I head my way to the Youhao’s office, still curious. On the way my Crushers and Duanlu meet up with me, seemingly notified as well. When we arrive at the door, a quick nock is all that is needed before we are let in. Once again, we are face to face with the super serious butler, and the secretary, déjà vu all over again. The butler seemingly takes offense at my attire, as he adjusts a couple things on my outfit that are apparently out of place, angled incorrectly, or just not up to his standards.

When I get let through into Youhao’s office, he is chuckling a bit, apparently he overheard my little “dress correction”. “Oh, I remember my younger days when he did that no matter how I closely I followed the dress code to the letter. I eventually found out he did it just to fuck with Young Master’s, although he is actually a stickler to for dressing properly. It has something to do with his father, some sort of [Gentry Commander] I hear. Could literally demoralize entire armies for poor dress code”. He goes onto a short tangent about the pedigree of his butler’s family, noting that they actually are an ironically famous family, the only one allowed into the upper echelons of the big Clans and Imperial Family without actually being married into them.

“While it is not that uncommon to have outsiders in the Clans and such, it becomes rare once you talk about notable positions in the Clan hierarchy, and his family is the only one that can reliably join those ranks. I believe he told me once about an inherited Technique called [Packaged Loyalty] that allowed them to isolate their own memories, knowledge, and Techniques related to their work in such a way that their loyalty couldn’t be questioned. They are meticulous in verifying the presence at that ability whenever leaving a Clan, joining a Clan, or at key moments in their employment. It is their fame and reliability that allows their relatively large extended family, a hundred or so strong, to be considered an unofficial Clan”

Eventually, he stops his praise and history lesson about his butler to get to why he called for me. Simply, it was that he has been needing to find me a “passion project” in which to truly test my administrative abilities. My current accolades indicate my abilities as a successful member who passed the Zucai exam, but now I need to demonstrate my readiness for the Jouren exam. With that in mind, it was ironic that I indicated interest in this particular project, as Zhonglei is currently overseeing this project. So if I came on in a more personal sense, rather than just stamping approvals, it would let the infamous duo of Young Masters have more time together.

I was originally concerned about this, as who would knowingly let two friends who mess around when they are together, be in overall lead of a project like this. It wasn’t until he told me that he knew both of us could set aside our more playful sides when at work and ensure the job gets done. We talked for a few minutes about some of the bigger details of the project, such as the name of the ship, how much longer is needed for the project, that type of thing.

“We have been struggling to name the actual ship, we have just been calling it Project Flagship so far. Some people want to call it Titanic, since it is going to be titanically large, the pride of the Zhou Clan for generations, but others think it is too on the nose” Youhao confesses.

“I agree, I don’t think the name Titanic is a good name, you don’t want to sink your money in a ship with that name. I would think something a bit more aligned with the Clan name would be better, the Azure Dragonship, or just Dragonship would work. Something simple like The Grand Zhou could work as well. Paint the sides of the ship a blue camouflage color scheme, make the figurehead a dragon, that type of thing. But I am just an administrator, so don’t think too much about my advice.”

Youaho seems to think for a second, before writing a couple of the suggestions down, seemingly to share it with Zhonglei when they spoke later on. With that done, I was told to finish out the work at my current assignment for the week, but that I will be moved over to the ship project next week, and likely will be getting some documents sent to my room over the next day or so to get up to date on the current status of the project. After everything was settled, Youhao dismisses me, and I head back to my room. While I was getting briefed by Youaho, my guards were getting briefed by the secretary about where I would be going, the different protections and defenses set up for security on the ship. While walking back, they inform me of a couple of the more pertinent things, such as a surprisingly large amount of security checkpoints, highly compartmentalized information, and the likelihood of some areas being off limits to me. I wouldn’t care about much of this, as I would likely stay in whatever administrative wing I would be assigned to, and wherever else I would need to go would likely be accompanied by Zhonglei, or because I have a meeting in that location, not because I was just wandering around.

Once I got back to my room, I decided to do some light reading for fun, mainly just looking through the various formations books I have to see what catches my fancy. Things continued like this throughout the night, only stopping to get some food for dinner. I knew I likely wouldn’t be getting much free time for more casual studying in the next week, so I decided to front load that enjoyment now while I had the time and was ahead on my studies.