The Elegant Guide
The return of Li Xiaomei, the fourteen-year-old mathematical and scientific anomaly, instantly increased the background noise of Li Tianyi's life. He knew his mother's mandate—to guide Xiaomei toward elegant restraint—meant sacrificing some of his tranquility.
The very next morning, the chaos began. Xiaomei, unable to tolerate the 87.3% inefficiency of Dragon City's traffic flow, had hijacked the family's mainframe and was attempting to upload her complex, optimized routing algorithms into the municipal traffic grid.
"Brother Tianyi, the current algorithm is based on a chaotic Poisson distribution!" Xiaomei protested when Li Tianyi politely interrupted her attempt to hack the city. "My Li-Xiaomei Model will ensure a perfect, smooth flow! Why allow billions in labor hours to be wasted?"
Li Tianyi, sitting calmly in front of the flickering command console, gently placed a hand on her shoulder.
"Xiaomei," he said patiently. "Efficiency is only elegant when it is integrated. Overwhelming, immediate change is chaos. We must first establish the political leverage to implement change, then implement it slowly, over a decade, disguised as minor upgrades. Messy public disruption is financially counterproductive."
He spent the next hour demonstrating how small, strategic investments in automated public transport—a single, profitable project—could achieve nearly the same optimization over time, while simultaneously enriching the Li Dynasty and avoiding public scrutiny. Xiaomei, brilliant but logically rigid, slowly grasped the necessity of political efficiency over raw mathematical perfection.
The Midday Run: A Glimpse of True Elegance
Having successfully diverted his sister's genius into a profitable, long-term infrastructure project, Li Tianyi decided he deserved a moment of true, uncomplicated physical enjoyment. He informed his security detail he was going for a run—a simple, elegant way to maintain his physical baseline without the chaos of a public gym.
He chose a secluded path near the affluent embassy district, flanked discreetly by two members of The Shadow Contingent. He moved with the effortless grace that characterized all his actions—a steady, perfectly paced run that seemed to require no visible exertion.
As he rounded a corner near a sprawling, high-walled estate—known locally to house various foreign dignitaries—he saw something genuinely remarkable: a display of unnecessary, perfect elegance that rivaled his own.
A woman was sitting on a low stone wall, attempting to lace a pair of worn, surprisingly cheap running shoes. She looked utterly out of place. Her clothing—a simple, high-quality linen dress—was subtly expensive, but she wore a large, bulky hat and sunglasses that concealed most of her face, giving her the air of someone attempting a clumsy disguise.
The Runaway Princess 👑
What caught Li Tianyi's attention was not the disguise, but the woman's Aura of Refined Chaos. She was visibly stressed, breathing heavily, and glanced around with a constant, nervous tension. Despite this, her posture was impeccable, and her hands, visible for a moment, were incredibly delicate, bearing the faint, tell-tale markings of someone highly trained in a forgotten, martial craft.
Suddenly, a massive, sleek black sedan—far more aggressive than his own family's standard security vehicles—screeched to a halt nearby. Two sharp-looking men in expensive suits, clearly security personnel but with an air of foreign discipline, rushed out, scanning the area.
The woman on the wall reacted instantly. Her composure snapped into an alert, military posture. She didn't panic; she executed a rapid, fluid movement, leaping down from the wall and vanishing behind a thick hedge with the speed and silence of a true assassin.
One of the pursuing men pointed. "There! That's her! The Princess!"
The security team raced past Li Tianyi, ignoring the powerful figure who was merely observing.
Li Tianyi came to a slow, elegant stop. He hadn't been running fast, but the sudden appearance of genuine, high-stakes political chaos—a runaway princess escaping a foreign security detail—was a remarkable deviation from his planned tranquility.
He looked at the hedge where she had vanished. She possessed an elegant, yet clearly strained, form of personal efficiency. Her movements were flawless, but her situation was catastrophic.
Li Tianyi continued his slow, elegant jog, retrieving his focus. A foreign princess, clearly royalty based on the security team's deference, was loose in Dragon City and running from her obligations. He wasn't involved. He preferred to maintain his elegant detachment.
However, as he passed the hedge, he noticed a small, beautifully crafted item lying in the grass: a single, delicate silver hairpin engraved with a complex, unmistakable foreign royal crest.
Li Tianyi paused, looked around, and with an elegant, effortless movement, bent down, picked up the hairpin, and placed it inside his running shorts pocket. His tranquility was indeed complicated.