Chapter 74

The seventh of January, a little over a fortnight from Spring Festival.

Peking University, half past eleven. Coming out of the examination room, Li Lan breathed out; she hadn't expected pharmacy's finals to fall on the last day before the holiday. Term ending tomorrow, the ordinarily busy campus was considerably emptier on the walk back.

Xia Yanyan was on her way out with her case. Like Li Lan she'd finished her last paper this morning, and being closer to the dormitory she'd got back earlier.

The other two had done slightly better; both in business studies, they'd finished yesterday and gone home the same day. So the room held only Xia Yanyan, about to leave, and Li Lan — and with a train to catch she said a few words and that was the goodbye.

Students aren't allowed to stay over the winter holiday, and it being the last day, Li Lan didn't linger. She'd packed the night before, tidied the desk and the bed and left with her case. Last day or not, plenty of people were leaving today, and the road to the gates was a continuous stream of luggage.

Fortunately the new underground line had opened last year, and though it meant a change, the underground beat a crowded bus by more than one level.

Li Lan glanced at the stop for buses to the railway station, didn't stop, and crossed the road, where she put a hand out for a taxi. She'd barely got in before the driver greeted her in unmistakable Beijing. "Student. Which station?"

"Hello. The Peking University medical park, please."

"Right you are. The one by Zhongguancun."

She nodded, and had got as far as "Yes" when her phone rang in her coat.

She checked the display, settled, and answered. "Hello? Mum?"

Chen Ying's carrying voice came through. "Lanlan, weren't your exams today? When are you coming home? That family next door — theirs is at university too and she came home days ago."

Hearing the hope in it, Li Lan was apologetic. "Mum, I've an internship. It'll be a fortnight or so."

Which reminded Chen Ying that she'd mentioned an internship over the holiday. "Oh — yes, yes, you did say. Look at my memory."

Knowing she'd helped in a professor's laboratory during holidays before, Chen Ying privately grumbled at professors who make people work over New Year and didn't feel able to object. "All right. What date's your ticket?"

Li Lan thought. "The twenty-second of January."

"The twenty-second — that's the twenty-fifth of the twelfth lunar month. That's very late. What sort of internship is this? Do you have to?" She counted it out and sighed.

Li Lan felt some guilt. The internship was a fiction; Cerulean was developing new products and needed people. Saying she was busy starting a company was too much, though — even with parents who didn't much restrict her, a student running a business sounds thoroughly unreliable, and rather than have them worry she meant to come clean when she graduated.

"Mm. A company the professor arranged. I can't get out of it." She said it apologetically.

There wasn't much Chen Ying could say to that. A professor at Peking was, to her mind, a considerable personage, and an internship he'd found could hardly be refused.

"If your professor arranged it, do it properly. A couple of days late doesn't matter, there's still time before New Year."

Afraid of her thinking about it further, Li Lan changed the subject. "Mum, when are Li Jingyu and the others home?"

Chen Ying's attention never stayed anywhere long. "Jingyu says a week. Chengcheng's in her final year and the school's running some extra classes, so she's a few days off yet."

Which prompted, unusually, some sadness. "You've all grown up in a moment. It's nearly New Year and not one of you at home."

This time last year all three had been there and the house had been full; now it was her and Li Quan, and cold with it, and meals had no savour. Children grow up and leave — she knew that, and she couldn't help feeling it.

Li Lan didn't know what to say. She'd been away since she was small and was used to seeing little of them, and after a silence she rallied.

The taxi reached the park soon enough. Adjoining Zhongguancun, the area had everything, and having found a hotel and dropped her luggage and eaten, she went straight to Cerulean's office.

With money available and Feng Jiang managing, the place had gone from an office containing only An'an a month ago to something recognisably a company — with premises beyond the park as well.

The park laboratory was now purely product development under Zhang Lin, while Feng Jiang and the administrative staff worked from the other office in the city centre.

---

Cerulean's office was at the end of the corridor and unlocked, and pushing the door open Li Lan found the outer office completely empty. She was about to ring Zhang Lin when Zhang Lin and Feng Jiang came out of the small office beside it.

"Sister Lin, Brother Jiang." She went over, smiling.

Zhang Lin's frown eased a little. "Lanlan, why are you here now? Exams over?"

Li Lan crossed to her. "Mm. Just finished." She looked round the empty office, puzzled. "Sister Lin, where's everybody gone?"

Zhang Lin checked her watch. "Engineer Liu's about to present the new product. They're all in the meeting room. Good timing — come and listen."

Engineer Liu was Liu Qiang, the senior researcher recruited at some expense not long ago to develop new products. So today was the report, which explained the empty office and Feng Jiang's presence at the laboratory.

Li Lan hadn't expected to arrive on the day. "Really? Engineer Liu's produced a new product already? He's only been here a few months."

Feng Jiang had raised new product development soon after arriving, and Zhang Lin had then hired several researchers at good salaries — though as head of research she wasn't in the projects herself, but keeping track of all of them.

Li Lan's position was peculiar. Nominally Cerulean's chief researcher, she ran between the university and the laboratory and when she came worked head-down on her own experiments; she wasn't in the new product work and knew little about how it was going.

Hearing it had produced something, she was interested, and followed them in.

"Director Zhang, Director Feng — young Director Li as well?" A middle-aged man at the front, thinning on top and in a white coat, greeted each of them.

There were four or five people scattered about the room and the projector was set up.

Zhang Lin looked round and exchanged a glance with Feng Jiang, and each saw the same resignation in the other. Cerulean's laboratory was pitifully short-handed; a "batch" of researchers had been hired, but the company was new, and counting the three of them the room held under ten people. Of those, Liu Qiang and two assistants were on new products, and the other two on improving Clearhead and the rest.

With few products it just about held. As products multiplied, researchers would have to keep coming — and fortunately Beijing lacks everything except talent; Cerulean was small and its salaries weren't low, and another intake was due after Spring Festival.

Li Lan knew nothing of the personnel side. Having greeted Liu Qiang she found a seat and settled down to see what he'd developed — the main product for spring and summer, a new sunscreen.

The shop had no shortage of sunscreen formulations, but human potential is limitless and she was curious what Cerulean's researchers could produce. She'd finished the second-year syllabus; take the shop away, though, and she couldn't develop a new product from nothing herself, so hearing other people's reports and thinking could only do her good.

With the three of them in, nearly everyone was there, and the meeting began. The subject was the new product, but it opened with the results on Clearhead II.

As Cerulean's mainstay, Clearhead II wasn't much better than its predecessor — the system's output being already optimised to the limit, improvement was hard — so the researcher responsible and Feng Jiang had changed direction. If the effect couldn't be improved, do something with the scent. The first was plain mint and a fair number of reviews called the smell ordinary; a range of scents would answer part of the demand.

Clearhead II was going smoothly and had reached small-batch trials, after which it could go into production. Feng Jiang nodded along, calculating: it was the holiday and Clearhead's sales were dismal, so II could relaunch them once term started.

Clearhead was falling back, but the calendula and rose toners were climbing steadily. The problem was that Cerulean lacked a flagship. Clearhead sold well and was technically simple and easily copied; imitations were already on the market — less effective, and a good deal cheaper. Which was why Feng Jiang kept pressing for new products: ideally something others would struggle to copy, or wouldn't matter if they did.

Clearhead II took ten minutes, and then came the day's real business. Liu Qiang took the computer; Zhang Lin and Feng Jiang sat up and gave it their full attention, and Li Lan watched the screen with interest. This was two months of a Cerulean researcher's work, and while she hadn't been part of it she'd caught enough conversation to gather it had gone well.

Before starting, he handed round a thick document — the sunscreen report — and a small sample bottle each.

Li Lan tipped some onto the back of her hand and spread it, and her brow moved very slightly. She felt the texture carefully, and the interest turned into a bad feeling. Carrying that feeling, she finished spreading it and checked the time on her phone.

She read the report while watching the film form on her hand, did the arithmetic, felt the misgiving deepen, and went straight to the ingredients section. Having read what was in it, she closed the document, propped her chin on her hand and listened to him being eloquent at the front.

Turning her head slightly, she found Zhang Lin at the front reading the document without expression — though her pressed-together lips gave away something of her actual view. Feng Jiang, on the other hand, new to cosmetics, was nodding steadily, and looked thoroughly satisfied when Liu Qiang said the protection was far above anything else available.

He finished, looked round confidently and summed up. "As I understand it, sunscreens currently on the market, including some major brands, manage at best SPF 30+, PA+++. This product comfortably reaches SPF 40+, PA++++. Not annihilating the competition, but a considerable gap."

The room was silent. Zhang Lin sat back, her temples throbbing. "Does anybody else have anything to say?"

The researchers looked at one another and nobody spoke. Liu Qiang was Cerulean's chief researcher. What were they going to say?

Zhang Lin nodded and stood. "In that case we'll leave it there. Brother Liu, come to the office."

And walked out, and the others left, and in a moment only Feng Jiang and Li Lan were left.

"Xiao Lan, is there something wrong with this sunscreen?" He'd noticed Zhang Lin's manner; as head of the laboratory she'd normally have summed up at the end, and instead had said nothing and taken Liu Qiang off alone. Which plainly meant a problem.

He'd only come to cosmetics recently, and while he'd crammed the basics, to his eye the bottle looked fine — both indices good, and genuinely above the rest.

Li Lan knew the limits of his knowledge and put it plainly. "It isn't that there's something wrong. It isn't an acceptable product at all."

He grasped the seriousness of it. If the product failed, the work was wasted, and the money was the small part — research isn't a hundred per cent — the problem being that Cerulean couldn't take a failure. Summer was coming, which is when sunscreen launches; missing it might not trouble another company, and for a company at Cerulean's stage the loss was large.

They had allowed for failure, but only as a last resort, and Liu Qiang had thumped his chest and sworn he knew what he was doing, so Feng Jiang hadn't prepared for it.

"Why? From what he said the product met everything."

Li Lan opened the report to the ingredients, circled several things and handed it back. "These ingredients are the problem."

He looked and saw nothing, and gave it back. "Don't make me read it, I'm not the specialist. Just tell me. What's wrong with them?"

She pointed at the circles. "Leaving the alcohol content aside — first, the preservative is methylisothiazolinone, which is strongly sensitising and very easily triggers a reaction; Europe and America have already banned it. Then iodopropynyl butylcarbamate, which is already banned in body lotions and body creams. And propylparaben here is another source of reactions in sensitive skin. Then the chemical filters: 4-methylbenzylidene camphor is permitted here, but the American FDA hasn't approved it and its safety is disputed, and benzophenone-3 is more irritating still and readily causes reactions.

"And then the most immediate things. The film takes far too long to form — I timed it, and Engineer Liu's takes close to ten minutes, where sunscreens on the market are between three and five. This is two or three times that. And the texture is poor and it doesn't spread. So however good the protection factor, it isn't an acceptable product. Certainly not at Cerulean."

She said it all in one breath, and his face grew heavier as she went, and at the end he let out a long sigh. "But summer's nearly here."

She nodded. By rights that ingredients list should never have got past Zhang Lin, and its having reached the final stage meant either Liu Qiang had acted on his own or Zhang Lin had approved it — and from her face, the former.

Which made Li Lan's head ache too. She'd founded the company because experiments at the university were inconvenient and she wanted space, equipment and money, and here was a serious problem within months.

Feng Jiang had got there as well, and being in sales was thinking further. "If we miss the summer, we'll have to plan for the worst: hold on with the old products while developing new ones. Time's precious, though, and Clearhead, calendula and rose toner won't carry us long." Not with imitations already out and their advantage badly eroded.

It came down to numbers. With more people they could have run several products at once instead of staking everything on one — and if they didn't get through this, the contracts they'd negotiated would largely become waste paper.

"Come on, back to the office. See whether your Sister Lin's finished, and we'll talk about what's next." He shook off the tangle and patted her shoulder.

---

"I did everything you asked and better. What more do you want? A sunscreen that works is a sunscreen that works. Sensitising ingredients — this country hasn't banned them, and there aren't that many sensitive people anyway."

Bang.

They'd barely left the meeting room when Liu Qiang's voice came furiously out of the office, followed by the man himself slamming the door. They exchanged a look; from the noise there was no need to guess how it had gone. Zhang Lin was in her office, grim-faced in her chair, with papers on the floor.

Seeing them, she produced a smile. "I'm sorry. That was a management failure on my part. I've wasted everybody's time."

Feng Jiang consoled her. "It's your first time, and you're pregnant. You can't cover everything. It's normal."

She shook her head. "Don't. Being pregnant isn't an excuse. It's my management. And now the sunscreen can't launch, so we plan for the worst."

He nodded, silent. They'd prepared for failure in the abstract; arriving at it was still hard, particularly for her — the laboratory was hers, and if Liu Qiang's process went wrong she was first responsible.

Li Lan spoke. "There's still time, though. It's only January."

Zhang Lin collected herself and shook her head. "It isn't like that. Sunscreen launches in June, and we've no production line of our own, so we have to place the factory order in May or earlier. That leaves three or four months, and a new product in three or four months is close to impossible.

"And it looks as though Liu Qiang developed this quickly — that's because it's what he did before. Honestly, this isn't very different from his last company's; he's modified it enough to get round the patent. I thought there'd be something different about it. Same soup, different bowl."

Which she regretted. She should have allowed for it; he'd sworn to it when she poached him and she'd let herself hope, and the result had been a blow.

Feng Jiang made the point. "It's normal. Without doing that, most people can't develop something genuinely new in that time."

"Let me try the sunscreen. I happen to have looked into it a bit," Li Lan said.

"You?" He looked at her, unconvinced.

"Yes. There isn't time anyway, so let me try."

Zhang Lin neither agreed nor disagreed. Her own work had been drug development and she knew little about cosmetics; she also knew what the other researchers could do, and the time wasn't there. Clearhead and the calendula toner were Li Lan's, but there's a real gap between those and a sunscreen — otherwise she wouldn't have recruited Liu Qiang to lead the work.

She didn't discourage her, though; the company had set aside money for Li Lan's own experiments, and whether she and Feng Jiang approved was neither here nor there. "Try if you want. We both work for you, after all," she said, joking at the end.

"True. Xiao Lan might manage it — the products we live on are all hers." Feng Jiang smiled too. He'd seen a good many so-called geniuses abroad, and the world being large, a few is hardly surprising.

---

Li Lan sat down, settled, and searched the shop for plants usable in a sunscreen. There was no shortage with photoprotective properties, and going through what she'd collected she settled on a picture of a string of small yellow berries.

[Sea buckthorn]

Sea buckthorn, one of the principal crops used for soil and water conservation, is rich in nutrients and biologically active compounds and has high medicinal value. She opened its purchase page, which ran from L1 almost to L5, and saw sun protection and repair under L2 at once.

[Sea buckthorn L1: Sea buckthorn oil extraction — 100 points; Sea buckthorn L2: Anti-inflammatory and anti-acne — 100 points; Sun protection and repair — 100 points; Sea buckthorn L3: Metabolism — 100 points; Brain and cognition — 100 points; Sea buckthorn L4: Cerebrovascular health — 100 points; Liver health — 100 points; Respiratory health — 100 points; Sea buckthorn L5: Gastric cancer protection — 100 points; Oesophageal cancer protection — 100 points]

From what Li Lan knew of sea buckthorn, [sun protection and repair] would be the tocopherol in the oil, and [anti-inflammatory and anti-acne] the effect of the fruit compounds.

[Sea buckthorn oil extraction] being L1 and the other two L2, she guessed this was because extracting the oil at L1 also required keeping the tocopherol and the fruit compounds intact — which would be the main challenge of this L2 experiment.

Beyond completing the L2 formulation, the important thing was finding a process that could be produced at scale. The L1 formulations had gone into production after she went to the factory and tuned the process herself; a sunscreen isn't simple extraction and blending, and the technical demands were considerably higher.

It just about worked for now. As the demands rose, contracting out would stop suiting them and their own line would become unavoidable — but that was Feng Jiang and Zhang Lin's problem. Hers was mastering the process and the formulation. She turned back to the purchase page and clicked [sun protection and repair] without further hesitation.

Buying at L2 for the first time, she'd assumed it would work like L1 and put the formulation straight into her head. Instead a window appeared with two options.

[Select the form of the item: 1: liquid 2: cream (+10 L2)]

She looked at it, surprised. She hadn't expected L2 to offer a choice of form. What about the others? Curious, she clicked L3.

[Insufficient points. Please convert first.]

So. Convert some L3 points, then.

Except that a hundred L3 points cost a thousand L1, and however well off she was, it hurt. Every one of those had come from an experiment — and they couldn't be converted back, only spent at L3.

Reflecting that she'd need L3 sooner or later, she regretted it briefly, rallied and tried [metabolism].

The window was different again, with one more option.

[Select the form of the item: 1: liquid 2: cream (+10 L3) 3: solid (+10 L3)]

So. She closed it and thought. The shop's default was liquid, and any other form, if available, cost extra.

That this hadn't come up before meant one of two things: either L1 defaulted to liquid throughout, or a given formulation had no form available but liquid — as [sun protection and repair] had no solid option.

A sunscreen is best as a cream, obviously. Sea buckthorn settled as the base material, the next question was the texture. A good sunscreen needs more than strong protection; in a few years, as she remembered, a Japanese sunscreen would take the top of the sales charts on protection alone, and plenty of people would complain about how it felt, some reporting that it brought spots on.

There's no avoiding it: the higher the SPF, the greater the burden on the skin, and the texture suffers. Making one that isn't greasy, doesn't clog and still protects strongly is not simple.

Thinking about that, she spent a hundred L2 points on a sample. If it wouldn't do she needn't buy the formulation, and switching plants wouldn't waste much.

The purchase produced a fifty-millilitre bottle. There was never any doubt about the shop's output; the only drawback was the quantity.

She opened it and smelt it first: a faint sea buckthorn scent, not unpleasant. Squeezed onto the back of her hand it looked fresh and dewy, a pale yellow cream close to the colour of the berries, and the scent came out as she spread it. The texture was a great deal better than she'd expected, neither greasy nor heavy, and the film formed nicely at about two minutes.

The shop's output is invariably excellent. Protection and texture both being superb, she stopped deliberating and bought the cream form of the sea buckthorn sunscreen formulation.