"Mengqi!"
Lin Feng knelt beside her.
"Should I call someone?"
She stopped him, placing a hand on his.
"No."
She slowly got to her feet.
He watched her carefully.
"Are you really fine?"
She nodded.
"I was just feeling a little under the weather."
"Are you sure I shouldn't call someone?"
She shook her head.
"I just need some time to myself."
She gathered the papers from the desk and walked toward the door.
Lin Feng watched her go.
What is suddenly up with her?
His phone buzzed.
A message from Yu Shen.
[Want to meet up?]
Lin Feng glanced at the door where Mengqi had just left.
He sighed.
He should let her be for now. She seemed quite shaken up.
He texted back.
[Let's have lunch together.]
…
Lin Feng and Yu Shen sat across from each other, trays of food between them.
"About yesterday's report," Yu Shen said.
He leaned forward.
"We received a total of twenty new investors. That's ¥55,000 in new capital."
Lin Feng raised an eyebrow.
"Isn't that a drop off from the day before? Why do you seem even more excited than the first day when we got over a hundred thousand?"
Yu Shen grinned.
"That's the most interesting part."
He held up a finger.
"From those twenty, only twelve came from Su Yue's affiliate link."
He paused.
"Do you understand what this means?"
Lin Feng's eyes widened.
"Organic traffic?"
"Well, that too."
Yu Shen shook his head.
"But more specifically - word of mouth."
He set down his chopsticks.
"Those who invested on the first day have already seen roughly 0.6% profits over the past two days. Some have even withdrawn and confirmed receiving the money."
He tapped the table.
"This has led to them realizing that the platform is genuine. They're starting to recommend it to friends."
He leaned back.
"I even heard some classmates who watch Moon Fairy talking about it."
Lin Feng nodded slowly.
This was quite the development.
It meant that just like they had planned, after the sponsorship with Su Yue ended, they might not even need to keep sponsoring anymore. They could grow organically through word of mouth.
Well, maybe they'd need to run a few ads or sponsor other content creators to expand their reach.
But for now, he didn't think they needed that.
"Say..."
Lin Feng looked at Yu Shen.
"Have you heard of LLMs?"
Yu Shen's eyes lit up.
"Large language models? Of course!"
He immediately straightened in his seat.
"The technology is fascinating. It builds on so much foundational work - JMLR publications, RNNs, LSTMs..."
He gestured animatedly.
"And then there's that paper - 'Attention Is All You Need.' The transformer architecture completely changed the game. The way self-attention mechanisms allow the model to weigh the relevance of different parts of the input sequence..."
He kept going.
Lin Feng just smiled.
It was all going in one ear and out the other.
He pulled out his phone and showed the screen to Yu Shen.
"Look at this. I heard about it the other day."
Yu Shen glanced at it.
"GPT-3?"
He leaned back with a sigh.
"While it's interesting, the beta is private. Only huge companies and important people are getting access to it."
Lin Feng tilted his head.
"Isn't it similar to what you're doing with our trading system? I heard it's all about predictive reasoning."
Yu Shen considered this.
"Well, somewhat. But it's a little different."
"You seem pretty knowledgeable and passionate about this."
Lin Feng met his gaze.
"Do you think we could make something similar?"
Yu Shen froze.
"What?"
"Is it impossible?"
"Well... not exactly. But still."
A notification popped up on Lin Feng's phone.
He glanced at it.
His new company name had been approved.
He stood up.
"Sorry, I have to go."
"Let's talk more later."
Yu Shen nodded, still looking a bit dazed.
Lin Feng walked away.
As he did, a small smile crossed his face.
He had planted a seed in Yu Shen's mind.
He didn't want to steer him too much. But with that little nudge, he should be able to take the first step.
…
Lin Feng reached the entrance of the building.
He greeted the guard and moved toward the elevator.
He pressed the button.
Please be working please be working please be working.
The elevator doors slid open.
His eyes widened.
It worked.
He quickly stepped inside and pressed his floor.
The doors closed.
He exhaled.
It was great that it worked. Having to climb all the way up... there was no way he could do that.
That being said...
He looked down at himself.
Wasn't he quite weak?
He wondered if he should get a gym membership and build some muscle.
He sighed.
The problem was time. He was already quite busy as is. And midterms were coming up, so he was going to get even busier.
The elevator opened.
He stepped out.
As he turned the corner, he noticed Mengqi's door.
It was open.
He wondered if something had happened.
As he reached the entrance, he saw her come out, holding a trash can.
She noticed him.
Recognition flickered across her face.
"It's you."
"Yep. The one and only."
"What are you doing here?"
"I wanted to talk to you about some stuff. What are you up to?"
She raised the trash can slightly.
"Can't you see? I'm cleaning my room."
"Cleaning?"
He moved closer.
He noticed something in the trash can and reached for it.
It was a framed photo.
"You're throwing this away? It seems important."
She took it from his hand and tossed it back into the trash.
"It's not anymore."
"It's all in the past."
She murmured quietly.
She had noticed that even after all this time, she was still wallowing in self-pity.
Why was she doing all this?
She was just being petty.
She was doing it for the wrong reasons.
She always had a goal in mind, but she was just kidding herself.
But this time, she was going to change.
She was going to have faith in her beliefs and do it for the right reasons.
And to do that, she needed to make it a success.
She stared at Lin Feng.
He took a step back.
"What?"
He raised his hands in surrender.
He wondered if she was even possessive of trash.
"Do you need help?"
"No need."
She sighed.
"You said you wanted to talk to me about something?"
"That's right."
She inspected him for a moment.
"Go on in. I'll take this out and then join you."
She walked past him.
He watched her disappear around the corner.
Then he went inside.
He looked around.
The place was quite modest. It was also much cleaner than he had expected, given how she had looked when he first met her.
Well, she said she had been cleaning.
He settled into a chair and just looked around from that position.
He didn't touch anything.
A few minutes later, Mengqi returned.
"What did you want to talk about?"
"Composing," he said. "You can do it, right?"
"Yeah. Why?"
"I need you to rent a studio."
She blinked.
"The two of us will work on something together over the weekend."
She frowned.
"What do you mean? You want me to write songs?"
She crossed her arms.
"You know I can't just write songs on demand, right?"
"Don't worry about that. Just do it."
He stood up.
"I'll see you then."
He walked past her and out the door.
She watched him go.
What is he thinking?
She couldn't tell at all.
And why did he even come here? Couldn't he have just sent her a text?
Was he worried because of what happened earlier?
She looked around her half-cleaned room.
Well, I guess I should get to work.