At the start, I had to choose one of four options, and I immediately picked the Brahmin from the cou

Li Xiao picked up the purple clay cup and took a sip of the warm tea. His expression remained calm, with only a faint smile appearing at the corner of his mouth.

"Only when the money is right can we feel at ease." Li Xiao put down his teacup and looked at the three people in front of him. "The key personnel outside have eaten their fill, so you guys who are carrying the heavy loads can't go hungry during the New Year."

As soon as he finished speaking, three extremely muffled cell phone vibrations rang out almost simultaneously in the office.

Chen Qiming, Zhao Ming, and Lu Yuan instinctively reached for their phones. Thinking it was a regular group message or a system alert, they casually swiped to turn it on.

However, the temperature in the entire office seemed to freeze instantly the next second.

Zhao Ming stared intently at the exclusive Black Gold customer account notification that popped up on the screen, his eyes almost popping out of their sockets.

【招商银行】您尾号8819的帐户于1月15日17:03转入人民币1，800，000.00元，交易摘要：澜盛资本顾问分红。当前可用余额……

"Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands... hundreds of thousands... millions?!" Zhao Ming's breath caught in his throat, his fingers trembled violently, and he almost dropped his phone. "One... one million eight hundred thousand?!"

Lu Yuan, who was standing to the side, froze completely on the leather sofa.

He and his fellow apprentices toiled for five years in Dongshan Province, doing backbreaking work like beasts of burden, repairing chassis. Even in their most successful year, the entire team's profits amounted to only a few hundred thousand yuan. But now, in his ordinary ICBC bank card, there was a transfer of a full 1.5 million yuan!

"Mr. Li... this, isn't this money transferred to the wrong person?" Lu Yuan suddenly stood up, his face flushed red, and a fine layer of white sweat even appeared on his forehead. "I've only had Deep Blue Factory here for a short time, and the torque fluctuations in the chassis haven't been completely smoothed out yet. This money is burning my hands!"

Sitting in the middle, Chen Qiming stared at the long, alarming string of numbers on his phone screen, completely speechless.

Two million two hundred thousand yuan.

After tax. The funds were directly injected into Lansheng Capital's independent offshore account under the guise of compliance technical advisory fees, with even the individual income tax being withheld and paid in advance without any issues.

In a county-level city like Jiangyang, this amount of money is enough to buy four of the best apartment buildings with elevators outright, plus two top-of-the-line Porsches! Even in Jianye, the provincial capital, this is a huge amount of net profit that many directors in large companies might not be able to accumulate even after working for five years.

"Brother Xiao..." Chen Qiming took off his glasses, rubbed his sore and swollen eyes, his voice hoarse, "Everyone knows Xinglan's current situation. To win over Jianye's major logistics client, we practically launched our SaaS system at rock-bottom prices. We need to keep our working capital to buy machine tools and molds for intelligent manufacturing. You've personally given us such a huge bonus; what will the company's cash flow be like after the spring..."

"You don't need to worry about cash flow."

Li Xiao interrupted him, his tone as steady as a mountain, carrying an unquestionable aura of authority.

He stood up from behind the table and slowly walked to the three people, his gaze deep and calm:

"Xinglan Technology may only have a small profit on paper, but the 200,000 concurrent scheduling capacity you built for me, and the T4 data center you established in Jiangyang, have brought me a strategic premium in the capital market that is far more than just a few million. Old Chen, you should be able to roughly guess how deep Lansheng Capital's pool is."

Li Xiao patted Chen Qiming on the shoulder, then looked at Zhao Ming and Lu Yuan, whose faces were filled with shock:

"People who work purely in technology have an inherent pride, but they are also the most easily burdened by the trivialities of life. I don't want my core technical team to be preoccupied with mortgage payments, school choices for their children, and medical expenses for their elderly parents at the end of the year."

These days, the fastest information transmission channel in the world is not a fiber optic line, but the social circles of young people.

Most of the more than one hundred technicians at Xinglan Technology are master's or doctoral graduates who have graduated for one or two years, or key personnel who have jumped ship from major companies in Jianye and Suzhou. This circle looks large, but it is actually extremely close-knit—going back three generations, they are either fellow students under the same mentor, or close friends who used to play games and stay up all night modifying code in the same dormitory.

On Friday night, Jiangyang High-speed Railway Station and major restaurants in Jianye District became the epicenter of this "Versailles storm".

Several young front-end developers who had taken the high-speed train back to their hometown of Jianye that afternoon to have dinner with their college roommates had just sat down in the private room when, after a few rounds of drinks, the conversation inevitably turned to their year-end bonuses.

"Don't even mention it. Our outsourcing company is doing poorly this year. The boss was so stingy that he gave out two thousand yuan in shopping cards, saying that the economic climate is bad and everyone should be grateful that the company didn't lay off any employees." A classmate who works at a well-known software park in Jianye District sighed with a frustrated expression as he held up his wine glass.

Another person working in testing at a foreign company next to him shook his head, saying, "We're in even worse shape. Their 13th-month salary has been cut in half, and their year-end bonus is being converted into annual leave. Who can possibly take all that leave?"

Sitting in the corner, Xinglan employee Xiao Sun quietly picked up a piece of beef. She initially wanted to keep a low profile, but several people kept asking her questions:

"Hey, grandson, didn't you go to a startup in Jiangyang County more than half a year ago with that Huaqing Business School project? How's it going? What did you make in that small county? Two bags of Northeast rice or a box of ribbonfish?"

Xiao Sun touched his nose, didn't say anything, but casually lit up the WeChat Wallet's balance page on his phone, and then quickly put it back on the table.

"I didn't get the fish... so I just got some year-end performance bonus, a minimum of 30,000, plus my project bonus for becoming a full-time employee, so I got a total of 42,000."

"puff--!"

The classmate across from him, who was drinking, spat out a mouthful of beer. The whole table seemed to freeze instantly, with four or five pairs of eyes fixed on Xiao Sun.

"How much?! Forty-two thousand?! You've only been working in Jiangyang for four months, haven't you?!"

"Holy crap, I scanned that screenshot you just posted, the last four digits really are over 40,000! Direct salary payment from China Construction Bank?!" "Is your boss crazy? A startup company, and they're paying out over 40,000 to a junior employee who just finished their internship?!"

Around the same time, similar upheavals were spreading rapidly in alumni groups and former colleague groups of several well-known science and engineering universities in Jianye, Suzhou, and even the north.

Someone posted a nine-grid photo on WeChat Moments: one was a brightly lit night view of the Xinglan Technology Building, another was a mailing slip for a high-end seafood gift box from Jiangyang, and in the very center was a screenshot of a bank text message, heavily blurred but vaguely revealing a "six-figure" year-end bonus, accompanied by a single, extremely Versailles-esque caption:

"Thanks, Mr. Li! This year I can finally buy my parents a new car back in our hometown. See you on the seventh day of the Lunar New Year! I swear to live and die with this system!"

Many people were looking for Chen Qiming, and his phone had been ringing non-stop since the evening of the 27th of the twelfth lunar month.

The moment he stepped inside, before he even had a chance to take off his coat, his phone in his pocket went completely out of control, vibrating wildly. WeChat notifications rang incessantly, as if the whole world had come looking for him at that moment.

The first to message him was a former subordinate he used to work for at a major company. His tone was half congratulatory and half probing, with barely concealed sourness and shock in his words:

"Brother Chen, is this for real? It's all over Maimai! They're saying Xinglan gave out year-end bonuses today, and even the regular core staff got 700,000 to 800,000 yuan. You co-founders... did you really get millions? That's outrageous! Our old company even halved our year-end bonuses this year!"

Chen Qiming looked at the screen but didn't reply with a specific number. He simply sent a "Not bad" emoji, a generous expression from his boss.

These few casual words instantly triggered a series of exclamation marks on the other side.

He could imagine that at this moment, countless former colleagues were staring at the chat screenshots, feeling incredibly jealous.

At this time of capital winter and major companies laying off employees and cutting salaries, Xinglan Technology's move is like throwing a bomb into stagnant water.