet laundry.
My fingers curled.
Nails bit skin. Just enough to keep my hand steady.
I could've argued.
Journal tiers. Citations. Frontier work.
My brain even loaded the old defense lines from grad school—
This study filled a domestic gap…
This proposed an innovation in methods…
If I opened my mouth, they would've come out on their own.
But I didn't.
Because I knew what those words sounded like here.
Innovation. Gaps.
Punchlines.
The more you explained, the more it looked like a fig leaf.
And Wang Fan was waiting for me to reach for cover—
so she could tear harder.
So I didn't explain.
I didn't even look at the abstract.
I lifted my eyes instead—to the back row.
Two Tech colleagues sat there: black-rimmed glasses, badges on their chests, faces worn into that exhausted expression that begged not to be called on.
I called a name.
"Xiao Zhou from Tech."
He jolted like he'd been hit. "Uh—yes."
"Pull up the raw data from last month's project," I said. Not loud. Just clear. "The one Director Wang led—'×× Risk Control Parameter Optimization Pilot.'"
The room paused.
Everyone recognized the shape of it.
What was she doing?
Was she counterattacking?
Was she about to throw data at Wang Fan?
Wasn't that suicide?
Xiao Zhou's eyes flicked to Wang Fan.
Pure survival.
Was I allowed to move?
Wang Fan didn't move.
For one beat, the smile stayed on her face—
like she hadn't realized what I was about to do.
I kept my tone flat.
"And pull up the project spec too."
"Especially the page on the data cleaning rules."
"I remember," I added after a small pause, "I wrote that page."
It was like a hand pressed down on the air.
Eyes slid off the screen—onto Wang Fan.
Then off Wang Fan—back onto my face.
Wang Fan's tapping finally stopped.
She turned her head slowly and looked at me seriously for the first time.
No amusement.
No playful cruelty.
Just one clean message:
You were really going to take it there.
She didn't stop it.
She couldn't. Not with every eye in the room watching.
If she said, Don't project it, it would've admitted there was something she didn't want seen.
"What were you trying to do?" she asked, lightly.
"Answer your question," I said, just as lightly.
"You said my dissertation had nothing to do with the business."
"Then let's see whether it did."
My voice stayed low.
But there was a blunt stubbornness in it.
Not polished.
Not professional.
The reflex of something cornered.
Xiao Zhou—pale—worked the controls.
The big screen flickered.
The abstract vanished, replaced by the company intranet.
A few seconds later, a familiar document opened:
"×× Risk Control Parameter Optimization Pilot Plan."
I closed my eyes for half a beat.
When I opened them, my gaze had cooled.
"Page seven," I said.
Xiao Zhou complied.
Pages flipped fast.
Then stopped.
A full page titled: "Data Cleaning & Preprocessing Rules."
I didn't need to read it.
I could recite it.
First week.
Working until 3 a.m.
Typing it line by line with my own hands.
"Everyone can take a quick look," I said, lifting a hand. No laser pointer then—just a small gesture. "Outlier removal. Stratification. Weight recalculation."
"If it feels familiar—"
I paused.
"That's normal."
"Because the logic came from the same framework as the chapter in my dissertation."
Someone inhaled.
In the silence, it sounded sharp enough to cut.
A few people started flipping through their notes.
Someone opened the project file on their laptop and began comparing.
Quietly.
I didn't give them time to settle.
"Director Wang." I turned to her.
This time I said her title cleanly.
"Do you remember who wrote the data cleaning rules for this project?"
She smiled.
Thin.
Cold.
"What were you trying to say?" Her voice wasn't airy anymore. "So you wrote it. So what?"
"Nothing," I said, and shook my head once. "I was just answering your question."
I pulled my eyes back to the screen.
"You asked whether my dissertation had anything to do with the business."
"Now you can see it."
"This rule set everyone's been using all month—"
My voice stayed even. "It's built on the same framework."
"You've been using it pretty smoothly."
"Haven't you?"
The last three words were almost weightless.
Like I was talking to myself.
But when they landed, the air dropped—hard.
A middle manager rubbed his brow without meaning to.
A VP in the front leaned forward and stared at the page for a full ten seconds.
Wang Fan's expression finally shifted.
Not rage.
She was too skilled to lose control like that.
Just a small dip at the corners of her eyes.
Her smile withdrew.
Her knuckles pressed into the tabletop, whitening.
She leaned back—
then sat up straighter.
No longer lounging.
Level with the table.
Serious.
Until that moment, to her, I'd been a funny little clown.
From that moment on, I was in the center of her sightline.
But right then—
my mind snagged.
Not from triumph.
Not from the rush of landing a hit.
The image cut out.
Like an invisible hand yanked the conference room backward.
The projector's white turned into another white.
White tile.
White fluorescent glare.
Wet, moldy stench.
A filthy corner of wall.
A black smear where shoes had stamped the same spot, over and over.
A puddle on the floor—I couldn't tell if it was water or something else.
An orange soda bottle.
Dented plastic. Crushed by someone's grip.
Cold.
Cold like it had just come out of a fridge.
"Open your mouth."
Someone said it.
Close.
Laughing.
"Come on. Be good—here was your reward."
"If she won't drink, hold her down."
Voices burst against my ears.
A shove from behind drove my shoulder into tile.
Hands clamped my arms from both sides.
Someone pried my jaw open.
Fingernails bit into flesh.
Pain flashed black across my vision.
The orange bottle tipped.
The rim pressed to my lips.
A stream of icy liquid—stinking, wrong—poured in.
I tried to clamp my mouth shut.
Someone pinched my nose.
I choked.
My chest seized.
The liquid kept coming, flooding my throat.
I tried to spit—
My stomach flipped.
My throat burned raw.
Air vanished.
The world spun.
And then—
"Liu Keying?"
Someone said my name.
The sound yanked me back.
The damp stench blew away into cold air.
The white tile snapped back into the projector screen.
Page seven was still there.
No one in the room knew what had just happened.
To them, it looked like this:
I went quiet for two or three seconds.
My eyes unfocused.
Like I got tired.
Like I drifted.
Only I knew.
In those seconds, my stomach cramped so hard it folded.
Acid rose in waves up my throat.
One second longer and I would've vomited.
I blinked hard.
Forced the sour flood back down.
"Sorry," I said, grabbing the first excuse that fit. "The lights flickered. Where was I?"
No one questioned it.
No one cared what those seconds did to me.
They cared about one thing:
This public stripping hadn't gone where Wang Fan intended.
And my dignity wasn't getting peeled off by her.
I had one corner of it in my fist.
Still.
Wang Fan hadn't given up.