By noon, the film adjustment had already travelled through three internal chats. The matter itself was simple: the small pre-screening began in a half-empty room. The dangerous part was that everyone at Xplendi had begun discussing it with bright eyes.
Yang Ruoqian's first concern was not whether the pre-screening sounded embarrassing. Embarrassment was acceptable. What mattered was that this still looked like an awkward film experiment, the kind of normal business trouble that could swallow money without asking for applause.
The expenses were especially comforting because they looked ordinary: slow post-production, awkward scenes, reworked music, and promotion that refused to behave like promotion. A normal boss would ask whether those costs could be recovered. Yang Ruoqian only cared that the receipts were real.
