◎ Pirated Copies ◎

The next morning, Lin Haichuan was having breakfast in the lobby. There was no sign of Gu Qiao’s boyfriend.

He had clearly heard that this man had a long-term suite at the hotel. The night before, Gu Qiao’s boyfriend had taken Gu Qiao out to dinner and included him as well. He couldn’t tell what technical expertise this man possessed — he seemed more fluent in the arts of fine living than anything else. And for someone who wasn’t a foreigner to be living in a hotel indefinitely didn’t exactly speak to reliability.

“Where’s your boyfriend?”

“He went to Guangzhou on a business trip.”

“By plane?”

Gu Qiao murmured an assent. When she had woken up, he was already gone — she had slept far too deeply, and had even, unusually, had a dream. In the dream she was back in her childhood, clinging tight to a large tree and climbing upward. A spring breeze brushed against her face, cool and light, and sunlight filtered through the branches and leaves, falling over her like a pair of eyes holding her in a long, quiet gaze. She lingered in the dream for a long time, and when it faded and she opened her eyes, there was only her in the room. She reached over to look at the watch he had given her. At this hour, he was already on his way to the airport.

All these days she had been busy — since the preparations for the software launch, she hadn’t slept a full night once. Keeping watch over the production line day after day, she had even had the mattress removed to resist the temptation of sleep, spending every night on just a bedsheet over bare boards. And yet for all her exhaustion, she had never once shown weariness the way she had last night. Last night, in the lamplight of the doorway, he had held her — the hair she had loosely pinned up had come undone with his movements. From the doorway to the bed, great lengths of her hair had spread across the white sheets, and she had sunk into the soft mattress and wanted nothing more than to sleep.

He was not tired, and he would not let her be tired either. In this particular area, Gu Qiao was not a person who could resist temptation well — she was easily drawn in by touches and kisses. Every time she wanted to sleep at the end, he would find a new way to coax her. Finally, when she truly could not hold out any longer, half-lidded with sleep and nearly pleading, she said she just wanted to sleep a little — and he laughed at her: *Weren’t you saying you were two years younger than me? Your stamina really shouldn’t be this bad.*

And yet, for all his teasing, when he saw the red in her eyes, he did relent. He asked if she’d had even one proper rest in all these days. She smiled and said she had rested every day — quality was excellent, only the quantity had been a little short. Not enough hours, but the quality was excellent. She fell asleep almost immediately after, and as she habitually would at home, she reached out in her sleep and held on to something — this time it happened to be a long body pillow, which she held tightly.

He really should have woken her.

—

Lin Haichuan was quietly puzzled. To make an early-morning trip to the airport today, and to have made a special trip to the airport the evening before — that was a lot of effort. He exercised admirable restraint about other people’s private lives and asked nothing further.

Compared to Gu Qiao, Lin Haichuan ate with considerable refinement. The moment Gu Qiao’s mobile phone rang, she immediately stopped speaking, chewed what was in her mouth as quickly as possible, and swallowed the last bite with great speed before picking up the phone and answering with a smile: “Hello.”

On her first day in Shanghai, before she’d even had time to rest, she was already receiving orders for more stock. One of her distributors from Nanjing, hearing she was in Shanghai, had driven at full speed all the way to Shanghai just to track her down.

At first her phone rang continuously — all orders and restocking calls. But very soon the nature of the calls changed. The people who had been urgently demanding stock were suddenly in no hurry for it. Some of these calls came with accusations. They wanted to know: hadn’t she said the encryption technology used in the software was guaranteed to keep pirated copies from appearing before the Lunar New Year at the earliest? So how had pirated copies already surfaced? Right on the same street, pirated discs were going for under twenty yuan — how were they supposed to sell their stock at full price? If they had known pirated copies would emerge this quickly, they never would have signed that kind of contract. With the software impossible to move, the stock would be left completely dead in their hands.

The original contract her distributors had signed with her included a clause that unsold inventory could be returned directly, with no payment required. But as the software had sold so well, with zero risk of dead stock, they had rushed to demand more product and signed a new contract with Gu Qiao. Under the new terms, Gu Qiao would receive payment regardless of whether the software sold, while they bore all the losses. Before the software had even launched, all anyone had worried about was whether there would be enough supply — no one had given dead stock a single thought.

Call after call came in. Some demanded face-to-face meetings with Gu Qiao, their tone suggesting they had been deceived. They had been preparing for the original-edition signing event, but with pirated copies flooding the market, the authentic software was instantly rendered vulnerable — the signing event now seemed like nothing more than a publicity gimmick.

Lin Haichuan heard from Xiao Tian about the piracy situation and instinctively asked: “How did pirated copies appear so quickly? Didn’t your boss say there would be absolutely no pirated copies before the New Year?”

Xiao Tian felt her idol was picking exactly the wrong topic — he sounded exactly like one of those distributors: “Our software sold so well — the profits are too attractive for pirates to ignore. The moment the software gets cracked, pirated copies flood the whole country instantly. These pirated versions are far simpler to produce too — some don’t even require a dedicated production line. They can be copied directly with a CD burner, and then read with a CD-ROM…”

Lin Haichuan had absolutely no idea what a CD-ROM was from his fan’s mouth, but for the sake of his image, he did not ask.

“Our advertisements for the signing event haven’t been distributed yet, have they?”

“Our advertisements went out long ago.” Idols are better admired from a distance. Xiao Tian was too busy right now — she was busy drafting materials explaining how to tell a genuine copy from a pirated one, and outlining the potential losses that pirated software could cause, printing them as posters to distribute to all the distributor shops. She had no time to pay close attention to her idol, and beyond the conclusion that he was excessively self-absorbed, she hadn’t yet spotted any other faults. She thought to herself: *a three or four times price difference — your signature might carry some weight, but not that much. Unless your signature brings the price down to the same level as the pirated copies.*

Lin Haichuan picked up on the subtext: his autograph was far less compelling than money. If even his signature couldn’t salvage the situation, Lin Haichuan figured there was nothing Gu Qiao could do to change things either.

He felt Gu Qiao really wasn’t a person destined for idle rest — but she had already earned enough for nearly two apartments. Whatever came next, failing to earn more wouldn’t leave her in a desperate state.

“The contracts are already signed anyway — whether the stock moves or not doesn’t affect your ability to collect payment. Let the regional distributors figure out their own solutions. You don’t only sell this one software — there will be plenty more money-making opportunities in the future.”

Xiao Tian glanced at her idol’s beautiful face and decided to forgive his short-sightedness. The distributors were making noise for exactly this reason — they had originally been afraid of insufficient supply, but now they were dreading the fact that the production line was still running. Even if the software didn’t sell, it wouldn’t affect the shop’s revenue — the risk was entirely on them. No one was a fool: having been burned once, they would think very carefully before signing anything like this again.

—

Qin Feng had not expected Luo Peiyin to fly to Guangzhou on his own initiative, visit his company, and sit down to talk technology with him. He had pitched to many investors, and this was the first time he had ever encountered one who actually understood the technology.

But Luo Peiyin seemed more interested in his shelved antivirus software than in the ISP project he was currently working on. Developing an ISP required just as much investment as making software — if not more. After last year’s failure, he had already lost his heart for software development entirely.

“Right now only Beijing and Shanghai are connected to the internet, with a total of only thirty-two ports. If more than six hundred people in the entire country tried to go online simultaneously, the system would break down. It definitely won’t stay like this. Besides those two cities, there are so many other cities in the country — they’ll all need to be connected eventually. There’s enormous room to grow in this kind of business…”

Luo Peiyin looked at Qin Feng directly and waited for him to finish: “But do you really think this kind of business will be left to private companies to run long-term?”

Luo Peiyin’s tone was perfectly even — yet those few words hit Qin Feng like a bucket of ice water. As his head cleared, he had to admit that this unremarkable sentence had struck harder than being told to go sell health supplements.

Luo Peiyin had reached out to him on his own, which had been a genuine surprise to Qin Feng — he had long since given up on securing investment from LC. Even more surprising was discovering that Luo Peiyin seemed to have genuine interest in investing in him. Of course, having spent a frantic stretch begging for investment from every direction, it was slightly unexpected that he was now suddenly playing it coy. Luo Peiyin had initiated the meeting, so Qin Feng had made a point of asking around in industry circles to find out more about him. From the limited information available, he had gathered that this man had a particular talent for buying at the bottom.

But after that one sentence from Luo Peiyin, he almost wished he hadn’t come.

Watching *The Legend of the Righteous Thief* sell so extraordinarily well, Qin Feng’s feelings were complicated. Shen Zheng was his junior schoolmate — his technical foundation had been built half on Qin Feng’s guidance and the software discs in his collection. After graduating, Shen Zheng had even come to work at Qin Feng’s company, and now, having struck out on his own, he had achieved this level of success. Meanwhile, Qin Feng’s company was barely keeping its payroll afloat.

Last year, the educational software his entire company had spent two years developing had been advertised extensively and sold fewer than three thousand units all year. The profit barely covered a fraction of the development costs — and the pirated copies ended up outselling them by far. The advertising might as well have been free publicity for the pirates. He had mortgaged his villa to fund the development — which meant he couldn’t even use the villa as leverage again. He had sold his car to make payroll.

Qin Feng had pitched his business plan to over a dozen investors. Not one deal had closed. The blow that stung the most was from Peter, who said that if Qin Feng were selling health supplements, he might consider investing. Qin Feng had felt deeply insulted at the time — yet he and his team had actually bought every top-selling health supplement on the market and studied them while still writing code every day. He had examined the ingredient lists of all these products and found them completely without barriers to entry. But if he couldn’t even sell three thousand units of software that actually took intelligence to make, he certainly wasn’t going to manage selling health supplements that had zero cognitive benefit to people trying to “boost their brains.”

After studying the advertising and distribution strategies of health supplements, Qin Feng concluded that last year’s advertising campaign had been a complete failure. A supplement with zero actual brain-boosting properties could, through advertising alone, convince people they’d get smarter by taking it — and yet with all the money he’d poured in, he hadn’t even managed to clearly convey what was good about his software.

Qin Feng came from a technical background. Before this complete failure, he had firmly believed that a great product would find its audience. Now he believed deeply in the power of advertising. He went through every piece of promotional coverage about *The Legend of the Righteous Thief* repeatedly and studied them. He thought that if Gu Qiao went into selling health supplements, she would make money there too — likely even more money. He had seen her photo holding a takeaway box in the newspaper and was surprised to find she was so young.

Qin Feng brought up the recently bestselling game software with Luo Peiyin. At first he was a little cautious, but as the conversation grew more engaging, he couldn’t help saying: “When it comes to software promotion, those of us who actually know the field have been outdone by half an outsider. That girl is something else — though now that the pirated copies are out, those sales figures probably won’t hold.”