The End of the Universe Is Live-Streaming E-commerce – CH24

Chapter 24: The 24th Day of Livestream Selling

What exactly Student Lin Xiang was planning to do—before the blind box named truth was opened, no one could predict it with one hundred percent accuracy. But Lin Zhao was very clear about what he needed to do next.

1. Organize people to assemble the transport robots and complete the handover as much as possible before the part-time college students returned to school.
2. Packing and boxing work could not stop. After ensuring that Kaman would not be short of goods for the time being, he needed to inform mercenary Gray that express deliveries would stop during New Year—their company’s principle was: when others take holidays, we also take holidays; when others do not take holidays, we still take holidays. And no adjusted workdays, only bridge holidays.*
3. Discuss preliminary post-New Year order quantities with each supplier in advance.
4. Maintain relationships with the bosses.
5. Help his cousin come out of the closet—not. Cough. Test his aunt’s acceptance of diverse sexual orientations.

Did you notice anything?

“Our next period is truly tight on time and heavy on tasks,” Lin Zhao said with a pained expression.

For this, he even rarely listed out an OKR again.

One had to know that when he resigned from his company back then, he had sworn that he would never touch OKRs again in this life. Just seeing those three letters made him feel sick.

But a work method used by major corporations all over the world always had its reason for existing.

When several “departments” needed to be pushed forward simultaneously in multiple threads like this, it really was quite useful. A group of clear-eyed college students who had not experienced much of the workplace used it with howling happiness, unable to pull themselves away from this adult make-believe game.

Only 1114 frowned, seeing the huge bug hidden beneath the rich list.

“What about livestreaming? Are we just directly ghosting for a month?”

Lin Zhao, who was buried in the supermarket warehouse assembling modules and had not seen the blue sky outside for several days, kept his hands moving while answering without even raising his head.

“How could it only be one month?”

1114: “…”

Should it say that it was not surprised at all that this would be his answer?

Other streamers were all fighting for annual rankings and boosting revenue at the end of the year, while they had already joyfully welcomed the New Year.

Couldn’t he just directly say he did not plan to work at all?

Lin Zhao, who really did not plan to work and was only focused on waiting for New Year, said, “I’ll buy you a new hat and scarf set for New Year. Do you like bright red, or angora red?”

“Zhaozhao! You are the best Zhaozhao in the whole world!”

The blue-and-white sphere immediately became jubilant, enthusiastically moving close to Lin Zhao. Together with him, who had already opened his phone, it began choosing with great interest.

This was its first time celebrating Spring Festival!

So happy!

This Forbidden City couplet set was pretty good. That wreath hanging ornament also looked really nice. Buy two sets—one for Auntie’s home, one for Zhaozhao’s home. Oh, no, three sets! There was also Manman’s home!

“Manman, Manman, do you want a pure red wreath or a red-and-yellow one?”

Qin Manman was currently absorbed in playing with—cough, researching—the two transport robots they had already assembled at lightning speed.

To be precise, this Third Boss was taking the lead, together with a group of college student employees who should have been on lunch break, watching the two transport robots work without sleep or rest in a completely addicted state.

Quiet and efficient.

The size and weight of each box, the information blueprint label stuck on the upper-left corner, even the stacking center of gravity and packaging strength—they could analyze everything within fractions of a second, sort and pack according to order information, and then form several optimal sorting and transport routes.

They did not speak like delivery robots in hotels, nor did they have any fancy expressions, but their silent and continuous working efficiency was several times that of an adult.

Tireless. Never making mistakes.

After watching until now, the surrounding college students truly had far too many questions.

For example:

“Ever since they were born, they started working on the spot and have worked until now. Will they get tired? Should they rest for a bit?”

“Your refrigerator that works all year round says: Oh?”

“How is the underlying coding for collision avoidance designed? I thought these robots could only move along pre-designed tracks. How do they know how to dodge? A couple days ago, I even saw in the news that an unmanned delivery vehicle was like an artificial idiot, shouting ‘back up, back up’ at a roadwork warning sign and insisting that the sign move out of its way.”

“Because ours can jump.”

Previously, Lin Zhao had not understood why a transport robot needed to be made into a strange centaur shape. Only after seeing its four legs squat slightly, then leap lightly two meters off the ground with miraculous airtime, did he understand.

When it encountered an obstacle, it chose to jump away.

And no matter how it jumped, the goods in its hands remained as steady as if gravity did not exist. It calculated the center of gravity in real time, ensuring that boxes would never tip over.

Another college student raised a hand. “So, am I the only one curious about when they charge? I don’t seem to see anything like a charging dock for a robot vacuum. Or do they charge like phones, plugging a cable into themselves?”

That was a good question.

Lin Zhao did not know either.

Now that the transport robots had already been working for almost a week, this was the first time he had thought about the charging problem of micro-fission batteries.

But this really could not be blamed on Lin Zhao, because the charging data projected on the holographic panel had never dropped below 95%. These robots had been consuming energy while charging at the same time. In the explanation Mechanic had given Lin Zhao about the energy module, there was only one simple sentence: when energy drops below 10%, it will prompt replacement or re-catalysis.

Replace what? How to catalyze?

“It must be automatic solar charging. You college students, how come you’ve seen less of the world than me, a vocational college graduate?” Qin Xiaoman’s relaxed sentence helped Lin Zhao resolve the hungry, thirsty gazes waiting for his explanation.

Everyone suddenly understood in unison.

Right, like those calculators that sneakily charged with solar energy. They could be bought and used for years without losing power.

Only Lin Zhao knew that this definitely was not the case.

But the people who had received an “answer” had already let their thoughts scatter to the next topic and did not see that their Boss Lin’s eyes were just as puzzled as theirs.

The next topic was started by 1114. Originally choosing Spring Festival decorations, in order to help Lin Zhao out of the situation, it suddenly began indignantly discussing with Qin Xiaoman a system novel it had read yesterday.

Mm. Also because it genuinely wanted to discuss it.

Do not ask why a real system loved reading system novels imagined by other people so much. There was no reason. It just liked them.

“The underlying algorithm of this system definitely has problems.”

“How so?”

“It’s the female lead’s system, right? Then why does the final benefit orientation all go to the male lead? The male lead becomes powerful, the male lead’s awful family gets resolved, the male lead unifies the world and receives the respect of thousands… What about the female lead? What did its real host get? Gaining love by continuously saving the male lead and bringing resources to the male lead? Using large amounts of benefits that were already handed away to gamble on another person’s conscience? Whose system is it, exactly? Can it tell who is the big king and who is the little king?”

We systems would never fail to distinguish priorities and fail to understand who the real host we should serve is!

1114 had no way to say this to Qin Xiaoman. After all, in Qin Xiaoman’s understanding, it was still only a technical shut-in behind a drone.

It was not a system. It was a living person.

Heh. To be fair, 1114 quite liked this feeling.

It liked being friends with Manman. It liked being a partner who invested technology into Pingtu Youcongmu Company. It liked becoming an independent… person.

In fact, Lin Zhao was not the only one considering the charging problem.

Because the imperial mothership Goddess of Disaster, which had joined the Universal Alliance Watcher Fleet mission and was preparing to change course, needed to first dock at a nearby route and hand over the refugees to another starship, Goddess of Wisdom, which happened to be nearby.

In the silent darkness, only the outlines of the two starships slowly emerged within the thin glow of the nebula.

The silver-white starship shells, under the illumination of distant stars, shone with a cold light, like daggers carefully polished by craftsmen: quiet, precise, and filled with proper vigilance. The two ships slowly adjusted their positions, their engines spraying short and precise blue particles of light. Finally, accompanied by a series of deep metallic echoes and the sighs of hydraulic devices, the docking ports on the sides of both ships tightly connected.

“Airtight lock confirmed. Docking complete.”

Cold electronic voices sounded simultaneously inside the passageways of both ships.

The heavy multi-layered gates slid open one after another, revealing the spotless white metal passage connecting them. The emergency lights along the inner walls lit up in sequence, illuminating the fine dust floating in the air.

The first to pass through were the uniformed female staff members from the Goddess of Wisdom. Like the soldiers of Goddess of Disaster, they were disciplined and orderly, tall and strong, with not a single one having mental power below A-rank.

Only then appeared Imperial Princess Elowen, surrounded like the moon by stars.

The grand duchess, who had beautiful long silver curls, always took large and quick steps. Her hair, like a waterfall pouring downward, always left different shimmering ripples in the alternating light and shadow.

This grand duchess, who had inherited both her mother’s forcefulness and her father’s beauty, had just ended a star-system hunting activity with her female companions and seemed to be in quite a good mood.

She did not lose her temper because her entertainment had to be ended early so she could temporarily clean up after her younger brother. She even personally stepped onto the Goddess of Disaster.

Without a doubt, she had come to watch a joke.

Cough. She meant that she was representing her imperial brother, who was temporarily too occupied with state affairs to spare attention, and had come to care about her younger brother’s lifelong matter.

But before seeing the protagonist of the important matter, she first saw Reinhardt sitting alone in the lounge, and the 3D diagram slowly rotating in the air before him.

“What are you looking at? Oh, Ancestors, what is this ugly patchwork machine? It is practically a violent crime against vision. Are you revisiting your kindergarten handicraft homework?”

“Elementary school.”

“This ugly technology isn’t that mature.” Grand Duchess Elowen curled her lip in disgust, her picky gaze looking down from above as if she were examining a pile of garbage.

In the art of language, these siblings had both inherited from their superior mother. Only their relatively mild-tempered imperial brother resembled their black-bellied father.

“…Wait.”

The imperial princess’s powerful, well-defined fingers tapped lightly in the air, calling up a deep-red analysis beam that swept over the crude, inelegant machine in the 3D diagram. The disgust on her face gradually gave way to sharp focus.

“The power source is a miniature, extremely crude but… operational decay reactor? ‘Decay energy utilization’? How is that possible?”

Her originally dismissive voice gradually lowered, and her green eyes, utterly different from her younger brother’s, were filled with unbelievable inquiry.

“Theoretically speaking, decay has very low output power, and the process is slow and uncontrollable. It is usually only applied in fields such as space exploration.”

Reinhardt said expressionlessly, “Transfer to human language, thank you.”

Elowen looked at her younger brother as if looking at a monkey that had never developed intelligence. But in the end, she still condescended and slowly said, “The current main power source of the empire’s mecha still uses mental particles to catalyze fusion and form energy reactors. The essence of fusion is combining two small magnets into one large magnet. The required ‘battery’ space will only grow larger and larger. It also needs continuous external high temperature and high pressure catalysis and is extremely dependent on the mecha pilot’s mental power.”

You know, it is like using the sharpest knife to carve the sun. Powerful, but extremely dangerous.

Reinhardt had to remind his imperial sister that slowing down her speech did not count as speaking human. “No, I don’t know. Please communicate in ordinary Yasa.”

Grand Duchess Elowen looked at her younger brother with extreme impatience.

Why exactly did she have to share a segment of DNA with this creature that only grew muscles and not brains? Was her mother really certain her younger brother had not been switched at birth?

She spread her fingers and pushed apart the 3D diagram, enlarging that unremarkable battery.

Although Mechanic had said this battery was micro-fission, in Elowen’s view, it was more like decay.

Decay, fission, fusion.

They were the three most basic concepts of energy utilization.

Most pending-evolution star systems had their civilization development process basically stuck at fission, where the raw materials were heavy nuclei. The Universal Alliance had long since entered the field of mental-particle fusion, where the energy material was light nuclei that civilizations below stellar level technologically could not break through and found extremely difficult to control.

Simply put: stellar suns.

In the eyes of people in pending-evolution zones, being able to use the sun’s energy was already the clean energy of dreams.

But there was no best energy source in this world, only productivity that would never be satisfied. From steam to electricity, from fission to fusion, from…

“Everyone wants to make apples soft. The theoretical direction is heating and baking. We use that too, only our baking method is more advanced and also more dangerous. The apple’s pilot—for example, you—could turn into a charcoal-roasted turkey at any moment. But Kaman went against the current and chose to accelerate the apple’s rotting on its own.”

“This should have been an extremely foolish idea, because the rotting process is chaotic and disordered, and the energy produced is pitifully small.”

“But the problem is, Kaman seems to have succeeded.”

Elowen murmured to herself, “Is it using the omnipresent strong radiation of the wasteland plane as a natural catalyst? Or did they find some barbaric method to ‘locally tame’ the decay chain? We don’t know that, but it is indeed running, and very smoothly.”

Although ugly, it was usable without regard for consequences.

Kaman’s extremely harsh survival pressure and radiation environment seemed to have, by great chance, produced an alternative practical path for energy use. Whether it was decay or fission was unimportant. What mattered was that this violent problem-solving method under extreme constraints might be exactly what the highly ordered empire currently lacked.

Of course, Elowen could not be one hundred percent certain from only this hurried glance. She merely could not help stopping because of this possibility.

Whether this was a genius design or an idea doomed to self-destruction, it was still a flash of wisdom.

If this way of thinking could be correctly applied to mecha energy reform…

All the contempt and teasing in the eyes of this imperial princess from a higher civilization disappeared. She asked her imperial younger brother, “Do you know what this means?”

—It means I have another reason to talk to Linlin.

Previously, Reinhardt had been staring at the 3D diagram in an attempt to see flowers bloom from it and find reasons and ideas to continue chatting with Lin Zhao.

Princess Elowen: “…”

A career brain really could not resonate with a love brain.

But forget it. She let out a long sigh. “Fine. You can say whatever you want to him. Say that it comes from the youthful pain of your family of origin, the endless regrets of your school years, distant and unreachable boring dreams—whatever you like. But remember to ask him where this energy module came from, whose hands it came from, and whether he would be willing to help introduce them. They can name any price.”

Lin Zhao, who had no ambition and no career drive, and was wholeheartedly waiting for New Year, never expected that even if he did not go looking for business, business could come knocking on its own.

Author’s Note:

This time, Lin Zhao counts as the middleman.

Bridge holiday: when a holiday and a weekend are separated by only one day, that day is also taken off to connect them.

Decay, fission, fusion: I really did work hard while preparing the outline and gnawed a bit on these energy principles. But… this is as far as a desperate liberal arts student’s understanding can go. I know there are definitely many loopholes and incorrect expressions, but as always, my Jiangzuo, my rules. If I say it works like this, then it works like this. Sob. Forgive me. With my current forgetful brain, I really did my best.

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