At eight o'clock in the evening, Xu Meng patted his shoulder as he walked out of the company's main entrance.
Behind him, the three-story building of Dream Builder was brightly lit.
Renting this small building and redecorating it cost much more than renting three floors of a commercial office building.
However, when the company was first established, they were full of grand ambitions, and Zhang Yang didn't care about these expenses.
Now that he felt the rent was a bit expensive, it wasn't easy to just up and move.
At this very moment, art, programming, operations, planning, marketing... all departments were made extremely tense by the new tasks assigned by him.
Whether it was meeting to discuss, working overtime on the spot, or pretending to work overtime while actually chatting animatedly, in short, there was no intention of getting off work anytime soon.
Xu Meng actually wanted to work overtime, too.
But after all, he had suddenly died twice—once himself, and once in this body—so he still had lingering fears to some extent.
He planned to rest and recuperate for a few days, and wait until his body wasn't so frail before talking about it.
Arriving at the parking lot, he found someone slouching against his car and tapping on a cell phone.
As he got closer, he realized it was actually Zhang Yang, who had disappeared for nearly two months.
--Not entirely disappeared; after returning to Flower City, Zhang Yang joined his old man's company, while Xu Meng frantically worked overtime trying to save the game. The two of them didn't even mention meeting up or hanging out, and chances to chat were few and far between.
Seeing him here suddenly at this moment was truly quite unexpected.
Before he could even speak, this dude slapped him on the shoulder, "Awesome, old Xu!"
"?" Xu Meng was stunned for a moment, "What?"
"The announcement you posted! So gutsy!" Zhang Yang said with an admiring expression, "But remember to turn off your Weiguang direct messages."
Xu Meng was speechless.
Zhang Yang was as sharp as ever.
His Weiguang account had already been bombarded with direct messages. The sheer variety of abuses made even him, a veteran of many battles, feel that his inventory of curse words had become much richer.
"Small problem." Xu Meng shook his head. As he opened the car door, he asked, "When did you arrive? Why didn't you come up to the company to take a look."
"I didn't want to be drafted by you." Zhang Yang nudged Xu Meng aside and sat in the driver's seat.
"How can I let Boss Xu drive personally! I'll do it, I'll do it."
Xu Meng smiled and walked around the front of the car to the passenger side.
The car slowly drove out onto the road.
"How does Young Master Zhang have the time to come see me today?" Xu Meng slumped in the passenger seat and asked.
"If I didn't come, I'd worry that you wouldn't even be in one piece anymore." The smile on Zhang Yang's face slowly faded.
"You've been working overtime way too hard, and you scared Meng Ling. This girl has even been carrying Quick-Acting Heart-Relief Pills and nitroglycerin to work lately. If I hadn't stopped her, she would have ordered a defibrillator the day before yesterday."
Xu Meng was speechless.
If not for this trans-migration business, that defibrillator might actually come in handy...
"Just look at you, how old are you, and you still have a young girl worrying about you."
Zhang Yang imitated his old man's stuffy tone to criticize Xu Meng.
"Alright, alright, I know. Didn't I get off work early today?" Xu Meng helplessly interrupted him, "Besides, with ten million in loans weighing down on me, I have no choice but to risk my life."
"I'm scared of you. How about I pay back this money?"
"?" Xu Meng looked over, "You have money again?"
Zhang Yang's old man was a self-made man, starting from clothing OEM manufacturing all the way to machinery OEM and precision electronic product OEM... a solid industrial tycoon.
He had suffered no shortage of hardships in his life, educated his son strictly, and had always been cautious with money.
Because of this "rebellious act" of opening a game company, Zhang Yang had sold some houses and mortgaged others, and his old man kept an even tighter leash on him.
Zhang Yang, however, said with a smile, "Although my dad is an iron rooster, my mom has a soft heart. If I cry poor and play the pity card a bit more, I can always manage it."
Xu Meng patted Zhang Yang's shoulder, genuinely feeling quite touched.
Yet the words that came out were, "Get lost! You just said my methods were awesome, and now you turn around and curse me to fail?"
"Let me tell you, this wave of transformation is going to earn at least a small goal!"
"Hahaha!" Zhang Yang immediately laughed out loud, "Good! I'll wait to watch your performance!"
"Do you want to take back some shares? Guaranteed profit."
"Forget it, I'm destined to go back and take over the family business anyway. Although my old man is rigid, what he said makes sense. Dream Builder was a rebellious plaything to me, but to you..."
Taking advantage of a red light, Zhang Yang turned his head and glanced at Xu Meng's heavy dark circles and haggard face.
"Developing games, that's your dream, right?"
After a moment of silence, Zhang Yang spoke again:
"Actually, from the moment Dream Builder was established, it belonged to you."
"It's merely a matter of sooner or later."
"The only fly in the ointment is: my initial plan was that once Dream Builder Game became wildly popular, I'd flex hard and make a splash before going home. But I didn't expect it to be so miserable after the game was released..."
"But no matter what, the result is the same."
"Dream Builder has still ended up in your hands."
"My goal has also been achieved."
"So don't even think about giving it back to me again."
Xu Meng hadn't expected this answer at all.
This wasn't something college roommates with a conjugate father-son relationship could pull off.
This required an actual biological father, right?
Just as he was hesitating whether to throw out a few cheesy lines like "such great kindness, I'll offer my body in return" to disgust Zhang Yang, he suddenly felt that the scenery outside the car window looked a bit wrong: "You took the wrong road, right? Where are you driving to?"
"The hospital," Zhang Yang answered calmly, "I made an appointment with a doctor for you."
"Ah?" Xu Meng felt a bit resistant.
"Heh, what did you think I sat in the driver's seat for?" Zhang Yang smiled triumphantly, "You don't have a choice now!"
Twenty minutes later, Zhang Yang drove the car to Kangya Hospital in Ningzhou, dragging an unwilling Xu Meng inside.
Half an hour later, Xu Meng came out holding an over-eight-hundred-word medical advice form, carrying medicine and a large bag of supplements to nourish his body.
Zhang Yang dropped Xu Meng off downstairs and gave one final piece of advice: "Work overtime a little less, and don't work yourself to death. Remember to take your medicine; I'll have Meng Ling supervise you."
Afterward, he hurriedly left to head to the airport for his flight.
--His trip here was purely to drag Xu Meng to the hospital for a physical checkup.
Xu Meng's parents died early, and at age fourteen, he was taken in by his aunt and uncle to be cared for for four years until the gaokao. After graduating from college, he stayed in Ningzhou to start a business with Zhang Yang.
After Zhang Yang returned to Flower City, he went about his days alone, and no one could persuade him once he started working overtime like crazy.
Chen Mengling tried plenty of times to no avail, and could only resort to seeking Zhang Yang's help.
Only then did Zhang Yang have to make a sudden appearance downstairs at Dream Builder Company.
After going home and dealing with food delivery, Xu Meng obediently took his medicine and drank his supplements, then went to bed early to rest.
Before sleeping, however, he still couldn't resist taking out his phone to check the follow-up impact of that announcement.
Then his brows furrowed.
Controversy was within expectations.
Yet the volume was simply too exaggerated.
No matter what, "Frost Snow Project" was only a flopped ACG Game, and its influence was very limited.
Even outside the ACG Game circle, very few people knew about it.
Even if the announcement content was relatively out of the ordinary, after a whole day, the netizens who came to watch the commotion should have dispersed by now.
The remaining ACG Game players should be happy to see these changes happen.
Right now, though, those players' voices were almost invisible beneath the announcement, replaced entirely by uniform negative comments.
Attacking Xu Meng personally for low moral character, mocking Dream Builder's futile struggle as a dying gasp, advising Dream Builder employees to resign early and escape the sea of suffering, reporting the game in advance, giving the game bad reviews—truly coming up with all sorts of tricks.
If someone with a fragile heart came across this, they'd probably have the urge to jump off a building right about now.
Yet Xu Meng sharply sensed that something was amiss.
He browsed through a dozen pages of comments and found a large number of highly similar comments. Selecting a few publishers to check their backgrounds, he quickly discovered a connection among them—
Following each other, replying and liking each other's posts, and having a history of "battle achievements" banding together to trash people under the same topics.
He caught the scent of internet trolls.
Who is in such a rush? Xu Meng couldn't figure it out.
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