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

The air conditioning vents in the reception room were humming.

The white porcelain cup lid spun half a circle on the glass table before finally coming to a stop.

Old Zhou didn't bother to reach for the cup lid; instead, he rested his hands on his thighs, leaned forward, and stared intently at Ye Chen through his glasses.

Last night, he stayed up until dawn at the Yanjing company. He and four senior junior engineers were staring at the screen full of garbled, pseudo-instructions and pulled out a handful of hair. At that moment, he was certain that the person who wrote this shell had been immersed in the security field for at least ten years.

It turns out that the underlying architecture that completely outclassed the entire Innovation Works technology team was actually created by this freshman who had just turned eighteen.

"Mr. Ye, that local bridging handshake protocol utilizes the long-lived connection pool in memory maintained by the debugging daemon, right?"

Old Zhou's voice was dry, and he leaned forward, throwing away all airs of being an industry veteran, his words filled with a fervent desire for verification.

Upon hearing this, Ye Chen picked up the warm water Chen Wei had just poured, took a sip, and put the cup down.

"Pretty much. After the initial digital signature authentication is completed on the computer, the local loopback address is directly mapped to the background service process. As long as the phone is not completely powered off, the daemon's token will remain valid."

Upon hearing this, Old Zhou slapped his thighs with both hands and nodded repeatedly:

"Brilliant! Absolutely brilliant! We've been focusing on the system installer's own permission verification, never even considering using a local loopback address as a workaround! Mr. Ye, I've learned a lot!"

Wang Junhua, who was standing next to him, took out a tissue and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

He straightened his back, which was originally leaning against the back of the sofa, and moved his hips forward, only sitting on the front third of the sofa. Li Ming, the business director next to him, also quietly put down his crossed legs and placed his hands properly on his knees.

The previous contempt and doubt have now vanished without a trace.

Ye Chen rested his right hand on the sofa armrest, his palm cupping the edge of the mahogany, and steered the conversation back on track:

"Mr. Wang flew in from Beijing today with his core team. It couldn't be just to discuss the underlying protocols of Android 2.2, could it?"

Wang Junhua crumpled the tissue in his hand into a ball, stuffed it into his suit pocket, and forced a bitter smile onto his face.

Faced with a prodigy who can casually write groundbreaking low-level code and controls the traffic of two phenomenal hit games, hiding anything would only make you look foolish.

"Mr. Ye is a straightforward person, so I won't beat around the bush either."

Wang Junhua sighed, his shoulders slumping slightly. "To be honest, yesterday your Star App Market went live, and with the full-screen pop-ups from 'Temple Run' and 'Angry Sparrow' driving traffic, our Green Bean Pod PC client's new users were halved, and the daily active users of our existing users dropped by more than 40%."

Ye Chen remained calm, waiting for him to continue.

"We had a meeting last night to review the situation, and we realized that we were completely outmatched on mobile devices."

Wang Junhua looked at Ye Chen and said, "I flew here today with a thick skin because I wanted to seek a strategic partnership with Xingchen Software and see if we could find a way to survive for the hundreds of thousands of existing users that Green Bean Pod has."

Before Ye Chen could speak, Li Ming, the business director beside him, seized the opportunity, leaned forward, and tentatively spoke up:

"Mr. Ye, although our Green Bean Pod is a step behind in the mobile market, we have been working hard on the PC market for more than half a year. We currently have more than 400,000 highly engaged geek users and have adapted PC drivers for more than 300 mainstream and niche Android models on the market."

Li Ming swallowed hard, observing Ye Chen's expression:

"We hope to reach a technology cross-licensing or joint operation agreement with Xingchen. We will open up all our PC channels and driver libraries in exchange for your company's silent installation module interface license. Together, we can combine our strengths and expand the Android distribution market!"

As soon as he finished speaking, Ye Chen shook his head and burst out laughing.

"Director Li, the abacus beads are practically hitting my face."

Ye Chen leaned back in his chair and said calmly, "The silent installation protocol is the core moat that Star Market uses to lower the barrier to entry for users. It's a generation-level technology that cannot be licensed to external parties in any form."

Li Ming's face flushed red, and he opened his mouth, but Wang Junhua raised his hand to stop him.

"However, Mr. Wang was right about one thing just now: the reputation your Green Bean Pod team has built up on the PC side and that driver adaptation library are indeed very solid."

Ye Chen lightly placed his hand on his knee, pointing out another way for the other party, "Many users who have just switched to smartphones are still used to using a data cable to connect to a computer to manage their phones. Starry Sky Software is currently focused entirely on the mobile end and doesn't have the energy to figure out the computer drivers for hundreds of miscellaneous mobile phones one by one."

Upon hearing this, Wang Junhua's breathing quickened slightly, and he immediately pressed for an answer:

"What does Mr. Ye mean?"

"Traffic swap, channel integration."

Ye Chen held up one finger. "Green Bean Pod will continue to retain your PC tool attributes, responsible for helping users install drivers, back up contacts, and manage photo albums. However, you must remove your own application download module and exclusively embed the mobile entry point of our Starry Sky App Market on the homepage of the PC software."

"As long as users connect to their computers using Green Bean Pod, Star Market will be automatically pushed to their mobile phones for installation. We will provide you with tiered revenue sharing based on the actual number of activations after deduplication. The price will be one unit for every 100,000 activations, and another tier for every 500,000 activations."