Unseen Name, Deeply Hidden Merit

Chapter 13: 1.13 Chapter Unnamed, Merit Deeply Hidden

As a commoner in the Main World, Wei Keng was very concerned about reducing living costs.

GDP is chicken's ass.

In the Main World, Wei Keng was skilled at calculations.

Outside, fried noodles with a fried egg cost one yuan and fifty cents. Oh, if you go to the cafeteria, grease the bowl, sprinkle some Lao Gan Ma, crack an egg in, and microwave it for one minute (it will explode if microwaved for longer than a minute), you get a soft-boiled fried egg for fifty cents.

Braised chicken wings from takeout cost eight yuan each, but Wei Keng could reduce the cost to two yuan. Wash two frozen chicken wings bought from the supermarket for two yuan each, then put the instant noodle seasoning packet and oil in the rice cooker with a small dish of water, and you can braise them to be more fragrant than outside—uh, later the rice cooker was confiscated by the Dorm Supervisor Aunt.

In this world, Wei Keng began to focus on increasing employment and started designing how to reduce consumption digitally while maintaining a steady increase in the substantive living standards of each worker.

Wei Keng: The wealth of the manufacturing industry should mainly flow within the manufacturing industry and its personnel's normal consumption. Branding and sales design can only occupy an auxiliary role in the economy and must serve the general public, not as a gimmick for specialization.

Upper-class temperament, unique taste, is auxiliary specialization. A specific example is giving mooncakes for the Mid-Autumn Festival, with gold foil wrapping outside and silver cutlery inside. Eastern culture is obsessed with gift-giving; it's considered impolite to visit empty-handed, which has supported a bunch of people in society researching how to be "golden on the outside" while ignoring the "rotten cotton inside" of virtual structures.

Old Master Wei felt this needed improvement.

In 1969, Wei Keng began to venture into the e-commerce field with some assets of the Luoshui Group. Three e-commerce companies were registered, and they began recruiting young people with no criminal records in the four western prefectures for the Logistics Station. Simultaneously, a large number of basic managers were drawn from the industrial park's existing workers to the villages across Shenzhou. In local ancestral halls, a series of Processed Food Contracts were signed. With all this laid out, and amidst the current economic depression, he financed a car manufacturing company that was on the verge of bankruptcy, transitioning it to produce electric scooters, Single-Person Assist Mechs, and other industries.

These actions made the leaders of the old industrial groups holding the Pillars of the Nation in Shenzhou feel inexplicably confused. The Luoshui Group was also a large industrial conglomerate; how did its business devolve into fiddling with trivial matters?

In the economic development cycle, the market being flooded with inferior goods has only appeared in world industrial history during times of world war, indicating a supply-demand imbalance where market thresholds outside the practical scope of products significantly decrease, digesting massive production capacity.

But in war, the consumption needs of the populace are paid for by the national treasury!

During economic downturns, the first reaction of the upper echelons is always that the market is problematic, that the leeks aren't consuming. Only when a complete crisis sets in do they shyly admit: those who control the means of production have priced their products in the market universally higher than the populace can afford.

What if? What if the price were lowered to a certain extent? Capitalists would say it's impossible to lower prices; the first price reduction would cause panic in the raw material market, resulting in primary producers being unable to recoup their costs! Products would directly expire and rot.

In textbooks, a classic case of economic crisis is farmers pouring out milk to maintain prices rather than selling it to the market. Why wouldn't they sell at a lower price, even to recover some costs? This question had always troubled Wei Keng.

Later, he roughly understood the logic: the buyers of milk were often merchants, and they were unscrupulous small-time merchants!

If the primary producer has ten units of milk, and the first unit is reduced by ten percent in price, it triggers market fluctuations, making it uncertain if the remaining nine bottles can be sold even at a fifty percent discount.

It's important to know that the goal of those who control the channels is not to buy milk to drink themselves but to make money by selling milk. The logic of these market-watchers is that if there's further room for price reduction, they will continue to hold onto their capital and push prices down further. They don't care about the plight of the dairy farmers or whether consumers want to drink milk. This can be referenced by the operations of Rice Merchants in classical China—a tradition passed down!

The dairy farmers anticipated this, so—alas! Rather than being continuously squeezed on price, they chose to cut their losses and pour out five bottles, insisting on the one hundred percent price.

But! What if the buyer were a large entity! One that genuinely represents a huge market demand to absorb the cheap milk.

Each time the upper market shrinks, this buyer clears your entire inventory at a low price (slightly above the production cost) and sells it to the lower and middle markets, or reprocesses and stores it.

In this way, regardless of market fluctuations, each unit of milk remains a fully tradable asset. The dairy farmers, knowing this, would not choose to pour out their milk.

The history of the Main World in the 21st century proves that as long as commodity prices are lowered to a certain extent, one will suddenly discover a vast rural consumption potential!

In this world, those with weaker productivity were abandoned, forced into low-efficiency labor, unable to afford the meat, eggs, and milk sold through traditional channels.

Therefore, they were never considered a market.

On April 1, 1969, the Online Grocery Store appeared. This store offered a vast amount of extremely cheap grain, oil, and vacuum-sealed frozen cured meat.

Daily check-ins could earn Vouchers. New members could claim one check-in per day. After one hundred days of membership, they could check in twice daily to claim twice. If they checked in daily without interruption for a year, they could claim one additional check-in.

This check-in system posed no daily task burden for those who were employed.

All factories of the Luoshui Group updated their Punch Clocks. The Punch Clocks' self-information could link to e-commerce platforms. While clocking in for work, employees would simultaneously check in on the platform.

Wei Keng thought, "This is how you grasp both employment and consumption." He added internally, "Clocking in every day is so annoying; I don't have time to check in on an app."

In the current economic crisis, the fringe class in Shenzhou expanded rapidly. They couldn't afford toiletries over twenty yuan, clothes over one hundred yuan, and even grain and oil were not guaranteed. They refused low-paying jobs, fearing that even with strenuous labor, they still couldn't support their families.

This year, Wei Keng took all these surplus materials destined for the market and listed them on these cheap e-commerce platforms.

Of course, the open sale of such substandard and inferior products led to widespread mockery in Shenzhou's mainstream commercial newspapers. They didn't believe anyone would buy them. Indeed, when urban dwellers conducted surveys via phone and newspaper, 99% of the answers were "would not try."

However, modern sociology textbooks taught that sample representativeness and breadth are crucial in sampling. These media surveys failed to consider this.

Is buying things a test of taste? Or a consideration of practical needs?

For Wei Keng, who had eaten instant noodles in college in the 21st century, buying things was merely a need. In the 27th century, when he was rushing his thesis, treating his Senior Student and Junior Female Student to Gongfu Cuisine was about maintaining appearances.

"Different material conditions" lead to different understandings of socio-economic activities! Therefore, when people with a certain set of ingrained values gather in a closed circle, they collectively ignore economic activities in a particular area.

For example, could people in the 1970s understand the economic activity of figurines costing thousands in the 1990s? Could wealthy young ladies in the city imagine the economic activity of an Old Man collecting scrap under a bridge underpass?

There were still many poor people in this era.

Consequently, the subsequent development greatly surprised the mainstream media. The cheap goods they thought would go unsold were sold out? In their economic models, markets were characterized by oversupply. Past market data showed a much smaller consumer base; this clearly exceeded demand and was already saturated, so how could it be snapped up?

These economists, accustomed to quantifying people, might have misunderstood a concept.

If a consumer drinks milk twice a day, they might fill out a survey saying, "I'm not used to it," rather than shamelessly stating, "I can't afford it." In reality, a twelve or thirteen-year-old teenager could drink milk like water.

[Wei Keng, a serious and conservative person regarding figurines costing over a thousand yuan: "I wouldn't buy them; that stuff is too embarrassing, doesn't fit my taste, I don't like playing with plastic figures." When the price dropped to one hundred yuan, a more open-minded Wei Keng thought: "I think I could follow the trend."]

Months later, the consumption boom driven by check-in discounts did not wane. Large quantities of agricultural products were not only sold to personnel in the new industrial park through the platform but also sold by these workers to their relatives and friends. This group represented the consumer base in the urban-rural fringe areas.

Following this, the wave began to advance further, blooming in both purely rural and urban markets.

Cheap Cups, Kettles, Black and White TVs a decade behind in technology, and Satellite Iron Pots – these outdated production capacities salvaged by the Luoshui Group rapidly spread to the countryside.

The countryside received loans to update agricultural production technology. The improved quality agricultural products were not only distributed in Luoshui's new industrial park but also reached the big cities due to their extremely low prices. They captured a certain market share among people in high-end industries, forming a cycle.

In the first half of 1970, after confirming the feasibility of this cycle, Wei Keng gave it another push.

The Luoshui Group's highest board of directors decided to promote the road network upgrade in the west and was willing to continue investing in the power grid system. This was because the villages that had signed contracts with Luoshui currently needed electricity, and while the solar power generation industrial park had time fluctuations in its power generation and couldn't secure city orders, small businesses in the countryside were precisely within its service scope.

Shenzhou's current road network was actually a very good foundation, only some branch lines needed to be addressed.

The power grid system was even more of a state-owned industry maintained by the old bureaucratic system, with funds invested annually and some facilities already sound, but past economic downturns had made it unprofitable.

The Shenzhou General Advisory Council tacitly approved the economic expansion of the Luoshui Group.

Within the Luoshui Group, a serious and solemn Wei Keng wrote in his 1970 goal plan: "The economic scale foundation of the third industrial era, light industry, agriculture, and transportation heavy industry, determines the market demand for the IT industry."

The larger the scale of the textile industry, agriculture, and economic activities, the greater the burden of information aggregation and processing. The traditional method was to continuously recruit clerks! This was how Soviet Russia's planned economy operated, but with more and more clerks, government offices became increasingly bloated.

In the information age, these tedious tasks could be completed by software programs within an electronic device.

In other words, massive economic activity could generate demand for the IT industry. And only by creating such a market could the IT industry be sustained. In the Main World's twentieth century, India, the "world's office," served Europe; its own domestic economic activities did not require the IT industry.

IT could be used for civilian purposes or military purposes! This was inherently part of the information technology revolution.

Wei Keng's strategic move was too far-reaching, having laid the groundwork from the very beginning of establishing training schools for the information industry. No one could have seen it.

Even in later generations, when the intelligent systems integrated into Shenzhou's combat machinery showed their advantages in warfare, if one only studied military technology and not the socioeconomics and civilian technology research of this period in depth, they might not discover that tiny butterfly wing behind all these changes.

Wei Keng sighed: "Of course, perhaps now, and even in the future, in people's eyes, I will probably still be a merchant with a bad reputation."

Wei Keng opened some documents, which detailed a serious product complaint incident that occurred during a recent sales process.

If there were problems with products on the sales platform, compensation would be issued, the supplier's platform sales qualification would be revoked, and it would be handled according to procedure. With the establishment of numerous rural factories, there were always a few of varying quality. From the perspective of societal transformation, these issues were not the most critical, but the news had caused a significant stir.

Because these electronic sales platforms were ultimately subsidiaries of his own group, and in the East, all old brands had a reputation to uphold, these incidents were undoubtedly damaging their reputation.

Having foreseen some unfavorable situations in the future, the reformist Wei Keng no longer possessed his initial fighting spirit, because reforms were often unrecognized in their time and would not be recorded with great emphasis in the future.

In society, when the focus of an economic group is on the lower strata, it creates a disconnect with the upper strata.

However, if ten or twenty years pass, and the lower strata of today complete their upward mobility, they will also turn towards the upper strata. People are inherently vain; they use cheap goods because they lack money, but once their conditions improve, they will chase trends. If the social ideology does not fundamentally change, consumers' tastes can shift towards the upper strata. When this era passes, Luoshui's brand and reputation will be cemented in the lower strata, and the market ultimately created will benefit the groups already established at the top, who have been waiting at their leisure.

Wei Keng: "Reform, reform, in the end, I'll be left out in the cold."

What made Wei Keng feel even colder was that, as a reformist, he had already taken substantial action, but the so-called revolutionaries were still just talking. Wei Keng thought they would at least make some moves, but not only did they not take advantage of the current momentum to develop in the countryside and research new markets supporting rural industries, they didn't even form new trade unions within the cities.

Now, Wei Keng was not afraid of trade unions; instead, he needed them to provide information on workers' income levels and the proportion of investment in education and healthcare to make further market judgments.

But the progressives were all engaged in trivial matters. For example, co-education! Or increasing the proportion of modern poetry in textbooks, and so on. Wei Keng: "I even want to find a lamppost and hang myself from the southeast branch."

Ding-dong, the system issued a prompt, indicating that Wei Keng's heart rate was too fast.

Cultivate Qi, must cultivate Qi. Wei Keng inhaled deeply, trying to regulate his breathing. If he wanted to refine True Qi soon, his heartbeat had to remain constant every day. Oh, the true methods of Taoism require a good state of mind and adherence to precepts and commandments.

If he were to play games, it would be equivalent to gambling, and he absolutely wouldn't be able to cultivate. Because if he lost even one head, his mentality would change drastically.

However, Wei Keng was no ordinary person; his temperament was restless and difficult to control.

At night, Wei Keng lay back into the Life Support Pod and activated the monitoring system. Seeing the horrific results of his studies, he sighed and mocked himself, "I came with great ambition, but practicing is a boundless sea of suffering. I should have known what kind of material I'm made of long ago."

April 1, 1970. An explosion suddenly occurred backstage at the Cuju field during the Fenghou Group Factory No. 34 internal sports meet!

After the explosion's aftermath, Bai Jingqi, the supervisor for the development of the Longyan Individual Combat System, looked with a pale face at the pile of ashes before him and the person who had disappeared.

Two minutes earlier, Bai Jingqi, as a high-level executive of the department, had finished his opening speech for the ball game and was walking to the transit area to rest.

He then saw a person dressed very differently from everyone else there.

This person called out his name and smiled, extending a hand to shake his. Bai Jingqi was confused. Oriental etiquette dictated a bow—but not knowing if he had met this person before, he decided to shake hands first and then inquire about his intentions.

At this moment, a telepathic warning sounded in his ear. He quickly shouted for security. The security guard twenty meters away lifted the curtain and discovered the stranger. Feeling derelict in his duty, he immediately stepped forward to stop him, but the other party, with a mysterious smile, moved to embrace Bai Jingqi.

A mysterious telepathic warning in Bai Jingqi's ear urged him to retreat quickly. So Bai Jingqi hastily backed away, only to find arcs of electricity flashing in the other person's palm. At that very instant, a field of energy pulled Bai Jingqi back three or four steps. The security guard finally rushed forward, and this security guard was thus turned into ashes.

Ke Feijia, who was accompanying the Fenghou Group's high-level officials to watch the game, was seventy meters from the scene of the incident. It was he who had sent the telepathic message to Bai Jingqi just moments ago. He had almost witnessed firsthand this assassination that had not occurred in other timelines.

Judging by the target of the assassination, it was clear that in the original future timeline, Bai Jingqi of the Fenghou Group would become very famous in the field of intelligent weapon design.

Oh, Master Wei Keng has now withdrawn from the competition for overall military equipment orders.

What? The software that the future military would widely use originated from the increasingly developed IT industry. So why wasn't Wei Keng assassinated by people from the future?

Even if Wei Keng was the direct provider of the software, he wouldn't be as famous as the equipment manufacturer. Wei Keng was just a seller of cheap goods. The people from the future might have overlooked this "mediocre" fellow.

However, a temporal assassination has now occurred. The original future has vanished. Uh, what comes next is a new future. In this new future, if the problem is not resolved, whom will they choose to assassinate if they are dissatisfied with the past?

Ke Feijia frowned, his heart determined, "He (Wei Keng) must have a certain level of self-preservation ability."