My capital is quite large.

The air in the conference room was so thick and heavy that it was hard to breathe.

All eyes were on Li Feng.

With just a bow of the head, with just a word of insincere flattery, the thirty-nine-year-old soul who died suddenly in the snowstorm could obtain the "peace" he had always dreamed of.

"Just admit defeat, survival is the most important thing..."

In my mind, the humble self before death is still desperately screaming, trying to force the head of this twenty-two-year-old young body to compromise with this messed-up world.

Li Feng closed his eyes and took a deep breath of the cold air in the conference room.

The moment he closed his eyes, the replay of those eighteen years from his past life exploded in his mind with even greater clarity.

In 2010, he saw the potential of mobile internet, but due to his past experience of being blocked by major companies, he could not find any angel investors.

In 2014, he realized the potential of the short video market in lower-tier cities, but due to the lack of a technical team and start-up capital, he could only watch others reap the rewards.

In 2019, he wanted to get on the fast track of live-streaming e-commerce, but found that his ship was so small that he didn't even qualify to enter other people's traffic pools.

Time and again, he stood in the eye of the storm, looking up as he watched others take flight against the wind, while he could only struggle in the mud.

In his past life, until the moment of his death, he blamed everything on not bowing his head at that meeting back then.

But now, standing here again, Li Feng suddenly understood.

Big mistake!

The source of suffering in his past life was not because of whether he gave in or not!

Even if he backs down today and licks Zhao Peng's shoe soles like a dog, will the outcome change?

Will not.

Zhao Peng, a shrewd and self-serving old fox, would only treat him as the most useful blood bag, endlessly squeezing out his value until he was thirty-five years old and was rightfully eliminated as an aging consumable!

The reason he failed in his previous life was that when faced with those opportunities that could truly transcend social classes, he only had vision, but no capital, no platform, and no power to control the rules!

Li Feng, that cowardly, incompetent, drunk man who died in the street at the age of thirty-nine, what right do you have to forgive your current twenty-two-year-old self, full of passion?!

You want to kneel, but I, Li Feng, will never kneel again in my life!

He now has a complete history of the future development of internet entertainment in his mind and holds the standard answers to every capital feast.

As a reborn individual with the secrets to success, why should I bow down to a mid-level manager destined to be abandoned by the times?!

Li Feng suddenly opened his eyes.

His previously cloudy and conflicted eyes became clear and sharp at this moment, even revealing a hint of mockery.

Looking at Zhao Peng ahead, a victorious smile on his lips, he uttered the exact same words as in his previous life:

"I've learned a lot, Manager Zhao."

Zhao Peng's smile widened, and he was about to reply.

"For example, I learned how to skillfully use 'Ctrl+H' to replace the original author's name on the cover of a 60-page report, even though I hadn't looked up a single line of Korean information in the past three months."

The entire conference room seemed to be paused, and the seven or eight executives who were originally nonchalant froze instantly.

The smile on Zhao Peng's face froze completely, shattered, and then turned purplish-red, as if someone had doused him with liquid nitrogen.

"Li Feng! What nonsense are you spouting?!"

"Whether I'm lying or not, you know in your heart."

Li Feng's voice lacked the hysteria and trembling grievance of his previous life. He calmly reached out and opened the laptop in front of him, turning the screen towards the crowd:

"The logs of the web crawler that scraped player reviews from Korean online forums, the local cache records of all the original Korean versions of the pages, and the modification timestamps of each version of the PPT over the past two weeks are all on my D drive."

"Manager Zhao, would you like me to connect the projector now and show General Manager Lin and the other bosses frame by frame the results of your 'three months of dedicated research'?"

"You—!" Zhao Peng suddenly stood up, his finger pointing at Li Feng trembling uncontrollably, and cold sweat instantly broke out on his forehead.

He never expected that this small-town exam-taker, who usually only knew how to bury himself in coding and had a somewhat dull personality, would actually flip the table in such a suicidal way at a meeting of this level!

"That's enough!"

A deep rebuke interrupted the farce in the conference room.

Mr. Lin, the vice president of the business group, who was sitting in the main seat, slammed his thermos cup heavily onto the solid wood table.

At this moment, the gears of history perfectly meshed with the trajectory of the past.

President Lin frowned, his eyes showing no interest in the truth, only dissatisfaction with the "disruption of order."

He stared coldly at Li Feng: "The company pays you to get things done, not to argue. It's understandable for young people to want to prove themselves. But to recklessly disrupt team harmony just to show off—that's called having no rules!"

Turning to Zhao Peng, his tone softened: "Zhao Peng, Xiao Li did help with the data collection for this report. The young man was a bit emotional, so you need to be more understanding and work on team building."

Zhao Peng, feeling like he'd been granted a pardon, immediately seized the opportunity and adopted a pained and forgiving demeanor: "President Lin's criticism is correct; I failed to provide adequate psychological support to the newcomers. Xiao Li, you should have said you wanted authorship earlier. Why throw a tantrum in this situation?"

The same.

Even the punctuation marks haven't changed.

Executives don't care who's working themselves to the bone; they only care who can control the situation.

Within the unspoken rules of the system, Zhao Peng represents a controllable order, while Li Feng is a troublemaker who doesn't understand the rules.

If he were twenty-two years old in his previous life, Li Feng would have already had tears in his eyes, trembling with anger, and despairing over the injustice of this world.

But at this moment, Li Feng looked at the group of people who were high and mighty in front of him and felt a sense of absurdity.

I quietly closed my laptop and unplugged the power cord.

"President Lin's lesson is correct."

Li Feng stood in the shadows at the far corner of the conference room, looked at President Lin, and chuckled softly.

"Young people should indeed have a broader perspective."

We're so big that we'll no longer see you, this future trillion-dollar giant, as our only safe haven; so big that we'll no longer be limited to the petty profits of this game's distribution rights; so big that... we'll trample you all under our feet and become the true masters of the domestic entertainment and internet industries for the next eighteen years.

Li Feng picked up his computer and, amidst everyone's astonished gazes, turned and walked towards the conference room door.

He knew what was going to happen next.

Zhao Peng will be promoted, while he will be transferred to the most peripheral testing position, where he will be put on the back foot for six months until he is completely dismissed on the day of DNF's public beta launch next June.

But so what?

"Click".

Li Feng pushed open the glass door to the conference room and then slammed it shut.

They completely shut out those backstabbing and infighting big factories from behind the door.

Walking down the corridor, the winter sun of 2007 shone through the floor-to-ceiling windows onto his face, dazzling yet warm.

Li Feng let out a long breath.

In his first battle after his rebirth, he did not change the course of his past, but he completely changed himself.

"Times have changed, everyone."

Li Feng muttered to himself as he strode toward his workstation.

His gaze no longer fell upon the confined space of the cubicle, but upon the vast ocean of stars that he was about to unleash his power to transform.