In Huizhou, the April air was already tinged with a distinct warmth.
The old camphor trees on the Keda campus had sprouted new buds. Sunlight dappled the road, creating a lazy, sleep-inducing haze.
Su Wei took the stairs of the business school building to the fourth floor.
The hallway was quiet. Occasionally, a student clutching a stack of books would pass by, their footsteps echoing faintly in the empty corridor.
Su Wei wore a faded, light-blue denim jacket. Her hair was tied back casually with a black elastic band. Carrying an unremarkable backpack, she stopped in front of the office at the end of the hall.
The door bore no special plaque, only a simple label with two words: Shen Lan.
Su Wei raised her hand and knocked twice. Without waiting for a response, she pushed down on the handle.
A blast of cold air hit her the moment she pushed the door open.
The central air conditioning was cranked up, keeping the room at just over twenty degrees.
The vernal warmth outside was completely sealed off by the heavy door.
This was a place Su Wei had entered every day for the past three months; she had grown very familiar with its distinct scent and temperature.
The air didn’t smell of chalk dust or the musty acidity of old books. Instead, it carried a faint, crisp aroma, the pure and chilly fragrance of expensive coffee beans.
In the center of the room stood a wide, dark, solid-wood desk. Its surface was clear of lesson plans and towering stacks of academic journals. The most striking feature was a set of six professional monitors arranged in a sweeping arc.
The monitors glowed with pure black backgrounds, all densely packed with flickering red and green K-line charts, high-frequency trading order books, and various constantly refreshing foreign market indices.
The numbers flickered so rapidly that a single glance would be dizzying for the average person.
Shen Lan sat behind the monitors in a black Herman Miller ergonomic chair.
She wore a sharply tailored, dark-gray silk blouse with the cuffs slightly rolled up, and she held a white bone-china coffee cup.
Hearing the door open, Shen Lan didn’t even look up.
Her gaze remained glued to the two center screens. Her right hand gripped the mouse, her index finger occasionally tapping the left button with a crisp CLICK.
Su Wei closed the door, walked to the desk, unzipped her backpack, and took out a black USB drive, placing it gently on the desktop.
"Professor Shen, I’ve finished extracting all the anomalies from the public financial reports of fifty domestic heavy industry enterprises from the last three years. The data is on here."
Su Wei’s voice was placid.
Shen Lan’s gaze finally lifted from the screens. She glanced at the USB drive, then reached out with her left hand, unplugged an old drive from the computer, and inserted the new one from Su Wei.
A folder popped up on the screen, filled with meticulously organized Excel spreadsheets. Each file name was timestamped to the exact second of modification, and their file sizes were all within a reasonable margin of a few dozen kilobytes of each other.
Shen Lan clicked one open and quickly spun the scroll wheel.
The data was clean, the alignment perfect, without a single extraneous blank row. The financial loopholes, once buried in hundreds of pages of convoluted reports to paint a rosy picture, had been extracted by Su Wei and listed separately in red, clear at a glance.
This had been Su Wei’s standard of work for the past three months.
She was like a high-precision, human scanner. As long as Professor Shen provided the parameters, Su Wei could transform dizzying amounts of public data into the most intuitive spreadsheets.
"Good work."
Shen Lan said casually, closing the folder. She opened the drawer to her right, pulled out a thick stack of printed, all-English documents, and slid it across the smooth desk toward Su Wei.
"Next week’s assignment. Go through the latest research reports for these few dozen Nasdaq tech stocks and extract their core financial forecast indicators. I need them for my proposal presentation at the business school next month."
After speaking, Shen Lan’s hand was already back on the mouse, ready to resume watching the market.
For the past three months, Su Wei would have taken the documents, said "okay," and either turned to leave or gone to her workstation in the corner to begin.
But today, Su Wei didn’t move.
She stood before the wide desk, her gaze not falling on the thick stack of English reports.
"Professor Shen."
Su Wei spoke.
"I won’t be taking this new assignment."
The hand Shen Lan had on the mouse froze.
In the corner, Xu Qian, the second-year grad student who had been hunched over her keyboard, also stopped typing.
Xu Qian turned, looking in astonishment at her junior from the gifted program, who was usually quiet and did nothing but bury her head in her work.
The office fell silent.
The only sound was the soft HISS of the central air conditioning vent.
Shen Lan slowly turned her head and leaned back in her chair. She looked at the young girl before her, who, with her old backpack, looked to be no more than fourteen or fifteen.
"Is it about the money?"
Shen Lan’s tone was unreadable.
Su Wei shook her head.
"The hourly wage you started me at was far above the market rate for part-time work. I’m very grateful for that."
Su Wei’s posture was relaxed. She looked Professor Shen in the eye and continued, her logic polite yet impeccably clear.
"But over these past three months, I’ve found that continuing to process this lagging, public data has a marginal utility that has fallen to zero—both for my own development and for your live trading."
Shen Lan’s eyes narrowed slightly.
"Marginal utility of zero?"
Shen Lan repeated the phrase.

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