The Punishment of Being Stopped

Chapter 298

A few days later, the WeChat Operations Department was filled with resentment.

Su Wan stared intently at the typo-ridden documents on her computer screen, feeling a wave of dizziness as her blood pressure soared to one hundred and eighty.

To deeply cultivate the lower-tier market, Gu Ran had intentionally tricked Ye Jinliang into serializing his simp diary, "My Years," on their official account.

He euphemistically called it "touching readers with sincerity."

As a bottom-tier auditor, Su Wan was forced to read these absurd stories about a toad wanting to eat swan meat every day, word by word.

These bizarre anecdotes of ugly people playing wild games inflicted immeasurable mental pollution and critical damage on her.

Finally unable to bear it any longer, she stormed into the supervisor's office with a stack of printed bizarre quotes and slammed the waste paper heavily onto the desk.

"Director Li, look at what this foul atmosphere is all about!"

Su Wan pointed at the papers on the desk, her voice trembling with anger.

"How can such vulgar content be put on the recommendation spot? This is simply messing around!"

Li Sinan did not even bat an eyelid. She held her coffee cup, stirring it gently, her tone carrying a bit of undisguised mockery.

"This is training your lower-tier user thinking."

She elegantly took a sip of coffee.

"President Gu said that only by understanding the underlying logic can we make a good mass product. Stop always applying your outdated theories."

Su Wan tried her best to maintain her professional dignity, attempting to persuade the other party with professional theories.

"But these articles don't even make basic grammatical sense!"

She tried hard to calm her heaving chest.

"This is completely lowering the overall tone of our platform!"

Li Sinan put down her coffee cup and directly used the exact words Gu Ran had taught her to leave her speechless.

"Su Wan, have you still not figured out the situation? Can we align our granularity?"

She leaned back in her chair and looked up at Su Wan.

"We are doing mass social networking, not highbrow art. That academic forum stuff doesn't work here. Traffic is king, understand?"

Su Wan looked at the other party's self-righteous face, forcefully holding back a chest full of anger.

Helpless, she could only turn around, wanting to cry without tears, and continue to endure the mental torture.

Meanwhile, in the river view apartment, it was a completely different warm and lively scene.

Ye Zhenzhen nestled on the soft sofa, looking at the complaining text messages sent by her best friend Pei Susu, laughing so hard that tears were about to come out.

Gu Ran leaned over, comfortably resting his chin on the young girl's shoulder, his face screaming "praise me quickly."

"Doctor Ye, look at how popular this column I planned for Lao Ye is."

Gu Ran pointed at the straight-soaring data on the screen.

"Now the whole internet is discussing his persona as a pure love warrior."

Ye Zhenzhen rubbed her stomach that ached from laughing, while proudly lifting her foot, using her fair toes to press against the boy's approaching chest.

"Men and women should not touch each other~"

"Keep your distance! Little brother Gu Ran~"

She turned her head and snorted softly.

"This wicked idea must have been yours!"

Gu Ran naturally grabbed that restless little foot, holding it in his palm and gently playing with it.

"Sister, how can this be called wicked?"

He gave a wicked smile and squeezed the sole of the girl's foot.

"I'm helping him discover his own commercial value, and incidentally driving traffic to our platform. It's a win-win."

Ye Zhenzhen withdrew her foot and reached out to poke Gu Ran's forehead.

"Stop trying to fool me with your business talk."

She waved her phone screen in front of Gu Ran's eyes.

"Susu just scolded you for ten whole minutes on WeChat, saying you've led her boyfriend astray!"

"That's because she doesn't understand. This is artistic processing."

Gu Ran curled his lips carelessly.

"Besides, Lao Ye is now a big influencer with a hundred thousand fans. In the future, he can support her just on tips. Tell her not to act innocent after getting a good deal."

The two bickered back and forth in the sunlit living room.

They had classes in the afternoon. After finishing lunch, they cuddled for a while longer, and under Ye Zhenzhen's constant urging, Gu Ran took the opportunity to demand a reward for his company.

The young girl blushed and scolded a certain someone for being shameless, but eventually agreed to the boy's request.

Only then did Gu Ran satisfiedly pull the blushing girl out the door.

In the classroom, the air was filled with the pungent smell of formalin, and the daunting cadaver lay quietly on the dissection table.

Gu Ran had nothing to do, so he accompanied Ye Zhenzhen to audit the class. He walked up to join the fun with a normal expression.

He pointed at the specimen on the dissection table and directly started discussing it with the old professor.

"Professor, look at the texture direction of this deltoid muscle."

Gu Ran's slender fingers traced the outline of the muscle.

"If we use the logic of 3D game modeling to analyze it, could we simulate its contraction and deformation through polygonal topology?"

The old professor pushed up his reading glasses, looking at Gu Ran with eyes full of amazement and appreciation.

"This student's idea is very constructive!"

He nodded in satisfaction.

"The future development of medical imaging indeed requires this kind of interdisciplinary cross-thinking. Which class in our medical school are you from, young talent?"

Gu Ran shamelessly stated his background, casually putting his arm around Ye Zhenzhen's shoulder.

"I'm from the School of Economics and Management."

He looked at the girl beside him with a cheeky smile, his tone full of doting.

"I'm accompanying my girlfriend to audit the class, and taking the opportunity to learn about human anatomy."

The whole class listened to this hardcore conversation, their jaws dropping to the floor.

Wang Kai, who originally still harbored fantasies about the young girl, looked at this ruthless guy who could talk eloquently in front of a cadaver, and his confidence was completely shattered.

Ye Zhenzhen blushed, forcefully pinching Gu Ran's thigh under the desk, and complained.

"Gu 'Dog' Ran, restrain yourself a bit!"

She warned in a low voice.

"This is a medical class, be serious!"

Gu Ran shamelessly leaned into her ear to claim credit.

"I'm just helping you consolidate your knowledge points, sister."

His warm breath hit the girl's ear, causing her to tremble slightly.

"Relating theory to practice, we can remember it more firmly when we go back tonight."

Ye Zhenzhen blushed and glared at him fiercely, but seeing the envious gazes from the girls around her, she felt a small sense of satisfaction in her heart.

Considering how excellent this dog-like guy was, she decided to give him a bit of a substantial reward.

"Hehe~"

The young girl couldn't help but laugh out loud. Hearing this inexplicable tone, Gu Ran beside her suddenly had a bad feeling.

This girl...

What bad idea is she plotting now...

...

As the final exams approached, Gu Ran was forcibly dragged back to the dorm by Zhang Qi and the others, starting an inhumane pre-exam crash course.

The young man sat boldly on the chair, relying on his terrifying photographic memory, acting like a human self-propelled scanner, accurately calling out the page number and line of every test point.

"Chapter Three, Section Four, cell membrane receptor mechanisms, a guaranteed exam question."

Gu Ran tapped the desk, his aura fully unleashed.

"The answer is in the second paragraph of page eighty-seven of the textbook. Highlight it and memorize it yourselves."

Qin Zhaoyang half-doubtingly opened the textbook, looking at the position Gu Ran had called out, and his eyes instantly widened.

"Brother Gu, you didn't even bring a book!"

He muttered while flipping through the pages.

"How could you remember it so clearly? Are you just making this up?"

Zhang Qi had already been beaten to a pulp by this multidimensional crushing blow, rolling around wildly on his bed while clutching a thick textbook.

"Holy shit! Even the punctuation marks are exactly the same!"

He wailed, pounding the bedboard.

"Is your brain equipped with a top-tier quantum chip? Comparing myself to you makes me want to die!"

Li Ming pushed up his glasses, scribbling down the exam points furiously, his hand moving so fast it was a blur.

"Zhang Qi, stop howling."

He continued writing without even lifting his head.

"Hurry up and copy down the key points Brother Gu highlighted. This is our saving grace to avoid failing the finals. Just cling to his coattails and we'll be fine!"

Gu Ran tapped the desk, mercilessly applying capitalist pressure on his roommates.

"Cut the crap and start memorizing."

He glanced around at everyone.

"If anyone fails this course, don't even think about joining my projects for a share of the profits next semester."

Utterly shocked, the dormmates completely gave up their struggles, willingly reducing themselves to mere accessories clinging to the straight-A student's legs, only hoping to scrape by with a passing grade.

A few days later, at a company executive meeting, Su Wan sat in the corner with a notebook, originally intending to secretly record the operational flaws of this ragtag startup.

Gu Ran strode up to the whiteboard, picked up a marker, and wrote down a few words, pitching the prototype of an advertising system called "Guangdiantong".

"We are not just building a social platform."

Gu Ran turned to face the crowd, his eyes resolute.

"We are going to build the largest traffic distribution center on the entire internet, using user profiling to achieve precise, targeted ad pushes."

Li Sinan looked at the architecture diagram on the whiteboard and instantly grasped the core concept.

"Mr. Gu, do you mean..."

She frowned slightly in thought.

"We are going to open up WeChat's social relationship chain to third-party advertisers?"

"Exactly."

Gu Ran snapped his fingers, his smile confident and flamboyant.

"We are going to create a closed-loop ecosystem from exposure to conversion, washing public traffic into a private gold mine, so that every bit of traffic can be monetized into real cold, hard cash!"

The closed-loop logic from targeted pushing to traffic monetization was unspooled and laid bare before everyone.

Every single link fit together so tightly that no one could find a single flaw.

Listening to these business concepts that were ahead of their time, Su Wan broke out in a cold sweat.

She finally realized that between her proud overseas experience and this young man's business acumen lay a bottomless chasm.

This was entirely cross-era innovative thinking!

Her psychological defenses as an undercover mole for Penguin began to shake violently, and in a hidden corner of her heart, a crazy desire to follow this genius actually sprouted.

The office area was completely empty late at night.

Facing the never-ending basic spreadsheets on her computer screen, Su Wan's accumulated grievances, shock, and self-doubt from the past few days intertwined, and she finally couldn't help but collapse on her desk and sob out loud.

Li Sinan happened to be passing by with a hot cup of coffee and gently placed a pack of tissues by her hand.

"Wipe your tears when you're done crying."

Li Sinan pulled out the chair next to her and sat down, her tone calm.

"The workplace doesn't believe in tears, it only looks at KPIs."

Su Wan looked up and questioned her with red eyes.

"Did you guys know my identity all along?"

She gripped the tissues tightly in her hand, her knuckles turning white.

"Were you deliberately using this tedious work to torture me and watch me make a fool of myself?"

Li Sinan didn't answer directly, but threw out a statement that saw through everything.

"Penguin can't satisfy your ambition, but WeChat can."

She took a sip of her coffee.

"The prerequisite is that you have the capability to endure it."

Hearing this, Su Wan's eyes widened, staring in astonishment at the operations director in front of her who was a few years younger than herself.

She finally realized that the higher-ups had seen through her long ago, and she had purely been played for a fool all this time!

Just as she was caught in a state of shock and uncertainty, Li Sinan stood up and walked back to her office, returning with a thick document in her hand.

She placed a top-secret "WeChat Pay Incubation Plan" on the desk in front of her.

"Since Miss Su has already experienced the grassroots life of our company."

Li Sinan leaned in, resting her elbows on the desk and propping up her chin, looking at Su Wan with burning eyes.

"Next, it's time to get down to real business."

Su Wan looked at the large characters on the cover of the document, her voice carrying an unconcealable tremble.

"What do you mean by this?"

She looked up and directly met Li Sinan's eyes.

"Aren't you afraid I'll leak this business plan to Penguin?"

"A bloated organization like Penguin that only knows how to copycat simply cannot carry your ambition."

Li Sinan's expression remained unchanged, her aura as steady as ever.

"But WeChat can give you a stage to change the era."

Su Wan clenched her fists tightly, trying to put up a final struggle.

"What makes you think I would betray my old employer?"

She gritted her teeth.

"Just based on this unformed business plan of yours?"

"If you employ someone, trust them; if you doubt them, don't employ them."

Her tone was firm and resonant.

"Follow us, and let's crush Penguin!"

This sentence completely shattered all of Su Wan's pride and disguise.

She wavered. Su Wan lowered her head, thought seriously for a moment, and when she looked up again, her eyes were resolute.

"Alright, I'm in."

The usually arrogant Su Wan transformed from an undercover mole into a true workaholic.

The next day, the conference room was filled with the flames of war.

After pledging her allegiance, Su Wan displayed extreme combat prowess, forming a fierce situation of executive infighting with Li Sinan.

Holding a thick evaluation report, Su Wan argued strongly on the basis of reason.

"The payment interface must prioritize security!"

She flipped to a certain page of the report, her attitude uncompromising.

"I suggest adopting the highest level of encryption algorithms. Even if it means sacrificing a bit of response speed, we absolutely cannot afford any mishaps."

Li Sinan refused to yield an inch. The two argued fiercely over the underlying technical solutions, the air thick with the smell of gunpowder.

"User experience is the number one priority!"

She slammed her pen on the table, her aura fully unleashed.

"If the payment process lags for more than three seconds, users will simply leave! Security can be entirely compensated for in the background through risk control models."

Gu Ran, however, held a thermos filled with goji berries, sitting in the head seat leisurely drinking tea. He transformed into a master of balancing acts, occasionally throwing in a joke and smoothing things over.

"We're all family here, let's not hurt our camaraderie."

Gu Ran unscrewed his thermos and took a sip.

"I think it's better to combine your proposals. We must grasp both security and efficiency firmly."

He happily calculated in his heart the workplace truth of the boss benefiting when the snipe and the clam fight.

He played the art of balancing executives and managing subordinates with crystal clarity, causing the observing grassroots employees to secretly click their tongues in awe.

Returning to the river-view apartment at night.

Ye Zhenzhen walked to the dining table holding the hearty chicken soup she had simmered in the kitchen for two hours, thus fulfilling the reward promise she had made during their anatomy class.

"Gu 'Dog' Ran, come drink the soup!"

Ye Zhenzhen placed the soup bowl on the table.

"This is an old hen I specifically went to the market to buy. I simmered it for a whole two hours."

Gu Ran smelled the enticing aroma and immediately took advantage of the situation.

He leaned against the kitchen island, shamelessly pointing at his lips to bargain with her.

He bent down slightly, bringing his handsome face close to the young woman to demand his tutoring fee.

"Dr. Ye, just drinking soup won't make up for the brain cells I lost today."

He pointed to his cheek, smiling like a complete rascal.

"Without a kiss, even this soup will taste bland."

Amused by his rogue-like behavior, Ye Zhenzhen's ears turned bright red. She rolled her eyes beautifully, hiding her true feelings.

"Drink it or don't. See if I care."

She made a show of taking the soup bowl away.

"If you don't want it, I'll go feed it to the stray cats downstairs!"

Gu Ran continued to press forward shamelessly, looking as though he wouldn't give up until he achieved his goal.

"Babe, you're wasting good food."

He grabbed the back of the girl's hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

"How could stray cats need nourishment more than your boyfriend?"

She scolded him playfully, then backhandedly scooped up a spoonful of the piping hot soup straight from the pot and shoved it right into Gu Ran's chattering mouth.

"Give you an inch and you take a mile!"

The boiling hot broth made the young man howl, jumping up and down in the kitchen while clutching his mouth.

Watching his sorry state, Ye Zhenzhen laughed until she trembled.

After drinking some cold water to recover, Gu Ran lunged at the girl with his arms wide open.

"Alright, Ye Zhenzhen, you're trying to murder your own husband!"

He wrapped his arms tightly around her slender waist.

"Let's see how I deal with you today!"

The two of them flirted and roughhoused under the warm lights, and in the end, that bowl of carefully simmered chicken soup never made it into anyone's stomach.

Gu Ran scooped the gloating girl up into his arms and strode toward the bedroom, ready to spend the entire night researching a major project on human anatomy.

Just as things in the room were reaching a critical juncture, the girl called for an emergency stop.

The young man lifted his head from Ye Zhenzhen's exposed chest, looking completely dissatisfied.

"Dr. Ye, we're at the crucial moment. It's too late to try and run away now."

The girl's already flushed face burned so brightly with shame that she couldn't even look at him.

She mumbled in a muffled voice, "I... I don't want to stop..."

Her words trailed off. Growing anxious from the wait, Gu Ran lowered his head and gave her a light, punishing bite.

"Ah~"

"Were you born in the year of the dog? Why are you biting people!"

Ye Zhenzhen gently pushed against his shoulders, pursing her lips in protest.

Gu Ran narrowed his eyes and threatened her.

"Spit it out! Or I'll bite you again!"

He lowered his head to make good on his promise, prompting Ye Zhenzhen to hastily blurt out.

"The lights! The lights are still on!"

Hearing this, Gu Ran gave the girl a slight smile, then quickly lowered his head to take another bite of that rosy spot.

The girl cried out in pain, "Gu 'Dog' Ran! You went back on your word!"

The young rogue replied, "This is your punishment for calling a sudden time-out."

"Gu 'Dog' Ran, you rascal!"

"Mmph..."

The rest of the girl's words were completely swallowed up, and the sounds inside the room gradually changed their tune.

Outside the window, a bright moon hung high in the sky, and the night itself was exceptionally alluring.

......