Pei Ningxue sat in her chair, her fingers resting beside the mouse. She had been ready to laugh at Chen Zhi’s misery, but the moment the melody of “Fulfillment” began to play, her smug satisfaction scattered completely.
Lin Wanwan’s voice was a gift from the heavens—crystal clear and full of life. The song’s lyrics were simple, unadorned with fancy rhetoric, telling a story line by line.
It told the story of a girl and a boy born side by side in a delivery room.
It told of two children sharing popsicles over a drying rack on a small balcony.
It told of a heavy snow falling outside the recording studio window when she finished laying down the final track.
The last line was barely a whisper, as if on the verge of disappearing.
The audio file ended.
The office fell silent.
Chen Zhi slipped his phone back into his pocket, walked over to the window, and turned his back to Pei Ningxue, his hands resting on the windowsill.
He seemed lost in thought.
Pei Ningxue noticed his knuckles turning white as he gripped the sill.
“The CEO of a hundred-billion-dollar company, brought to tears by a song?” She walked over and leaned against the windowsill beside him, both of them facing the lead-gray sky outside. “Want me to call Old Zhao and have my private jet ready to fly you straight to LA to win her back?”
Chen Zhi ignored her sarcasm.
Slowly, he straightened up, picked up the USB drive, and tucked it into the inner pocket of his suit jacket, close to his heart.
“She’s made up her mind to study abroad,” he said, leaning back into his chair. “Chasing after her would only irritate her more. We have a one-year agreement. I promised I wouldn’t disturb her.”
Pei Ningxue let out a cold laugh.
“You sure are loyal, aren’t you? Still holding onto Li Zhiyi here, while pining after an ocean away Lin Wanwan.” She handed him the letter of intent. “Sign it first, CEO Chen. I’m afraid you might faint from an overdose of heartbreak later and hold up Deep Space Tech’s major plans.”
Chen Zhi picked up a pen and scribbled his signature.
Pei Ningxue turned to look at the man beside her.
She had been entangled with him for nearly a year; she knew him too well. His face betrayed nothing, but she could tell he might be on the verge of tears.
“Alright, don’t hold it in around me.” Pei Ningxue grabbed a box of tissues from the desk and tossed it into his lap. “If you need to cry, just cry. I won’t laugh at you.”
“What would I cry about?” Chen Zhi turned around and rubbed his nose. “A man worth a hundred billion crying—what a joke. I’d never live it down.”
“A man worth a hundred billion juggling three women—what’s that if not a joke?” Pei Ningxue pulled a tissue from the box he held, carefully wiped her fingers, and her tone grew flat. “Her leaving is a good thing. Berklee College of Music—it’s a world-class school. It’ll do wonders for her career.”
“Besides,” she paused, “she can only truly thrive away from you. Don’t you believe that?”
Chen Zhi gave a bitter smile.
“Yeah.”
Pei Ningxue crumpled the tissue into a ball and tossed it into the trash can, clapping her hands together. “Well then, stop wallowing here. Qidu is teaming up with Google and Microsoft to take you down. Got a plan for that? Don’t go turning my assets into dust.”
Pei Ningxue walked back to her desk, sat down, and opened her laptop. “You can’t deal with Lin Wanwan’s situation, not until that one-year agreement expires. But Qidu joining forces with overseas giants to corner you—every day you drag your feet is a day closer to death.”
Chen Zhi had to admit she was right.
He hobbled back to the desk with his cane, tearing open the brown paper envelope.
Inside was a stack of printed documents, neatly organized—a sign that Pei Dongcheng’s secretary was meticulous in their work. The first page was a translated transcript of an overseas meeting, with the Google headquarters logo and date at the top.
After flipping through two pages, his expression darkened.
Pei Ningxue leaned in to look and gasped.
“They’re planning an open-source encirclement?”
Li Mingyuan, Qidu’s vice president, had flown to Silicon Valley last week to recruit allies. Google’s DeepMind team was preparing to open-source a multimodal large model to rival Moss, and Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform would offer free computing power to all developers using that open-source model.
In plain English: If I can’t beat you, I’ll give away your core technology for free to the whole world, so everyone can use AI without paying.
Chen Zhi almost laughed. In his previous life, Chinese AI models were overwhelmed by computing power limitations and had to resort to open-source as a last resort. Now, the tables had turned.
“This is a bit tricky,” Chen Zhi mused.
“It’s more than tricky,” Pei Ningxue said, quickly scanning the remaining pages. She tapped her finger on one section. “Look at the timeline. They plan to launch simultaneously at the GTC conference next March, and they’ve brought in Meta’s team too. This isn’t just one or two companies—this is the entire Valley uniting against us.”
Chen Zhi fell silent.
He had been through the AI wars in his past life, but the battlefield was completely different now. In that past life, Moss didn’t exist, and no Chinese company could go toe-to-toe with Silicon Valley in AI. In this life, however, Deep Space Tech had risen too fast, catching Silicon Valley off guard.
Their push to crush Deep Space Tech was driven by their desire to carve out a share of the AI market.
“We can win,” Chen Zhi suddenly said.
Pei Ningxue looked up at him.
“Open source isn’t the threat—the ecosystem is,” Chen Zhi tapped the desk twice. “Their open-source model still needs time to develop, time to adapt, and time for developers to switch over. Right now, we already have our cell phone terminal as an entry point and a stable user base.”
“Is that enough to stand up against the Silicon Valley giants?”
“Of course not,” Chen Zhi said, looking her in the eye. “So, Pei Ningxue, do you want to come back?”
Pei Ningxue leaned back in her chair, arms crossed, pretending to be aloof.
“We just secured our Series B funding, with tens of billions of dollars in cash flow now,” Chen Zhi pushed the finalized NVIDIA letter of intent, with her revisions, in front of her. “Money alone won’t help without a professional to manage it. I need you.”
Pei Ningxue’s gaze dropped, her fingers unconsciously tracing the cover of the letter of intent.
“Chen Zhi, do you think every time you bring up the company, I’ll just say yes?”
“No,” Chen Zhi replied, pulling a red-string peace charm from his pocket and placing it on the table.
It was the matching pair Pei Ningxue had left behind in the guest room four months ago.
“When you left this behind, were you planning to never look back?”
Pei Ningxue stared at the red string, silent for a long moment.
“Back then…” Her voice dropped. “I did think about leaving it all behind.”
“And now?”
Pei Ningxue lifted her head, meeting Chen Zhi’s gaze.
This man—who made her love and hate him in equal measure.
“Chen Zhi, give me a reason,” she said softly. “Give me a reason to stay.”
Chen Zhi smiled.
He picked up the red string and dangled it in front of Pei Ningxue.
“Because when you picked out this red string at that souvenir shop, you told the old lady there—‘This is for my husband.’”
Pei Ningxue’s ears turned crimson.
“How do you remember everything so well!”
"As a husband, you have to remember every word your wife says."
"Who's your wife!" Pei Ningxue stood up and reached for the red string.
Chen Zhi lifted his hand higher. Pei Ningxue couldn't reach it, so she hopped up and down twice in frustration, then accidentally stepped on the foot of Chen Zhi's bad leg.
"Hiss—" Chen Zhi winced in pain.
Startled, Pei Ningxue quickly crouched down to check on him. "Did I hurt you? I didn't mean to!"
Taking advantage of her crouching, Chen Zhi quickly wound the red string around her wrist and tied a slipknot.
Pei Ningxue was stunned.
"Pei Ningxue, come back."
As she knelt there looking up at him, her lips moved slightly.
"...If you ever dare leave me alone in the guest room with takeout again, I'll break your other leg too."
ut it can buy an entire year of absolutely perfect training results! Su Yu stared at his empty wallet and decisively opened up various online loan platforms. “Borrow a thousand bucks! Recharge my vitality!” Boom! His vitality broke a hundred points, shattering the limits of the human body! “Borrow ten thousand bucks! Recharge my combat skills!” Boom! A basic punching technique so common it was everywhere instantly maxed out, revealing the ultimate assassination technique of Five Elements Unity—Inner Force! When a rich kid hired assassins for a midnight ambush, aiming to break both of his legs, they instead ran headfirst into a monster—a human-shaped tyrannosaur, brimming with dragon-like vitality. With just two fingers, Su Yu snapped a steel staff reinforced with alloy. Staring at the killer’s stash of stolen cash—a staggering quarter-million dollars—he showed a corporate-sincere smile: “Thanks for the pre-exam gift pack, Mr. Zhao! I’m gonna go re-invest this!” Three days later, at the National Martial Arts College Entrance Exam, while everyone else struggled just to reach the passing line, Su Yu threw a single punch—and more than a thousand vitality points literally detonated the entire arena!
e, Immortal Body, Transmigration, System, Progression Fantasy, Academy Setting, Third-Person Perspective. Alternate Title: Transmigrating into a High Martial World and Reading Live Comments. Bad news: I transmigrated. This is a terrifying high-martial world, and my original, pathetically weak body fell into a coma and never woke up. Good news: I got a Popularity Points system upon arrival. I can see live comments and even create an unkillable alternate identity. Starting out, the alternate identity has all stats at 1. The system tells me that to grow stronger, I must participate in the plot, gain popularity points to allocate stats and grow stronger, and ultimately awaken my original body. And so, carrying my original body on my back, I officially entered Huaqing Academy, where the story's protagonist resides. From that moment on, Chen Guan kicked the original plot to pieces. Live Comments: [Doesn't anyone find this mysterious coffin guy creepy? He can summon indescribable grey misty hands.] [Is this guy a hero or a villain? What kind of onion became a spirit?] [By the way, does anyone know who's in the coffin? Shouldn't the debt for saving his life be repaid by now?] [According to unofficial histories, the person in the coffin was Chen Guan's first love. Their love was once passionate and earth-shattering, but they were separated by life and death due to worldly circumstances. What a star-crossed pair.] ... Years later, the world knew of a demon god born from a coffin, shrouded in grey mist, impossible to gaze upon directly. His foremost divine emissary often wielded a scythe, reaping lives like the god of death. As war approached, facing former friends and a boundless sea of enemies, Chen Guan merely raised his scythe. "Would you like to dance as well?"
grated, and just when he finally managed to get into an elite academy, he discovered that he actually had a system, and the way to earn rewards was extremely ridiculous. So for the sake of rewards, he had no choice but to start acting ridiculous as well. Su Cheng: "It's nothing but system quests after all." But later, what confused Su Cheng was that while he was already quite ridiculous, he never expected those serious characters to gradually become ridiculous too. And the way they looked at him became increasingly strange... (This synopsis doesn't do it justice, please read the full story)
ing gift was a patch of barren land, and disciples were all picked up along the way. He spent fifty years diligently building three "ramshackle little sects," thinking he could finally live a carefree life relying on his disciples. But right at the fifty-year mark, he was suddenly swept away by a spatial rift and exiled to the Chaos Desolation, the Disorderly Ruins. There was no spiritual energy there, only slaughter. Relying on the cultivation feedback from his disciples, Gu Changyuan hacked his way through a sea of blood for eleven hundred years. When the system finally fished him back out, he discovered the ramshackle little sects he'd built back then had developed a rather... unusual style. Hold on... I vanished for a thousand years, so how did my ramshackle little sects become holy lands?!
