At eight in the evening, Xu Meng patted his shoulder and walked out the front doors of the company.
Behind him, the three-story building of Zhu Meng Company 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 just founded, they were full of ambition, 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 move away.
At this very moment, the art, programming, operations, planning, and marketing... all departments were driven into high tension by the new tasks Xu Meng assigned.
Whether it was meeting for discussions, working overtime on the spot, or pretending to work overtime while actually chatting animatedly, they showed not the slightest intention of getting off work.
Xu Meng actually wanted to work overtime, too.
But after all, he had just suffered sudden death twice—himself once, and this body once again—so he still had lingering fears to some extent.
He planned to 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 a guy leaning against his car with a slouched posture, tapping away on his phone.
When he got closer, he found out that it was actually Zhang Yang, who had disappeared for nearly two months.
--Not completely disappeared, either; after returning to Flower City, Zhang Yang joined his old man's company, while Xu Meng crazily worked overtime trying to save the game, leaving the two of them with hardly any chances to meet up or even chat.
Seeing him suddenly here at this moment was truly rather unexpected.
Before he could even speak, this dude slapped him across the shoulder, "Awesome, old Xu!"
"?" Xu Meng was stunned for a moment, "What?"
"The announcement you posted! Too ballsy!" Zhang Yang wore a look of admiration, "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, and the variety of abuses was so rich that even he, who had experienced many battles, felt his stock of swear words had become much more plentiful.
"Minor problem." Xu Meng shook his head, opening the car door as he asked, "When did you arrive, and why didn't you come to the company to take a look?"
"I certainly don't want to be grabbed by you as forced labor." Zhang Yang pushed Xu Meng aside and sat in the driver's seat.
"How can I let Boss Xu drive in person! I'll do it, I'll do it."
Xu Meng smiled, walked around the front of the car, and got into the passenger seat.
The car slowly drove onto the highway.
"How does Young Master Zhang have the leisure to come see me today?" Xu Meng slumped in the passenger seat and asked.
"If I don't come, I'm afraid you won't even be around anymore." The smile on Zhang Yang's face slowly faded.
"You've been working overtime way too fiercely, and it scared Meng Ling. This girl has been carrying Quick-Acting Heart-Relief Pills and nitroglycerin to work lately, and if I hadn't stopped her, she would've ordered a defibrillator the day before yesterday."
Xu Meng was speechless.
If not for this time-travel business, that defibrillator might really have come in handy...
"Look at you, how old are you, and you still make a little girl worry."
Zhang Yang criticized Xu Meng while imitating his old man's pretentious tone.
"Enough, enough, I get it, didn't I get off work early today?" Xu Meng helplessly interrupted him, "Besides, with a ten-million loan pressing down on me, I have to risk my life, too."
"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 started from scratch, starting with apparel OEM and working all the way up to machinery OEM and precision electronic product OEM... He was a solid industry tycoon.
He had suffered plenty of hardships all his life, was also strict in educating his son, and had always been very cautious with giving out money.
Because of this "rebellious act" of opening a game company, Zhang Yang had sold 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 is soft-hearted. If I cry poor and play the pity card a bit more, I can always manage it."
Xu Meng patted Zhang Yang's shoulder, truly feeling rather touched.
Yet what came out of his mouth was: "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 will earn at least a small target!"
"Hahaha!" Zhang Yang burst into laughter right then and there, "Good! I'll wait to watch your performance!"
"Do you want to take back some shares? Guaranteed profit."
"Forget it. After all, I'm eventually going back to take over the family business. Although my old man is rigid, what he said makes sense: Zhu Meng is just a rebellious game 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 is your dream, right?"
After a moment of silence, Zhang Yang spoke again:
"Actually, from the very moment Zhu Meng was founded, it belonged to you."
"It's nothing more than a matter of sooner or later."
"The only fly in the ointment is: my initial plan was to wait until Zhu Meng Game became wildly popular, flex hard, show off for a bit, and then go home. But I didn't expect it to be so miserable after the game was released..."
"Still, no matter what, the result is the same."
"Zhu Meng is still handed over to your hands."
"My goal has also been achieved."
"So don't think about paying it back to me again."
Xu Meng hadn't anticipated this answer.
This wasn't something college roommates and conjugate father-son relationships could pull off.
This had to be a biological dad, right?
Just as he was hesitating whether to throw out a few cheesy lines like immense kindness, I will repay you with my body to disgust Zhang Yang, he suddenly felt that the scenery outside the car window was a bit off:
"You went the wrong way, right? Where are you driving to?"
"The hospital," Zhang Yang answered calmly. "I made an appointment with a doctor for you."
"Ah?" Xu Meng was a bit resistant.
"Heh, what did you think I sat in the driver's seat for?" Zhang Yang smiled triumphantly, "There's no backing out for you!"
Twenty minutes later, Zhang Yang drove the car to Kangya Hospital in Ningzhou and dragged an unwilling Xu Meng inside.
Half an hour later, Xu Meng came out holding an over-800-word medical advice sheet, carrying medicine and a large bag of health-tonifying supplements.
Zhang Yang dropped Xu Meng off downstairs and gave one final piece of advice:
"Work less overtime, don't work yourself to death. Remember to take your medicine, and I'll have Meng Ling supervise you."
After that, he hurriedly left to rush to the airport for his flight.
--He made this trip purely to drag Xu Meng to the hospital for a physical checkup.
Xu Meng's parents passed away early, and he was taken in by his uncle and aunt at age 14 to be cared for for four years until the gaokao; after graduating from university, he stayed in Ningzhou to start a business with Zhang Yang.
After Zhang Yang returned to Flower City, he went his own way, and when he crazily worked overtime, no one could persuade him otherwise.
Chen Mengling tried quite a few times, but she simply couldn't persuade him, and in the end, she could only turn to Zhang Yang for help.
Only then did Zhang Yang have to suddenly respawn downstairs at the Zhu Meng Company building.
After returning home and solving his food delivery dinner, Xu Meng obediently took his medicine and drank his health supplements, then went to bed early to rest.
Before sleeping, however, he still couldn't help taking out his phone to follow the subsequent impact of that announcement.
Then his brows furrowed.
Controversy was to be expected.
However, the quantity was way too exaggerated.
No matter what, "Frost Snow Project" was only a flopped ACG Game with very limited influence.
Even outside the ACG Game circle, very few people knew about it.
Even if the announcement content was relatively out of line, after a whole day, the netizens watching the commotion should have dispersed by now.
The remaining ACG Game players should be happy to see these changes happen.
Yet right now, those players' voices were almost invisible beneath the announcement; it was all uniform negative comments.
Attacking Xu Meng himself for having low moral character, mocking Zhu Meng's deathbed struggles as futile, advising Zhu Meng employees to resign early and escape the sea of misery, reporting in advance, giving the game bad reviews—truly pulling out all sorts of tricks.
If someone with a fragile heart had come across this, they'd probably have the urge to jump off a building right about now.
Yet Xu Meng keenly sensed that something was amiss.
He skimmed through a dozen pages of comments and found a large number of highly similar comments. Choosing a few publishers to check their components, he quickly discovered a correlation among them—
They followed each other, replied and liked each other's posts, and shared a historical "battle record" of huddling together to bash people under the same topics.
He caught the scent of internet trolls.
"Who's in such a rush?" Xu Meng couldn't figure it out.
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