The company’s computers were all assembled machines. Li Xun rolled up his sleeves and started hauling components. Guo Shijie came over to help.

Li Xun took out a graphics card and examined it for a long moment.

“Is something wrong?” Guo Shijie asked quietly from beside him. “Can’t figure out how to install it? I can go wake Zhao Teng.”

“Remarkable,” Li Xun said, his tone flat.

“What’s remarkable?”

“The exact model I assembled six years ago — and here I am, installing it again.”

“…”

Guo Shijie knew perfectly well what he meant by that and turned red. “Our company doesn’t have a lot of capital, so our hardware specs aren’t great. The graphics card — the model is pretty low-end, but it can still run things, just barely.”

Zhu Yun was standing behind them, craning her neck to see.

Back at the base, the computers had also been assembled machines. Every component had been chosen by Li Xun — and installed by him. Whenever a computer at the base had a problem, you never needed to call the school’s maintenance staff. Li Xun alone was enough.

Li Xun was partway through assembling the computers when Zhao Teng woke up. He scratched his stomach on his way to the bathroom, and on the way past, glanced over at what Li Xun was doing. “Cable management’s pretty clean,” he remarked.

It took Li Xun only an hour to complete the full installation of both computers. When Zhu Yun tested hers by powering it on, he was standing beside her and reminded her, “Set a password.” Then he turned and went back to his own seat.

Zhao Teng had been in the bathroom for half an hour. Zhang Fang called out impatiently: “Stop taking so long in there! Get out here and send those documents!”

In the time Zhao Teng spent on the toilet, Zhu Yun had been sitting idle, browsing the internet. She had barely opened three pages when — the computer froze solid.

Zhu Yun moved the mouse.

No response.

She looked sideways at Li Xun. He was staring at his screen with a serious expression.

Zhu Yun said quietly, “It’s crashed.”

Li Xun’s gaze drifted over, still wearing that neutral, serious look. Zhu Yun pointed at her computer. Li Xun came over, fiddled with it for a bit, fixed it, muttered “junk machine,” and went back.

Zhao Teng came shuffling out of the bathroom hitching up his trousers, and Zhang Fang immediately started in on him: “Where’s your work ethic? Can’t you be even a little faster?”

Zhao Teng rolled his eyes and asked Zhu Yun and Li Xun, “Do you have a QQ account?”

He read their expressions and shook his head. “Figured as much. Go register one — for work.”

Feiyang Network Co., Ltd. had no internal communication system. Work was done entirely through a QQ group. The group was at least tidy — including Zhu Yun and Li Xun, the two new additions, there were only six people in total. Everyone had set their group nickname to their real name — except the boss, Dong Siyang, who went by “Feiyang Rules the World,” with a knife as his profile picture.

Zhao Teng called across the room, “The documents are in the group file-sharing! Download them yourselves!”

Zhu Yun wasn’t particularly familiar with the software and spent a good while clicking before she finally managed to download the files. After reading through two of Zhang Fang’s strangely chaotic game design documents, she found herself questioning her life choices all over again.

The two games Feiyang was currently “developing” were: the first, called Invincible Warrior, a strategy combat game set in the Warring States period — though Zhu Yun was startled to discover that it inexplicably featured Lü Bu.

She read through the entire design document from start to finish and couldn’t find any coherent logic to speak of. What she could tell was that Zhang Fang was a devoted, borderline fanatical fan of Lü Bu. Nearly half the document was dedicated to explaining Lü Bu’s skill design. After playing a few rounds of the internal testing version, she found that aside from Lü Bu, the game had almost no actual content whatsoever.

The second game was even worse — it was called The Playboy, also known under the alternate title Easy on Me, Bad Boss.

The direction of the game was clear enough from the name alone. Zhang Fang had included a note in the design document: the intended audience was lonely males between the ages of twelve and thirty-five, and it was described as a warm and comforting game, meant to accompany players through countless long and solitary nights.

The Playboy didn’t even have a playable trial version yet. The final column in the development schedule noted that progress was severely behind.

Zhu Yun propped her elbow on the desk and pressed two fingers to her temple.

Zhang Fang walked over.

“How’s the reading going?”

Zhu Yun rallied herself. “I’ve finished.” Zhang Fang looked at Li Xun, who also gave a brief nod.

“Good.” Zhang Fang bellowed at the other two: “Meeting time!”

The conference room was the same small interview room from before. Zhao Teng pulled a face. “With three people it was fine, but how are five of us supposed to fit?”

Zhang Fang insisted: “This is the rule the boss Dong Siyang set — meetings must be held in the conference room. Proper management.”

And so all five of them were crammed in a circle around the small square table. Zhu Yun sat beside Zhao Teng, directly across from Li Xun. Zhao Teng looked sideways at her. “You even brought a notebook?”

Zhu Yun hesitated — she had, out of pure instinct when she heard the word “meeting,” picked up a notebook and pen. While Zhang Fang was getting ready, Zhao Teng leaned over and murmured to Zhu Yun, “Don’t bother writing. Waste of paper.”

Zhu Yun: “…”

Zhang Fang finished preparing, cleared his throat, and began.

“Alright, let’s get started.” He rested his arms on the table and looked at Zhu Yun and Li Xun. “You’ve both had a chance to review the games the company is currently working on. Any thoughts? Let’s hear them.”

Silence.

Zhang Fang said, “Okay, I’ll give you a little time to process. Anyway, that’s the situation we’re in — and both game teams are short-staffed.”

Zhu Yun inwardly blanched. Before she and Li Xun arrived, this company had exactly three people in total — and somehow they had managed to divide that into two project teams.

“So the two of you will need to take on at least one project each. Normally you’d each be handling both, but since you just joined and aren’t fully settled in yet, we’ll give you some buffer time. Fair warning, though — the pressure here is not small. You’re going to need to buckle down.” Zhang Fang rubbed his hands together. “So… between the two of you, divide things up. Decide who takes which project.”

Zhu Yun looked at Li Xun. He was leaning back in his chair, with no apparent inclination to speak.

“I’ll take Invincible Warrior then,” Zhu Yun said.

“Alright. Li Xun, you’ve got The Playboy — any objections?” Zhang Fang asked.

Li Xun shook his head.

“Great!” Zhang Fang buried his head in his notebook and started typing furiously. Zhao Teng stole a glance — it was a progress report to be reviewed by the boss. Even though the project assignments had only been verbally handed to the two new employees, Zhang Fang had no shame whatsoever about stretching the progress table several steps further along. His task targets for this month were basically complete now.

Zhang Fang looked up with unmistakable satisfaction, meeting Zhao Teng’s gaze by chance. Zhao Teng narrowed his eyes. “How is it possible for someone like you to exist in this world?”

Zhang Fang acted as if he hadn’t heard a word.

“Meeting adjourned!”

On the way out of the interview room, Zhu Yun stopped Zhang Fang.

“I think the design of Invincible Warrior is quite flawed.”

Zhang Fang waved a yawn away. “Go talk to Zhao Teng — he wrote all the code.”

Zhu Yun went to find Zhao Teng. He was playing a game. Zhu Yun watched from behind for a moment, then asked, “Why does your machine run so fast?”

Zhao Teng made a dismissive sound. “Because I customized it myself, obviously.”

“You can customize company machines?”

“Of course.”

Zhu Yun nodded, thoughtful. Zhao Teng glanced back. “What did you need?”

Zhu Yun remembered why she’d come, and laid out everything she felt was wrong with the game. “The content doesn’t match the setting. The only fully developed character, Lü Bu, is actually going to have to be removed. Beyond him, the other characters are basically hollow. And the battle system — it’s far too rough.”

Zhao Teng laughed lazily.

Zhu Yun tried her luck: “What would you do to fix it?”

Zhao Teng: “No idea.”

Zhu Yun: “…”

“I’m on the programming side,” Zhao Teng explained, as if stating the obvious. “Zhang Fang writes the design documents. Whatever he puts in the design doc, I build.”

Zhu Yun looked at Zhao Teng, at a loss for words.

Zhao Teng was, by most measures, a fairly good-looking guy — lean and slight, with features that had a somewhat Japanese aesthetic, his hair grown out a little longer than average, eyes that always looked half-closed. He wasn’t very old, somewhere in his early twenties at most. But he carried none of the naive, unpolished quality of someone who’d just left university. There was a deep, ingrained worldliness about him, the kind that usually came from six or seven years of working experience.

Zhu Yun considered that, in a certain sense, if Zhao Teng was truly the only programmer who had worked on Invincible Warrior, then his skills must be reasonably solid — because the one finished character in the game, Lü Bu, was genuinely impressive.

It was just a shame he seemed to have absolutely no intention of continuing.

“If we could get the other characters to the same level as Lü Bu, and flesh out the battles and story as well, the final product would look completely different from what it is now,” Zhu Yun said.

Zhao Teng, slumped in his chair, replied, “We don’t have time. The game has to launch at the end of next month. This is what we have to work with. You can just clean up the content going forward — the requirements are in the design doc. Also, UI is your responsibility too. For anything art-related, go to Guo Shijie.”

And with that, he went back to his game.

On their first day, outside of that one meeting, Zhang Fang and Zhao Teng had little interaction with either of them.

Zhao Teng, nominally the lead programmer, seemed to have complete confidence in Zhu Yun as a new employee. After stating his bare-minimum expectations, he left her entirely to her own devices.

As for Li Xun — Zhang Fang and Zhao Teng didn’t even bother giving him basic expectations. They had probably already written him off as someone Zhu Yun had brought in through connections, useful mainly for filling a headcount.

Zhu Yun quietly returned to her seat and opened Zhao Teng’s program files.

Feiyang Company used Unity3D as its game engine — and without having to ask, Zhu Yun already knew the reason: it was free.

Unity3D had only been gaining traction in China for about three or four years, making it a relatively new engine. Back when Zhu Yun was studying abroad, she had once tagged along to GDC — the Game Developers Conference — out of curiosity while in San Francisco. That was the first time she’d encountered the engine. It had created quite a sensation at the time, and afterward she had enrolled in a short-term Unity3D training course.

Zhu Yun glanced covertly over at Li Xun. He was staring intently at his screen, brows slightly furrowed, moving the mouse occasionally, but not typing anything on the keyboard yet.

Unity3D primarily used JavaScript and C# — neither of which should pose much difficulty for him. The question was just how out of practice he was after all this time.

And then there was the bigger issue: Li Xun had never once touched a game engine before. During their university years, neither of them had ever imagined they would end up making games. About the only game Li Xun had ever written was back in their first year — that pixel character game that had completely derailed Zhu Yun.

The engine had all kinds of small operational nuances, along with many built-in assets that required hands-on experience to use properly. For someone completely new to it, a few hours in, they might not even know how to get the game to run.

Li Xun was completely absorbed. He hadn’t noticed Zhu Yun watching him at all.

After a moment, Zhu Yun’s gaze drifted back to her own screen.

A broken-down machine. A broken-down game.

She drew a slow, deep breath.

There was a lot to do. One thing at a time.