Preparing

He bought a ticket for the latest return train, along with a little folding stool!

Chen Hao spent a little money to board early, found the connection between the carriages, plopped down his little stool, and sat there, claiming advantageous ground in advance.

Only after the train started moving did Chen Hao finally relax.

Careful sailing keeps a ship afloat for ten thousand years. Fortunately, public safety in China was still guaranteed.

Unlike abroad, where they wanted not only your kidneys but might take your life if you were careless. Even five-star hotels weren't safe, and calling the cops wouldn't help.

He hugged his backpack with both arms. Inside was his first bucket of gold.

He still had to spend an entire day and night on the train. His six-foot frame was curled up in the cramped corner between the carriages, surrounded by the smell of smoke.

Chen Hao mocked himself. Was he the most pathetic reincarnator of them all?

No, he still needed a lofty ideal. For example—

Once I'm rich, I won't ride anything but a sleeper berth!

With nothing else to do, Chen Hao pulled a book thick enough to kill someone from his bag: Delphi: From Beginner to Prisoner. He began reading.

He had already read half of it on the way there. This time, he could finally chew through the rest.

Chen Hao skipped over the first third, which covered basic concepts, and started directly with basic syntax and APIs. After all, he had a solid foundation in C language. Like Zhang Wuji after mastering the Nine Yang Divine Skill, he could learn other programming languages by analogy, achieving twice the results with half the effort. He learned everything quickly.

Why was he learning this? Because the code for developing Legend had been written in Delphi.

For a while, Chen Hao was immersed in the ocean of code, ignoring the noisy surroundings and unpleasant smells.

Time flew.

A day later,

Chen Hao drifted back to the dormitory like a long, thin zombie, his whole body radiating a mixed stench of stale odors. He gave his roommates a fright. They thought he had escaped from Myanmar.

He put his bag in the cabinet and locked it, then ate and showered in one smooth sequence. Only then did he finally recover half a breath.

Chen Hao lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling with his eyes open.

His roommates downstairs were still battling in the game world. If he hadn't crossed over, he would probably have been one of them.

Unfortunately, they had less and less in common to talk about.

That was Chen Hao's last thought before falling asleep.

The next day, just as dawn broke,

Sleeping in or playing games now gave Chen Hao a deep sense of guilt. The feeling was much like when he had been unable to find a job after graduating from university in his previous life and had instead become addicted to the game world to escape reality.

You've been given a second chance at life, and you're going to use it to sleep in? Anyone would feel guilty.

Chen Hao got up early, ran two laps around the track, returned to the dormitory, grabbed his bag, and left.

He took a taxi to the Harbin Netcom Company, wandered around the nearby residential areas, rented a two-bedroom apartment, and signed a six-month lease.

The apartment was about eighty square meters, with windows facing both north and south. At four hundred yuan a month, it was slightly expensive, but it was clean, tidy, spacious, and bright.

Southern China had Telecom; northern China had Netcom.

At this time, Internet access still used traditional dial-up connections, which were slow and unstable.

ADSL broadband had not yet achieved full coverage in Ice City. Only a few nearby residential communities were running pilot programs.

Chen Hao went to the service hall to apply for ADSL Internet access and chose the fastest package: 1 Mbps.

That afternoon, the installation technician came over and finished everything in a few minutes. Chen Hao used the speed-testing tool on his laptop to test the connection. If dial-up was like riding a slow green-skinned train, ADSL was like flying on an airplane.

Though in Chen Hao's eyes, it was still absurdly slow—downloading a movie took several hours. The movie might not even finish downloading before he had already become a sage through self-sufficiency.

Still, the speed could at least hover around 100 KB/s, nearly ten times faster than dial-up.

The only piece of hardware still missing was a server. That would be easy.

Chen Hao took out his phone and made a call. After a long while, nobody answered.

Damn, where is he?

Forget it. He would call again later. He might as well play Legend first.

Chen Hao took out his laptop and the hard drive containing a Legend private server, placed them on the desk, and fell into a daze.

He had forgotten that he was using a laptop. It didn't have a hard-drive port. He slapped his forehead.

No programmer who didn't know how to repair computers or reinstall systems could call himself a qualified IT laborer.

Before long, he bought a pile of tools from nearby hardware and computer shops.

He directly removed the back cover of the laptop, connected the external hard drive with a data cable, then booted the computer and adjusted the settings in the BIOS.

He restarted it, and it was done.

He copied the Legend private server source code from the new hard drive onto the laptop.

Then he removed the hard drive and restored the laptop to its original state.

He launched Legend. The familiar screen appeared, accompanied by familiar music.

Everything was fine. Chen Hao downloaded the various programming tools he would need from the Internet.

At that moment, the phone rang.

"Hello, bro!"

"I was in the server room just now. They don't allow phones in there. You're in Ice City, right?"

"Yeah. I rented a place next to your company."

"Seven tonight—fuck, that idiot of a supervisor is holding another meeting after work... Make it eight-thirty. Same old place. I'll welcome you properly~ So, what do you need me for?"

"I remember you mentioning that you had an old server."

"Yeah, I have two. I wrecked one while playing around with it, but the other one still works. You want to use it?"

"Yeah. I want to set up a private server."

"A private server? What's that? We'll talk later~ I'll carry the server over tonight."

"Sounds good. See you then, bro. Bye-bye~"

"Bye!"

Chen Hao and the cousin he had just called were both only children.

His father's generation had three siblings. Chen Xingguo was the second eldest, with an older sister and a younger brother.

Lin Lang was the son of Chen Hao's eldest aunt, and was five years older than Chen Hao.

That was why Chen Hao and Xu Pengkun had followed Lin Lang around like his little shadows since childhood. They had raided birds' nests, chased dogs, climbed mountains, crossed rivers—there was nothing they wouldn't play at.

Lin Lang had also been their gaming mentor, taking them from the Little Overlord all the way to Internet cafés.

When Lin Lang went to university in Ice City, the trio temporarily disbanded and became a duo.

One reason Chen Hao had chosen to attend university in Ice City was that his older cousin was there.

After graduating from university, Lin Lang had worked at Inspur for two years. Thanks to his excellent technical skills, he later jumped ship to IBM's Harbin branch. He was now mainly responsible for after-sales maintenance of the servers in Netcom's server rooms.

Since the server room had only recently been built, there were many problems. He had worked overtime throughout the New Year period and hadn't returned home for the holiday this year.

Software engineers worked long hours under immense pressure, and hardware engineers were no better. The IT industry paid more than most others, but people often only saw the thief enjoying his meat and never saw him getting beaten. They all paid with their lives.

Wasn't there a saying? You could tell an IT professional's technical level by how much hair he had. A bald big shot wearing a tank top, oversized shorts, and flat slippers was probably a Sweeping Monk-level existence. Those wearing plaid shirts and jeans, with dog tags hanging around their necks, were merely entry-level disciples of the sect.

Once they passed thirty, becoming a civil servant or entering a state-owned enterprise became the endgame in the eyes of most IT workers.

The hardware and network were now settled. Only the software remained, and that was his specialty.

Chen Hao opened the Legend code in an IDE—an integrated development environment—and began studying it.

Nothing could be accomplished in a single step.

To modify the original code and architecture, he first had to understand it. Only then could he start making changes and debugging.

The process couldn't be wrong, and neither could the logic or syntax. It required immense patience and care. If even one letter was wrong, the program wouldn't run.

Society might deceive you, and your lover might deceive you, but mathematics wouldn't, because if mathematics said no, then it was no! Programming: Same here!

This reminded Chen Hao of when he had first learned programming. The simplest piece of code had stubbornly refused to run, and he eventually discovered that he had typed an uppercase I as a lowercase l. They looked the same, didn't they? But one was an uppercase i, while the other was a lowercase l.

It was like a pair of twins. Their faces and figures looked identical, but once you got them into bed, you'd discover—

An hour later,

Dizzy and bleary-eyed, Chen Hao broke down and roared,

"Fucking Korean programmers! Don't you people write comments in your code?"