Epilogue
Taiwan Edition v3.5 (Added 〈Two and a Half: Before〉: Pengguang Industrial cross-company observation)
I. The Study
I anticipated they might be this kind of people.
I chose to assume they weren't. Just get the work done.
These words I say twice in this book, once at the beginning and once at the end. The hundreds of thousands of words in between are the price paid for this sentence.
It is now February 1026. I am sitting in the study. Outside the window is late winter in Jade Mirror City—gray skies, the wind entering the house but not quite cold enough. My computer is on. A Word document open. I have been writing for exactly a year. Today I arrived at the epilogue.
I used to think that on the day I wrote the epilogue, I would know what to write.
Now, sitting here, I realize I don't know. I just—have nowhere else to push this. The previous chapters are all completely written. Lin Zhaoming's story, from being called away in the pantry, to the PIP, to the Gray Rock, to the final refusal, to the N+1 severance package, to the "invalid credentials" login screen—it has all been written. From the day he "assumed they weren't" to the day he realized "they actually were," every step in between is right here.
But this book cannot end here.
The reason it cannot end here is simple: if a reader finishes the first nineteen chapters and closes the book, they should take away something. Not just the words "so tragic." Not just the comment "this company sucks." It should be—a map they can carry out into the world. A map bought with my four years and several lives I could not save.
This map exists in the form of feelings in the first nineteen chapters. Lin Zhaoming, inside the office, could not name anything. He could only feel. His body knew years before his words did—but he couldn't translate this "bodily knowing" into something portable.
The epilogue is the first and only place where the author can name things directly.
I will try.
But in writing this epilogue, I face a choice: write it shallowly so more people can easily understand, or write it deeply so fewer people take away the complete picture. I chose the latter. The reason is—this observation is specific enough that simplifying it would lose it entirely. Readers have already seen simplified versions in many other places; I have nothing to add to those.
But the cost of this choice is that some sections will be difficult. I try to keep a reader-friendly tone while writing, but a few sections are inherently abstract.
So here I give you a map, letting you know the road ahead.
The epilogue is divided into nine sections:
- I. 〈The Study〉: The section you are reading right now. Easy.
- II. 〈Both Sides〉: Easy. The author explains their position.
- II & a Half. 〈Before〉: Medium, personal. Cross-company observation, an evidence base of the system rather than the individual.
- III. 〈The Mask〉: Abstract. The framework of the central concept. If you lose the thread, you can jump to the fourth section.
- IV. 〈Breathing〉: Abstract, emotionally heavy. The anchor of the moral frame. If you skip III and IV, I recommend you at least come back and try reading section IV, because what it explains will be referenced later.
- V. 〈Another Layer〉: Relatively easy to read, emotionally heavy.
- VI. 〈Never Intended To〉: Medium difficulty. Contains industry-specific references.
- VII. 〈Fracture〉: Easy to read, personal, emotionally heavy.
- VIII. 〈The Map〉: Easy, highly practical. A takeaway list.
- IX. 〈No One Applauding〉: Short, easy, closing.
If you only have time for three sections, read: I, VIII, IX. If you only have time for five sections, add: II, VII. If you want to read all of it, just read in order.
If you read certain sections and lose the thread, you have two options.
The first option: jump. Jump to the next section. The later sections do not rely on all the prior technical details. Some ideas echo across sections, so bumping back into the same idea after skipping might actually make it clearer, given the different angle.
The second option—this I must say directly, because not saying it would be another kind of mask—
There are now tools that can help you unpack a dense text. You can paste a paragraph of this epilogue into it and ask, "What does this paragraph mean?", "Rephrase it in simpler words," or "Give an example." What it answers may not be complete, but it will help you catch a thread so you can keep reading.
The reason I can suggest this directly is because when I was writing this book myself, I used the same tools as a mirror. I used them to reflect my own fragments. When I had a pile of feelings but couldn't find a framework, I would speak a paragraph, it would reflect it back, and I would look at the reflection to see what was right, what was wrong, and what I hadn't figured out myself yet. Its function is not as a producer. It is a mirror.
Readers using these tools to reflect my framework—is the exact same action, just with the direction reversed.
There is an awkward layer here I must acknowledge: among the things this book critiques is the commercial hype using AI for window dressing—talking about AI in town halls, writing AI on slide decks, AI in press releases, while the actual thing produced is corporate valuation rather than a product. This will be explained in detail in section VI, 〈Never Intended To〉.
And now I am telling you to use these kinds of tools to read my book. I will not resolve this contradiction.
I merely acknowledge—tools are neutral. The same knife can chop vegetables, kill a person, or carve wood. The question isn't the knife; it's the hand wielding it. A system using AI as a narrative wrapper to fabricate a capability roadmap to support valuation—is one use. A reader using AI as a mirror to reflect a text they don't understand, allowing them to access a framework they otherwise couldn't—is another use.
Both uses share the same tool. But the outcomes produced are opposites.
The hand you are using right now is yours.
OK, housekeeping done. Back to the epilogue itself.
II. Both Sides
That I can write this book is luck. Not a marker of character.
I have to state this clearly very early on, otherwise the entirety of this epilogue will be misread.
I have been an expat employee. I have also been a local regional employee. This combination is highly uncommon in this industry. Most people only experience one side. Those who are expats see policies, strategies, town hall slide decks, and quarterly numbers. What they do not see are the under-the-table maneuvering—not because they aren't smart, but because they aren't on the ground. The people on the ground every day wouldn't raise their hands in a town hall and say, "This strategy is doing completely different things underground." No one would. So the policies look pristinely clean.
Those who are regional employees see the opposite side—under-the-table maneuvering, office politics, who is in whose circle, how promotions actually happen, and how HR handles logic gaps in specific cases. But they don't see the source of the strategy. Because regional employees have no access. They merely receive.
If you have only been on one side, you will think you've seen the whole picture. Expats think the company is what the town hall looks like. Regional employees think the company is what the pantry looks like. Neither side is wrong, but both sides are fragments.
I did both. I was an expat first, then a regional employee later. With a few years in between. Those middle few years are critical—if I had done both consecutively, I might not have been able to separate the two frames. But with a gap of a few years, the day I returned to the other side of the same industry, I brought memories. I remembered the voice of the town hall, and simultaneously, I was experiencing the voice of the office. Both voices were in my head at the same time, cross-referencing each other.
This cross-reference is the source code of this book.
Without this cross-reference, I would be like everyone else—thinking my private experience was purely private. Thinking this specific company was uniquely terrible. Thinking I was exceptionally unlucky. Thinking this was a Jade Mirror Island problem, or a regional problem, or a local culture problem.
With this cross-reference, I finally started to see—this is not a private experience. This is an instance of a broader structure. I had seen an earlier version of this same structure in other places from the expat perspective. At the time, I couldn't name it because in the expat view, I only saw the strategy side. Now, returning to the regional perspective, I finally had all the fragments from both sides. Only then could I begin to piece them together.
But I must emphasize—this is luck.
I did not consciously arrange to experience both sides. I didn't see through everything and decide, "Well then, let me try both sides to write a book later." Absolutely not. My choices at every step were driven by immediate reasons—finding a job, family, moving, getting laid off, finding another job—just like everyone else. I had no grand foresight. I am merely piecing the puzzle together after the fact.
And piecing the puzzle together post-mortem—is something very few people do. Most people, even if they have access to both sides, will not merge the two frames. Because merging them is incredibly painful. The reason for this pain won't be explained until the core of this book.
So this book is not a product of courage. It is a product of conditions. I had the fragments of both sides, I had time, and I had a baseline that didn't require me to burn through cash every month—at least for now.
These are all conditions.
If I am to take any credit for this book, the only credit I'll accept is this: at the moment the conditions aligned, I did not waste them.
II & a Half. Before
What I am writing now—the years at Lingyun Synthesis—was not my first time seeing this shape.
In my first few years in the industry, I worked at a company called Pengguang Industrial. They produced disposable batteries. I was young then, working at the grassroots level, watching a group sitting above us called the Strategy Development Department. They were considered the "elites" within the company. They had their own floor, their own jargon, and their own discourse on "how to be responsible to the company."
The core of that discourse was: "Being cruel to the bottom is the only way to be kind to the majority."
When I heard that back then, I thought, "Fuck off." But I admit, it had a logical structure on the surface—the company was in a sunset industry, a red ocean market where profit margins were paper-thin. If we didn't squeeze to the absolute extreme, the factories would move away, jobs would vanish, and everyone would die together. So the extreme squeezing was necessary. Whistleblowing and mutual surveillance were necessary. Changing cardboard packaging to shrink wrap to save a few cents was necessary. Outsourcing the automation of an entire line to dozens of disjointed vendors, producing a "customized system" with beautiful dashboards but actual bottlenecks everywhere, was necessary.
My explanation at the time was: This bullshit discourse is a product of economic pressure. People in a sunset industry, pushed to the brink by the ledger, turn out this way. If you removed the economic pressure, this system would disappear.
I carried this explanation with me for a full decade.
But during those years at Pengguang Industrial, I registered an observation. I didn't name it then; I just filed it away.
The heads of the Strategy Development Department changed on average every one or two years. Some left after a few months. During my time there, it changed at least five or four times. And every person who sat in that chair had the exact same shape. The identical ruthlessness. The identical discourse. The identical contempt for those below. The identical fluency towards those above. Even the mannerisms were alike—the angle of a shifting gaze, the speed of reframing, the reflex of digesting an awkward fact within three seconds.
At the time, I thought: Strange. If this is a personal issue of the individual, going through five or six people, you'd bound to find at least one who's different. But no. Not a single one.
I had no answer back then. I simply filed the observation away.
Then I went to Lingyun Synthesis.
Lingyun Synthesis is not a sunset industry. It has money. It has scale. It has a globally recognized brand. It has HR processes, compliance training, town halls preaching "People First," and DEI policy documents. It has absolutely none of Pengguang Industrial's "forced by the ledger" excuses.
Yet the level of bullshit discourse—using the phrase "100 times worse" is honestly conservative.
And what disoriented me the most during that period wasn't the bullshit itself. It was—the people I bumped into there, I recognized their shape.
They were the exact same shape as the people sitting in that Strategy Development Department chair at Pengguang Industrial. The same identical ruthlessness. The identical fluency. The identical contempt for subordinates disguised as care. The identical reflex of digesting an awkward fact in three seconds flat.
But Lingyun Synthesis had no sunset industry excuse.
And the level of bullshit—I don't know how else to describe it—if Pengguang Industrial was a 30 out of 100, Lingyun Synthesis was a solid 100.
Back at Pengguang Industrial, I thought 30 points was the absolute limit. I thought human nature combining with systemic cruelty to kill people, with no one caring and no one looking, was the absolute farthest this sort of thing could go. I spent a full ten years explaining it to myself: this is a mutation born of extreme environments; this isn't the norm; this is forced by the ledger, so remove the ledger and it's gone.
Then I went to a place with no structural ledger constraints and saw a full 100 points.
My decade-long explanation severed precisely in that moment.
In that moment—perhaps it wasn't a single moment, but a buildup over a full year—the explanation I'd carried for ten years snapped.
If this bullshit discourse were the product of economic pressure, it shouldn't exist in a massively wealthy company. But it did. And it was more refined, harder to pierce, incredibly complete.
Which means—the root cause was never economic pressure.
Economic pressure is merely an amplifier.
The root cause is: The selection mechanism of this system carves out a specific shape. Those sitting steadily in those chairs already completely fit that shape. Those who sit unsteadily are swapped out within months. The system doesn't need to educate anyone, doesn't need to instill ideology, doesn't need endless meetings to align values. It only requires short-cycle elimination. Those who sit steadily, stay. Those who sit unsteadily, leave. After a few cycles, what remains is not "ordinary people trapped"—what remains is a batch of meticulously selected individuals whose core capability is maintaining the mask with absolute fluency.
This mechanism operates in the sunset industry of Pengguang Industrial. It also operates in the wealthy Lingyun Synthesis. It has nothing to do with economic pressure. Economic pressure merely gives its surface an extra layer of narrative cover—providing the people sitting in those chairs a convenient justification for themselves. Strip away the narrative wrapper, and the shape remains.
And when writing this book, the one sentence I constantly had to remind myself was—do not let readers think this is a uniquely Lingyun Synthesis story. And do not let them think this is a sunset industry story.
Both framings are safety nets. Both will assist the reader in evading the actual problem.
The true problem is: as long as those few conditions are met, this shape will appear anywhere. Regardless of the industry, regardless of nationality, regardless of whether the company is rich or not, regardless of how "progressive" the company appears to be on the surface. Pengguang Industrial is the 30-point version. Lingyun Synthesis is the 100-point version. And every single tick mark between 30 and 100 points—right now, at this very moment in some corner of the world—someone is currently experiencing it.
Not every company is like this. But a company not being like this doesn't mean it exists outside this spectrum—it's just hovering at a very low tick mark. And when that tick mark starts to climb, from the inside, there are zero warning signs.
I am so certain of this observation because I've seen it twice.
Once is not enough. Once could mean your company is just exceptionally terrible, you're exceptionally unlucky, or you have a particularly evil boss. With an N=1 sample, you can't distinguish "individual" from "structural."
Twice, across companies, across industries, across geographic regions, across economic conditions—and still persisting across multiple personnel permutations within each company—only then is it enough for you to say: This is not individual. This is a reproducible shape.
And the implications of this reproducible shape are utterly devastating. It means: the boss you are facing right now in your office, the things he does, are not because he is him. The things he does are because he sits in that chair. If you swap him out today and someone else sits there tomorrow, what you will experience—will be fundamentally the same.
This implication is cruel to the victim. Because it strips away the one hope that could carry you through tough times: "It'll be better once this boss leaves." That hope is false. The next one will be the exact same shape.
But this implication is completely essential for understanding. Because it shifts your anger away from a person and redirects it back to a system. And anger at a system has a completely different quality than anger at a person. The former doesn't have a face you can fixate on, but the former is far more accurate.
In Section VII, I will recount how my belief system ruptured. The origin point of that rupture didn't actually lie in the death of November 1024. The origin point was earlier—in my second year at Lingyun Synthesis, when I bumped into that shape, retrieved the Pengguang Industrial file, overlaid the two, and realized they were the exact same blueprint.
In that moment, ten years of my explanations snapped.
The day of the death simply made the rupture final.
III. The Mask
The book is titled Mirror Realm: The Murder in the Masked System.
I didn't directly use the term "Masked System" even once in the first nineteen chapters. Inside the office, Lin Zhaoming couldn't say this term—not because he didn't understand it, but because his body hadn't yet pieced together this frame. Now, in the epilogue, I can say it.
The essence of the masked system is:
Speaking (Spoken) ≠ Writing (Documents) ≠ Doing (Actions)
Three entirely distinct sets of things, maintaining a facade of uniformity. This is the masked system.
This isn't anyone's conspiracy. This is a—routine operating mode of the corporate world. If you pick any mid-to-large-sized company, you can verify this mechanism. They speak certain things (town halls, press releases, the CEO's LinkedIn posts). They write certain things (internal documents, policies, PIPs, contracts). They do certain things (the actual personnel decisions being made, the actual flow of resources, who actually gets the promotion). When the gap between these three sets of things is small, it's a relatively healthy company. When the gap between them is grotesquely large, yet the company still operates, that is the mature form of the masked system.
When Lin Zhaoming entered the industry, he was already aware of its existence. He wasn't naïve. He knew that what is said and what is done are often different. Anyone who has spent a few years in the corporate world knows this. This isn't an insight; this is common sense.
But what he didn't know was—how absurd the extent could be.
"People First" printed on a town hall slide, while a layoff list comes out three weeks later—this he anticipated. This is normal corporate hypocrisy. He knew how to handle it.
But: after someone dies, a previously existing technical issue suddenly "never existed"—
This, he did not anticipate.
After the incident occurred, the ticket vanished. Comments were edited. He asked the adjacent team in the pantry, "What's going on with that null pointer issue now?" The other person looked at him, their eyes completely sincere and deeply confused—"What null pointer?" At that moment, Lin Zhaoming finally understood: this wasn't an issue of "no one dares to mention it." "No one dares to mention it" is a conscious avoidance. This wasn't that. This was—the event being processed into never having occurred. Across all systems, all records, and everyone's mouths, it never existed.
This is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is—they know the truth, and then they speak the opposite. This is not that. This is—the fact itself is disappeared. Even the anchor against which to speak the "opposite" is taken away.
This is the mature form of the masked system.
A system that reaches this stage possesses a trait that is very difficult to describe: it no longer needs to distinguish between true and false. Because it no longer operates on the axis of "true vs. false." It operates on the axis of "whether the narrative can be maintained." If an event can maintain a narrative, it is true. If it cannot, it vanishes. There is no layer of "fact" operating as a baseline beneath it.
Hearing this, readers might think: "So this system will eventually blow up, right? Because reality will inevitably crash into it."
This is a reasonable deduction, but it is incorrect.
Whether or not this system will blow up depends on how hard the reality it crashes into is. If the task this system performs is—for instance—a rocket meant to fly into space, it will blow up very quickly. Physics will rip its narrative apart.
But if the task this system performs is—some interfacing protocols, some firmware timings, the working conditions of some supplier engineers, the execution of certain policies—then it can be maintained for a very long time. Because the "reality feedback" of these things is slow, distributed, and lacks a single catastrophic failure point. A supplier engineer dying—is a distributed event to the system. A null pointer—is a distributed event. An outsourced responsibility—is a distributed event. No single event is massive enough to crash through the entire narrative all at once.
So the system can avoid blowing up for a long time.
And during this "non-explosive" period, real things are still happening—they just lack records.
There is a deeper layer here that I must explain clearly, because it took me the longest time to accept.
I used to believe—that a system ridden with ambiguity exists because it "failed to record the truth." Meaning, it intended to record it, but simply couldn't. Its tech system wasn't good enough. It lacked headcount. The categorizations weren't unified. Version control was flawed. Therefore, many things were lost in the cracks. If you fixed these technical issues, it would be able to record them.
This understanding is wrong.
The truth is the precise opposite: ambiguity itself is a feature of this system, not a bug.
When your system operates on the axis of "whether the narrative can be maintained," you need a deeply ambiguous state of record-keeping. Because a clear record locks the facts into place, leaving the narrative no room to maneuver. If your ticket system had unified tracking numbers, perfect version traceability, and uneditable comments—that null pointer issue could not have "never existed." It would be there forever.
So—why do massive corporations spend so many years pushing for so-called "digital transformation," "ERP integration," or "systems consolidation"—and taking so long to ultimately fail?
It is not due to technical difficulty.
Technical difficulty is the surface reason. The deeper reason is: there is a cohort of people inside that system whose survival hinges on ambiguity. These people may not consciously sabotage digitalization—they simply sit at every decision point and cast their vote for "let's delay this a bit," "let's run another round of evaluation," or "this isn't the priority right now." Every individual decision has a perfectly reasonable surface justification. But combined, the outcome is: ten years pass, and nothing gets done.
This isn't a conspiracy. This is emergent behavior.
This point is profoundly important, because it explains why these systems self-reinforce. No one is sitting in a boss's chair saying, "We must never let digitalization succeed." But every microscopic, rational, individual decision adds up, producing the exact same effect.
It took me a long time to accept this. Because this overturned the default model of "organizations" I carried when I entered the industry—I thought organizations were strictly top-down, with an executive layer setting the direction and cascading it down. I thought if something couldn't be done, it was because the executives refused to do it.
This model is fine for certain aspects. But for others, it is incredibly naïve.
And for this specific aspect—"why data cleaning still hasn't succeeded after ten years"—the top-down model is completely wrong. At the execution level, no one votes for "success." Every single vote is cast for "delay." The emergent vote of the execution layer overpowers the stated direction of the executives.
And this emergent vote—is driven by every individual's immediate self-interest. None of them want digitalization to succeed, because its success would force their own responsibilities to the surface. And they don't even need to discuss it amongst themselves. Each person has done the math on their own.
This is the engine of the masked system.
IV. Breathing
This is the section of the book I rewrote the most times, both forwards and backwards.
Because there is a distinction here that took me years to think through. If this distinction isn't made crystal clear, the moral frame of the entire book collapses.
I used to think—the people in management who spoke lies, shirked responsibilities, severed ties with colleagues, and fabricated narratives—were "genuinely buying into their own version of things." Which is to say, they didn't think they were lying. They lived inside a self-justifying reality bubble. They were victims of the structure, not perpetrators.
This understanding, I now believe, is wrong. Or to be more precise: it is partial, and partial to such a degree that it becomes completely wrong.
We have to divide people into two categories here.
The first category: Those who genuinely don’t know about the middle layers.
These people exist. I don't deny it. In any corporate enterprise, there are many vertical layers, and the input received by the upper layers has already been filtered by the lower layers. These individuals—typically managers separated by a significant distance, newly-arrived executives, or cross-functional colleagues—receive a narrative that has already been scrubbed clean. They have no access to what actually happens in the middle layers.
For this group, "genuinely buying into it" is an accurate description. The version they speak matches the version they received. They are not lying. They are merely relaying a version that they believe to be the truth.
The existence of these people is one of the mechanisms by which the system sustains itself. They are honest brokers—honest within their own frame. But the content they are brokering has already been filtered. Thus, in effect, they are amplifying an inaccurate narrative. But they themselves don't know it.
Towards this group, I hold no anger. I feel sadness. They are victims too, just a different kind of victim.
But this group—these "genuinely believing" ones—make up the minority of those who tell lies within that system.
The second category: Those who know, but choose to say the opposite.
These are the majority.
It took me a very long time to accept this. Because acknowledging it required me to abandon a default assumption I carried when I entered the industry—namely, "human beings are rational creatures; to commit a bad act, there must be a reason they can use to justify it to themselves." I thought if a person did something wrong, they must have an internal narrative explaining to themselves that what they did was reasonable. Otherwise, they wouldn't be able to do it.
This assumption was naïve.
The actual mechanism operates like this:
A system has been running for a decade or two. Every cycle, it is picking people. Those unable to fabricate narratives leave—they fail to get promoted, they become unhappy, they get marginalized, and eventually, they go. Those who can—the more effortlessly, the better—are promoted. They are given more power. They get seated closer to the core. Then they train the next batch.
After several cycles, the remaining people are not "ordinary folks trapped in a bind." The remaining individuals are—a batch of thoroughly vetted people. Their core competency is the collective fabrication of narratives.
The traits of this cohort:
They have an unspoken understanding—one speaks half a sentence, the next knows exactly how to catch it; one shifts their eyes, the next knows exactly where to slide the knife; one writes the meeting notes, the next knows exactly which item those notes should omit. This understanding requires zero prep meetings because they have been mutually calibrating themselves for years, sometimes decades.
The speed and fluency of their narrative fabrication reach a level where you can't even tell they are improvising. In a meeting, if an awkward fact surfaces, they can collectively reframe that fact into something entirely different within three seconds—with absolutely zero visible signals during the process. No eye contact. No pause. No hesitation. They are just fluent.
When faced with scrutiny, their default reflex is—to reframe the question as the personal issue of the questioner themselves. "You've been under a lot of pressure lately." "You have some communication challenges." "Your perception is slightly off." The speed of this reframing is faster than the question itself. This is not a strategy. This is an instinct.
These traits—I am telling everyone—are a form of discipline.
It is a deliberate discipline, effectively camouflaged as a spontaneous daily routine.
And here—here is the hardest step of all:
These people, they know.
Not "if they stop and think for a second, they'd know." It means that at the exact moment of every micro-action, they know. They know they are fabricating a version. They know that version has a gap with the truth. They know what that gap means for the victims. They know.
It's just that—this "knowing" has been trained into an automatic layer. Like breathing. When a person breathes, do they know they are breathing? They do. But they don't need to consciously think, "I am going to take a breath now." Breathing occurs in a lower-level layer. The conscious mind can perform other tasks simultaneously—chatting, thinking, decision-making—while breathing continues unbothered.
For this cohort, the fabrication of narratives operates at this layer.
However—
Breathing being automatic does not mean it isn't a choice.
I must absolutely emphasize this point. Because this is the anchor of the entire moral frame.
If someone's narrative fabrication has become automatic, does it still count as a "choice"?
My answer is: Yes.
I'll use a thought experiment to explain. A professional hitman has killed so much that he no longer needs to consciously think to commit the act. His methods have become muscle memory. His emotional responses are fully desensitized. He can murder someone while simultaneously pondering what to have for dinner. He no longer experiences moments of conscious hesitation.
Is this hitman still considered a murderer?
Of course he is.
"Automatic" does not equal "absolved of responsibility." "Automatic" merely means his conscious threshold has dropped to a negligible level. He is still physically doing the thing. He is still reaping the rewards for doing it. He is still advancing his position through it. Every automatic frame-up, every automatic severing of ties, every automatic "I don't recall saying that"—is a choice. Even if that choice is so automated that he himself doesn't need to stop and think about it, it is still a choice.
An atrocity, even when manifesting as instinct, is still an atrocity.
I have to make this perfectly clear: There is no forgiveness. There is no sympathy. And there is no "they didn't have a choice" exit ramp.
The "they didn't have a choice" narrative is one of the most effective anesthetics this system feeds us. It causes those who have seen the truth to eventually be stripped of their rightful anger. "Nothing they could do," "Everyone's just a cog in the machine," "It's a structural issue"—these sentences will slowly dissolve your moral compass. You will begin to feel that no individual wrongdoing justifies anger, because "the structure determines everything."
This is the system's most brilliant trick: it cultivates a cohort of people whose capacity for malice is practically instinct, and simultaneously cultivates a theory to argue that these people "couldn't help it" and "are merely victims of the structure," thereby robbing any third party of their right to be angry at their wrongdoings.
Do not fall for it.
Both are true: a specific person, sitting in a specific room, deciding to shift a specific disaster onto another specific person—that is a moral event. They must be held responsible for that decision, even if their entire career has trained them to perform it without thinking. At the same time, the system—the system that trained them, rewarded them, promoted them, and dispatched them to manage the next generation—must also be indicted.
You must hold both. Individual responsibility, and systemic responsibility. Dropping either side leaves you with an incomplete picture.
I wrote this book, specifically, to write both.
V. Another Layer
There is an entire layer of things that this book downplays.
Not omitted by accident. Deliberately chosen. I knew this layer existed when writing—it probably affects daily office life more than any other layer in the book—but I chose not to write about it.
The reason for not writing it is simple: if I wrote it, this book would turn into an entirely different book. And that book, I am incapable of writing.
What I am talking about—and I will state this using the most structural language possible, because any direct naming will immediately trigger the pre-existing, deeply entrenched side-taking reflexes in the reader's brain—
Any set of categories designed to protect a certain group of people will, in this kind of system, mutate into another vector for hunting them.
This sentence sounds very abstract. Let me be more concrete.
There are categories in the world meant to protect people. Because certain groups have historically been subjected to unfair treatment, institutions carve out positions, reserve the right to speak, and set aside protected spaces for them. The starting point for this—I have never thought there was anything wrong with it. One of the regional legacy successor companies I worked for genuinely attempted to achieve this. They weren't perfect. When the market was bad, they laid people off too. But they were honest. When someone was laid off, the boss would personally sit down, look them in the eye, and say, "I'm sorry, this is not fair." That sentence doesn't solve anything. But the texture of it—it is a completely different species. The texture of those flashbacks labeled D in this book is exactly that.
But when this set of categories enters a company that has already been hollowed out by the system, something incredibly difficult to explain happens.
Those categories don't disappear. They are preserved—even enthusiastically embraced, written into mission statements, printed on the office walls—but their function is inverted. What was originally a tool for protection becomes a tool for hunting. Language initially meant to give a voice to the vulnerable becomes a procedure to suppress doubters. A framework originally intended to give those without power a floor to speak on, becomes a mechanism allowing the most powerful people to use the guise of "protecting the vulnerable" to slap an "offensive" label onto anyone who questions them.
This phenomenon is much harder to recognize than direct regression.
Because it utilizes the very language you originally intended to use for resistance.
If you try to oppose it, you'll find that every one of your arguments will be read as an "attack on the vulnerable." If you choose to remain silent, you'll find that your silence will be read as "complicity." Whatever you do is wrong. And the people who designed this double bind—they are not ideologically committed. They just did the math: which set of language is currently the most effective at shutting up dissenters. Today it's this set; tomorrow it could be another. They learn incredibly fast.
This dynamic is a specific application of the previous section, 〈Breathing〉. The same cohort of people, the same skill set, the same "breathing-style" discipline—except this time the wrapper is progressive language. Next quarter, the wrapper might be the exact opposite. The underlying mechanism is the same.
But none of this is the most painful part.
The most painful part is not the struggle between categories.
The most painful part is—the people within the same category hunting each other the most ruthlessly.
This is the hardest observation I have had to digest in my entire life. People who supposedly should recognize each other as kin—sharing the same history, sharing the same experience of being treated a certain way, people who fundamentally should protect each other—in this kind of system, become each other's most direct prey.
And the intensity of this internal hunting is an order of magnitude higher than the struggles between categories.
Why? Because committing violence against people outside your category carries a political cost. It will be seen. It will be named. It will leave a trace. But committing violence against people inside your category—"Oh, they're our own people," "This doesn't concern outsiders," "We'll handle it ourselves"—carries absolutely zero political cost. The violence can be conducted inside a wrapper that looks pristinely clean to the outside world. And the perpetrators can simultaneously continue to present themselves to the outside world as the fierce defenders of that exact category.
I have seen this happen.
I cannot provide evidence. There are no documents. No audio recordings. No third-party witnesses. Just like the other layers of this book—this layer only lives inside the minds of those who have seen it. Ninety percent of the victims die without ever realizing they were slaughtered beneath a framework that was supposed to protect them. They just thought it was their own personal bad luck.
I cannot write the complete version of this layer.
If I did, this book would become a thesis book. And a thesis book cannot explain a structure—a thesis book only triggers another round of side-taking. And the act of taking sides itself is nourishment for this system. Every round of taking sides, every judgment of "which side is the author on," washes away the core observation this book is trying to make. Readers would pivot to asking, "Do you support this stance?"—and that question itself already misses what I am trying to say.
What I am trying to convey is not a stance. It is a structure.
Any stance—no matter which side—when placed inside this type of system, will be squeezed dry, inverted, and weaponized. The operational logic of the system runs a layer deeper than the content of any stance. The content of the stance is merely the wrapper the system picked to use for that quarter. Next quarter it might swap to a different wrapper. But the underlying mechanism is the same.
Therefore, I chose to downplay it. I chose to write specific scenes—Cindy's KTV, Ah-K's twins, Old Xu's "Debtors' Alliance"—to write them as flesh-and-blood human beings, rather than placing them into any categories. I hope that after reading it, readers will not feel "this is a book about gender" or "this is a book about a certain political faction."
This book is not that.
This book is about a system that will absorb all of the above things, digest them, and vomit them back out as weapons.
And I must also state one more thing: this kind of system is not limited to the corporate office.
I wrote about an electronics manufacturing company. But you will see the exact same shape in entirely different places. In entertainment, in content creation, in the arts, in gaming, in academia, in media—in any industry whose operation fundamentally relies on managing people's emotions and identities—you will see the exact same pattern.
The same banners.
The same layoffs.
The same internal mutual hunting.
The same "This isn't political, this is about performance."
The same disappearing people. The same "No big deal" colleagues. The same HR personnel using the exact same tone to read the exact same script.
On the surface, these industries have absolutely nothing to do with a supplier engineer dying. One makes electronics. One makes games. One does academia. There is no supply chain linking them, no shared shareholders, no obvious connection. But structurally, they are the exact same animal. The same algorithm running in different industries, spitting out different kinds of corpses.
This is not a metaphor. This is the pattern I pieced together post-mortem after entering different kinds of companies using the perspective of both sides.
So the function of this section is not to explain.
It is to point it out.
I cannot write the full version of this layer. The full version is ten times more complex. The full version requires not a novel, but generations of field research and oral history, and most of those people who could provide it are still currently being hunted and cannot speak.
But the one thing I can do is leave a single sentence here:
This layer exists.
If one day you bump into it—whether it's in a company, a group, a circle, or a place you previously thought was a safe house—you'll recognize its shape. You'll remember that someone once wrote here: This is not your fault. This is a mechanism that absorbs any identity language and turns it into a weapon. You didn't do anything wrong. You just stepped into a place designed fundamentally to grind people down.
Leave.
Do not think you can fix it from the inside. Do not think your category will protect you. Do not think the opposing side will show mercy because you're the same kind.
Leave.
This is a sentence bought with four years of my life—and several people who shouldn't have died.
VI. Never Intended To
This section contains the final reveal of this book.
This reveal never appeared in the first nineteen chapters because Lin Zhaoming, from his office perspective, couldn't have known about it. He had no way of knowing. This reveal belongs only to the study perspective—belonging strictly to this moment as I sit here, piecing together the fragments of four years with years of other industry context.
I am referring to the "final refusal" in Chapter Eighteen—Lin Zhaoming being called upon to lead a project named "Next-Generation Core Architecture." A project intended to replace the legacy architecture with a new generation one. He was brought in to handle timing alignment, protocol matching, and cross-architecture compatibility of the firmware. He calculated—based on his engineering judgment—that the scope of the project was physically impossible within that timeline. So he refused.
The narrative of Chapter Eighteen stops right there. Lin Zhaoming's refusal was based on technical judgment: no logs, no baselines, no team, no referenceable root causes. These were all things the office-perspective Lin Zhaoming could see. His refusal was an act of self-respect, as well as an honest technical assessment.
But there was another layer here that he didn't know at the time:
That project was never intended to be fully realized from the very beginning.
This reveal is not a dramatic twist. It is a pattern I pieced together after the fact. I will explain it in detail here.
The ecosystem of this industry—the hardware, the software stack, the drivers, the applications—the entire ecosystem revolves around one dominant architecture. I won't name this dominant architecture here, but industry insiders reading this will naturally know. For the sake of ecosystem integration, compatibility, driver support, and translation efficiency—all incentives, all capital flow, and all talent movement revolve around this single architecture.
The new architecture is theoretically superior on the market. But it requires ecosystem support to truly launch and take root. And ecosystem support is not a technical problem—it is a political-economic problem. All stakeholders must simultaneously commit. This—given the current trajectory of the industry—will not happen. Every party is waiting for the other side to commit first. No one will make the first move. Consequently, devices utilizing the new architecture might remain permanently stuck in the prototype phase.
I can say these things now because I have distance. Back then, I couldn't.
And Lingyun Synthesis's "Next-Generation Core Architecture" project—based on my retrospective pattern recognition—was an instance of this ecosystem trilemma. They were not actually trying to complete this project. They were trying to show they were doing it.
Why show it?
Here, it aligns with LOG-031—the upper-level reorganization happening at headquarters during that same period.
Between 1023 and 1024, the Amerion headquarters swapped its COO. They brought in someone in their mid-twenties. Town halls, emails, press releases, the main official website, massive amounts of content preached "AI decisions," "future vision," and "efficiency through automation." Meanwhile: massive layoffs. Mass departmental contractions. Amerion's core R&D shrank. The entire Data Analysis department was removed. A new Strategy Operations Development department was established—the typical function of such a department is to generate valuations, handle packaging, spin narratives, and prepare everything for a potential transaction.
I intercepted all of this back then. During the days I spent taking care of my mother on the Intermediate Island, I watched the video town halls and treated them as background noise. "Big companies reorg all the time." I didn't think twice.
Now, piecing it together, the picture emerges: the entire enterprise was likely preparing to be sold.
Within the "preparing to sell" framing, everything must be re-understood:
Why execute the "Next-Generation Core Architecture" project? —Because in an acquisition, the buyer wants to see that the seller possesses next-gen capabilities. They want to see a slide deck stating, "We have a next-gen architecture transition roadmap," and "We have already invested in a next-gen core." That deck does not require a product to actually ship. The deck only needs to exist.
Therefore—the impossible mission Lin Zhaoming was ordered to undertake, its impossibility was by design. The mission was not designed to succeed. The mission was designed to produce a deck. The deck was designed to support a valuation. The valuation was designed to support a sale.
Why was the PIP-style design of this mission intentionally designed to make Lin Zhaoming fail? —Because the day the deck is written, it needs a narrative along the lines of "We tried, but the individual contributor was incompetent." Lin Zhaoming's failure is the raw material for the deck. His N+1 severance is the condition required for the deck to be written cleanly.
Lin Zhaoming is the raw material.
The entire project, from beginning to end, was designed to extract him to be used as raw material. His technical judgments, his timing analysis, his root cause probing, his engineering integrity—all of it was a cover story. The function of the cover story was to make this extraction look like it possessed process, review, and fairness.
This is the ultimate layer of understanding from my four-year journey.
And this layer of understanding makes everything that came before it far more tragic.
Because in the previous chapters, the reader could perhaps still think: "Lin Zhaoming was in there fighting a malfunctioning system. He lost, but the system is still designed to do something—it just does it poorly." That frame retains dignity. A person failing within a system that intends to succeed but fails is still a tragedy—but it is a recognizable tragedy. A tragedy with meaning.
But what if the system itself never intended to succeed at all?
If the entire project, the entire product line, the entire "Next-Generation Core Architecture," the entire visionary town hall pitch—was entirely designed just to produce raw material for a valuation—then what exactly is Lin Zhaoming fighting against?
He is not fighting against incompetence.
He is fighting against window dressing.
This distinction is massive. Fighting against incompetence, you lose, but your loss is meaningful. The things you documented, the root causes you analyzed, the solutions you proposed—theoretically, someone could pick them up and use them. Fighting against window dressing—the things you document are designed from the very start to never be read. You are not inside battling a broken machine. You are battling a stage prop.
And the operational logic of a stage prop is fundamentally different from a machine. A stage prop doesn't need to work. A stage prop only needs to look like it works, just long enough for a specific transaction to complete.
Lin Zhaoming's four years—his technical contributions, his root cause analysis, his communications with suppliers, his platform knowledge, his system diagnostics maps—all of it was just ramming against a stage prop. Zero traction. Zero echo. Completely devoid of anything to stick to. Because a stage prop doesn't have a surface you can stick things to.
This is the ultimate presentation of the masked system:
The purpose of the system is not to do things. The purpose of the system is to maintain itself. Shipping a product is merely a byproduct. When even shipping a product becomes optional, all that remains is: constructing narratives, polishing numbers, and preparing to sell.
And a supplier engineer dying—is an acceptable collateral in this process.
Not intentional collateral. Acceptable collateral. No one wanted him dead. But no one stopped to think about what his death meant. Because stopping to think would disrupt the narrative. Narrative disruption affects valuation. A drop in valuation costs real money. Real money versus a supplier engineer's life—according to the calculus of the system—is an unequal trade-off.
No one will ever speak this trade-off out loud. But every person's micro-decisions, added together, equals actively executing this trade-off.
This is emergent murder.
Lin Zhaoming didn't know about this layer back then. His refusal was based purely on technical judgment, not upon this insight. His dignity remained intact, because he still believed he was fighting a broken system, and refusing an impossible task was an honest act of engineering.
His dignity was real. My writing of this reveal is not intended to retroactively strip away his dignity.
I write this reveal to tell readers: even if your fight isn't against what you think you're fighting against, your fight still has meaning. The moment Lin Zhaoming refused, he didn't save any supplier engineers. He didn't stop any sale. He didn't expose any narratives. He was simply—refusing to be raw material.
This refusal itself, is the central act of this book.
When you refuse to be raw material, your refusal won't be recorded. But a refusal remains a refusal.
VII. Fracture
From August 1024 to January 1026, my blog was blank.
This year and a half was the period when this book truly began to have the possibility of existing.
In August 1024, my belief was—good intentions lead to good outcomes. I had carried this belief my entire life. It wasn't an abstract theory. It was a working assumption—doing the right thing will, over the long term, yield a return. The return might not be immediate, it might not come in the form expected, but it would be there. The world is net-just.
I brought this belief into the industry with me. Every career decision I made—refusing to fabricate data, refusing to let outsourced vendors take the blame, staying back in a place I felt was broken to try and fix it from the inside—was all based on this belief.
On November 8, 1024, this belief fractured.
Someone died.
The relationship between this death and my work, I cannot confirm 100%. This book adheres strictly to this epistemological baseline from start to finish: I only have inferences. No hard evidence. No documents. No confessions. No audit trails.
But my inference is overwhelmingly strong. The same system. The same boss. The same tactics. The same pressure. The same silenced voices. I saw how the mechanism worked. I saw how victims were isolated. I saw how investigations were corrupted. I saw how tickets simply vanished. I saw how comments were edited. I saw how "nobody recalls" was mass-manufactured. I saw what this mechanism did to the things I was involved in—except I had six layers of protection keeping me from being pushed over that edge.
When I heard about this death, my first instinct wasn't grief. It was recognition. It was—I recognized this shape.
This recognition is far harder to carry than grief. Grief is at least an emotional event; it has a beginning and an end. Recognition is a cognitive event, and it doesn't end. It just settles in. It becomes your baseline.
And the process of it settling in, was the process of my belief fracturing.
After the fracture, I sat in a space I cannot properly describe for over a dozen months.
This space wasn't depression, although it looked like it on the surface. It wasn't anger, though it contained anger. It wasn't grief. It was a—limbo following the failure of a working model.
The model I used to navigate the world was: doing the right thing will, over the long term, yield returns.
That model failed.
It wasn't a realization that "doing the wrong thing yields returns." It also wasn't "doing anything yields no returns." It was—the link between returns and the 'right action' severed. If you do the right thing, you might get a return, or you might not. If you do the wrong thing, you might get a return, or you might not. The distribution of returns completely decoupled from ethical content.
The implication of this model failure took me a full year to digest:
If there is no link between returns and the right action—then why should I do the right action?
This is not nihilism. This is a far more fundamental question. Nihilism is a philosophical position. The question I was asking wasn't a philosophical position; it was a daily operating question: when I wake up tomorrow morning, why should I choose the harder path?
It took me 12 months to find the answer.
The answer wasn't "the return is still there, it's just slow." The answer wasn't "the universe is just in the long run." None of those I personally believed anymore.
The answer was: Because I cannot afford the cost of giving up.
The unit of this answer isn't cosmic justice. The unit is me.
If I chose to give up on doing the right action—if I chose to participate in the mask, to shirk responsibility, to fabricate narratives to protect myself—I would turn into someone I no longer recognized. I would become the mirror image of the people I am writing about in this book. I would look into the mirror and fail to find myself.
That cost is unbearable.
Not because of guilt. Guilt is something I can negotiate with myself. It is because of identity erosion. A person's identity—is not abstract—it is a cumulative pattern built by daily micro-decisions. If that pattern breaks, that person ceases to be that person. He remains, he still breathes, he still produces output—but the internal thread of self-recognition is severed.
That cost, I cannot afford.
So—I continue doing the right action, not because I believe it yields returns. Simply because the cost of not doing it is too high for me.
This is a reconstructed faith. It is completely different from the original faith. The original faith was outward-facing (the world is just). The reconstructed faith is inward-facing (I choose to be myself). The original faith was anchored in the cosmos. The reconstructed faith is anchored in self-recognition.
Original faith is far more elegant. Reconstructed faith is far more honest.
And this reconstructed faith, is perhaps what a grown-up faith looks like. I used to think growing up was keeping your faith. Now I think growing up is losing your faith, and then choosing to keep doing the right thing under conditions devoid of faith entirely.
There is another layer of pain following the fracture—
"Not knowing if I saved someone" is much harder to endure than "Knowing I failed to save someone."
"Failed to save" is a concrete fact. You can grieve, you can process, you can learn, and you can move on.
"Not knowing if I saved" is not a fact. It is a state of permanent uncertainty.
Every decision I made over those four years—every time I called a halt, every refusal, every time I flagged the concerns in Ah-Qiang's report, every statement I refused to sign in the PIP—might have spared someone a day of immense pressure. Might have bought some supplier engineer another week to stay here. Might have caught a failure mode on some production line one extra time.
Might have.
I will never know.
Because—and here is the cruel part—successful prevention leaves no records. A death that is thwarted has no marker. An outage that doesn't occur goes completely unnoticed. A trigger that doesn't fire leaves no ticket. Prevention is entirely invisible.
If I saved 5 people over those four years, I will never know who those 5 people are. They are out there continuing to walk their own paths in life, possessing utterly zero knowledge that someone named Lin Zhaoming sat in a conference room and hit pause on certain things on their behalf.
This invisibility—is one of the most agonizing features of the right action.
If I choose to believe I saved someone—I have zero evidence. I might just be comforting myself.
If I choose to believe I saved no one—I also have zero evidence. I might just be self-flagellating.
I have no evidence on either side. I can only continue walking within this permanent uncertainty.
And this uncertainty, to me, is harder to bear than "definitively knowing I didn't." Because when you definitely know you didn't save them, you can let it go. You can say: OK, lost this round, onto the next. Uncertainty you cannot put down. Every single day you ask yourself—maybe I did? What if there are 5 people walking around right now, completely unknown to me? They might be having dinner right now. They might be playing with their children. I will never meet them. But I might have hit a button in a conference room four years ago that ensured they are still here today.
This possibility—and the opposite possibility (that I saved absolutely no one, and these four years were utterly in vain)—coexist.
I learned to coexist with it.
It brings no peace. Only toleration.
This is what fully reconstructed looks like.
VIII. The Map
The ultimate functional purpose of this book is to hand readers a map they can physically take with them.
Not a narrative takeaway. A navigational tool.
If you are a person about to enter or already inside a similar system, the following items are the main features of this map:
First: Recognize the shape.
The shape of this system possesses a few specific markers. If you encounter multiple markers presenting simultaneously, there is a high probability you are inside a masked system.
Markers:
- A massive gap across speaking, writing, and doing
- Obvious process improvements taking decades and failing, yet every resistance having perfectly rational individual reasons
- You raising a technical concern, and the response defaults to reframing your communication style rather than addressing the concern itself
- Things discussed in your 1-on-1s later appearing in the mouths of others, largely in a distorted form
- A colleague suddenly vanishing, followed by everyone adopting quiet euphemisms: "Organizational restructuring," "Changing paths," "Personal development"
- Things you documented later appearing in a set of meeting notes, but entirely inverted
- A systemic rift between your manager's friendliness and their actions, yet the friendliness never stops
- HR procedures remaining technically faultless, but the outcome always exclusively protects the organization, never protecting the individual
- A glaring technical issue, when raised, triggering the response "This problem never existed," and no one referencing your prior tickets
If you bump into three or more of these markers, you are inside a masked system.
Second: Do not attempt to fix it from the inside.
This is a lesson bought with four years and a fractured set of beliefs. I used to think—that a sufficiently competent, sufficiently honest, sufficiently persistent individual could fix a broken system from within.
It is impossible.
Not because the individual isn't competent enough. It is because the system's self-defense mechanisms are vastly more powerful than any individual's effort could ever be. The system has an advantage in headcount. The system has an advantage in institutional memory. The system has an advantage in procedure. The system has an overwhelming advantage in narrative production. The individual only has themselves.
Attempts to fix it from within have exactly one outcome: the individual gets ground down, gets forcefully ejected, and the system easily continues unbothered.
This lesson is incredibly important for idealistic people to hear. An idealistic person's default move is always to stay and try. And that default is the right move within a healthy system. Inside a broken system, it is a fatal move.
Third: Leave.
This is an echo of the previous section, but I will repeat it because it is the single most important piece of advice on this entire map.
Leaving, and "leaving while keeping your dignity perfectly intact," are two different things. You can leave looking ugly. You can leave in an unglorious way. You can lose something on your way out. That is all OK. The important thing is—leave.
Do not wait until your reserves have thoroughly burned out. Do not wait until your health crumbles. Do not wait until your relationships shatter. Do not wait until you are fully ejected—because being ejected and walking out are two entirely separate events. The former is the system's final act of violence upon you. The latter is your final act of refusal towards the system.
You won't feel this distinction in that exact moment. You'll only feel it when looking back in retrospect.
Leave.
Fourth: After you leave, do not seek to prove.
I have seen countless people who have left, spending the subsequent years desperately attempting to prove the reasons they left to the outside world. They write essays. They try to explain it to friends. They desperately try to align narratives with ex-colleagues. They sit around constantly waiting for a moment of complete vindication.
That moment of vindication almost never arrives.
The reason it doesn't arrive isn't just because "the world is unfair" (although that is true). The reason it doesn't arrive is because: one of the core design features of this system is rendering its victims permanently incapable of producing evidence. The evidence exists strictly within the system's interior walls. The evidence is heavily managed. What you manage to carry out with you are merely fragments, distinct impressions, and a highly tuned pattern recognition accumulated over several years inside—but pattern recognition cannot serve as third-party evidence.
So—do not seek to prove it.
Proving it is a fool's errand. It only anchors you squarely within the system's framing, because to prove it requires using the specific evidence type recognized by the system. And the system fully controls those types of evidence. You cannot ever win that game.
What you can do is: describe.
Describing is entirely different from proving. To describe is to—document your experience, release it, and let the next person coming along recognize it. Describing carries zero burden of proof, because it isn't claiming to be objective evidence. The audience for describing is not a judge in a courtroom; it is a fellow traveler on the road.
This book itself is a pure form of describing. I have not attempted to prove a single thing. Nor am I capable of it. I merely describe a shape, thoroughly hoping that the next person who bumps into this shape might recognize it a day earlier.
Fifth: Know that someone has seen it.
If you are currently experiencing these things right now—
Know this.
Know that someone has seen it.
Know that someone—a person completely unknown to you, sitting in a study entirely unknown to you—once sat in a position almost identical to yours, experienced identical things, and wrote this very book specifically so you could have this map right now.
Your confusion is not yours uniquely. It is the dense fog actively manufactured by the system.
Your isolation is not yours uniquely. It is deliberately designed by the system.
Your perpetual self-doubt—"Is it all my personal problem?"—is the system's single most effective weapon against you.
None of this is your fault.
I cannot pull you out. No one can pull you out. The nature of this system determines that—a rescue must be a self-rescue.
But the one single thing I can do is drastically reduce the time it takes you to perform it. It took me four years. If this map lets you do it in two years—or one year—or half a year, my four years will have found its echo.
This is the entire reason I wrote this book.
IX. No One Applauding
I have written down to here; it is drawing to a close.
I pondered for a long time—how this epilogue should close.
My first instinct was to reach for a highly dramatic closing. A climactic image. A final massive twist.
I rejected that instinct. Because the voice of this book from beginning to end has never been highly dramatic. It has been quiet. It has been measured. It has been dry. The closing should stay in voice.
My second instinct was to reach for an intensely emotional closing. A catharsis. A massive release.
I rejected that as well. Because the readers of this book—if they have faithfully walked with me right to this point—do not need a cathartic release. They need confirmation. They need to know that every single thing I wrote is deeply sincere. Every observation is painstakingly hard-won. Every single recommendation was bought with a steep price. Catharsis is profoundly cheap. Confirmation is fiercely expensive.
So this closing will be quiet. It will be incredibly short. It will be—a statement, rather than a conclusion.
I anticipated they might be this kind of people.
I chose to assume they weren't.
Just get the work done.
I said these heavily unadorned sentences once at the start of this book, and I say them again right now, but the weight they carry is entirely different.
The first time, they were the stance of a young man. He had anticipated it, but he actively chose to trust. This trust was entirely idealistic. It was utterly unproven. It cost absolutely nothing.
Now, this time, they are the stance of the aftermath. I fully anticipated it, I genuinely trusted, I devastatingly lost everything, and I eventually wrote this book, and now I still—
Still choose to make the exact same choice.
If I had to start over entirely from the beginning, fully knowing the devastating ending, what would I do?
I would make the exact same choice.
Not because the ending turned out good. The ending was terrible. Someone brutally died. My entire career shattered into pieces. My marriage fractured tremendously under the pressure. I burn heavily through my savings every single month. My family members do not fully know how I am right now. My reserves are strictly bounded. I am writing this book squarely inside an exceedingly narrow window. The window will soon close forever.
But I would still make the exact same choice.
Because the only available alternative avoiding this action—is actively turning into the very people I am writing about. Is waking up everyday to stare straight into the mirror at a complete stranger you no longer recognize. This cost to me, is overwhelmingly higher than sheer financial ruin. Financial ruin, I can painstakingly recover from. Identity erosion, I can never recover from.
So—
I anticipated they might be this kind of people.
I chose to assume they weren't.
Just get the work done.
This book concludes exactly here.
The final highly unadorned sentence, I fully anticipated for a very long time:
The system silently murders, but the lone survivor is not a failure. On the very day you quietly walk out the door, absolutely no one will be applauding you, and no glorious victory music will magically swell. You and only you will personally know: You never became a part of it. And that is profoundly enough.
Lin Zhaoming February 1026 The Study