The richest man started taking advantage of loopholes after joining Alibaba.

Hangzhou. A traditional express delivery sorting center.

03:00 AM.

Old Liu, supporting his lower back, struggled to straighten his spine.

Sweat streamed down the helmet straps, stinging my eyes.

"Hurry up! You there! What are you dawdling for!"

The supervisor, holding a megaphone, stood on the iron frame on the second floor and roared.

Spit flew everywhere under the searchlight.

"This batch of goods must be shipped out in half an hour! No one is leaving get off work until it's all shipped!"

Old Liu gritted his teeth, bent down to pick up a package, glanced at the shipping label, and then tossed it into the woven bag labeled "Beijing" like a basketball shot.

This is the 3800th time he has bent over tonight.

This is the 24000th step I've taken.

This was the 15th time he had thrown away the wrong bag because he couldn't see the shipping label clearly.

This is the current state of logistics in China in 2019.

Human wave tactics.

Violent sorting.

With millions of cheap laborers like Lao Liu, they carried the world's largest express delivery volume with their knees and sweat.

tired.

chaos.

And they have no dignity whatsoever.

.......

at the same time.

Wuhan. Jiangxia.

Warehouse No. 1, which was recently designated as "Fangzhou Infrastructure".

There are no roaring managers here.

There is no body odor.

There weren't even any lights.

The interior of the enormous warehouse was like a bottomless black hole.

Only the occasional flashing red indicator light, like the eyes of a wild beast, flashes by in the darkness.

"Boss, are you sure you don't need to turn on the lights?"

Chen Gang, the domestic technical director of Weiguang, stood at the door, his palms sweaty.

He's a veteran in logistics, having worked in the field for twenty years.

But he had never seen such a quiet warehouse.

The silence was unsettling.

"Need not."

Lin Che's voice rang out in the darkness.

It has a metallic, cold feel to it.

"They don't need light."

"They don't need eyes either."

"Smack."

A crisp snap of the fingers.

It wasn't for lighting.

It was for display purposes.

Hundreds of industrial searchlights on the top of the warehouse suddenly lit up.

A bright light pierced the darkness.

Chen Gang subconsciously squinted.

The moment his eyes adjusted to the light and he could see the scene before him clearly.

His pupils instantly contracted to the size of a pinhead.

My legs went weak.

I almost knelt on the ground.

"This...this is..."

He pointed ahead, making a "clucking" sound in his throat, like a chicken being choked.

That's the sea.

A blue ocean made up of machinery.

On a 20,000-square-meter concrete floor, thousands of blue, flat robots are densely packed together.

They were arranged so neatly that they looked like a giant circuit board.

There wasn't a single gap.

There wasn't a single mess.

This is the "specialty" that Lin Che brought back from Silicon Valley—an intelligent warehouse robot.

A modified version based on the Amazon Kiva system.

It features an edge computing chip based on the Open-V architecture.

"start up."

Lin Che spoke softly into his earpiece, uttering two words.

boom!

That wasn't the sound of an explosion.

That was the low-frequency hum of thousands of motors starting up simultaneously.

The once still "blue ocean" instantly came to life.

The ground is shaking.

Chen Gang watched as a robot suddenly slid into the bottom of a half-ton shelf.

Lift up.

Spin.

accelerate.

It only took 2 seconds.

The shelf full of shampoo started to "run".

It sped along a track with an accuracy of 3 meters per second, stopping precisely in front of a packing table.

The packer reached out to take the goods.

I just took it.

The shelf immediately turned and moved away, and the next shelf, filled with toothpaste, seamlessly took its place.

There was no waiting.

There is no idling.

There wasn't even a collision.

Thousands of robots zipped through the narrow passage at high speed, brushing past each other at a distance of less than a centimeter, yet they avoided each other perfectly as if they were alive.

That ultimate sense of order.

That kind of industrial violence aesthetics that doesn't belong to humanity.

It made Chen Gang feel suffocated.

"The goods find the people."

Lin Che walked to the railing and looked down at the mechanical legion.

His eyes were filled with fervor.

"In the past, we had to make people run themselves ragged to find the goods."

"Now, the shelves come and line up on their own."

"Efficiency increased by 400%."

"Error rate......."

Lin Che held up one finger.

"One in ten thousand."

Chen Gang's lips were trembling.

He's an expert.

He knew what this meant.

This means that even if all the deliverymen in China were worked to death, they still couldn't outrun these iron lumps that don't need to sleep, eat, strike, or complain of being tired.

This is a case of dimensional reduction attack.

It was the industrial civilization's massacre of the agricultural civilization.

"These...these technologies..." Chen Gang's voice trembled, "...were all brought from the United States by you..."

"It's not just about technology."

Lin Che interrupted him.

His gaze was deep and unfathomable.

"It's computing power."

"The path of each robot is calculated in real time by the cloud-based mainframe."

"They are not individual entities."

"They are a whole."

"A ghost army from Silicon Valley."

Just then.

A sudden, urgent telephone ring shattered this almost sacred atmosphere.

Xie Yu answered the phone.

I only listened for two seconds.

His face turned deathly pale instantly.

"Boss."

Xie Yu put down his phone, his voice hoarse.

Something's happened.

"Cainiao Network just sent a business letter."

"They said it was a system upgrade and that all of Microlight's data interfaces would be 'temporarily' cut off."

"besides......."

Xie Yu glanced at Chen Gang and gritted his teeth.

"STO Express, YTO Express, ZTO Express, and Yunda Express have just notified us that they are suspending all parcel pickup services originating from Weiguang."

"The reason is... insufficient transportation capacity."

The air freezes.

Chen Gang broke out in a cold sweat instantly.

This was the decisive blow.

Cutting off the interface is tantamount to blinding the faint light.

Stopping collection is tantamount to Weiguang becoming paralyzed.

We have goods but can't ship them.

Orders are piling up but we can't get them.

Alibaba is trying to completely stifle Weiguang in this warehouse.

"Insufficient transport capacity?"

Lin Che smiled.

That smile looked particularly eerie under the cold white light.

He turned around.

Looking behind me at the ocean of robots that was still running at high speed and flowing endlessly.

The machines tirelessly moved the goods.

It emitted a deep and powerful roar.

It's as if it's mocking the fragility of humanity.

"Xie Yu".

Lin Che spoke up.

"Please return my call."

"For whom?" Xie Yu was taken aback.

"For Mr. Ma."

Lin Che straightened his cuffs.

Her movements were as elegant as if she were attending a banquet.

"Tell him."

"Since he lacks the capacity, I'll help him out."

"Also, please pass on a message."

Lin Che raised his head.

The gaze seemed to pierce through the thick concrete wall, as if looking directly at the brightly lit command center in Hangzhou.

"This childish lockdown game is over."

See you on Singles' Day.

boom--

A heavy forklift was just about to unload the goods.

A loud bang was heard.

It sounded like a war drum.

It was also a final ultimatum to the old era.