Chapter 2: Welcome to Mist Valley
Taiwan Edition v5
Location: Mirror Realm · Emerald Isle (Parallel Universe No. 15) Time: JUN 1021 (4 years, 8 months ago) Protagonist: Lin Zhao-ming
The offer was signed, and he flew to Emerald Isle.
Off the plane, straight into quarantine. Fourteen days mandatory plus seven days self-monitoring, stuck in a hotel room, unable to go out.
He didn't think it was miserable.
On the third day, a black hard-shell case was delivered. Inside was a Mirror Screen terminal, a docking station, and a company access card—though there was nowhere to swipe it, because he wasn't even at the company. There was also an A4 piece of paper: Rule number one, please log in to the company intranet.
He sat on the edge of the hotel bed, powered it on, and logged in.
There was an invitation on his calendar: Welcome Call, 3:00 PM. The organizer was Peter Legacy, and there were eight participants, none of whose names he recognized.
He didn't find it strange. The company was operating as usual, he just hadn't arrived on-site yet.
Simultaneously, the boss's group chat started showing activity. Meeting notifications came one after another, too many to count. No one specifically asked him to join. He listened in on one or two, felt they were routine matters, and didn't bother following them further. He spent his days eating, playing video games, reading, and occasionally researching the things he was about to be working on.
Twenty-one days. Every day, he was his own master.
After quarantine ended, there was still a week before his official onboarding. He went for walks around Mist Valley, ate some local food, and checked up on that apartment unit.
For nearly a month, every day, he was his own master.
Then came his first official day of work. He booted up the Mirror Screen terminal, and the very first notification popped up: Three meetings today.
One month into the job.
Lin Zhao-ming had seen the faces of over a dozen people, all exclusively through the Mirror Screen terminal. Faces in little grid boxes, large and small. Some turned their cameras on, others were just a name. Some would smile broadly when they spoke, others would stop talking after exactly three sentences and retreat as if they hadn't opened their mouths at all from the very beginning.
He hadn't met a single one of them in person.
The benefits of WFH were something Peter had specifically brought up in a monthly review—"Aura Synthesis highly values work-life balance, and WFH is already a core part of our company culture." He sounded very serious when he said it, as if he were presenting an achievement that he had poured his blood, sweat, and tears into building. Lin Zhao-ming listened, and didn't say anything.
The benefit of WFH is that no one is watching you. With a meeting running in the background, he could listen while reading other documents. If something important came up, he'd pay attention; if it wasn't important, he'd let it slide. Meetings would drag on to the point where you didn't know when they'd stop, but since you didn't have to be anywhere anyway, you just left them on.
Routine matters, producing very little, but making you feel very busy.
On the day of the Welcome Call, Peter Legacy had his camera on. In his fifties, hair impeccably styled, sitting against a backdrop of a completely white wall. There was absolutely nothing on the wall, like a meticulously arranged blank void.
"Welcome aboard, Zhao-ming. You'll start by taking over the consumer product line to get familiar with the operations. If there's anything you don't understand, feel free to ask anytime."
The consumer product line—mostly maintenance and support. No new projects, borrowing resources from other teams to learn the ropes. Lin Zhao-ming nodded. Place him somewhere where nothing much could go wrong to observe first. He understood.
He started asking questions. There was a Mentor, there was patience, and there was always an answer. But every time an answer was given, he found himself right back at square one—only now with a pile of new documents and several new pieces of corporate jargon, yet the actual answer to his question was nowhere to be found within them.
The jargon was the first wall.
It wasn't the kind of wall built to intentionally keep you out. It was the kind of wall where everyone genuinely wanted to tell you what was going on, but the more you listened, the less you understood.
The core technology of the Mirror Screen's electronic core wasn't inherently complex. The core had a few basic parameters: charge indicator, charge/discharge status, and battery health. At the companies he had worked at previously, these things had official, standard names—SOC, SOH, Fuel Gauge. You said the words, and everyone knew what they meant without requiring extra explanation. One number, one meaning, crystal clear.
But here at Aura Synthesis, identical concepts had an entirely different set of names.
In his first week, he heard a term in a meeting: "Phoenix Threshold."
He thought it was some kind of quality standard. It sounded very substantial. But no one explained it. He went and asked his mentor, J.
J was very patient: "It's better if you ask Fai about this one, he's in charge of that line."
He went and asked Fai. Fai said, "That's actually a setting on the manufacturer's side, you should ask the supplier's PM, they should have a document for it."
He sent an email to the supplier's PM. The PM sent back a specification document. Over twenty pages long.
The first three pages were version histories and approval signatures. Pages four through eight were the "Background Explanation," written in a highly professional tone, detailing a bunch of things that, after reading, left him feeling no more enlightened than before. Pages nine to thirteen were an "Overview of Relevant Parameters," listing more than twenty different values. Each one came with two paragraphs of explanation, and after reading those explanations, he still had no idea what the value actually represented in practical operation.
Page fourteen. A table.
"Phoenix Threshold."
Definition: The critical threshold value at which the system automatically cuts off the power supply when the electronic core discharges to a specific percentage.
He stared at that line of text.
In other words, a cut-off percentage.
In other words, at what percent battery the device automatically shuts down.
This exact thing was called a "shutdown threshold" when he worked at the American company. Two English words, universally understood. In industry spec sheets, this number was usually written on the very first page because it was so fundamental.
But here, from the time he heard the name, to asking the first person, to being pointed to a second person, to being pointed to a third person, to finding this document, to flipping past thirteen pages of professionally packaged nonsense, to finally reaching page fourteen—it took him three days.
Three days to find a cut-off percentage.
He sat there, looking at the document, a sentence sitting in his heart that he didn't say out loud.
Then he kept reading. Because there were over a dozen other names in that document— "Sirius Steady-State," "Dragon Return Ratio," "Zenith Gradient" —and every single one of them was exactly the same: a perfectly normal technical concept shoved into an obscure name whose meaning you could never guess, wrapped in a dozen pages of paper. Ninety percent of it was "professional explanation" that wouldn't make you understand anything more, and the remaining ten percent were the two actual words you needed.
He had asked J once: "Why are these things named like this? Is there a complete glossary anywhere?"
J laughed a little. "There's no official glossary. But you'll understand once you've been here long enough. Each product line has its own set of terms. Some of them were brought over from when people used to work at that local manufacturing plant."
Brought over.
Meaning, Aura Synthesis hadn't invented these names. It was simply that a specific group of people were used to using them at their old company, and brought them over to keep using them here. To them, "Phoenix Threshold" was as natural as "shutdown threshold." It wasn't that they were intentionally not explaining it—it was that they fundamentally felt no need to explain. To them, a name was just a name, just like you wouldn't bother explaining to a new colleague why a "cup" is called a "cup."
But to Lin Zhao-ming, every single name was a wall he had to climb over. And every time he climbed over a wall and saw what was behind it, he wanted to curse—because the thing itself was simple. The complexity never lay in the thing itself. The complexity was in the packaging.
Lin Zhao-ming didn't make a fuss. If the jargon was annoying, it was annoying; he'd just learn it. It didn't matter. He thought that once he'd learned it, everything would be fine.
On the day of that Welcome Call, Lin Zhao-ming couldn't see the boundaries linking those eight names.
Several of them had worked together at the same local system manufacturing plant before joining Aura Synthesis. Even further back, some were from the same university department—different graduating classes, but sharing the same professors, the same network of connections, and the same set of unwritten rules about "how to survive in a place like this." This network had never been spoken of out loud—not out of deliberate concealment, but because there was no need to speak of it. Everybody already knew.
Lin Zhao-ming was an outsider crammed into the middle of it. But he didn't know that.
He just thought he was a newcomer who had arrived a little late.
Once, during a meeting discussing vendor shipments, a guy named Old Xu said, "This pattern is exactly the same as when we were at that plant."
The plant he named was a local system manufacturer. Lin Zhao-ming knew of the company—he had seen it when doing his homework.
He didn't pay much attention to it at the time. Only later did he piece it together: Old Xu, Fai, Cindy, and a few others had all worked at that local plant before coming to Aura Synthesis. And before that, several of them had come from the same university.
This network was never mentioned. It wasn't deliberately hidden—later, he reasoned it was probably just that they felt no need to mention it. Because to them, these facts were known realities, as natural as the weather. You don't explain to a new colleague that "it rains here."
But Lin Zhao-ming wasn't from here. He didn't have those dozen or so years of shared history. When he stepped onto the board, the chessboard was already set, the pieces were already in their respective positions, and he was just a new piece placed on the edge. He thought the game had yet to begin. In reality, multiple rounds had already been played long before he even walked in.
He just didn't know it.
One day, Fai stayed behind after a meeting. Everyone else had left, leaving just the two of them.
Fai asked, "Zhao-ming, when are you handing in the tracking report for your consumer product line?"
Lin Zhao-ming looked at him. "I haven't received that assignment."
Fai chuckled. "Peter probably forgot to CC you. I'll forward it to you."
He forwarded it, then logged off. A few seconds later, his grid box went black.
Lin Zhao-ming opened the email. The date was four days ago. His name wasn't in the recipient list. He looked at the string of recipients: Fai, Cindy, K, Old Xu, and a few other people whose names he recognized but hadn't spoken to.
Peter's name was in there. His name was not.
He started typing to ask Peter. Typed two lines, deleted them. Typed another line, deleted it again.
Finally, he just started working on the report.
Four days of missed time, he made up for it in two. When he handed it to Peter, Peter said, "Good work, keep it up." He didn't mention that Lin Zhao-ming was four days late. He didn't mention that absolutely no one had notified him to begin with.
Lin Zhao-ming thought it was an accident. Forgetting to CC someone happens everywhere.
Only later did he realize that this kind of "forgetting" followed a pattern. But at the time, he didn't know how to read the patterns yet.
He merely noticed something strange: The data was all there. Inside the system, the documents were complete, the records were complete, the histories were complete, everything looked transparent and intact. But it didn't match the facts. It wasn't that there was no data; it was that the data told you one story, while the actual reality of what happened was another story entirely. What was missing in between, he couldn't find anywhere.
He thought it was just because he wasn't familiar enough yet.
One day, Old Xu answered a question of his by saying, "Take a look on ALC, it should be there."
ALC.
These three letters. He had heard them once before. During his first week, when J was explaining the system architecture, he had mentioned it, casually, as naturally as saying "just open your browser."
Lin Zhao-ming logged into ALC.
His very first feeling was: Wow.
The interface was clean, the structure was clear. On the left was the navigation panel, categorized into classes—Product Lines, Vendors, Test Records, Quality Reports, Personnel Structure, Process Documents. Inside each category were subfolders, and inside those subfolders were more subfolders. The sheer volume of documents was oceanic. He casually clicked one open with his mouse: Product Lines > Mirror Screen Terminal > Electronic Core > Supplier Evaluation. Inside were over twenty files, each marked with a date, version number, and an assigned owner.
He clicked on another: Test Records > Q2 1021 > Functional Testing. Dozens of log files, each with timestamps, test conditions, and a result summary.
It looked as though everything was perfectly transparent.
He selected a quality report and opened it. Over forty pages. Complete with charts, exhaustive data, and clear conclusions—"Supplier component anomaly rates remain within acceptable bounds; continuous monitoring is advised."
He selected another. Thirty pages. Same structure, same tone. Different data, but the exact same conclusion—"acceptable bounds," "continuous monitoring."
He selected a third.
The data in the third report contradicted the first two. Not a massive contradiction, a minor one—Q1 stated the yield rate was a certain number, and Q2 stated the yield rate had improved, but he ran the math: if the Q1 number was genuine, the magnitude of improvement claimed in Q2 didn't mathematically align with actual output. The gap was incredibly small, so small that if you only looked at one report, you'd never notice. You had to lay all three out side-by-side to see it.
He paused.
What did this mean? A typo from typing too fast? Differing statistical parameters? Or...
He didn't continue the thought. He assumed he just wasn't familiar enough with how this system calculated its metrics yet. Every company has its own way of doing things—definitions of numbers, sampling methods, the internal logic of their reporting. He was still in the learning phase.
He closed the report and continued reading documents.
ALC's tutorial files were exceptionally well-made. Every single function had step-by-step instructions, complete with screenshots and FAQs. He spent two hours walking through it from start to finish.
Once he finished, he knew how to use the system. He knew where to find reports, where to look at test records, where to check supplier evaluations.
He just thought: This system is pretty easy to use. The data is comprehensive. As long as I keep reading, sooner or later, I'll figure it out.
On a Wednesday afternoon, there was a project synchronization meeting. Eight people. Lin Zhao-ming was the ninth.
Halfway through the meeting, they touched upon an issue with a part specification. Fai said he had contacted the manufacturer, and the manufacturer said they needed time to confirm. Cindy said she had handled a similar case before and could share her experience. Old Xu said the schedule waits for no man, and they needed to push harder.
The conversation between the three of them was fast, precise, with no gaps in between. Fast as if it had been rehearsed. But it didn't feel rehearsed—it felt genuinely natural. The kind of natural that only comes when you've done something so many times that your body simply remembers the rhythm.
Lin Zhao-ming sat there listening.
He suddenly realized something: The conversation these three people were having didn't start in this meeting. It had already started before the meeting even began. They were just performing it here, for the others to see.
He didn't have any evidence. Just a feeling. But that feeling was sharp and clear.
When the meeting ended, he wanted to ask J: "Did they already discuss this before the meeting?"
He typed a few words. Deleted them.
What would asking that question mean? It meant he believed people were doing things behind the scenes. But he had no proof. He was just a newcomer who felt some things didn't seem entirely natural. If he said it out loud, what would the other side think?
"This new guy is too paranoid."
He didn't ask.
A few more days passed.
A video conference ended, and the grid boxes on the screen went black one by one. Some people logged off immediately, others stayed behind. Leaving the call open like this was natural—the meeting was over, you chat for a bit, just like talking in the hallway after class before heading home.
Lin Zhao-ming stayed behind too. He didn't log off, because he wanted to listen in.
Four people remained: Him, Cindy, K, and a back-end engineer named Xiao Hu.
K was talking about his son's school, and Xiao Hu was smiling and listening. Cindy, off to the side, suddenly said, "I'm so exhausted lately. Rent in Emerald City went up again. Can't hold on much longer."
Emerald City. She was talking about the capital of Emerald Isle. Most people who worked here rented apartments there.
Hearing this, Lin Zhao-ming said casually, "Well, since you're WFH right now, why not just move back to your hometown?"
Dead silence.
The kind of obvious, air-solidifying dead silence. It only lasted two seconds, but that was long enough.
Cindy gave a short laugh and said, "My hometown is in Lu Township."
Then K very quickly picked right back up, shifting to another topic. Xiao Hu chimed in as well. The air thawed out.
Lin Zhao-ming continued to sit there, staring at the screen.
He didn't understand the underlying meaning behind those words, "My hometown is in Lu Township."
He knew Lu Township was located in the south of Emerald Isle. He knew that for WFH, living in the north or south theoretically made zero difference. He knew rent in Emerald City was expensive. He knew that if you could save money, moving back to your hometown was the perfectly normal choice.
But the moment he asked, the air froze. Which meant that this choice was not normal.
He had definitely stepped on a landmine. He just didn't know what it was.
He thought about it for a long time. Was staying in Emerald City a matter of convenience? No, WFH doesn't require commuting convenience. Was it about lifestyle? Lu Township has a lifestyle too. Was it because...
He couldn't think of it. He didn't have this specific tool in his toolkit.
On Intermediary Island, geography was purely functional—you lived where you did because of where you went to work. You moved because you changed jobs. No other reasons were required.
But on Emerald Isle, maybe geography wasn't just functional. Maybe geography was... he couldn't find the word. Status? Belonging? A membership card?
He didn't know. He only knew he had stepped on something, and he couldn't say the name of the thing he had stepped on.
When he saw Cindy later, her attitude toward him hadn't changed at all. Normal politeness, normal distance. He wasn't sure if that incident had lingered between them. Maybe it did. Maybe it didn't. Maybe he was the only one holding onto it.
He didn't ask again.
One day, K privately messaged him on Teams.
It wasn't official business. No subject line, no attachments, just a few typed words: "Zhao-ming, does your wife work on Emerald Isle or Intermediary Island?"
Lin Zhao-ming replied. Intermediary Island, fully remote.
"Oh, well that's convenient then," K said. "What district do you guys live in? Renting or buying?"
He replied again. Bought a place. Mist Valley.
K sent over a huge wall of text. Talked all about himself—his twins were starting elementary school this year, the cost of international school tuition, how much car loan he had left. He had run the numbers; if he got laid off, he'd be in serious trouble within three months. "Everyone is under a lot of pressure," he said.
Lin Zhao-ming didn't know how to respond to that. He owned his house, he had no rent pressure, he hadn't taken out a loan to buy a car, he didn't have kids to put through international school. His pressure was completely different—the living expenses for two elderly parents back on Intermediary Island could never stop. But that kind of pressure had no place in this conversation.
He typed a single sentence: "I understand. It's tough."
K replied: "Let's grab a drink sometime."
And then it was over.
Lin Zhao-ming thought it was just idle workplace chatter. Colleagues talking about their personal situations; totally normal.
He didn't know that within that very same week, K had chatted with every other person on the team about almost the exact same content. Every conversation was one-on-one. And every person thought it was just normal idle chatter.
The days went by quickly. Every day: boot up, go to meetings, read documents, do work, shut down.
He began to adapt to the rhythm. Or, more accurately, he began to grow numb to it. The content of the meetings didn't all need to be heard—he had figured out what was important and what wasn't. He had figured out whose words actually contained substance and whose didn't. He started getting a feel for which decisions were real and which were just putting on a show.
But he found himself in a very strange position: He could see a great many things, but his "visibility" had absolutely zero impact on anything.
It was like being separated by a sheet of glass. You can see the people on the other side doing their work, and you know exactly what they're doing, but you can't touch it, you can't intervene. You just watch.
Peter reached out to him twice that month.
The first was a routine one-on-one. Peter had his camera on, backed by that blank white wall, as pristine as a room no one had ever lived in. He asked Lin Zhao-ming, "How are you adjusting?"
"Alright. The documentation is heavy, but I'm slowly digesting it."
"Good. Take your time, there's no rush. The pace of the consumer product line is slower, it gives you time to adapt."
Peter's tone of voice was always flat. Not cold, not warm, just... a constant temperature. Exactly like an office permanently kept at 23 degrees Celsius. Comfortable, but you can never feel the seasons change.
"Is there anything you want to know more about?" Peter asked.
Lin Zhao-ming thought for a second. He wanted to ask: Have the people on this team known each other for a long time? He wanted to ask: Are those tiny discrepancies in the ALC reports normal? He wanted to ask: Why are there some meetings that I'm not CC'd on?
He didn't ask. It wasn't that he lacked the courage. It was because he felt that declaring "I think something isn't right here" in your very first month felt like... a newcomer questioning things before even understanding the baseline situation wasn't a show of competence, it was a display of "not knowing how to handle social politics."
"Nothing for now," he said. "Thank you."
Peter nodded. "Alright. Keep the communication lines open."
The second time was because of an email from a vendor. The vendor had asked a technical question, CC'ing both Peter and Lin Zhao-ming. Lin Zhao-ming felt he could answer it, so he just directly replied.
Peter called him afterward: "Zhao-ming, next time, before you reply to that vendor, let me know first."
There was no unhappiness in the tone. It was just a factual directive.
"Was there an issue with the content of my reply?" Lin Zhao-ming asked.
"No. Technically, there was no issue. But this particular vendor is a bit sensitive. There is some background to their cases that you don't fully understand yet. Next time, verify with me first."
Lin Zhao-ming said okay.
After hanging up the phone, he thought: What background?
He opened ALC and searched the vendor's name. Over a dozen documents popped up. He read them one by one. Historical correspondence, quality evaluations, meeting minutes. The data was perfectly complete; after reading it, he knew the vendor's supply history, quality trends, and primary contacts.
But he couldn't find the "background" Peter was talking about.
There was a massive crack running down the center between what the data told him and what Peter's words had implied. He could see both sides of the crack, but he couldn't see what lay inside it.
Once again, he just assumed he wasn't familiar enough yet.
At the end of his first month, Lin Zhao-ming conducted a self-review.
He wrote it down in a private document, shown to no one:
Things I've learned:
- Product line architecture
- Basic vendor situations
- ALC system operations
- Team members' names and general roles
Things I still don't understand:
- Why some meetings relevant to me aren't CC'd to me
- What those tiny discrepancies in ALC's reports represent
- What the "background" Peter mentioned actually is
- The true decision-making logic of this team
Actions:
- Keep learning
- Don't rush
- Adapt
He looked at those two words: "Keep learning."
He assumed time could solve these problems. He assumed that as long as he was patient enough, worked hard enough, and paid close enough attention, one day he would perfectly understand it all.
This conviction was something he had brought with him from Intermediary Island. At the companies on Intermediary Island, and at the American company, this conviction held entirely true. Time really did fix a lot of things. If you did an exceptionally good job, others naturally respected you. If you understood the work deeply enough, a space was naturally made for you.
He didn't know that the rules of the game on Emerald Isle were entirely different.
He just sat in his study, closed his laptop, and felt that his first month had been "reasonably smooth."
Location: Mirror Realm · Emerald Isle Study (Parallel Universe No. 15) Time: AUG 1021 (4 years, 6 months ago) Late at night
That night, he was in the study, and his wife was in the living room. Same floor, but they were used to this—he would usually sit in the study for a while after clocking out, waiting until she came out before exchanging a few words.
"My first month is over," he said.
"Yeah. How does it feel?" his wife walked over and stood in the doorway of the study.
He leaned back in his chair and thought for a moment. "The colleagues seem okay. But... it's very hard to truly get to know them."
"Well, with WFH, of course it's different," she said. "Take your time."
He hummed in agreement.
He wanted to say a bit more. Wanted to say that he felt like this group of people had already known each other for a very long time, but no one was telling him. Wanted to mention the ALC reports, and how there were microscopic details that he couldn't mathematically align. Wanted to talk about that meeting he stumbled into, and that one dead second of frozen air.
But the words wouldn't leave his mouth. Not because he didn't trust his wife. But because if he said them out loud, it would sound like: "I'm already getting paranoid in my very first month."
He didn't want to be that. He wanted to believe his judgments were just the hyper-sensitivity of a newcomer. A few months, and it would be fine. Once he adapted, it would be fine.
"Want something to drink?" his wife asked.
"Sure."
His wife went into the kitchen, and he stayed in the study.
He stared at that powered-down screen. When the screen was black, it reflected the contours of the study—the bookshelf on the wall, the cup on the desk, his own shadow.
Blurry. Like he could see it, but also like he couldn't see it at all.
He walked out. Took the cup from her, took a sip.
"Emerald Isle is very quiet," he said.
His wife looked at him. "What's wrong?"
"The nights are very quiet," he said. "Sometimes I feel... like I'm the only person around."
He didn't tell her that he wasn't really talking about Emerald Isle.
He didn't say he was talking about being in a team with a dozen people, having three or four meetings a day, receiving dozens of emails a day, yet not a single thing making him feel like he was actually there.
He didn't say it. Because he still wasn't sure if that feeling was real, or if it was just his own problem.
They each finished their drinks, and each went to sleep.
The night on Emerald Isle was truly quiet.
He thought he had entered the field. In reality, he was standing on a chessboard with invisible boundaries. The pieces were already set. The game had already begun. And he still thought he was sitting in the audience.