## Chapter 7 — The River

  He lasted three more weeks.

  Later, trying to reconstruct the timeline, he would find it difficult to identify a single breaking point. It was not one thing. It was the accumulation of small arithmetic — not dramatic losses but the steady subtraction of every margin he had built.

  The pay stub came on the first of December. The demotion had not been implemented — the conduct inquiry had not been filed, so the flag had not been triggered — but the annual increment he had been expecting, the 3% cost-of-living adjustment applied to all Band B and above employees, had not been applied to Band C. He had not known this was the rule. He had not thought to check. He would have known if he had checked.

  He did the revised math. His monthly income was effectively 204 yuan lower than his projection. The 52-month timeline extended to 56. He would be thirty-three and a half.

  He did not update the spreadsheet.

  ---

  The second thing: his laptop stopped connecting to the office network remotely. This was relevant because he had been doing one to two hours of manifest pre-processing each evening from his room — not required, not compensated, but it had kept his daily numbers high, which had been the basis of his accuracy rate, which had been the only evidence he had that the work was being done correctly. Without remote access, the morning queue would be fuller. His rate would drop. He reported the technical issue. IT responded in five business days with a form asking him to re-specify the problem. He re-specified. He waited.

  The third thing was smaller and therefore worse: the break room coffee machine, which had been free to use since he joined, was replaced with a vending unit that charged three yuan per cup. He drank two cups a day. Six yuan per day, 120 per month.

  He logged this in the expense spreadsheet and looked at it for a full minute.

  120 yuan per month. It was nothing. It was the kind of thing a person in a healthy financial position would not notice. The fact that he noticed it — that he had to notice it — said something he did not want to hear said clearly.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  ---

  The cousin called again on December 9th. This time Chen Wei's wife was in the background. He could hear her voice, not the words, just the cadence — the cadence of a woman who had been patient for longer than she intended to be and had stopped performing patience.

  "Next month," Chen Hao said. "I'm sorry, Chen Wei. Next month."

  He ended the call.

  He sat at his desk in his 9.6-square-meter room and looked at the wall.

  He thought about the past three years with the specific, flat clarity of a man who has stopped defending them. He had worked correctly. He had maintained accuracy no one tracked. He had stayed late without record. He had read the handbook. He had filed the right reports. He had prepared the folder. He had compiled eleven incidents into a chronological document with headers.

  All of it had been done according to a logic he had accepted without questioning — the logic that correct behavior, sustained long enough, produced correct outcomes. That the relationship between input and output was reliable. That the system rewarded what it claimed to reward.

  He had been wrong about this. Not slightly wrong. Fundamentally wrong, in a way that three years of evidence had been trying to tell him and that he had re-explained to himself each time as a temporary anomaly, a short-term disruption, a function of timing that would correct itself.

  It was not going to correct itself.

  He understood this now with a clarity that did not feel like despair. It felt like arithmetic. The kind of arithmetic you do when you stop hoping the numbers will change if you look at them differently.

  ---

  He left the room at 11:30 PM.

  He was not running. He was not crying. He walked the way he always walked to work — steadily, at the same pace, with the same attention to traffic signals. He wore his jacket. He had not eaten dinner but he was not hungry.

  He walked to the Shenzhen River.

  It took thirty-four minutes.

  The bridge was a pedestrian and cycling overpass, grey concrete, functional, no particular architectural intention. The river below was dark. He could hear it rather than see it — a low, continuous sound, the sound of something that did not stop because no one had asked it to.

  He stood at the railing.

  He checked his phone once: 12:17 AM. He put it in his jacket pocket.

  He stood for eleven minutes.

  He did not think of anything dramatic. He thought, briefly, about the manifests that would sit in the queue tomorrow. He thought about the plastic shelf in his room — the instant noodles on top, the documents in the middle, the folded clothes on the bottom. He thought about the notebook in the jacket pocket he was wearing, the blank Q4 page, the two lines he'd written.

  He thought: *I just want to stop running the numbers.*

  He stepped off the railing.

  The water was very cold. The current was stronger than it looked from above. These were the last two things he registered before the cold became the only thing.

  *He had not chosen to die. He had simply run out of reasons to stay.*