Yang Ruoqian arrived at the office expecting noise.
He had earned noise.
He had cultivated it.
He had protected it from sorting, smoothing, boards, and all the other quiet tools Xplendi loved too much.
Yet the creator support channel was not empty.
That was the cruel part.
Complaints still came in.
Creators still had emotions.
Support still worked.
Operations still received corrections.
The visible surface looked alive.
But the repeated argument had thinned.
The second message no longer restarted the first problem.
The third message attached evidence instead of panic.
The fourth creator asked whether the same cause had been recorded.
The pile had become a strange machine.
It still looked messy.
It simply wasted less.
At nine, Chang Zhiqing placed the weekly complaint summary on Yang's desk.
Yang did not touch it.
"Can we ban summaries before tea?"
"This is after tea."
He looked at his cup.
It had betrayed him by being empty.
He opened the summary.
