By noon, the pre-release mess had already travelled through three internal chats. The matter itself was simple: celebrity cameos had been refused. The dangerous part was that everyone at Xplendi had begun discussing it with bright eyes.
Yang Ruoqian's first concern was not whether the no-stars choice sounded embarrassing. Embarrassment was acceptable. What mattered was that this still looked like a quiet pre-release mess, the kind of normal business trouble that could swallow money without asking for applause.
The expenses were especially comforting because they looked ordinary: argument, uncertainty, delayed conversion, and staff time spent on something that should have stayed cold. A normal boss would ask whether those costs could be recovered. Yang Ruoqian only cared that the receipts were real.
