We agreed not to date, so why are you crying now that I've become the richest man?

Ye Chen pressed the send button with his thumb, then turned off the screen and placed it face down on the table.

With his left hand, he picked up a chicken bone with his chopsticks, flicked his wrist, and tossed it steadily into Sun Haoyu's open mouth, laughing and scolding:

"Just eat your food. All you ever think about is gossip. Didn't that meatball shut you up?"

Sun Haoyu tilted his head to avoid the chicken bone, chuckling to himself.

"I'm just worried about you! Look at our dorm, Lao Lu has Wang Yao, Li Meng and I are almost there, Qiangzi is busy renting out buildings on campus to run food delivery jobs, and you're always elusive, surrounded by beautiful women but you haven't settled down with one yet."

"That stroke of your 'eight' character, did you draw it with two weeks' worth of snacks you bought yourself?"

Lu Wenbo stood by and mercilessly undermined them.

"Stop talking nonsense, Lao Lu! Li Meng even asked me last night if I had finished my calculus homework!"

Sun Haoyu immediately turned his attention to Lu Wenbo and started arguing heatedly, then veered into the topic of which internet cafe to go to for the night.

Ye Chen leaned back in his plastic chair, slowly sipping his seaweed and egg drop soup, while the sounds of his two roommates arguing heatedly over a piece of virtual game equipment filled his ears.

The surrounding area was filled with the unique noise of university cafeterias and the clattering of bowls and chopsticks.

This freshman, sitting in the corner wearing a cheap gray hoodie, had just finished allocating computing power to the largest Android distribution channel in the country while munching on meatballs, and personally cut off the most lucrative piece of the mobile internet pie in 2010.

Twenty minutes later, the three of them finished their meal, put their empty plates in the recycling area, and walked out of the dining hall building side by side.

The October night breeze blew in my face, carrying the coolness of the autumn night.

The streetlights cast long shadows of the three people.

When Ye Chen reached the fork in the tree-lined path, he suddenly stopped.

Having spent over a decade working in a major internet company in his previous life, he knew all too well where the bottom line was in the early days of the software industry in China.

In 2010, the mobile internet was far less regulated than it would be in later years. Billing codes, malicious bundling, hacker battles, and online smear campaigns were rampant. In the struggle for access to the bottom layer, jealous competitors would resort to any underhanded means.

Before nightfall today, Xingchen App Market had already absorbed more than 56,000 active devices, which is equivalent to directly destroying the livelihoods of countless traditional download sites and similar assistants.

Tonight's traffic peak is definitely not going to be peaceful.

"You two go back to your dorm first. I'll stand here and get some fresh air to digest my food and make a phone call."

Ye Chen waved to Sun Haoyu and Lu Wenbo.

"Okay, let's go back and turn on our computers to reserve our spots!"

Without thinking much, Sun Haoyu hooked his arm around Lu Wenbo's neck and ran towards the dormitory building.

Ye Chen walked to the shade of the camphor tree where the streetlights couldn't reach, took out his phone, and added a command to Chen Wei:

"After 8 PM tonight, have the entire security team keep a close eye on the firewall, focusing on checking for abnormal address ranges from overseas proxies and the main backbone networks in the north and south of China. We must be vigilant against large-scale network attacks launched by hackers hired by our competitors. High-defense cleaning nodes should be on standby at all times. Once any abnormal requests are detected, do not hesitate for a second. Switch directly to the high-defense channel and blacklist and block all malicious addresses to ensure uninterrupted access for normal users."

After a pause, Ye Chen typed another line:

"In addition, we divided the operations team into two shifts to keep a close eye on the comment sections of the pinned posts on the three major forums, JiFeng, Android, and AnZhi. Once a batch of newly registered accounts are found to be spamming malicious negative reviews such as 'fee-stealing, Trojan horse, crash,' we immediately use a script to take screenshots to preserve evidence of the malicious accounts and the timeline of the spamming. At the same time, through the super moderators of the forums with whom we have established connections, we retrieve the abnormal spamming records from the same address in the backend, directly apply for batch deletion of posts and banning of accounts, and release our security verification report as a countermeasure."

Zhangjiang Integrated Circuit Port, 30 kilometers away.

Chen Wei, who was preparing to take the first batch of employees to a nearby upscale restaurant, received these two text messages and immediately stopped in his tracks.

His expression hardened, he quickly turned around, grabbed the intercom on the table, and his voice suddenly rose:

"Security team! Operations team! Postpone everyone's plans to have dinner at the restaurant. Have administration pack up the high-end meal and send it over! President Ye just gave a direct order, immediately activate the highest level security protection plan! Put all backup high-defense cleaning nodes on the main backbone. The entire operations team is keeping a close eye on the three major forums. If anyone dares to make a move tonight, just chop them off!"

The cheerful atmosphere in the office hall immediately turned tense. More than a dozen engineers sat back down at their workstations, their fingers pressing heavily on the keyboards, and lines of defense monitoring commands scrolled rapidly across the black screen.

On the campus of National Chiao Tung University, Ye Chen received a reply from Chen Wei that "all defenses have been deployed." He casually locked his phone and put it in his pocket.

He looked up and gazed at the brightly lit boys' dormitory building in front of him.

On the fourth-floor balcony, Sun Haoyu, who had just run upstairs, had taken off his coat and was leaning on the railing wearing a tank top, yelling at his brothers in the next dormitory room to play games together.

Ye Chen smiled slightly and strode into the dormitory building.

The streetlights illuminated his young figure carrying his schoolbag as he went upstairs, while in the unseen undercurrents of the internet, a defensive electric fence had been quietly laid out, just waiting for those prey with bloodshot eyes to run into it.