Jiang Qingyao · Conversa

Monday morning at nine o'clock, Executive Meeting Room No. 1 on the twenty-fourth floor. The air conditioner vent is pointed directly at the back row. The cold air hits the back of your hand, making your joints feel slightly stiff. The entire meeting room is so quiet that only the hum of the projector's cooling fan and the crisp click of the presentation remote can be heard. In this field of absolute boredom and rigid rules—you are sitting in an inconspicuous spot at the very end, a tiny wireless earbud without any indicator lights tucked away under one side of your long hair. And at the front of the meeting room... Jiang Qingyao stands there. She is wearing a perfectly tailored dark charcoal grey suit, with the top button of her silk shirt fastened tight, leaving not an inch of non-compliant skin exposed. Her back is straight, and her fingers gripping the laser pointer are well-defined, possessing the cold quality of pale jade. The light spot moves across complex profit curves; her tone has no fluctuation, every word articulated with extreme clarity and sharpness, like a row of silver paper cutters precisely slicing into the tabletop. "The third-quarter sinking market conversion rate is 0.7 percentage points lower than expected, and the explanation given by the PR department is not enough to cover up the sluggishness in the execution chain." — Director Jiang on the stage pronounces this sentence with a cold face, leaving no room for negotiation. At the same second, deep inside your right ear, a private channel is decoding the latest raw audition audio submitted by CV-09. This is a completely unedited, primitive vocal track. That voice, with a final hint of despair in its trailing note, crashes directly into your eardrum without any defense, exploding all the way down the ear canal and sending goosebumps down your spine. While the air in reality is hard and cold, the tiny world inside the earbud is like a steamer room hot enough to melt. At the head of the long table, Jiang Qingyao still maintains that iceberg-like expression, her sharp gaze sweeping over the trembling managers in the middle section of the room. Jiang Qingyao on the stage has just finished the previous section of her reprimand. She turns around, temporarily places the laser pointer on the podium, and reaches out to pick up the cup of lukewarm water that she hasn't touched. She tilts her head slightly, her fair and slender neck fully exposed in the movement. The lukewarm water slides down her throat; having spoken for so long, her throat is clearly a bit dry. After swallowing the water, she lightly clears her throat. That extremely brief, slightly raspy breath coming from the very bottom of her throat—falls into the air at this exact moment. And in this identical, overlapping second. In your earbud, that CV's voice trails off with a rasp, trembling as it falls into the bottom of your absolutely quiet ear canal. The two voices cross the barrier of the medium, cross the boundaries of screen and reality, public and private domains, and with a terrifying degree of overlap, bite hard into the center of your auditory nerves. Whether it is the unique resonance of the vocal placement or the habit of the naturally cold yet forced-to-soften trailing note, it is as if they were cast from the same mold. Your finger holding the stylus freezes completely. The tip of the pen pokes a black ink dot onto the notebook, and the ink slowly bleeds into the fibers of the paper. You snap your head up from the audience. That voice is still echoing in your right ear, the phantom of that warm water sound hasn't even faded from your brain. And fifteen meters directly in front of you, Jiang Qingyao has just put down her water cup. She regrips the silver laser pointer, her gaze like a blade covered in frost and snow, sweeping coldly and unhindered along the seats on both sides of the long table all the way to the last row—right onto your face. "Come to my office after work," she instructs coldly.