After finding some delicious street food, I was once again reminded of home. My mother always told me about how Asian countries, China especially, were known for their street food. Some Chinese cities had large portions of their tourism industry based around street food and street shops, making them a “must-do” thing to enjoy in these cities. I was catching the same vibes from the streets I passed through, envisioning some “influencer” walking around these streets recording the various food vendors, doing a “food review” of the guy who makes Qi infused turtle soup. That made me chuckle a bit, until I realized I was leaving out mukbangs in this stupid “influencer meets fantasy world” idea. It was at this point my mind went into stupid overdrive. I could just imagine it, girl in yoga pants adjusting her camera, “I’m back y’all with the newest clothes haul”. We both know Pianxin would be dropping some cash to get that girl to try her clothes on, we just wouldn’t acknowledge it. The comments would just be like “omg girl you look so fabulous”. Then there’s the drama community, although in this case it would just be “did you hear what the Zhou Young Master said” from the same people who would be doing to the make up tutorials.

All these crazy thoughts eventually lead me to wondering about Baoli. Is she more of a clothes haul girl, or a makeup and drama girl? She certainly has the “secret fashionista” vibe going, especially since she knew all the best clothing designers. But then again, we all knew growing up the important rule, “silent but deadly” so it’s possible she’s a low key queen of drama. I consider bringing it up to her the next time I see her, but then I remember she has an icy personality. No I’m not scared of her, just scared of being cold. I don’t want to cause problems for Zhonglei, yes that’s the excuse I’ll go with if someone ever asks me.

Eventually I get out of my head with my stupid thoughts, and we get home with no issues. That surprised me more than anything, considering I have yet to run into other Clans, but I must just be lucky, or maybe my existence is still being kept quiet within the Clan. It’s a bit late in the night, so I don’t do too much studying, just an hour or so. I tell myself it doesn’t really matter, I was originally meant to be here a month, but will get two months before I need to take the exam. Along with having over half of my studying done, and I’m pretty much on the third week of my studying, it’s safe to say I can slow down a bit.

The following morning I find out why the mysterious project has inflated values associated with it. I’m sitting at my desk on Wednesday morning, having no issue with the rest of my paperwork, minding my own business, that is until I get some surprise paperwork midway through my work day, and the paperwork is marked under some rush review status. Since I pretty much have already verified the rest of my stuff is fine, just needing to do the deeper dive stuff to ensure nothing is has been slowly becoming wrong, I put the rest of my stuff to the side and focus on it.

Nothing is wrong with it, values correct, the right people signed in the right places, From an administrative standpoint nothing made this seem like it needed to be rushed. It took me a second to realize why it was rushed, finally looking back at yesterday’s forms. It looks like it was possible that someone was misinformed on which day’s form needed to be reviewed and returned as soon as possible, likely why yesterday’s was so quick. Nonetheless, I get this form squared away and filed. Curious as to what sort of project would cause this sort of administrative slip up, I look into the actual project details, not just the administrative history. I begin to see a potential reason for some of the other weirdness with this project. The project is for the construction of a large ship, a flagship presumably, as it seems bigger and more advanced than others on record. When I keep looking, I notice the Empire itself is partially funding this project, making the overfunding and potential project delays make more sense. Even then, nothing is seriously bleeding money, more like a paper cut of funding and administrative issues.

I knew this was a port city, it’s not hard to see the ocean when I came by carriage there had even been a few water variant tailed fox spirit beats that we had fought, but I just had never made the connection that this city also built boats, much less had the government involved in Clan business like this. As I started going a bit down the rabbit hole of this project, I got a note passed on from the Head Secretary, essentially The Branch Head had found out about my snooping on the project and wanted to see me. Admittedly, I wasn’t worried, nothing about the project indicated it noticeable security clearances to the projects existence. In fact, I even saw evidence the project was actually highly public knowledge, a bit of press was made earlier about this being the city’s biggest project in a few decades. If I had to guess, he was probably kept aware of my general work, and noticed my interest in the project. A bit curious on what he would actually want to talk about, as I haven’t yet actually made any public hints at wanting to expand my obligations or take on more advanced work, I could only guess that my previous notices to my Head Lead, combined with the eventual expectation that I’d need to take on harder and harder administrative work lead to a test case. I quickly finished up the tiny bit of work leftover, filing things away and cleaning up my workspace before heading over to Youhao’s office.