Chapter 117: Cloud (8)
117 – Cloud (8)
The elders’ praise for the Goddess of the Luo River lasted a full five minutes without stopping. Although it’s said that grandparents dote on their grandchildren, was he, a mere lemon spirit, truly no match for a phone spirit? Lin Xun decided he would never show them the 3D projection form of the Goddess of the Luo River, or else within a day, they’d probably forget who Lin Xun was.
He returned to his third-floor home with a sense of loss, only to find the three of them gathered together, completely engrossed in playing games, having entirely forgotten his existence.
Lin Xun silently went back to his room, called his Dong Jun, whined for a while, and ended the conversation with a “mwah” before kicking open his door and saying in an extremely harsh tone, “Rehearsal time!”
Rehearsing wasn’t difficult either.
The three of them acted as the audience while he, expressionless, explained the PowerPoint and made minor adjustments to unsuitable parts. They rehearsed like this three times.
Wang Anquan wore a look of reluctance: “Um, Algorithm…”
Lin Xun raised an eyebrow: “What’s wrong?”
Wang Anquan: “Could you, um, be a little more… emotionally expressive?”
Lin Xun stared straight at him: “I will.”
Zhao Jiagou: “Tsk, you’ve only been apart from your man for half a day, why do you look like you’re in mourning?”
Lin Xun: “?”
He immediately got into a physical altercation with Jia Gou, giving him a good beating.
After laughing and roughhousing for a while, they caught their breath, each sitting down, exchanging a few silent glances.
Lin Xun spoke first: “Tomorrow…”
Jia Gou: “Everything will go smoothly.”
Wang Anquan let out a ghostly cry: “Everything will go smoothly!”
Lin Xun smiled, leaning back on the sofa: “You’ve worked hard.”
Jia Gou leaned against him and said, “You’re the one who’s worked hard. We’ve been playing for days.”
Lin Xun didn’t respond.
Three years wasn’t a short amount of time. He had skipped grades and was only nineteen when he graduated. Jia Gou was about the same, while Anquan had taken the steady path, going through the proper college entrance exams and university. Even so, he hadn’t yet turned twenty-two when he graduated. Those who graduated from their department either went straight into academia or joined top-tier companies or institutions—the kind of people seen as the most talented and promising.
Yet, during their youngest and most precious three years, the two of them had followed him, holed up in this old-fashioned residential complex, coding away for three years. It wasn’t that they had no money—any one of them could have taken on freelance work and lived comfortably, and the company still had plenty of funds saved up. It was just that the workload was immense, what they wanted to achieve felt so far out of reach, and they had no extra energy to worry about making a living.
Lin Xun held Zhi Zhen, silent for a long while. Just as he was about to bore a hole through the ceiling with his stare, he finally said, “Thank you… for believing in me.”
Jia Gou nudged his shoulder: “How could we not believe in Lord Xun?”
Lin Xun slapped him.
“You hit me!” Jia Gou pounced on him, pulling at him.
And then they were fighting again.
Lin Xun gave up on sentimentality and focused on the fight, ultimately unable to say anything overly sentimental.
The fight ended when Zhi Zhen joined the fray, scratching Jia Gou and drawing his fury onto itself. Then, a fierce chase broke out in the room.
Lin Xun idly opened his phone, scribbling in the notes app.
Over there, a chat notification from Dong Jun popped up—Dong Jun had said goodnight to him.
A Happy Zhi Zhen: Working tomorrow?
Dong Jun: Yes.
A Happy Zhi Zhen: What time are we going?
Dong Jun: Seven o’clock.
A Happy Zhi Zhen: Then I might not be able to say good morning to you. Good night, good morning.
Dong Jun: Mwah.
Lin Xun looked at the words “mwah” and couldn’t help but laugh, but the smile lasted less than five seconds before he felt a bit sad again. He opened his memo app and jotted down a string of numbers.
“What are you doing? Crying one moment and laughing the next.” Wang Anquan snatched his phone away.
“Hey!” Lin Xun didn’t have time to stop him. Anquan’s phone-snatching skills were honed to perfection through countless repetitions. Immediately after, Anquan frowned at his memo: “What’s this?”
“Nothing.” Lin Xun snatched it back.
Wang Anquan: “Why are you recording so many times?”
Lin Xun: “It’s really nothing.”
“Come on.” Wang Anquan looked determined to get to the bottom of it: “What are you hiding from us?”
Lin Xun glanced at him and said calmly, “Do I have to tell you if I’m secretly recording my boyfriend’s work schedule?”
Wang Anquan: “…”
He let go: “Fine.”
He turned and slowly walked away, adding, “You’re something else.”
Then he suddenly turned back: “Are you a pervert?”
Lin Xun: “?”
He replied coldly, “Do I look like one?”
Wang Anquan: “Yes, you little weirdo.”
Lin Xun stared at him wide-eyed, and after five seconds, suddenly said, “Do you remember blockchain?”
Wang Anquan looked confused but nodded: “Yeah, I remember.”
“In the first class, the teacher explained its principle. He said, in a possibly inaccurate but easiest-to-understand way, blockchain is like a line of poetry.”
“Oh, I remember that.” Wang Anquan said: “Something about a bird and the sky, and… a goose leaves its call?”
“Something like that,” Lin Xun held an aluminum soda can, slowly crushing it bit by bit, and whispered, “When something happens, like the butterfly effect or everything else in the world, it inevitably affects its surroundings. Then… even if the event itself is erased, the traces it leaves behind in the world can’t be wiped away. In fact, through those traces, we can deduce what happened here.”
“That’s right.” Wang Anquan nodded: “Blockchain, Bitcoin. Information is safest in the blockchain.”
Lin Xun looked at the crisscrossing patterns on the soda can and nodded: “I think reality is like blockchain too. There are no secrets that can stay hidden forever.”
Blockchain, a decentralized, distributed ledger. When you do something, traces of it are left all over the world, impossible to wash away or alter.
Wang Anquan looked at him, his Adam’s apple bobbing: “What are you trying to say?”
“Nothing.” Lin Xun said: “I’m just a bit… crazy, you know? That’s how people in love are.”
Wang Anquan: “Get lost.”
He quickly shut himself in his bedroom, as if trying to draw a clear line between himself and the little weirdo.
Lin Xun shrugged, got up to wash up briefly, and returned to his own bedroom. Lying in bed, he didn’t draw the curtains, gazing at the night outside the window. In the distance, the lights of countless households flickered on and off, and the city’s glow shimmered, illuminating most of the sky. After closing the soundproof window, all the noise faded away, leaving only the occasional sound of a car horn and the faintly swaying shadow of a hawthorn tree.
He pulled on his eye mask. When he wasn’t by Dong Jun’s side, his sleep quality was always unsatisfactory, and he would dream. Dreams about… Dong Jun.
Why was this? And why did those dreams disappear when he was by Dong Jun’s side? Lin Xun withdrew his gaze from the window and looked up at the ceiling, thinking that this wasn’t actually anything strange. When he shared a room with Dong Jun, he couldn’t even enter the System Space. Within a ten-meter radius of Dong Jun, it was practically the only place in this Cultivation world that adhered to a materialistic worldview.
Thinking this, he spoke to the empty air in front of him, “Hey.”
“I mean, System,” he said. “Golden Core stage, Nascent Soul stage, Soul Division stage—I’ve completed so many main quests. Why haven’t you given me the funds and Sect Territory yet?”
The System didn’t reply, so he continued, “Are you trying to renege on your promises? Or did I level up too fast?”
In the silence, a mechanical voice echoed faintly.
“System busy, please try again later.”
Lin Xun: “.”
Alright, no point relying on it.
He closed his eyes, his thoughts swirling. He reflected on the events of the past few days and wondered: after setting up the cloud platform, he reached the Soul Division stage. So how would he advance to the next stage, Tribulation Transcendence? Looking at the general trajectory of computer development from people’s perspectives, could it be something like Neural Networks, machine learning, or artificial intelligence?
“What exactly are you up to?” Lin Xun asked the System again. “A computer science primer? And only an introductory one at that. Your framework is a bit low-level, really—it can only fool high school students. How about I write you a new set?”
“System busy, please try again later.”
Lin Xun gave up trying to communicate with it and attempted to sleep.
He thought, if he had to dream, then he might as well have a good dream.
Things went exactly as he wished. In the hazy confusion unique to dreams, a sweet and cheerful tune drifted in from somewhere, like the kind of music you’d hear in children’s games, Barbie movies, or amusement parks. The air was sweet too, carrying the scent of candy, light and soft.
A clown with a red nose wobbled past in front of him, holding a bunch of balloons.
An amusement park… right, an amusement park.
A quiet one, with only the sound of music.
Lin Xun looked around at the familiar structures. In the center of the amusement park was a castle made of pink and blue, and beside it stood a black castle, as if inhabited by wizards or evil sorcerers. Lin Xun knew that was King Arthur’s maze. The entire amusement park resembled a world straight out of a fairy tale, with all the rides in operation. A roller coaster roared past on the left, yet the vast amusement park had no visitors—only the red-nosed clown, flower fairies, and princesses walked along the paths.
What was he here for?
A vague memory told him: he was here for a date.
A date at an amusement park seems quite common, but the specific location is unclear—perhaps it wasn’t mentioned by the person who invited him, or maybe he was the one who invited someone else. It’s hard to recall; dreams are always so chaotic.
He walked toward the Ferris wheel. In his twenties, he no longer felt like a young person, uninterested in thrilling or adrenaline-pumping rides.
Throughout the entire amusement park, every attraction was in operation—even the empty carousel horses rose and fell slowly. Yet, only the Ferris wheel remained still. Unimpeded, he approached it. The lowest cabin had its door open, with a faint silhouette inside. He walked over and pulled the door shut.
The mechanical axle creaked, and the Ferris wheel slowly began to turn, ascending into the sky.
He gazed at the man across from him. That familiar profile, sharp and handsome features, impeccably dressed—it seemed unchanged over all these years, forever standing there with effortless grace, high above everything.
“Happy birthday.” A new melody began to play in the amusement park. He smiled and said to Dong Jun, “Time passes… so quickly. It’s been over twenty years since we met.”
Dong Jun didn’t speak, only looked at him. His eyes seemed like a pool of undisturbed water, so deep. Even after twenty years, Lin Xun still didn’t know what lay hidden within them.
“I prepared a gift for you,” Lin Xun said, “but I forgot to bring it.”
Dong Jun looked at him, his expression seemingly gentle. Indeed, Lin Xun thought hazily, this person had never lost his temper with him.
Dong Jun said, “It’s alright.”
“Mmm…” Lin Xun said, “There’s something I want to tell you.”