Chapter 2: The Fragile Reflection

She muddled through until clock-off time, practically fleeing that cold prison of glass and steel.

The evening metro was like a sardine can packed with despair. She was jostled in the thick, sticky air, a mix of sweat, cheap perfume, and lingering lunch smells, her body swaying violently with the carriage while her soul seemed detached, hovering above,冷漠地 staring down at the weary shell named "Lin Nuannuan."

Her phone screen lit up in the dim carriage, casting a ghostly glow on her bloodless face. It was a message from her best friend, Su Yuan: a carefully crafted selfie in an upscale restaurant with gourmet food. In the picture, Su Yuan, bright-eyed with gleaming white teeth, her makeup perfect like a magazine cover girl, stood against an elegant, expensive backdrop, a crystal chandelier refracting warm light. The caption read: "Babe, found this new place, tastes amazing! Ambiance is top-notch too! Let's come together next time~"

It was a parallel universe, glossy and bright, completely severed from the world of exhaustion, sweat, and suffocation Lin Nuannuan was trapped in now. She moved her stiff fingers, wanting to reply with an "OK" or a happy emoji, but found she didn't even have the strength to twitch the corner of her mouth. In the end, she just turned off the screen, sealing away the smiling face that stung her eyes into darkness.

Returning to her rented, thirty-square-meter studio, the darkness and silence, like living entities, instantly swallowed her whole. She didn't turn on the light, just collapsed onto the cold floor, her back against the equally icy door, as if only this could grant her a sliver of pathetic security.

The scenes from the day played, twisted, and magnified uncontrollably in her mind – the disdain shooting from Director Zhang's eyes, narrowed to slits by fat; the constantly moving lips of her colleagues as they whispered; the meaningful, slightly gloating look in Sister Wang's eyes behind those gold-rimmed glasses... "Fool," "idler," "get the hell out"... These words were no longer sounds; they had transformed into tangible, venomous needles, repeatedly, precisely stinging her most sensitive nerves.

Her thoughts drifted uncontrollably further back. In college, her ex-boyfriend Qin Hao, to whom she had given all her tenderness and dreams, had used a similarly contemptuous tone, as if appraising a flawed item, to tell her just before graduation: "Lin Nuannuan, you're great, really kind, but... too ordinary. We're not suited. Our paths are different." Then, he had walked away from her world, arm in arm with another, prettier, more well-connected girl, as if discarding an old garment.

Why?

Why was she always the one negated, abandoned, trampled upon so easily? Was she not hardworking enough? Who saw her when she worked late into the night? Was she not kind enough? She always tread carefully, mindful of everyone's feelings, and for what? Or was she truly, as they said, essentially a worthless good-for-nothing, deserving to be eliminated?

A massive wave of grievance and bone-deep powerlessness surged up, drowning her instantly. Her last psychological defense crumbled completely. Tears finally broke through the dam, large, scalding drops falling onto her tightly clasped hands, warm for a moment before turning cold. She buried her face deep in her knees, curling her whole body into a ball. Her shoulders shook with uncontrollable tremors, suppressed, broken sobs echoing helplessly in the empty, silent room.

And it was at that moment, the phone she had tossed carelessly onto the carpet nearby lit up again, abruptly and without warning.

It wasn't a message notification from Su Yuan, nor any news alert or software update.

In the dim light, the screen seemed to unlock itself autonomously. An application icon she had never seen before, minimalist to the point of being eerie, appeared quietly and突兀ly in the very center of the screen. The icon was a pure black background, upon which a few simple lines, seemingly traced with precise,幽蓝色 starlight, vaguely outlined the shape of an... ancient, silently operating spindle or loom.

Below the icon, there was no application name. Just blank space.

Just as Lin Nuannuan, tearful, dazed, and barely conscious, caught a glimpse of it, a line of elegant, icy white art font surfaced clearly above the icon, like an iceberg emerging from the water:

"Lin Nuannuan, do you desire change?"

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