Chapter 284
The cafeteria was bustling with noise. Even the cafeteria ladies serving food were discussing WeChat's newly released video call feature.
Gu Ran naturally took Ye Zhenzhen's hand.
He squeezed the girl's soft palm under the table, his tone carrying a hint of teasing: "Let's go, Lady Boss, let's head to the company and inspect the fruits of our labor."
Hearing the words "Lady Boss," Ye Zhenzhen's cheeks flushed slightly.
She muttered, "Who cares about going? I still have to go back and memorize my books."
Despite her words, her footsteps were very honest, closely following Gu Ran's pace.
Shenzhen, Meeting Room 1 on the top floor of the Penguin Headquarters building.
An executive from the WeChat business department stood in front of the projector, spitting as he enthusiastically reported the results of their "one billion subsidy" campaign.
"Leaders, WeChat did indeed catch us off guard in the early stages."
He waved his arms vigorously, as if victory was already in his grasp. "But we have completely rolled out in the lower-tier markets. With one billion in cash thrown in, internet cafes, universities, and offline promotion channels are entirely our people. Eight hundred thousand against six hundred thousand—the advantage is ours!"
"Even if WeChat has a voice feature, so do we. With our sheer size, they definitely won't last past this month."
Around the conference table, several Penguin executives smiled and nodded frequently.
Just as he finished speaking, the heavy doors of the meeting room were pushed open violently.
A staff member from the Data Operations Department rushed in, sweating profusely.
He gripped a freshly printed urgent report tightly in his hand, completely ignoring the passionately speaking executive. After distributing the report one by one to the attending leaders, he turned to fiddle with the projection equipment.
The image on the large screen switched instantly.
The originally flat data lines suddenly shot off into two incredibly absurd extremes.
The red curve representing WeChat's daily active users and user retention rate showed a cliff-like plunge, with the retention rate even dropping below three percent.
Meanwhile, the blue curve representing WeChat's data shot straight into the sky at a vertical angle that made one's scalp tingle.
The meeting room suddenly fell into a dead silence.
the balding executive who had just been talking loudly stood with his mouth open, unable to utter half a word, his face turning pale and green by turns.
"WeChat has launched a video call feature."
"The nationwide viral spread is too fast; our monitoring servers almost crashed."
For a moment, the faces of the executives present turned as black as the bottom of a pot, and no one could smile anymore.
The meeting room door was pushed open once again.
Su Wan walked in wearing high heels.
Before anyone on the scene could speak, a man in a sharp suit followed closely behind into the meeting room.
It was the secretary of the board of directors.
The secretary walked to the end of the long table, his gaze sweeping over the room before finally landing coldly on Su Wan.
"Su Wan."
He pushed his glasses up, his voice somewhat icy. "The board has resolved that due to the severe setbacks in the WeChat project, which have caused a massive waste of company resources, your position as the head of the WeChat business department is revoked effective immediately. Liang Dong will take over."
Hearing this, Su Wan sneered in her heart. She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes tightly, and didn't say a word.
The secretary turned to look at the others, continuing to convey the board's demands.
"The frontal battlefield is a complete rout. The board demands an immediate change in strategy."
"First, use all means necessary to launch high-intensity DDoS attacks on WeChat's servers."
"Second, activate internet water armies across the whole web to smear them, pinning the label of violating user privacy onto WeChat."
"If we can't eat the meat, we won't let them chew it in peace either."
In the Imperial Capital, the headquarters buildings of the top three telecom operators were brightly lit.
An extremely rare joint emergency video conference was underway.
On the screen, the executives of the three giants looked at the reports in their hands, falling into a collective silence.
Over the past twenty-four hours, revenue from traditional voice call services had dropped by fifteen percent.
SMS service revenue had plummeted by a staggering forty percent.
WeChat's free voice and video calls were practically digging up the very foundation of their core profits.
"We can't just watch helplessly anymore."
The China Mobile executive tapped the table. "WeChat is sucking our blood. I propose an across-the-board increase in data tariffs and targeted throttling and charging for high-data-consumption apps like WeChat!"
"Bullshit."
The China Unicom executive immediately retorted, "Forcing a price hike will only make users curse us and offend people to death."
"We should do the exact opposite: lower the data threshold and push large data packages."
"Since WeChat has made the mobile internet pie bigger, let's go and cut the biggest piece of the data pie."
The meeting room devolved into a noisy argument.
These giants, who had monopolized the telecommunications industry for decades, felt the terrifying oppression of a dimensional strike for the first time.
Meanwhile, at GR Company in Qinglin City, the dense clatter of keyboards sounded like a warzone.
Gu Ran, holding Ye Zhenzhen's hand, had just stepped into the R&D hall when he heard the operations supervisor roaring at the top of his lungs.
"Boss Li, the video feature is too fierce! The national traffic flood peak has hit early!"
"Server Cluster One is at ninety-eight percent load, memory overflow alarms are going off, it's going to blow any second!"
Li Sinan stood in front of the main console, speaking at lightning speed. "Cut off non-core services, start the backup distributed nodes! Operations team, distribute the traffic within three minutes!"
"Copy that!"
"Node One is online!"
"Node Two traffic access is normal!"
"Load is dropping! Eighty percent... sixty... forty!"
Three minutes later, the piercing alarms abruptly ceased.
The server clusters were running smoothly, having forcibly withstood this unprecedented tsunami of traffic.
Li Sinan let out a long breath.
She turned to look at Gu Ran, who was walking over, and gave him an all good gesture.
Gu Ran clapped his hands and pointed at the giant real-time data screen ahead.
Right in the center of the screen, WeChat's national daily active user count was jumping wildly at a speed visible to the naked eye.
99,999,800.
99,999,900.
Everyone didn't even dare to breathe loudly, staring intently at that number.
100,000,000!
The number froze.
It had officially broken the one hundred million mark!
After a brief silence, the entire room erupted in roars that could lift the roof.
Technicians hugged each other, jumping up and down. A few burly programmers were so excited that their eyes turned red.
From a startup software besieged by Penguin across the entire web, to a super giant holding one hundred million daily active users today, they had molded a miracle with their own hands.
"Quiet down."
Gu Ran raised his hand, suppressing the crowd's cheers.
He snapped his fingers.
Two administrative staff members pushed in a small cart covered with a red cloth.
He stepped forward and pulled off the red cloth.
Bundles of hundred-yuan bills were piled up into a small mountain, their bright red color carrying extreme visual impact under the lights.
A collective gasp echoed through the hall.
Gu Ran turned his head with a smile, pulled over the still-dazed Ye Zhenzhen, and shoved a thick stack of cash into her hands.
"During this time, the brothers have all put their lives on the line."
He raised his voice. "Today, let our Lady Boss hand out the bonuses to everyone!"
The girl was caught completely off guard by this sudden move.
"Thank you, Lady Boss!"
Lead programmer Wang Hao led the charge, roaring at the top of his lungs.
"Thank you, Lady Boss!"
The employees shouted in unison, their voices filled with extraordinary passion.
Ye Zhenzhen's face was entirely flushed, so red that even the tips of her ears looked like they were about to bleed.
She shot Gu Ran a reproachful glare but obediently walked over to the trolley.
Picking up the money, she began to hand it out.
"Thank you, Lady Boss!"
A programmer accepted the money with both hands, grinning from ear to ear.
The young woman couldn't suppress the upward curve of her lips, and her movements as she distributed the cash grew increasingly practiced.
The next employee was so focused on staring at the money that he reached out for it but momentarily forgot to speak.
Ye Zhenzhen pulled her hand back.
She raised her delicate chin and stared fixedly at him.
The employee instantly caught on: "Thank you, Lady Boss!"
"Mhm."
Only then did Ye Zhenzhen hand the money over with a satisfied expression.
Seeing that she would only release the red packets after hearing that specific title, the other employees couldn't help but start cheering and teasing her.
Standing to the side, Gu Ran watched the girl's proud yet shy demeanor and laughed out loud.
Half an hour later, the bonuses were fully distributed.
Clutching thick stacks of cash, the employees' morale was absolutely maxed out.
Gu Ran walked to the center of the crowd and put away his smile.
"Brothers, breaking the hundred million mark is just the beginning."
His voice echoed through the hall: "Video calling won us this turnaround battle, but Penguin will definitely be seeing red."
He leaned his hands on the desk and looked around the room.
"But we aren't going to play defense; we are going to take the initiative and attack."
With that, he turned around and swiftly wrote a few large words on the whiteboard.
Official Accounts.
"Next, WeTalk will launch the Official Account ecosystem."
Gu Ran tapped the whiteboard: "We are going to build a brand new content distribution platform, bringing news, information, independent media, and all content creators entirely into our ecosystem."
"We are going to make WeTalk not just a chatting tool, but an irreplaceable lifestyle."
Hearing this, Li Sinan's eyes instantly lit up.
In private, she had been cramming books on related professional subjects whenever she had the time.
Although she still couldn't entirely keep up with Gu Ran's brilliant ideas, she could already grasp the terrifying commercial closed loop behind his concept.
"Penguin wants to use their traffic to seal us off?"
Gu Ran continued, "Then we will just build our own traffic empire."
nd fell into a coma while saving his younger sister from an out-of-control car. He became a vegetable. No one knew that his consciousness had crossed into a world of cultivation. Over the course of sixty years, he began as the lowest kind of mine slave, struggling to survive amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood. By sheer chance, he eventually obtained the complete memories of a fallen Immortal King. Alchemy, medicine, formations, feng shui, physiognomy, artifact forging… Every great inheritance of the cultivation world was now his. But when he opened his eyes again, he discovered that ten full years had passed in the modern world. To pay for his treatment, his father had sold the family’s shop and house, leaving himself covered in lasting injuries and illness. His mother had cared for him day and night, and more than half of her hair had already turned white. His younger sister, who had been only fifteen back then, was now twenty-five. To help repay the family’s debts, she had been forced to lower her head and put on a smiling face in places of glittering lights and endless revelry. Only then did Chen Xuan understand that what he had lost was not merely ten years. He had lost the life his entire family was meant to have. The good news was that he had brought back the memories of an Immortal King’s entire lifetime. The bad news was that his soul had returned alone—his cultivation had not come with him. Spiritual energy was scarce, resources were depleted, and the modern world still had firearms, surveillance, capital, and laws. If he wanted to protect his family, break free from everyone’s control, and become truly invincible beneath the heavens, he would have to start all over again.
s the Eldest Princess, renowned for her cold and aloof detachment, became the most docile of lambs, obeying his every command without question. But when the final move was played on the chessboard, as Gu Chenghan seized everything and ascended on the verge of apotheosis, that very Princess suddenly embraced him from behind, her tone carrying a dependence never heard before: "Wait... you haven't yet... commanded me to love you forever." Gu Chenghan froze abruptly. She... hadn't been hypnotized?! ... [The Eldest Princess's Diary] [When my soul was extracted, becoming the sole spectator outside my own shell] [At first, there was overwhelming fury, until I saw] [How he used my sword to effortlessly shatter my inescapable doom] [How he wielded my authority to eradicate fatal conspiracies I had never even detected] [Like a deity, he rescued me from the deep mire I was trapped in] [If not for those annoying vixens, he and I would be a match made in heaven] [I think I am ill, gravely ill] [My deity should belong to me alone] ... "Hypnosis? Oh, it succeeded, my dear Master." "Only this time, it's my turn to hypnotize you."
ts me of treason?" "Correct. The host must return to the capital and gradually build up influence." "Wait—I have half a million soldiers, and you want me to go back to the capital to 'build influence'?" "Host, you are currently the Northern Garrison General, loyal to the Great Xia Dynasty." "Of course I am loyal to Great Xia! Absolutely loyal!" "But you keep referring to yourself as 'We'..." "Never mind the details! Summon all the regional commanders and military officers! We suspect treacherous officials are manipulating the court! They shall march with Us to the capital and purge the corrupt!" "......"
he colors of other people’s emotions. Light red meant anxiety. Gray meant exhaustion. Orange meant excitement. Yellow... meant repression. At the same time, he could gain unlimited control over one of those colors. Pale cyan: relaxation. Using this ability, he started offering “two-yuan hugs,” spending an afternoon exchanging emotional-color experiences with others. Then came his final female customer of the day— a girl whose emotional color was pure black... —— A week later, Xu Chuan had become skilled at using pale cyan—Relaxation—treating it like a bottle of menthol balm whenever he needed it. That was when he discovered he had unlocked another unlimited emotional color: Purple, the color of fear. So these emotional colors refresh every week? Fine, I take it back—I’ll never call you useless again... —— Much later, after Xu Chuan had accumulated countless emotional abilities, one night, he suddenly found himself inside someone else’s dream. There, he could use the emotional colors he possessed to paint. And in her dream, he painted her a shower of pink shooting stars, spreading across the depths of the night sky...
