Rational Deconstruction and Emotional Feasting

A figure carrying a tray stopped beside the table.

She was short, with the Flamebearers' Academy engineering department uniform worn neatly and properly. Her glossy black hair hung to her waist, and a strand at her right temple was tied with a red cord.

Rimless glasses rested on her nose, and the eyes behind the lenses were fixed unwaveringly on Zhou Yu's face.

"Excuse me, can I sit here?"

Every word came out at the same pitch.

Linnai was just about to speak when Sigelica recognized the newcomer.

"Chisaki? What brought you to Cafeteria No. 3? Doesn't the engineering department have its own dining hall?"

Only then did Chisaki look away, glancing at Sigelica as a flash of white reflected off her lenses.

"Sigelica, Sunspeakers reserve member. Ranked seventh overall last semester. Combat arts, A; theoretical courses, S."

"We took the same general course. You don't need to recite my personal file."

"Verifying data is the foundation of clear cognition."

Chisaki sat down beside Sigelica without further ado and set her tray on the table. It held a serving of nutritional paste and a few slices of vegetables.

Without touching her food, she leaned forward and fixed her gaze on Zhou Yu again.

"I've been observing you for a long time."

Zhou Yu picked a piece of seaweed out of his soup and blew on it.

"Pets aren't allowed in the cafeteria, and neither is staring at other people while they eat. Thank you."

Chisaki ignored the remark, a faint, multicolored light appearing in her eyes.

"I used the Eye of String Unraveling to dynamically capture your entire confrontation with the serving counter employee, Li."

Linnai nearly spat out a mouthful of soda and leaned her whole head closer.

"The legendary genius from the engineering department? Chisaki, the walking, talking computer?"

Chisaki pushed up her glasses, Zhou Yu's face reflected in the lenses.

"There were several logical paradoxes in your intervention."

She held up one finger.

"First, your heart rate remained at seventy-two beats per minute throughout, without fluctuation. That does not fit the stress response curve in a conflict model."

A second finger went up.

"Second, your control of your microexpressions was textbook-level. Your pupil dilation and the movements of your orbicularis oris muscles were precisely coordinated, revealing neither fear nor anger."

She paused for half a beat, spending a long time choosing her words.

"The emotional characteristics you displayed were close to the irritation one feels when filling out an expense claim."

Zhou Yu slowed his chewing of the seaweed for a beat.

Linnai's soda bottle hovered by her mouth, forgotten.

"How do you know what filling out an expense claim feels like?"

"I've observed the facial muscles of the finance office staff when submitting my lab's consumables list each month."

There was not the slightest hint of a joke in Chisaki's voice as she raised a third finger.

"Third, your statement, 'You don't want to lose your job over something like this, do you?' From a game theory perspective, it leveraged the other party's highest anticipated loss at an extremely low cost of threat."

"That kind of psychological pressure requires the person applying it to perceive themselves as unequivocally superior, yet you're merely a newly hired logistics worker."

She lowered her three fingers, interlaced all ten, and laid her hands flat on the table.

"In summary, your behavioral pattern cannot be fully deconstructed using existing psychological and sociological frameworks."

She stared at Zhou Yu, her voice still flat.

"May I ask how you did it?"

Linnai and Sigelica both stopped eating.

Zhou Yu leisurely swallowed the egg in his mouth, picked up his soup bowl, took a sip, and set it down.

"It's simple."

"A worker's passive skill: an instinctive resistance to exploitation by capital."

Chisaki tilted her head, making the red cord at her right temple sway.

"I don't understand."

"Of course you don't."

Zhou Yu pointed his chopsticks at Auntie Li, who had already resumed her divine art of shaking the ladle.

"In her eyes, she's the rules, and the students are lambs waiting to be slaughtered."

He turned his chopsticks around and pointed them at himself.

"But in my eyes, she's a bottom-ranking employee who failed to meet her KPI targets, and I'm here to optimize the process. The two of us are on entirely different channels when it comes to how we perceive the world."

"Misaligned cognitive channels..."

Chisaki swiftly pulled out an electronic notebook and stylus, her fingers flying across the screen.

"Gaining a psychological advantage by redefining the scenario. Interesting."

"Could you stop writing a paper during a meal?"

Sigelica tapped her chopsticks on the table.

"I'm not eating."

Chisaki didn't even look up, her gaze already shifting to Dania, who was busy digging into her food.

Dania's plate was half empty, her cheeks were stuffed full, and her chewing was steady enough to calibrate a metronome.

"One more question."

Chisaki tapped the screen with her stylus.

"Dania, estimated weight approximately forty-two kilograms, body fat below fifteen percent."

"In ten minutes, you've consumed approximately three hundred and fifty grams of sweet-and-sour pork ribs, high in oil and sugar, exceeding the limit of a normal stomach's immediate expansion capacity."

She spoke a notch faster.

"Yet your eating speed hasn't slowed, your chewing frequency is steady, your swallowing is smooth, and you show no signs of discomfort."

The stylus jabbed hard at the screen.

"May I ask whether your digestive system uses spatial folding technology or enhanced energy conversion efficiency?"

At the mention of her name, Dania dropped the rib in her hand onto her plate.

She hadn't understood a single one of those words, but she understood that the other girl was eyeing her food.

The next second, she spread her arms and pulled her entire tray against her chest, glaring warily at Chisaki.

"You can't have any!"

Her voice was sharp and loud, with a tearful quaver.

Chisaki opened her mouth, then closed it again.

She was only engaging in an academic discussion, so why was the girl across from her guarding her food?

"I wasn't going to..."

A chopstick tapped the notebook she had brought close.

"No talking about work at mealtime."

Zhou Yu's voice was neither loud nor soft.

"And no performance analysis of my dining companion in any form."

"Otherwise, I'll charge today's meal to your credits on the grounds that you disrupted normal dining order in the cafeteria."

Chisaki looked up at him, two fingers unconsciously twisting the cap of her stylus.

"But exploring the unknown is a scholar's instinct."

"Digging in is a human instinct too."

Zhou Yu picked up the only rib on his own tray, which Dania had insisted on giving him, and placed it right in the middle of Chisaki's nutritional paste.

He let go of his chopsticks and leaned back in his chair.

"Which do you think is superior?"

Chisaki looked down.

The rib glistened with sauce and oil, and its sweet-and-sour aroma rose from the gaps in the nutritional paste.

She stared at the meat and tapped her fingers three times on the edge of her notebook, each tap slower than the last.

The light from the notebook screen reflected in her glasses, lines of data streaming through her pupils, but she didn't write another word.

At last, she put down her stylus, picked up her chopsticks, and hesitantly lifted the rib to take a small bite.

The meat was tender, and the sauce's sweet-and-sour flavor melted across her tongue.

Chisaki chewed more slowly, her eyes widening little by little.

The signals from her stomach pushed all the formulas running through her mind into the background.

"Emotion... really is redundant information that cannot be quantified."

She swallowed the mouthful of meat, her voice dropping.

"But it does have extremely high positive feedback value."

Linnai held up half a roasted sweet potato and waved it in front of her.

"Speak like a normal person."

"Delicious."

Chisaki paused, then added two words.

She picked up her tray, stood, and walked over to the serving counter.

"Auntie, one serving of sweet-and-sour pork ribs, portioned according to the standard Supervisor Zhou Yu requested earlier."

Auntie Li's ladle shook.

Dania lay across the table, watching Chisaki's back from afar as she chewed her last piece of meat. Suddenly, she turned to Zhou Yu.

"Zhou Yu, she's not a bad person, right?"

"No."

"Then I was mean to her just now."

Dania's voice grew quiet as she picked at the edge of her tray.

"Just let her sit next to you and eat later."

Zhou Yu took a sip of soup.

"You don't have to share your ribs with her. She can buy her own."

Dania's face lit up at once.

Chisaki came back carrying a plate piled high with ribs, wearing an expression identical to Dania's.

Sigelica set her chopsticks on the table and rubbed her temples.

"I just want to ask one thing."

Her gaze swept from Dania to Chisaki, then to Zhou Yu, who was leisurely drinking his soup.

"The two most promising academic rising stars at Flamebearers' Academy: one was lured away by strawberry cake and paid sick leave, and the other was won over by a plate of sweet-and-sour pork ribs."

"Who exactly did I write that six-thousand-word self-criticism for?"

Zhou Yu put down his soup bowl and thought seriously about it.

"For yourself, to improve your writing."

"Would you shut up already?!"