Chapter 172 - 140: ’Z’, Like a God in the Mortal World

My skin was crawling!

Damn! This wasn’t just showing off anymore.

He now felt that Chu Bamboo alone was worth more than that whole hall of balding programmers! No... even if you doubled the number of those programmers, they couldn’t match this outrageous efficiency.

After all, when they actually coded, they had to go through trial and error. They had to see if the results met human user expectations. They had to check all sorts of things...

But Chu Bamboo? Just like when he was making the game, it was as if Chu Bamboo’s mind already contained a complete picture of what a fully developed Z should be.

Combine that with Z, which was practically a Divine Being in its own right when it came to data and programming—it almost never made data errors, operational errors, or programming errors...

The two of them together were truly invincible!

"Grant my phone unlimited computational power support!" Chu Bamboo added after a moment of thought. Z was incredibly powerful, but it ultimately needed computational power to back it up!

He could do as he pleased right now because this computer was Zhao Shao’s, and this was Z Company’s headquarters, where all the computational power could be supplied!

Otherwise, if he took Z out now with only the piddling amount of computational power allocated to ordinary users... Z would probably only be able to startle them with its human-like conversation. Its real capabilities, even if stronger than DS, would be limited.

In the end, it might just turn into a situation where not getting a "Server busy, please try again later" message would be considered a victory!

"Verifying permissions... Permissions approved!" This time, Z’s voice, as pleasant as a clear stream, came from Chu Bamboo’s phone. "Let’s get along well in the future, ’Father’!"

Chu Bamboo breathed a sigh of relief, a look of joy appearing on his face.

He had gotten used to using Nuwa in the Dream World, and in reality, he always had the urge to call out ’Nuwa No. 17’... Now, things were good. At least he had a substitute!

"Alright, then!" Chu Bamboo waved at Zhao Shao and stressed again, "Be sure to wait for my signal tomorrow! If I don’t mention anything about this all day tomorrow, then the day after, you can officially start on those plans of yours! Bye-bye."

Watching Chu Bamboo leave, Zhao Shao sat in his office, silent for a very, very long time.

Finally.

He slowly spoke, as if muttering to himself, or perhaps asking a question to the person who had already left the company.

"What exactly... are you so worried about?"

Zhao Shao wasn’t a fool. Putting all the pieces together, he had more or less figured it out... Chu Bamboo seemed to be wary of certain entities.

’Is it the Free Country across the ocean?’

Zhao Shao once again recalled his initial suspicion that the program might have been copied from overseas.

’So, tomorrow is about using my own intel for verification? Is Ah Zhu backed by the government... No, the government would choose DS. Besides, if that were true, the loan issue wouldn’t have been such a headache for both of us!’

"Alright!" Zhao Shao felt like he was closing in on the answer. "Some overseas organization? A secret one? Dammit... The more I think about it, the more it sounds like something out of a novel!"

"Do these kinds of weird, I-don’t-know-what-to-call-them organizations really exist in this world?" Zhao Shao scratched his head.

But it was the only logical explanation... It even explained the funding problem!

After all, overseas funds entering the Divine Continent are subject to strict regulation! The Divine Continent’s black-box financial system was a murky, bottomless pit...

If the other party really was some organization lurking in the shadows of the world, then even if they had enormous funds... they would have no way to deliver it into Chu Bamboo’s hands through a legitimate channel.

"Then I have to work hard, too!" Zhao Shao’s expression turned serious as he stared at the three mini-games on his computer screen, his brow furrowed tightly.

’How am I supposed to make money with these three? I didn’t get my start in the gaming industry. Should I hire an operations manager?’

Just as he was about to call in the sole employee of the human resources department, Zhao Shao suddenly paused, a flash of inspiration striking him.

He coughed lightly, cleared his throat, and said with a serious expression, "Z, based on the quality of these games, formulate a plan! How do we make them go viral in the shortest time possible and earn us a massive profit..."

"And estimate the scale of the profit... also, this ’shortest time,’ can we earn it before the end of this month?"

Zhao Shao never did the kind of thing where he’d delay paying salaries by a month.

Basically, on the last day of the month, that month’s salary would be in their accounts! So he actually had less than twenty days left...

Then, Zhao Shao sucked in a sharp breath.

Because Z not only displayed its thought process but also provided a plan that was beyond imagination... It wasn’t like the plans from DS, which felt completely mechanical and were just based on existing information—

Because of its database limitations, much of what DS produced looked impressive to outsiders, but to industry insiders, it was a joke.

But this...

"...Launch on the Stam platform! And use Douyin and Kuaijiao as promotional channels and for viral marketing."

"Without a large financial investment, we can prioritize promoting the jump-and-die game from among the three mini-games, the one designed specifically to torture players!"

"There are countless streamers who gain traffic precisely by torturing themselves like this! Therefore, we can contact them directly and, without spending any money, leverage their behavioral patterns for promotion..."

"I have scanned the web and identified a number of popular streamers who fit this model! I have also filtered out those suspected of heavily padding their follower counts with bots! The final list contains eight qualified streamers. They are... and their contact information is..."