I pulled up the attendance records.

"Fine. You're worried about internal harmony? Let's look at hourly rates."

"There were two hundred forty-eight official workdays in 2025. Our department averaged three hundred fifty days on-site. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, while everyone else was home with their families, we were rolling out a new system. We slept in the office."

"Out of those three hundred fifty days, the earliest anyone clocked out was eight p.m. The latest?" I paused. "There was no latest. We pulled all-nighters for a hundred of those days. Our actual logged hours hit five thousand nine hundred."

"At seventy-two thousand a year, that's twelve dollars an hour."

I let that sit for a moment, then spoke slowly, each word deliberate.

"Twelve dollars. In this city, bubble tea shops pay twenty-two."

"The company provides dinner and late-night meals when you work overtime. No one's mistreating you—"

"Dinner and a midnight snack. Less than ten bucks a person. Every single time, we had to dig into our own pockets just to not go hungry."

By then, I was barely holding it together.

Ronnie's expression turned cold.

"Claude, you can't just focus on your own contributions. You have to compare horizontally. Finance and Strategy contribute far more than your department."

I stood up and rolled my eyes so hard it hurt.

"What contributions? Blocking reimbursements?"

"Oh right—this year, our department submitted legitimate expense reports. Fifty thousand dollars' worth. The boss's niece, Vanessa Blake, the head of Finance, refused to approve a single one. No explanation. I guess that does save the company money."

"And Strategy?" I kept going. "The boss's distant relative who couldn't pass the college entrance exam, so he got shipped overseas for some worthless master's degree. Came back and landed the director title."

"Dylan Mercer. All year, his team's been busy filming vlogs and making us build mini-apps for their projects. Last month, they uploaded the wrong photo and cost us a major deal."

"That's contribution?"

The more I spoke, the angrier I got.

"And then there's your department. All you do is make PowerPoints and hand out fines. Missed a clock-in? Two hundred dollars. Messy desk? Two hundred. Didn't say hi to the boss? Three hundred."

I laughed—bitter and sharp.

"What heroes you all are! Such generous contributors!"