Chapter 2: I Am the Biggest Problem

A soft knocking sounded at the door, so faint it was almost impossible to hear.

A low, pleasant voice came through the panel. "Come in."

Lu Qiuyi flinched, then pushed the door open.

A wave of chill, even more biting than the corridor's, rushed out to meet her.

In the vast top-floor office, a huge floor-to-ceiling window took up an entire wall, revealing the noisy, glittering city beyond.

He Jinyue sat behind a dark desk so wide it could have served as a conference table. Without looking up, he said, "Assistant Lu, find three core logical flaws in the three groups within ten minutes, and give me directions for improvement."

Lu Qiuyi felt even her breathing stall for a moment, and her legs began to tremble again in a most unhelpful way.

Find flaws? She was the biggest flaw here.

She almost marched with the wrong hand and foot all the way to a point about two meters from the desk, then stood there, unable to force out a single word.

Silence. Still silence.

At last, He Jinyue lifted his eyes. His sharp gaze swept over her from head to toe, devoid of any emotion.

Lu Qiuyi felt as though she had been stripped bare and thrown beneath a spotlight, with nowhere to hide. She unconsciously held her breath, fingers clenching the report so tightly that her knuckles turned white.

"Sit."

His voice remained low and pleasing, yet it carried an unmistakable command, with no superfluous syllable.

Lu Qiuyi felt as though she had been granted amnesty and practically collapsed into the chair across from him. The cold leather seat made her shiver, waking her a little.

She opened the report written by the original owner of this body.

This thing was barely any better than code.

Her eyes were full of terms she could not understand:

"Insufficient optimizer convergence causing increased oscillations in the later stages of training"

"The loss curve reaches a plateau too early on the validation set"

"Redundant feature embedding dimensions significantly affect real-time inference efficiency"

And then there were the complicated charts covered with lines, bars, and scatter points, with formulas annotated beside them.

She recognized every individual character, but once they were strung together, they began dancing a collective dance before her eyes.

He Jinyue's cold demand rang in her ears like a death knell. Lu Qiuyi turned page after page in despair as time slipped away, each second feeling like a step pressed onto her heart.

Cold sweat soaked the back of her blouse. She stared at the report until her vision began to blur.

Then, suddenly—

Her gaze locked on the bottom of page thirty-seven and the top of page thirty-eight.

The last line on page thirty-seven ended halfway through a sentence; it did not even finish. Yet the page number was plainly thirty-seven.

The beginning of page thirty-eight, however, picked up with an entirely different paragraph, and its page number was thirty-eight.

The pages did not connect. Clearly, this was not the original owner's blunder, but content that the project team had failed to provide in the first place.

Looking further down, among a mass of complicated data charts, she caught a subtle inconsistency.

A bar chart had its Y-axis labeled as thinking rate, in percent, yet one data label on a bar blatantly read "+15.3 K"!

K? Thousand? Percent and absolute quantities mixed together?

"I can't find the core logic flaws, but isn't this sort of low-level mistake itself a flaw?"

Lu Qiuyi remembered the classic move she had learned as a born-after-2000 intern when facing unreasonable client demands: the art of muddling through, avoiding the main point, shifting the focus, and using complaints to conceal ignorance.

Ten minutes were up, with no greeting and no pleasantries.

He Jinyue leaned back slightly in his large chair, his hands folded on the desk, his scrutinizing gaze still firmly fixed on her face.

"The report."

He spoke concisely, tilting his chin toward the document in her hands.

Invisible pressure crashed down like a boulder, and Lu Qiuyi's heart was about to leap from her chest.

She took a deep breath and threw caution to the wind. Success or failure would be decided now.

Lu Qiuyi pushed the folded report toward He Jinyue.

"President He," she said, her voice a little tight with nerves, though she strove to keep her pace steady, "after a preliminary look at this report, I found several fairly obvious issues."

He Jinyue's gaze flicked to the folded corner.

Pointing at the report, Lu Qiuyi sped up and went straight to the point. "First, the reading logic between pages thirty-seven and thirty-eight is broken, so the information cannot be carried over coherently. In a technical document, that is a major omission and affects review efficiency."

"Second, in the data charts, the Y-axis is labeled as a percentage increase, but the specific data tags mix in an absolute unit, K, meaning thousand. The units are inconsistent, which can easily cause ambiguity and misjudgment in data interpretation. That's a fundamental error."

After she finished these two points, He Jinyue showed no expression at all. He simply looked at her with deep, unreadable eyes, then glanced at the report.

Lu Qiuyi's heart rose to her throat. Meeting that inscrutable gaze, she said her third point: "The conclusion section is written like a foot-binding cloth, long-winded and foul."

"The core points are buried in a heap of technical details and repetitive chatter. After reading it, users or reviewers will probably only want to hit the close button in the upper-right corner; they can't grasp the key points at all. The efficiency is far too low."

The moment her words fell, Lu Qiuyi clearly felt the air in the entire office plunge to absolute zero.

No thunderous fury as she had expected. No icy rebuke.

He Jinyue parted his thin lips, his tone laced with a hint of amusement. "Assistant Lu's perspective is quite unique."

Lu Qiuyi's heart gave a violent jump.

"Passable."

Before she could think further, He Jinyue's gaze lingered on her face for a few seconds. His eyes remained sharp, but something elusive seemed to have been added to them.

"Confused page numbers, mixed units, redundant expression," he repeated the problems she had pointed out, his tone flat as if stating facts. "The first two are basic mistakes and unacceptable. As for the third..."

He paused, his eyes sweeping over Lu Qiuyi's face, which had once again tensed up in an instant.

"The comment is fair."

Fair... fair?

Lu Qiuyi thought she might be hearing things.

"Overall," He Jinyue said, his voice returning to its earlier chill, "passable."

Barely passable?!

Lu Qiuyi could hardly believe her ears.

Before the surge of delight could even rise, He Jinyue's next words came down like a bucket of ice water. "However, flaw analysis: zero. Optimization suggestions: zero."

The corners of Lu Qiuyi's mouth, just beginning to lift, froze at once.

"Assistant Lu," He Jinyue said slowly, "have you been promoted, or has your brain gone rusty?"

Lu Qiuyi could only stand stiffly there, bearing that gaze that seemed almost ready to pierce straight through her.

He Jinyue seemed to lose interest. His slender fingers tapped the smooth desktop twice, producing a crisp sound.

"Get out," he said, looking back at the computer screen, his voice cold and commanding. "You will lead the afternoon meeting."

Lu Qiuyi felt as if something had exploded in her mind.

That meeting, bringing together the company's top technical experts and discussing the Zhiyu project, a name she could not even pronounce properly, and he wanted a rookie who could not even understand the report to chair it?

That was even more terrifying than being fired outright!