Explaining things to Gao Jianhong took more than twice as long as it had with Zhu Yun.

When Gao Jianhong came back, his expression was not the easy one he had worn the last time. He was quiet for several days before he slowly came around.

Zhu Yun felt that sometimes the business between men was more complicated than anything between a man and a woman.

Once all three of them were in the picture, Zhu Yun wasted no time in asking Li Xun for the program. She wanted to know exactly what was different between what Li Xun had been quietly building and the website they had made together.

Li Xun copied the program over to both of them. Zhu Yun got her hands on it, went home, and stayed up the entire night going through it.

When she finished, she felt a little puzzled — and a little let down.

She had gone in expecting to find something unstoppable: brilliant ideas, flawless algorithms, clean extensibility. What she found was not that. What Li Xun had been secretly developing wasn’t even strictly a website. It was an extended development of a single feature from the website they had already built.

The functionality seemed narrow. Zhu Yun couldn’t make sense of it. Neither could Gao Jianhong.

One day, Li Xun brought them to a café.

The moment she stepped inside, Zhu Yun felt a quiet amazement — they had finally managed to gather somewhere that actual sunlight could reach.

They settled into a corner with a power outlet. The server brought menus, and Li Xun opened his laptop while saying, “Order whatever you want.”

Since Li Xun was paying, Zhu Yun had no reservations. Before long the table was covered with things she liked.

Gao Jianhong couldn’t help remarking, “You can really eat.”

Zhu Yun bit into a cream bun. “My brain has been working overtime lately.”

Gao Jianhong shrugged — fair enough.

Li Xun flipped his laptop around for them to see.

Zhu Yun said, “No need — I practically have it memorized. It’s not even a complete website. How do you sell something like this?”

Li Xun: “Who said only a complete website can be sold?”

Zhu Yun chewed her bun and waited for him to explain.

Li Xun said, “Langan didn’t want to rely on other platforms. They wanted their own website. The starting idea was good — but they don’t understand the current direction of the internet.”

Zhu Yun: “What direction?”

Li Xun: “Shopping websites have only just started taking off in the last few years. They look like a flourishing landscape right now, lots of sites out there — but before long, the vast majority of resources will gradually concentrate into a handful of large platforms. Building something like that takes enormous effort.”

Zhu Yun: “Can’t we do it?”

Li Xun looked at her. “We could. Give it ten years and you’d probably get there.”

“…”

Seeing the less than convinced expression on Zhu Yun’s face, Li Xun leaned forward slightly. “Your Highness.”

Zhu Yun put down her bun.

“Could you stop calling me that?”

Li Xun: “What should I call you then?”

“Don’t I have a name?”

“Is ‘princess’ not nice to hear?”

“The issue is I’m not a princess.”

“Then what are you?”

A knight — the word surfaced in her mind instantly, but she didn’t say it. She was afraid he’d laugh.

“Go on,” she said, and resumed eating her bun.

Li Xun looked at her and asked, “Langan Company — how many products did they carry? Do you remember?”

Zhu Yun: “Over five hundred.”

“A few hundred items and one person can handle the search function just fine. But what about a few hundred million?”

Zhu Yun had nothing to say.

“A few billion? A few hundred billion? At that point no single database can hold the data. Then you have to start studying distributed data storage. Then you have to study how to organize that data, how to recommend it, how to add and remove entries — every single element requires powerful algorithms to support it, otherwise the whole system collapses. Do you think you could manage that in a month?”

“…”

“And that’s just one search function. A website like that — from early development through to the later stages — requires an enormous investment of people and resources. We don’t have enough people, and Langan doesn’t have that kind of money.” Li Xun settled back into the sofa. “So now you understand — trying to go head-to-head with the major platforms on overall capability simply isn’t realistic.”

A brief silence. Then Li Xun added, in the same unhurried tone, “But there are other ways to come from nowhere and take a lead.”

Both Zhu Yun and Gao Jianhong looked at him.

“The large platforms are characterized by breadth. And with anything, once you go broad, it becomes very difficult to go deep. So if you can take one function and develop it with real depth and precision, that struggling little company might still have a chance.”

Li Xun tapped the screen with one finger. “Langan’s strength is health supplements. The overwhelming majority of their products have a wellness function, and their range is quite distinctive — they’re the only ones producing it, which probably has something to do with the fact that the owner’s mother practices traditional Chinese medicine.”

You even know what the owner’s mother does?

“This feature is focused specifically on health maintenance. Here, let me show you…” He began walking them through it as he demonstrated.

To make selecting and purchasing easier, Li Xun had built detailed product recommendations into the system.

“Most people don’t know enough about health and nutritional supplements. They’re too lazy to read, and they won’t go through items one by one. Better to cut straight to the problem.” Li Xun opened a search bar. “Type in a symptom here — say, ‘dizziness and blurred vision,’ or ‘nausea’ — and the system will automatically recommend appropriate supplements. Langan’s products are already organized into product lines, which makes them easy to promote.”

Zhu Yun stared at the screen, then said suddenly, “What about adding a feature that explains the underlying condition — a brief description of what’s going wrong in the body, followed by an introduction to the corresponding product formulas that can address it? Would that be more persuasive? Would people be more inclined to buy after reading it?”

Li Xun looked at her. His expression went unusually still.

Zhu Yun ate her bun without concern. She had long grown accustomed to that unsettling look Li Xun wore when he was thinking something through.

She also knew that although his eyes were pointed at her, his mind was somewhere else entirely.

Li Xun’s thinking, like his height, preferred to work from the top down, surveying the whole from above.

He was certainly running through it at speed right now, reconsidering and restructuring the entire system — as careful as a spider reweaving a web.

After a few minutes, the tension in Li Xun’s face eased. He said one word simply: “Add it.”

When he nodded, it meant everything was fine.

Li Xun lit a cigarette, leaned back loosely in his chair, and watched Zhu Yun.

Zhu Yun: “What?”

Li Xun smiled and shook his head. He bit the cigarette and glanced out the window, then said easily, “Order whatever else you want. Keep going.”

“Are you trying to fatten up a pig?”

“I’m feeding a Zhu.”

“…”

She could never seem to win with him.

But it didn’t matter.

She sat there quietly and ate her bun quietly.

That peaceful afternoon — in an era when mobile services had only just begun to emerge and smartphones had yet to fully take hold — she sat in that small café and listened to Li Xun talk through his thinking, his ideas, the motion capture system he was planning to add to the lab next.

Zhu Yun didn’t know whether the program would end up being sold to Langan. The only thing she knew for certain was that this memory would be stored permanently somewhere in her mind, and every time she called it up, it would be saturated with the smell of sunlight and cream buns.

They began working together to refine the software’s functionality.

Zhu Yun discovered another advantage of the single-focus approach: it kept them out of conflict with Zhang Xiaobei.

What they were building wasn’t a website. It carried no implication of “replacement.” If Zhang Xiaobei ever questioned them, they could brush it off entirely as a hobby side project.

Li Xun threw himself into a project the way other people threw themselves off cliffs. He put an enormous amount of effort into this system, meticulously researching every piece of material — especially anything medically related, which he absolutely refused to handle carelessly.

So Zhu Yun had barely finished with web design when she was suddenly immersed in the world of traditional Chinese medicine.

This was considerably more complicated than web design.

Li Xun gave Zhu Yun a document listing all of Langan’s health supplement products, along with detailed descriptions of each — formulas, ingredients, and treatment applications.

“You think you’re going to sit there reading the Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine until who knows when?” Li Xun dropped the materials on the desk. “Work backwards — from product to pharmacology. Be thorough!”

“And for conditions the products don’t cover?”

“…”

Li Xun stood, and walked slowly toward Zhu Yun.

Zhu Yun was forced to step back until she had nowhere left to go. She heard Li Xun’s quiet voice: “Your Highness, is our software called ‘Cure for All Ailments’?”

Zhu Yun shook her head.

Did he just wash his hair? He smells very clean.

“Since it is not, perhaps you might refrain from practicing the full scope of traditional medicine on its behalf?”

Zhu Yun nodded.

Li Xun was just turning back to his work when Zhu Yun said, “About that…”

He glanced back.

Zhu Yun: “I’m not a princess.”

Li Xun looked at her steadily for a few seconds, then raised one hand, pointed at her, and said slowly, “Zhu Yun. If you bring this up with me one more time, I will print out the words ‘Your Royal Highness’ and paste them on your forehead.”

“…”

Do you know you turn into a lit fuse the moment you start working?

Li Xun frowned and clattered away furiously at his keyboard. Zhu Yun grumbled to herself and closed the Yellow Emperor’s Classic.

Even though Li Xun consistently insisted on working backwards from the products, the body of traditional Chinese medical theory was simply too vast and too unfamiliar for Zhu Yun to navigate easily. She drafted several approaches in a row, and Li Xun rejected every one.

Eventually, seeing that she was genuinely at her wits’ end, Li Xun gave her two days off to rest. Zhu Yun couldn’t sit still even then, and ended up spending the weekend visiting the largest traditional Chinese medicine clinic in the city in search of inspiration.

The clinic sat in the very heart of the city center — a pocket of quiet amid the noise, decorated entirely in a classical style, the surroundings refined and serene. The moment you stepped inside it was as though you had walked into a classical landscape painting, everything pleasing to the eye.

Zhu Yun walked further in, past the registration area, and the crowd began to thin.

Deeper still, past a small courtyard, she caught the faint sound of someone speaking.

She followed the voice to the innermost part of the courtyard, where she found a small hall. A promotional poster was pasted by the door — something about a wellness lecture by a certain master of the Daoist tradition.

Zhu Yun stood outside and peered in through the floor-to-ceiling glass. The room was sparsely occupied, people scattered loosely around, heads bent over their phones.

On the stage, the master cut quite a figure at first glance — long beard, long hair, the bearing of an immortal — but on closer inspection, he wasn’t particularly old. Forty at most.

With no one listening, the master remained entirely unbothered, lecturing on at an unhurried pace, with the particular air of a university Marxist theory professor.

Zhu Yun had walked a long way and was tired. Seeing the door was open, she slipped inside and took a seat along the edge to rest.

A worn acupuncture chart hung on the stage. The master crossed his legs at ease and said with a smile, “Every time Daoism comes up, people assume it’s all about becoming immortal, ascending to the heavens in broad daylight — but that’s an extremely advanced level. Take a wrong turn and you’re liable to fall to your death.”

Zhu Yun laughed.

The master continued, “So let’s aim a little lower. If we can’t ascend to the heavens, perhaps we can settle for living out our days free of illness.”

Zhu Yun stayed and listened for a while. The master rambled cheerfully across every topic imaginable. She couldn’t quite gauge his skill in wellness theory, but she did find his comic timing rather impressive.

Eventually it was time to go.

Zhu Yun rose and prepared to leave. At the door, she brushed past someone who appeared to have also grown tired of walking and was looking for a place to rest.

She stopped mid-step.

The master was still speaking: “And so — in Daoism, we speak of ‘following the heart.’ Like right now — those of you playing on your phones, carry on. Those who are dozing, doze away. I have no objection. I will simply keep talking. Even if no one listens, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”

The young man had fine, clear features — a quietly striking face.

Zhu Yun rode the bus back toward school, and somewhere at a crossroads, a thought suddenly struck her.

That young man she had just passed — the one who had seemed faintly familiar — hadn’t he been the subject of that English assignment she’d done for Liu Sisi?

What was his name again?

Zhu Yun furrowed her brow, trying to remember.

“Young man, painter… Tian Xiuzhu?”