Chương 11: Passive Circulation

Monday morning arrived with the cruelty it usually brings, but this time it was more amplified than usual. Lin Che had the misfortune of running out of annual and sick leave, which normally was not an issue for someone stuck in a time loop, but, as much as he would have loved to, killing himself to avoid work was not ideal for his goals. Technically, he hadn't worked a full day in half a year, so he felt slightly rusty getting back into it. Lin Che's company occupied the fourteenth floor of a building.

The floor itself was wide with a low ceiling, and divided into clusters of desks separated by partitions which were just low enough to prevent any real sense of privacy. The carpet was a shade of grey and the windows were large, which would have been a great selling point, except they pointed directly at an identical building across the street, whose occupants had, over the years, become familiar faces which Lin Che had never met but could identify on sight.

His desk was in the middle cluster, fourth from the left, and second row back. In all of his years of occupying it, he had personalised it with exactly one (1) small cactus, which he'd been informed multiple times was a fire hazard and would immediately hide in a drawer when desks were inspected. He sat down as the clock struck the hour and logged in, opening the task that had been waiting in his inbox since tens of deaths ago.

The subject line read: FWD: Re: Re: Q3 Inbound Freight Reconciliation — ACTION REQUIRED The work was not that complicated, which was, in many ways, the exact problem with it. A supplier in Guangzhou had submitted freight invoices for the third quarter that didn't reconcile with the internal shipping logs.

Specifically, there were fourteen line items whose declared weights didn't match the warehouse intake records by margins which felt consistent enough to chalk up to a measurement error, but he still had to confirm this hypothesis. At the very least, it didn't look like fraud to him.

Someone had made a mistake somewhere in the chain, and Lin Che's job was to go back through four separate spreadsheets and a shared drive folder containing scanned documents of varying quality to find exactly where the mistake had taken place. It was the kind of task that required paying enough attention to prevent him from thinking about anything else, but couldn't hold enough focus to make the time pass.

By half past ten, he had corrected just under half of the discrepancies and developed a comprehensive understanding of which of his colleagues had the most identifiable typing sounds. The man to his left, Pang Wei, lovely gentleman who ate the same lunch every day packed by his wife, typed with two index fingers, pecking at the keyboard, as though any other way of typing had never come to mind. Directly behind him, someone had a keyboard with a rattly spacebar. Lin Che looked at line item seven.

The declared weight was four hundred and twelve kilograms, but the intake record said three hundred and ninety-eight. The difference of fourteen kilograms, which was the same difference as line items two, four, and nine, suggested the error was systemic rather than individual, which meant he needed to go back further in the chain to the original purchase orders, which meant going through the dreaded shared drive folder. Lin Che sighed and sat back in his chair as he waited for the folder to open.

The office was running hardware from decades ago which simply couldn't keep up with the demands of a modern operating system. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to clear his head. The Liuhe Breathing Method came to mind almost immediately, so he decided to channel it as a breather. Breathing was in the name, after all. He found the root gate, let the Qi gather, and began the first circulation. It moved up through the back, hit the shoulder blades, and held.

Around him, he was still vaguely aware of Pang Wei's two-fingered typing. He let go of the third consolidation point and the Qi completed the loop. He opened his eyes. The shared drive folder had finally opened, so he clicked on the first document and zoomed in to read the handwriting. And then, without entirely meaning to, he circulated again. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. He stopped, looked at the spreadsheet, and carried on.

He checked the state of his own attention, where the Qi was still moving in its loop, but his mind was looking back at the spreadsheet. Both things were happening at once He moved the Qi through the second consolidation point and clicked on the next scanned document. His eyes read the purchase order date, and his mind noted that it was from September and therefore irrelevant, but none of that interrupted the Qi at all. The circulation kept going.

It was like how you could walk and hold a conversation without tripping over your own two feet. Two different systems running in parallel, neither one requiring the other to pause. He ran the full loop twice more to confirm this was actually happening and not a fluke. This was not a fluke. Lin Che looked at the spreadsheet with newfound glee — the reconciliation was no more interesting than it had been earlier, but his mood was certainly much better.

He opened document three, found the purchase order, and cross-referenced the date of purchase and weight, and realised that it matched the declared invoice figure rather than the intake record. The error must have entered the chain at the warehouse level and not the supplier level, which resolved another chunk of the discrepancies in one move. The Qi completed another loop. He wrote up the finding in his notepad with a note to bring this up in the next meeting.

The last hour and a half of the day was spent occupying a meeting room on the east side of the floor that had a partially-broken partially-working projector and a small window to clear the stuffiness and heat from putting twenty bodies in a cramped environment. Lin Che sat at the far end of the table and circulated through all three harmonies across the duration of the meeting whilst taking notes. Both activities were unimpeded by the other.

At one point, the presenter asked if anyone had questions, and Lin Che queried about the weight tolerance bands in some new specification. It was a reasonable and relevant question, and the presenter said that he'd follow up once he received advice from the relevant authorities. Lin Che had asked this question whilst simultaneously completing a consolidation hold at the throat point. He walked back to his desk and grabbed his pack, said a brief goodbye to Pang Wei, and left.

Lin Che's evening commute consisted of standing on the metro with one hand on the overhead rail and his mind on the fourth harmony. Despite never having completed the fourth harmony properly, he thought he had a good shot at it now with such mastery over the first three. He managed to hold the passive awareness for about eight seconds before the train lurched and broke his concentration. He tried a couple of more times: six seconds and eleven seconds.

The train reached his stop and he climbed the stairs to street level with his Qi still circulating. He walked home in the cool of the early evening, and, just as he reached the front door, it opened for him. Shen Yue did not look pleased.

"You've been circulating all day," she said, matter of fact.

"Most of it," he said, hanging up his jacket and feeling quite smug.

"For around six hours straight. I figured out that if the task is repetitive enou—""Do you have any idea," she shouted, threateningly pointing a finger at him. Lin Che flinched backwards.

"Just how visible that is?" He stopped.

"Not to ordinary people," she continued.

"But to anyone with sensitivity above a basic threshold, you've been broadcasting your Qi signature across your office building for six hours." She looked at him like she was about to explode.

"If there is anyone in that building or the surrounding area who can sense Qi, they know exactly where you are, what stage you're at, and that you have no defensive capability whatsoever." Lin Che waved his arms in the air.

"I didn't know that was how it worked."

"I know you didn't know," she said, sighing, voice now quieter.

"I should have told you before you started training. That's on me."

"How do I stop broadcasting?"

"There's a technique you can learn after you finish learning the Liuhe Breathing Method. In the meantime, there's a paper charm that can mimic its effects temporarily. I'll write you a few." There was a dryness that sat in the room for a moment after she'd finished speaking. Lin Che looked at the back of her head.

"Thank you," he said. She walked over to the living room.

"Wash your hands. I've heated up the leftovers." He went to wash his hands. The Qi was still circulating, now a habit after a full day of it, and he let it run whilst he stood at the bathroom sink. He tried to switch it off, but he just couldn't. It was like trying to keep your tongue completely still in your mouth: possible with concentrated effort, but would revert back to circulation the second his mind wandered elsewhere. It was essentially the opposite issue one would have when they first learnt the technique.

He thought about the fact that he had spent six hours being visible to anyone who could look, and that nothing had happened, which was either very lucky of him, or a testament to how uneventful life could be. He was mainly glad the mannequins had been dealt with. He turned off the tap. It was probably just uneventful. Probably. He went to the living room.