My capital is quite large.

The job transfer notice was sent via email to the entire department the following morning.

As expected, Li Feng was kicked out of the core game agency project team and reassigned to the extremely marginalized old PC game maintenance and testing team.

Not only that, his workstation, along with his computer, was moved to the far corner of the office area.

On the left is a public printer that roars every day and emits the smell of ozone; on the right is the only way to the men's restroom and the tea room.

It's drafty in winter and smells bad in summer; it's widely recognized as the worst feng shui spot in the entire large apartment complex.

Zhao Peng's revenge was direct and petty.

On the day of the move, no one in the department dared to help. Even Brother Lu, who was usually on good terms with Li Feng, only gave him a sympathetic look when he went to get water before quickly walking away with his head down.

What followed was a constant stream of people being unfairly treated.

"Li Feng, these are 1,300 compatibility bugs left over from last month in 'QQ Huaxia'. This week, run them one by one on different test machines and submit the reproduction report to me before the end of the workday on Friday."

One of Zhao Peng's lackeys, a team leader, slammed a thick stack of test lists onto Li Feng's dusty table with a bang.

This is an amount of work that treats people like animals.

If it were him in his younger, impetuous self, he would definitely be blushing and slamming his fist on the table, arguing with the other party about how unreasonable the work assignment was.

But Li Feng simply looked up from the computer screen, glanced at the list calmly, and nodded: "Okay, put it there."

There was no anger, no humiliation, not even a ripple of emotion.

The lackey leader was stunned for a moment. The sarcastic remarks he had prepared were like punching cotton, leaving him extremely uncomfortable.

He scoffed, "Don't think you can just coast along here. You've got a D in your probationary period assessment, you should know that!"

After saying that, he turned and left.

Li Feng didn't even look up.

Ask him to manually fix 1,300 tedious bugs? Are you kidding me?

Having memories of the future, he spent an hour casually writing an automated test script that combined AutoHotkey and Python.

I tossed a few test phones into a drawer, plugged in the data cable, and started the script.

In the lower right corner of the computer screen, in the black code box, lines of green test data are automatically scrolling at a rate of ten times per second.

In the very center of the screen, Li Feng leisurely sipped the instant coffee provided free by Tencent, opened Flash CS3 and the code editor, and continued typing away at his powerful weapon hidden deep within his D drive.

In the days that followed, Zhao Peng and his gang kept finding ways to make Li Feng miserable.

This includes, but is not limited to, organizing old project documents that had been abandoned for three years, deliberately not informing him of departmental dinners, and using him as a negative example in the weekly meeting to criticize some newcomers for being "ambitious but incompetent and having a negative attitude."

But gradually, Zhao Peng and his team realized something was wrong.

No matter how tedious or trivial the task was, he always managed to deliver it on time.

No matter how others ridicule or belittle him, he always maintains a gentle, dull, and wooden expression.

"Mr. Zhao, has that kid suffered too much trauma and lost his mind? He's been staring at the screen all day, like a living dead." The lackey team leader stood in Zhao Peng's private office, looking at Li Feng in the corner in the distance, with a bored expression.

Zhao Peng, holding his bone china teacup, gave a disdainful sneer:

"This is what happens when a poor student from the countryside is crushed by reality. Just ignore him and let him rot there. When my DNF game launches next June, I'll free up some positions and have HR find a reason to lay him off."

When a person completely gives up resistance, the sadist loses his pleasure.

In less than half a month, Zhao Peng and his gang completely ignored Li Feng.

In their eyes, this young man was already a workplace zombie lying at his desk waiting to die.

The greatest heroes live in seclusion; the most perfect way to remain hidden is to make everyone think you're a good-for-nothing.

Time flies.

The deep winter of 2007 passed in the blink of an eye, and Shenzhen ushered in the rainy season of early spring 2008.

In less than three months, a great deal of change was taking place: the first-generation iPhone began to gain momentum globally, and the number of registered users on Renren.com in China exceeded ten million.

"Clatter".

February 18, 2008, 11:30 p.m.

Everyone had left the large office area. The cleaning lady turned off the main light, leaving only the lone incandescent bulb above Li Feng's head still lit.

Li Feng typed the last line of ActionScript code and pressed the Enter key heavily.

"Compilation successful."

A simple prompt box pops up on the screen.

Li Feng let out a long breath and rubbed his dry, red eyes, which had become sore from staring at the screen for so long.

nailed it.

In less than three months.

He single-handedly completed almost all the front-end animation logic and back-end database interactions of the original "Happy Farm".

It doesn't have the fancy Unreal Engine, nor does it have dozens of gigabytes of texture packs.

It only has a rough pixelated screen, a few patches of yellow earth covered with grids, a low-resolution pixelated pet that looks like a dog, and a simple "Shop" and "Friends List" button next to it.

But Li Feng knew that even this broken thing, with its underlying code logic of "time countdown," "social interaction theft," and "profit incentives," was enough to completely exploit the weaknesses of Chinese netizens' human nature in the coming years!

To verify the final result, Li Feng opened two test accounts on the local server.

Account A planted a "white radish" in the soil, and set the ripening time to 10 seconds.

Ten, nine, eight... three, two, one.

The radishes are ripe, their green leaves shimmering with an alluring light.

Li Feng quickly switched to account B, clicked the mouse, and the icon that turned into a small hand reached out towards the radish.

"Whoosh!"

A notification pops up in the center of the screen: [You have successfully stolen your friend 'Li Feng A's' white radish, gaining 10 coins!]

Accompanying this is a cheap but extremely satisfying sound effect of gold coins falling.

That's it!

This simple sound effect, in the quiet office late at night, seemed to toll the death knell of the old era and also to blast open the door to a new era.

Li Feng stared at the number of gold coins on the screen, his eyes shining brightly in the dim fluorescent light.

"The first bullet is already loaded."

Li Feng muttered to himself as he packaged and encrypted the entire project file and uploaded it to his private cloud drive.

Subsequently, all related traces on this Tencent computer were completely erased.

Now, nuclear weapons have been developed.

But a suitable launcher is needed to detonate it.

Li Feng understood the Achilles' heel of web games—the social relationship chain.

Without a large user base to support it, even the most fun stealing game is just a single-player game and meaningless.

Given his current status, he is clearly not qualified to discuss cooperation with Tencent's QQ Space.

"Besides QQ, in early 2008, the largest and most dynamic real-time social network for young people in China..."

Renren (the school's intranet).

It is a gathering place for hundreds of millions of college students from all over the country who are idle, energetic, and eager for social recognition.

As long as we can link Happy Farm to the Renren.com API...

Li Feng turned off his computer and stood up from his workstation.

He glanced at Zhao Peng's luxurious private office in the distance and chuckled contemptuously.

"Mr. Zhao, thank you for sparing my life, and for the free electricity, internet, and base salary for these three months."

"The show is about to begin."