Architecture

"What are they doing?"

"Are they being chased? Huh? There's no one behind them."

"They're all Revival Group security guards, right? In the Vegetable Market District, who would dare mess with Boss Han now?"

On the street, thirty people in total, dressed in clothes bearing the Revival Group name, were slowly running along like dead dogs from exhaustion.

Behind them, Shen the Butcher rode an electric bike, cursing as he went. "And you want to be security guards looking like this? You're exhausted after a little running? If you can't do it, tell me early. Plenty of people want this job!"

"I quit! I can't run anymore!"

One trainee security guard stumbled and fell. He struggled desperately to get back up, but no matter what he did, he could not rise. Unable to hold it in any longer, he shouted.

Sweat, tears, and snot were mixed all over his face, as if it were raining.

"If you can't do it, then get lost! Strike your name from the internal roster! From this moment on, you are no longer part of the Revival Group!"

Shen the Butcher showed no mercy. He coldly tossed out those words and rode away.

At the sight of this, the remaining twenty-nine men were terrified into silence.

Zhang Dazhu gritted his teeth. He neither spoke nor looked around, refusing to let his mind wander as he ran forward with his head down.

By the time they finished the ten-kilometer run and returned to the martial arts hall, only twenty-seven remained. Three had been eliminated.

The twenty-seven collapsed onto the ground in crooked heaps, so exhausted that they could not even move a finger.

"Who told you to sit down? Get up! Stretch!"

Shen the Butcher shouted and cursed as he lashed the trainee security guards with a bamboo rod. The trainees cried out in pain as they were struck.

Three or four hours passed, and the twenty-seven men felt as though their legs no longer belonged to them.

"Alright. From now on, you get half an hour of rest, then it's time to eat!"

"Food?"

Zhang Dazhu perked up. Only then did he feel the burning hunger in his stomach.

When they reached the cafeteria, Zhang Dazhu saw huge buckets piled high with white rice and large iron trays heaped with braised pork. His eyes went wide.

Damn... with food like this, dying from exhaustion would be worth it.

Just as he was about to rush forward, Shen the Butcher let out another roar.

"Line up!"

The bamboo rod came down again with a rapid series of smacks.

Bamboo rods did not truly injure people, but they hurt terribly. With Shen the Butcher's technique, he always struck the fleshiest spots, leaving a red welt with every blow.

The twenty-seven men obediently formed a line and took their food one by one.

"Everyone's exhausted. Eat as much as you want, eat your fill! But there's one rule: no wasting food!"

Eat their fill?

Zhang Dazhu's eyes nearly turned red.

When had he ever dared to eat as much as he wanted before? He earned so little that even the slightest carelessness would leave him broke.

The twenty-seven trainee security guards wolfed down their food. Zhang Dazhu in particular filled large bowls with white rice, poured meat gravy over it, then piled on braised pork. He ate bowl after bowl, only feeling satisfied after four full bowls.

Watching the trainee security guards devour their food, Shen the Butcher revealed a cruel smile.

"Good. Mealtime is over. Rest for an hour, then we continue this afternoon!"

That afternoon, Shen the Butcher arranged strength training and sparring practice. At first, the trainee security guards, their bellies round from lunch, felt nothing unusual. But after training for a while, they began struggling to breathe, their stomachs churning wildly, and one after another, they started vomiting.

If one ate too much and then expended too much energy, vomiting was inevitable.

Shen the Butcher watched coldly without the slightest pity. Training continued.

At dinner, faced with the same huge buckets of white rice and braised pork, the trainee security guards were much more restrained. Each ate only until he was eighty percent full, not daring to eat any more.

At this point, three more trainee security guards began to think of quitting.

This life was too hard. That damned Shen the Butcher was too ruthless and too heavy-handed. There was no way to go on like this.

After dinner, the three immediately went to Shen the Butcher and submitted their resignations. Shen the Butcher did not try to keep them at all. He readily signed the papers, and the three took them to Zhao Fu, who handled finances.

"Brother Fu, we can't live like this."

Zhao Fu sighed inwardly as he looked at the three dejected men.

Ever since Han Yang had announced the Revival Group's rules and strictly prohibited prostitution, gambling, and drugs, one group of people had already come to resign. These three had been some of the more capable fighters in the gang, and now they were resigning too, which made Zhao Fu feel rather bad.

But these were Han Yang's orders, and Zhao Fu had no choice.

He promptly gave them their severance pay, then sighed. "Brothers, take care. If fate allows, we'll meet again in the jianghu."

While the trainee security guards underwent hellish training, Han Yang was not idle in the core area of Fuxing Base either.

While operating forty computers to process orders, Han Yang buried himself in his studies.

The deeper he studied, the more complicated the knowledge involved became—so complicated that even Han Yang had to study it seriously to understand it.

In particular, now that Han Yang's CPU manufacturing capability had reached a 2.72-millimeter process, advancing any further involved another, even more complicated field.

Architecture.

Han Yang could no longer simply get transistors and circuit boards and start working as he had before. At this level of precision, he had to design things from an overall perspective—the so-called CPU architecture.

It was like building a small rural house. You could simply stack bricks; what design did you need? But if you wanted to build a high-rise, design was indispensable.

Instruction registers, shift registers, memory, cache, the connections between circuits, the distance between two semiconductor particles, the overall layout, and so on all had to be considered and arranged as a whole, just as constructing a high-rise required consideration of fire safety, electrical systems, lighting, communications, layout, passageways, material strength, and more.

Under normal circumstances, designing a CPU, even a primitive one, was the work of an entire team. Specialists in different fields divided the work and cooperated, each handling a particular area, before a CPU could be designed.

But for Han Yang, every aspect had to rely on him alone.

Fortunately, Han Yang had already fused with the chip. Otherwise, even if he worked himself to death and racked his brain until it exploded, he could never have completed it.

On the fortieth computer, more than twenty chat windows continuously handled business communications. A drawing program was also open beside them, where the architecture design was being developed bit by bit.

The mechanical arms moved swiftly, hammering across the keyboards in a blur as though they were about to fly. Windows switched rapidly across the screens, dazzling the eye. An ordinary person probably would not even be able to make out what was displayed on them.

Han Yang himself sat in the laboratory, studying a thick book while continuously sketching on white paper with a pencil.

Advancing several aspects at once sent the usage rate of Han Yang's mental processing power soaring directly to a high of ninety-nine percent.

After finally finishing the day's study tasks, Han Yang stretched and sighed to himself. "Studying really is a damn hard job."