Chapter Ninety-Three: The Unknown Variable

That evening, Cheng Xiaoyu made his routine call to Wang Dongliang.

Wang Dongliang briefly reported the situation. In order to keep the matter from making too much of a spectacle, the hacker they had hired, though he had already penetrated the alumni site’s backend and gained administrative privileges, had not taken any drastic action that would bring the whole site crashing down at once.

Instead, he had quietly increased the burden on the servers, making logins harder and harder, data retrieval slower and slower, and crashes more and more frequent.

Although complaints from most users were steadily mounting, they still had not reached a critical point, or rather, they still lacked a spark to set the whole thing off.

And because they were desperately short-handed, progress on the web architecture was also slow. A great deal of the work could only be subcontracted out in pieces to university students taking temporary jobs.

Cheng Xiaoyu knew full well that a fat man could not be stuffed in one bite, but he was still somewhat anxious. Social networking was all about seizing users first. Whoever could take the lead would naturally hold a tremendous advantage. Time was simply too important to them.

Things like this are far too easy for the big internet companies to copy. Once they take off, they may be everywhere. So every first-mover advantage they failed to seize would be another guarantee of success lost.

But he knew nothing at all about website construction and could offer no constructive advice. He could only hope that Wang Dongliang would hurry and get the test page for "Fine Rain" built first. If the acquisition of the alumni site went smoothly, they could link it directly then and speed the whole process up.

Wang Dongliang was also burning with urgency every day. In the past, he had thought being the boss was easy: drink tea, tease the secretary a little, sign a document, and the day was gone.

Only after he had truly started doing it himself did he realize that nothing was simple. Lately he had been so stressed that he had blisters on his mouth, and even speaking hurt like fire.

He was practically sleeping at the company now, single-mindedly pushing the work forward. All the stakes in his life had been placed on this. Whether or not he would fail, he had to do his utmost and make everything as perfect as possible, so he would not betray his own hopes or leave himself with any regrets.

After hanging up, Cheng Xiaoyu remembered that he had promised to record the songs he had written for Xia Shamo, Wang Ou, and Chen Haoran after the arts exam was over, so he went off to the studio to get busy.

For him, getting into the theater academy was already a sure thing. Reviewing at school was enough. His memory was excellent now, and for liberal arts subjects, which were mostly rote memorization, he could manage quite well.

As for mathematics, he had already given up completely. The theater academy’s past college entrance scores were only around three hundred and sixty or so, at most four hundred, which was effortless for him.

After recording the piano, drums, and guitar accompaniments, Cheng Xiaoyu checked the time. It was nearly eleven, so he planned to go back to his room and sleep. Before bed, he took a look at the music site, only to find that the four songs on his homepage still had zero listens.

He felt a little disappointed. The flop was just too brutal. He did not know that he had accidentally set the listening price at five yuan, which was frighteningly high, so no one dared to listen.

And because no one listened, the songs had remained on the new-upload page for less than five minutes.

Those five minutes of promotion did bring quite a few people to click in and take a look. But when they saw that listening cost five yuan, they all thought it was a money-grubbing scam and not a single person was willing to pay for a listen. Thus the songs rapidly sank to the very bottom of the new-song chart. In a way, it had set a record: the record for zero listens.

Cheng Xiaoyu was puzzled, and on the music site he casually clicked into the page for that week’s top-ranked new song, "Falling in Love with My Crime," to have a look.

The other person's homepage was all flowers and glitter. Uploaded there was a heavily nonmainstream photo of himself: a boy with shoulder-length hair dyed snow-white, wearing bizarre makeup, seven or eight earrings in one ear, a cigarette in one hand, his gaze hazy and lost.

The personal profile read: That is not my sorrowful crying, but the shedding of yesterday's grief, letting time lick its own wounds. The fragments of a heart overloaded with broken dust are like flowers frozen in ice and snow.

Silently, Cheng Xiaoyu clicked the free listen, and a deep male voice drifted from the speakers.

"Feeling the taste of love, I don't know who I should love. Watching you shed tears for me, I kept retreating step by step. It's all because I was too intoxicated, never giving you even one chance. Only after losing you did I realize your true love was beautiful too."

Cheng Xiaoyu felt that this song was so vulgar he could hardly swallow it. He decisively clicked the close button.

Then he looked at the comments below. They were all things like very nice, great singing, the song is well written, keep it up. It wounded him deeply.

He clicked on several more songs ranked near the top. They were not as unbearably vulgar as the number one, but the monotonous melodies, simple accompaniments, and amateur recording made him feel that the songs he had recorded were of an entirely different level. How could they be so miserable?

This made him begin to doubt whether uploading songs online had been the right choice.

After his worldview had been refreshed, Cheng Xiaoyu chose to go straight to sleep and mend his wounded spirit.

The next day at school, Cheng Xiaoyu still could not let it go. Unable to help himself, he asked the taciturn Wang Ou, "Have you heard 'Falling in Love with My Crime'?"

Wang Ou shook his head. "Ever since I listened to your songs, I've realized all the other pop songs are trash! Didn't you say you were going to record all those songs? Why is there no movement?"

Wang Ou leapt over the desk, hooked an arm around Cheng Xiaoyu's neck, and said, with considerable resentment, "Didn't you say you'd record them all? Why is there still nothing?"

Cheng Xiaoyu was strangled so hard he could hardly breathe, and cursed, "Damn it, you don't have college entrance exams to worry about, but everyone else does, okay? There’s still more than a month before vacation. What are you rushing for?"

"The other day I ran into Brother Yong. He said that ever since Crown of Sin didn’t go to the Forest of Lanterns, business has fallen off a cliff. He also said that Liu Huaming from Listening to the Wind is now singing the songs you wrote." Wang Ou said a little resentfully.

Cheng Xiaoyu did not find that surprising. Smiling, he said, "Good music is meant to be shared. There's nothing bad about that."

"You're pretty magnanimous, aren't you? Weren't you the one who said Scorpio's revenge is the fiercest? After the way they treated you last time, you still don't care?" Wang Ou had some complaints about how soft-hearted Cheng Xiaoyu could be.

"My thirst for revenge is strong," Cheng Xiaoyu said leisurely. "The problem is, last time they didn't actually manage to hurt me."

"If it were me, I'd have gone and smashed up their bar," Wang Ou said with a curl of his lip. The class bell rang, and he returned to his seat.

This class was mathematics. Cheng Xiaoyu looked at the numbers and English symbols on the blackboard, and his brain turned to mush. He felt as though his intelligence had gone offline. His eyelids were fighting each other. Supporting his head with one hand, he dozed off.

In his dream, he was back in that hot early summer. Piled high on the desk were reference materials and textbooks, and the drawer was stuffed with stacks upon stacks of exam papers. Those papers had etched one name into his memory: Huanggang, Hubei, to the point that for a very long time he had felt a deep resentment toward the province of Hubei.

Back then, the naive version of himself would still flip through comic books in class, read Slam Dunk, read One Piece. What he feared most was the silent face of the homeroom teacher, suddenly appearing outside the window.

Even now, that image remained as terrifying to him as Sadako crawling out of a television set.

Back then, he had never worried about the future. He thought he would remain young forever. He thought love was just two people liking each other, and he only resented himself for not growing up immediately.

Only when he was in his thirties did he realize that Xiangnan would never win the championship, and that One Piece was still so far from its ending. He began to suffer insomnia, began worrying about mortgage payments and marriage. So, on every sleepless night, he lay in bed imagining that his life could start over.

How long had the moonlight dappled the shadows of the trees? Would the girl who wanted to confess still pass along that long street? How many times had he looked back at his parents' retreating figures beneath the sunset? How much regret still remained in the backpack of dreams?

And our greatest sorrow is this: in the bravest years of our lives, we still do not understand the world. Thus, by ignorant acts, we alter our fate forever.

By the time we are mature enough, we no longer have any such childish impulses, yet we have also missed the courage to change everything.

Cheng Xiaoyu felt as though he had slept for a very long time. Startled awake from his dream, he remembered that he had not finished his homework. With a rustle, as he raised his hand, he knocked the pencil case off the desk.

The math teacher was writing problem-solving steps on the blackboard. Turning around, he glanced at Cheng Xiaoyu and said, "What is it? Oh great poet, are you dreaming your horse onward again?"

The classroom burst into laughter, and the heavy silence vanished in an instant. Cheng Xiaoyu’s drowsiness was frightened away as well, and he sat there laughing too.

Life is like the blackboard: even if you do it ten thousand times over, it is still an unknown, and regrets are inevitable.

Only those things that must never be missed, this time, he absolutely would not miss.