◎ Objective ◎
Qin Feng received the gift Gu Qiao had arranged in full. Though upon glancing through Mr. Zhang’s recovered document, he couldn’t help a flicker of curiosity — did this content really merit such intense emotion from Mr. Zhang?
Unless it was all theater — but if so, it was theater of the highest order.
Mr. Zhang’s reaction was that of a lottery winner who had found their ticket again after thinking it lost forever. He clasped Qin Feng’s hand and shook it without stopping. Facing the cameras, he poured out every superlative in his vocabulary, as though Qin Feng had saved not his missing 300,000 characters but the very flame of literature itself. Qin Feng, unprepared for this torrent of flattery, held back a smile with visible effort.
When the photograph of their handshake appeared in the newspaper alongside the accompanying story, that suppressed smile acquired a new meaning — he was no longer a man being tickled by Mr. Zhang’s overwrought praise but someone holding back an enormous wave of joy. Qin Feng could barely bring himself to look at his own photo — it was the picture of a complete fool. Yet that photograph, which he himself considered foolish, brought him a flood of calls from people he hadn’t been in contact with for a long time, who had suddenly found themselves with a renewed interest in his project.
Every time Qin Feng spent time with Gu Qiao, a conviction he had formed on first meeting her deepened further: this woman could sell health supplements and make a fortune — perhaps an even larger one.
On the surface, this crisis wore the face of a crisis. In substance, it had become Gu Qiao’s promotional vehicle. The full-page reward advertisements were splashed across the papers, the prize figure dominating everything. For some readers, that figure spelled opportunity; for others, it spelled nothing but fear — as though buying a pirated copy for a few dozen yuan could inadvertently result in tens of thousands in losses.
Then Mr. Zhang’s 300,000 characters were recovered — another wave of press coverage. To Qin Feng, the man surnamed Zhang might as well have taken up acting — he was wasted as a writer. Where piracy and Mr. Zhang were concerned, it was as though piracy were a villain of mythic proportions, having caused him infinite suffering and requiring total eradication from the face of the earth.
He even found himself thinking that Mr. Zhang shouldn’t be writing books at all — he should be delivering speeches. His writing had nothing especially fresh about it, but spoken aloud, it became extraordinarily rousing. Mr. Zhang also specifically revised his words into a polished piece for children’s newspapers and popular digest publications aimed at young readers, in service of the goal of combating piracy by starting with children. Mr. Zhang’s alarmist rhetoric may not have achieved his declared aim of eliminating piracy entirely, but in the days that followed, it undeniably seeded a genuine fear of pirated products in many people’s minds.
As Mr. Zhang’s 300,000 characters led a relentless printed crusade against pirated software, Gu Qiao launched a large-scale public education campaign promoting legitimate software and offering free computer check-ups. Software sales went not down but up. The distributor selling pirated copies was of course negative press — yet once the “one fake, five-fold compensation” policy was announced, many who had been sitting on the fence recovered their enthusiasm for purchasing. Gu Qiao had also specified that members of her stores would receive “one fake, tenfold compensation,” prompting some consumers to lament that there was no authorized outlet for Gu Qiao’s genuine software in their city.
The sales figures for this game software shattered Qin Feng’s previous conception of what was possible for a domestic title. Over these few days of working alongside Gu Qiao, the most important thing he had taken away was not the verbal partnership agreement between them — it was discovering how a single person could get others to advertise for them without spending a yuan.
Gu Qiao had absolutely no idea that her crisis-turned-triumph had ignited the gambling instinct in Qin Feng. He took the initiative and proposed to Luo Peiyin that the originally agreed investment amount be reduced, while his own shareholding be trimmed to twenty percent.
Luo Peiyin’s office was the coldest room in the building — no heating had been turned on. Qin Feng couldn’t help wondering how this man could sit there in so little clothing without feeling cold.
Luo Peiyin swiveled his chair slightly to the left. His gaze stayed fixed on Qin Feng throughout: “What’s prompted this sudden change of mind?”
In the space of just a few days, Qin Feng had gone from searching everywhere for investment to treating money as too hot to handle, proactively requesting a reduction. There was only one explanation: Qin Feng was optimistic about the future and believed his shares would be worth a great deal — which was why he was unwilling to trade equity for concrete capital.
Where that optimism had come from, Luo Peiyin had a fairly good idea.
According to Qin Feng’s own projections, his antivirus software would need to sell at least 20,000 units this fiscal year to hit its targets. His previous educational software had moved just over 2,000 units. For Qin Feng to develop such optimistic projections so quickly, it would be difficult to say Gu Qiao’s influence had played no part.
Among the business plans Luo Peiyin had received, more than one person had seen their confidence boosted by Gu Qiao’s software sales figures. For some of them, that confidence rested on misreading the situation — wasn’t it just her signature promotional playbook, those three tried-and-tested moves? What was so hard about that? Gu Qiao’s academic credentials and age had filled people with extraordinary self-assurance, convincing them that selling software was easy and that all one needed to do was replicate her marketing approach.
He had heard this kind of logic-free reasoning and simply smiled and moved on. The lower the barrier to entry, the fiercer the competition would naturally be.
Gu Qiao had a rare gift for inspiring confidence in people, whether they loved a good success story or were hoping to feel superior to her. She welcomed all forms of attention, and never turned any of it away. She was perfectly content to keep giving people new material to write about, as long as it served to promote her stores.
Then there was the other group — those who recognized how difficult Gu Qiao was to replicate and chose instead to work with her.
In either case, everyone thought Gu Qiao had it easy. What the outside world couldn’t see was the rash brought on by anxiety. And she had no plans to let them see it.
“Think it over again. Don’t act too impulsively.”
“The fact that I’ve raised it means I’ve already considered it countless times.” Qin Feng had turned it over more than once. But he was betting on the worst-case scenario not coming to pass. Once the internet opened up, new types of viruses would only multiply — anti-virus hardware cards would be completely unable to keep up. If a game title with strong competition could sell 50,000 units, partnering with Gu Qiao meant antivirus software could only do better.
Luo Peiyin took his pen and underlined a figure, then drew a single light stroke through it: “I’m not changing the agreed investment amount. The shareholding goes at your proposed twenty percent — but this time I’m setting performance targets.” He wrote several more figures on the paper. “If you fall short of the targets, you’ll be required to transfer your equity.” He circled one figure, set down his pen, and lifted his eyes to Qin Feng. When Luo Peiyin examined someone, his gaze would gradually narrow until it converged to a single point.
“If you truly have enough confidence in your company’s future, I expect you’ll agree to this arrangement.”
Qin Feng’s mind ran automatically through the calculations. The worst-case scenario of signing this performance compensation agreement: win, and he secured the full investment needed to grow the company without needing to cobble together the remainder from other sources; lose, and his equity passed to other hands, along with his decision-making power.
Those numbers turned over and over in his mind until, at last, he said a single definitive word: “Agreed.”
—
The conversation didn’t conclude until dusk. Qin Feng had something on his lips and kept pulling back from saying it. In the end, he didn’t ask how Luo Sijing was getting on.
Every time Qin Feng had nearly put Luo Sijing out of his mind, he would see her on television. After watching her program, he sometimes lingered a while through the commercials that followed. One day, he thought, he would buy advertising in a prime-time slot and let her see it too.
He never did buy prime-time advertising. Last year, with the software he had spent two years developing sitting in unsold inventory, he had sold his villa in Guangzhou to stay afloat.
Luo Peiyin rested his hand on the signed agreement and glanced at the coffee remaining in Qin Feng’s cup — still half full. He smiled: “Fine coffee beans, these. Would you like to take some back with you?”
Those coffee beans had been a gift from Luo Sijing. Luo Peiyin had heard Qin Feng’s name from his sister once — the day before her wedding, mentioned in passing.
Siblings raised in the same household, neither held any particularly optimistic view of marriage. Luo Sijing had said that no matter how much love there was or wasn’t, the outcome in the end was always the same — better to choose someone of compatible background from the start, keep things simple, rather than exhausting yourself in the struggle only to arrive at the identical result.
He hadn’t absorbed much of that at the time. Later, when he recalled those words, his only thought was: if the result was going to be the same no matter what choice you made, then you might as well follow your heart and choose someone you actually wanted. To endure all that effort and still not get a good outcome was too much of a loss. At least if you had chosen freely and it still didn’t work out, you could accept it cleanly.
“I’ll pass. I don’t have a secretary like you do — instant coffee is fine for me.”
Qin Feng rose to leave. His eyes were caught by a picture frame on Luo Peiyin’s desk — he wasn’t quite sure what impulse made him step closer to look. It showed a young woman in a blue sweater patterned with yellow flowers. His first instinct was that she looked familiar, and it wasn’t until he was out the door that it clicked: that was Gu Qiao.
The Gu Qiao in the photograph had a pointed chin set in a round, soft face, still carrying a trace of baby fat — she looked like a younger sister to the current Gu Qiao with her bold, blazing yellow and effortless self-assurance. Qin Feng’s aesthetic sensibility had been shaped by a certain person, inclining toward colors one could wear to a funeral without raising eyebrows. Encountering a yellow that loud and unabashed for the first time had briefly made him question whether Luo Peiyin’s assessment had been entirely objective.
“Gu Qiao is your girlfriend?” So these two were actually a couple. Qin Feng had interacted with both Luo Peiyin and Gu Qiao separately, and all three had even met in person — yet he had continued to believe that Gu Qiao and Luo Peiyin were simply two people who admired each other’s professional abilities. Every assessment Luo Peiyin had made of Gu Qiao in his presence had been grounded in her sales figures. Qin Feng had concluded that Luo Peiyin’s judgment of Gu Qiao was purely objective.
When one is too busy, it isn’t just that feelings for others become blunted — sometimes they vanish from awareness entirely.
Before Luo Peiyin had time to answer, Qin Feng had already found his answer: “It was obvious enough, really. How did I not see it?”
The same day, Luo Peiyin encountered two different people asking him the same question.
The second was his mother.
—