At 3:00 AM, the real world was shrouded in heavy night and silence.
Xu Yunzhou rubbed his eyes, tipsiness and sleepiness intertwining as they swept over him.
He just wanted to complete his final "guidance" for Lin Ruoxuan before completely collapsing into sleep, pushing her toward that pre-set, radiant apex.
When he stopped fast-forwarding and the footage stabilized, Lin Ruoxuan was already in the ancient capital Chang'an, standing before that underground legion that had slept for a millennium.
(TL: I will leave a big TL note at the end of this chapter explaining each of these places, if I do it as usual it would be too cluttered.)
Separated by the screen, gazing at those solemn and spectacular Terracotta Warriors, he searched online while speaking to her:
"The underlying logic of all knowledge is interconnected. These warriors, with a thousand different faces yet uniform specifications, the underlying logic of their mass manufacturing is essentially consistent with the standardized, rapidly replicable, and expandable business model we are trying to build."
At the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang, he said:
"Extreme beauty possesses the power to penetrate the barriers of time and reach straight to the soul, becoming an eternal classic. This classic texture and profound foundation that can withstand the test of the long river of time is exactly what you need to continuously draw upon for business temperament and brand soul."
Strolling through exquisite and elegant Jiangnan gardens, he integrated Eastern architecture, spatial psychology, and visual aesthetics, deeply interpreting the creation of experiential layering and brand mystery.At Kinkaku-ji in Kyoto, he not only explained the aesthetic implications of Zen Buddhism, but also cleverly extended it to the creation of "brand image" and "benchmark effect" in modern business.
In front of the colossal statues of Ramesses II at the Abu Simbel temples in Egypt, he recounted how this pharaoh perfectly combined personal deification with the state's theocratic rule, using this to sharply analogize the top-tier strategy in modern business where "founder's personal IP and company brand value mutually empower and fulfill each other."
...
Two months later, Lin Ruoxuan returned to that penthouse apartment in Jingzhou that overlooked the entire city.
She stood quietly in front of the huge floor-to-ceiling windows, her eyes completely different from when she left.
The former slight bewilderment and the tension brought by rapid success were replaced by a tranquil and gentle radiance emitting from the inside out.
Flowing naturally all around her was a unique aura that was both broad and magnificent, yet restrained and profound.
That was the confidence and composure that naturally settled down after being jointly nourished and baptized by vast knowledge, profound insights, diverse cultural collisions, and magnificent natural scenes.
Xu Yunzhou narrowed his sleepy eyes. Looking at the attribute panel automatically refreshing on the screen, where various stats (especially [Temperament] and [Knowledge]) were steadily leaping upwards, he leaned back in his chair in satisfaction and let out a long breath.
This feeling of "transporting" knowledge and insights readily available in the real world to another spacetime, and witnessing with his own eyes how they blossomed, bore fruit, and reshaped a soul in a person, made him feel an indescribable satisfaction and fascination far more than any simple game completion or cold surge in numbers.
The developers of this game truly understood human nature deeply, knowing what could truly move a player.
"I've rested enough."
Lin Ruoxuan spoke proactively, her voice peaceful and soothing, yet containing a calm and powerful force like the deep sea,
"Tyrant, let's begin. It's time to go take down that future that belongs to us."
The continuous injection of massive capital and the official opening of this grand campaign seemed to further activate the [Business Prodigy] talent within Lin Ruoxuan's body.
She personally took command, establishing a new holding group.
With substantial capital and an extremely attractive vision, she rapidly recruited and assembled an elite force covering technology, marketing, and management from all over the world.
And with an astonishing premium of thirty percent or even higher than the market valuation, she launched acquisition battles one after another, pocketing several startup teams or patent holders possessing unique technical advantages in specialized sub-sectors.
Under the guidance of the product concepts and architecture provided by Xu Yunzhou—which far exceeded the vision and cognition of this era—the acquired technical teams began technical integration and productization breakthroughs, working day and night and racing against time.
However, the road to disruption is never smooth.
Trouble soon appeared.
"Tyrant,"
Lin Ruoxuan's tone carried unprecedented solemnity,
"Our progress is much slower than expected. Chief Technology Officer Dr. Huang just told me very clearly that according to the existing technological paths and current understanding, to achieve the results you described... he pessimistically estimates it will require at least ten more years, or even longer, of technical accumulation and breakthroughs."
Hearing this, Xu Yunzhou was not only unsurprised but instead raised his eyebrows.
This little bit of trouble had long been within his expectations, and he had prepared a solution long ago.
He opened open-source code repository websites in the real world like GitHub and Hugging Face.
Relying on his foundation as a programmer, he quickly searched for and downloaded a large amount of relevant open-source program codes and algorithm models that were disguised and had their time traces erased.
For the technical environment of 2010, every line of code and every architectural idea of these was tantamount to an absolute higher-dimensional strike from the future.
"Hand these materials over to your technical lead. Remember, the source must be kept absolutely confidential; the unified explanation to the outside is 'open-source technical solutions provided by an anonymous overseas geek team'."
About an hour later, Lin Ruoxuan replied excitedly, her tone full of amazement:
"Dr. Huang was extremely shocked after looking at the first part of the code! He said the ideas in these codes are unbelievably exquisite, and the architectural design is far ahead of our current level!"
"Many underlying algorithm efficiency and accuracy problems that have troubled our technical team for months have ready-made, almost perfect solutions in these codes! He pressed to ask whose team's work it was; I said it was a confidential channel, and he sighed with emotion saying he had met a true master!"
Xu Yunzhou smiled in satisfaction, his sleepiness seeming to have dissipated a bit.
This immense sense of achievement from using an absolute information gap to solve difficult problems in real time, pushing the game plot to develop at high speed, and immediately receiving strong positive feedback was simply addictive.
About two weeks later, a dramatic scene played out in the technology R&D center.
Holding a freshly printed code analysis report, Dr. Huang hurriedly found Lin Ruoxuan, who was inspecting the progress, his face mixed with extreme excitement and confusion:
"President Lin! It's too amazing! Look at this core algorithm for 'real-time 3D facial keypoint detection and muscle micro-movement tracking'; its processing efficiency and accuracy are a full eighteen times faster than our lab's current optimal solution! And the resource footprint is extremely low! This idea is too genius!"
He excitedly pointed, his finger trembling slightly, at a line of English comments behind a section of code, his tone full of incomprehension:
"It's just... President Lin, look here, an annotation is cited here, saying 'Refer to SOTA Solution from 2023'... 2023? Is this... a typo? Or some internal version numbering rule we don't know about?"
Lin Ruoxuan took the document without changing her expression, her gaze quickly sweeping over that line of comments, and then she calmly explained with a matter-of-fact tone:
"Oh, this. It should be an internal version number or some special project code name; there's no need to overly delve into its literal meaning."
"Dr. Huang, our most important task right now is to concentrate our energy, digest and integrate these technologies as soon as possible, and produce mature products that can disrupt the market. Not chat about this kind of time-traveling science fiction, understand?"
"Yes!"
After Dr. Huang left, the corners of Lin Ruoxuan's lips lifted imperceptibly into an arc of pride—her Daddy System was omnipotent; wasn't getting technical solutions from the future a very reasonable thing?
In front of the screen, Xu Yunzhou, who took all of this in, first blanked for a moment, then couldn't help but burst into loud laughter:
"They even checked for this kind of unintentionally left future timestamp detail, and even provided such realistic, reasonable NPC reactions and plot feedback!"
"The designers of this game are simply divine!"
Today's release is a bit earlier than usual since I have to travel to another city later today.
Ok here are the places of their travels:
1) Chang'an is the ancient historical name for Xi'an, capital of multiple major Chinese dynasties and home to the world-famous Terracotta Army.
2) The Mogao Caves, also known as the Caves of the Thousand Buddhas, are a world-renowned UNESCO site in Dunhuang famed for their exquisite ancient Buddhist wall paintings and statues.
3) Jiangnan refers to the culturally rich region south of the lower Yangtze River, celebrated for its poetic water towns and highly intricate classical scholar gardens.
4) Kinkaku-ji(or Golden Temple) is a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto(Japan) famous for its top two floors, which are completely covered in brilliant gold leaf.
5) The statues at Abu Simbel are four colossal, 66-foot-tall seated figures of Pharaoh Ramesses II carved directly into a sandstone cliff side. Designed to project absolute power, they guard the temple entrance and align perfectly with the sun to illuminate the inner sanctuary twice a year.