Chapter 45: The 45th Day of Livestream Selling
Lin Zhao had expected difficulties, but he had not expected them to be this difficult.
The beautiful black-haired young man looked despairingly at the eight-thirty morning sun, unable to believe that he had found himself a job with his own two hands. Even after washing up and sitting down at the breakfast table, Lin Zhao still looked dazed.
Sure, it was an iron rice bowl. Six insurances and two housing funds, benefits on par with Academician Zeng, China’s only brain-domain evolver, and he did not even have to clock in every day. He only held the expert title of senior consultant and needed to go to the Special Administration Bureau when necessary.
But none of that could hide the essence of the matter: this was still going to work. Ahhhhh.
Especially when everything had only just begun. There was something every day. Lin Zhao was needed every day. More accurately, 1114 was needed, but as 1114’s only host, many things could only run after Lin Zhao personally gave 1114 the command.
Little Salted Fish Lin wore a mask of pain.
1114 flew beside him, imitating Psyduck with its head in its hands.
Only Lin Xiang, Dr. Lin with a heart as hard as iron, calmly placed soy milk and a sandwich in front of his brother, sat down opposite him, and said without the slightest ripple, “It’s been so long. You still haven’t gotten used to it?”
Lin Zhao: QAQ. Going to work is something I’ll never get used to in this lifetime.
Yes, some time had already passed since Lin Zhao had handed himself over. Back then, Jiangzuo had still been in a not-too-cold winter. Now it was already the kind of summer in Jiangzuo that could roast a person alive.
During the previous period, Lin Zhao had basically spent his days at the Tianquan City satellite base.
With his brother and 1114 accompanying him, Lin Zhao met many people, said many things, and of course, underwent many tests. In the end, he signed many documents. He now had an entire national-level office built around him. He even had a panel of experts, different specialists in charge of different departments. Lin Zhao worked very hard before finally remembering which person and which face corresponded to which field.
To put it simply, if Lin Zhao were to write his life résumé in the future, he could write: participated as a core figure in a national project.
Lin Zhao had no idea how Lin Xiang had done it. In any case, the whole handover and coordination process went extremely smoothly and efficiently, unbelievably standardized and practiced, and even took into consideration Lin Zhao’s condition as a patient. Many procedures that could be simplified had been simplified.
Lin Xiang’s answer to this was, “There’s nothing strange about it. My teacher’s wife already went through this once before.” Everyone had experience now. They just had to follow the regulations.
As for whether what he said was true, or whether he had said it to comfort his brother, that depended on the listener.
In short, just as Lin Zhao had told 1114: We have Xiangxiang. Smart matters should be left to smart people. There is really no need for mediocre people to trouble themselves over them. He only needed to do what his brother told him: go meet people when told to meet people, attend meetings when told to attend meetings, and take the system to participate in tests when told to do tests.
They had even, under layers upon layers of protection—an even more frightening security level than the night Lin Xiang returned to Jiangzuo—almost made another trip from Tianquan City to the capital, Yongji.
The reason they did not go in the end was that something shocking suddenly happened internationally. More precisely, the president of Country A, who had to make big news every once in a while or else feel uncomfortable, directly bypassed the United Nations’ unanimously passed temporary bill not to disclose natural energy to the public, and announced the matter to the entire world in a livestream.
Yes. He just announced it like that, as inexplicably as suddenly abducting the president of another country in the middle of the night.
And yet, he actually succeeded.
One bug was a bug. A pile of bugs could work.
The whole thing was so absurd that it felt like an April Fool’s joke. Unfortunately, April Fool’s Day had already passed by then. And the reason this president announced it was simply because Country A had produced a pair of S-class ability users.
Yes, just this year, the ability users who had previously been roughly divided into low-tier, mid-tier, and high-tier for more than a year finally received a unified international ranking standard. Do not ask why it was changed. Even Lin Xiang, an expert in this field, had only been notified at the last minute that the system would be changed.
It was the most traditional web-novel ranking system: ABCDE.
Above A was S. Lin Xiang reasonably suspected that Country A had forced through this new standard precisely to highlight that they possessed two globally rare S-class ability users.
By the way, China only had one.
At the current stage, when global evolution had barely begun for less than two years, ability users’ ability levels, let alone showing obvious improvement, often regressed for various reasons. This also meant that whatever level one awakened at was basically the level one stayed at.
Of course, exceptions did exist. They were just comparatively rare.
In short, awakening directly as S-class was, in mainstream understanding, basically the current ceiling of combat power. Very few others could surpass that.
No wonder Country A could not hold itself back. Who could resist letting others know when they held a nuclear weapon in their hand?
And to prevent powerful ability users from not reporting themselves and ending up privately controlled by others in some melodramatic situation, all data tested through ability testing machines would be automatically uploaded to the backend. Especially S-class data. There was no way to fake it, and no way to conceal it.
Because of Country A’s sudden move, China was extremely busy for a while. Fortunately, preparations had been made in advance, so society was not thrown into too much turmoil.
China also immediately announced to the public that the First National Fitness Exercise Routine they had been promoting during this period was in fact a natural-energy exercise routine. It would be beneficial for people’s awakening, and could help ease and reduce the possibility of genetic disease as much as possible.
Yes, there was no need to doubt it. The First National Fitness Exercise Routine was adapted from the Basic Body-Refining Manual.
After Lin Zhao gave that book to his younger brother, Lin Xiang began studying it and made modifications that were more suitable for the Chinese people’s constitution.
And during Lin Zhao’s stay in Tianquan City, under arrangements from above, he had led everyone through the routine for a period of time in his livestream room.
At the time, no one had expected that Country A would suddenly announce the existence of natural energy one day in the future. It had only been a test of Lin Zhao’s system, so he had been placed on the livestreaming platform with the highest daily activity, given the biggest traffic support, and paired every day with different currently popular celebrities as his livestream partners. At the time, many people were asking: What background does this little streamer have? What kind of backing? Why does he even have official endorsement?
Lin Zhao became popular like bamboo shoots after rain, suddenly popping up overnight.
The expert team built around Lin Zhao believed that since Lin Zhao’s trading system required him to livestream, there had to be a reason for its existence. Even though 1114 repeatedly emphasized that it was a traditional system and did not do that “fail a mission and get punished” thing. But the experts still wanted Lin Zhao to test what would happen if his audience base became larger.
The facts also proved that whether Lin Zhao became popular on Blue Star or not did make a difference. At the very least, he obtained quite a few system achievements that had almost never moved before. And the higher the achievement, the better the reward.
At the very least, it finally stopped being stingy things like “one free draw” used to fool people.
When Lin Zhao asked why he had not triggered system achievements when his audience base in Kaman was also quite large, the experts proposed all kinds of possibilities. For example, Lin Zhao was from Blue Star, so naturally the system was Blue Star-centered. Or perhaps Kaman’s population was too small, so even if everyone watched, it would still fail to meet the system achievement requirement, and so on.
But that was not important. What was important was that Lin Zhao was really afraid that this group of experts would someday get a sudden idea and make him test whether increasing livestream hours could earn achievement rewards.
He really did not want to face the camera endlessly.
Ahem, back to the topic. The country’s original plan was to proceed gradually: first stir up a nationwide exercise trend, then subtly help everyone accept the matter of natural energy.
As a result, Country A suddenly made a big move. Even if the country did not say anything, everyone understood now. What kind of national exercise was this? It was clearly preliminary cultivation for awakening abilities. Whether foreigners believed in this method or not was hard to say, but the domestic public, who had always had a foundation in immortal cultivation culture, believed it very much. Lin Zhao’s livestream room was instantly flooded by such a frenzied number of viewers that the livestreaming platform crashed.
Before, the authorities had been pushing Lin Zhao’s popularity up. Now, they instead had to urge everyone to treat cultivation rationally, or else beware of cultivation deviation.
The warning about cultivation deviation finally put the brakes on this wave of fervor.
What truly made people start treating the matter rationally was the mass addition of exercise courses, the way the routine entered schools, workplaces, and other parts of daily life in an everyday and standardized manner.
The world was just that annoying. Even if you had superpowers, you still had to go to work when it was time to work.
Lin Zhao’s dead-eyed expression quickly became a viral meme online.
At first, Lin Zhao’s office-worker emotion of obviously not wanting to go to work was not immune to criticism. After all, when a livestream room had a large viewer base, there would always be all kinds of people who disliked some of his behavior. Things like “his attitude isn’t serious,” “if you don’t want this iron rice bowl, then don’t take it,” and similar remarks were everywhere.
But soon, no one said that anymore.
On one hand, everyone discovered that the list of adaptors for this exercise routine included the names of the Lin brothers, Lin Zhao and Lin Xiang. In other words, without this salted fish, there would be no exercise routine.
On the other hand…
Lin Zhao’s test results came out.
S-class.
Everything that had happened around him, all the changes and attention, instantly became reasonable.
After all, this was S-class.
Obviously, the golden finger of plane trading could not be made public, so the authorities needed to give Lin Zhao’s existence a reasonable explanation. But no one knew exactly how they discussed it. In any case, the experts did not think making Lin Zhao appear low-key and ordinary to the outside world was a good choice. Just like everyone knew that Ms. Zeng Chunhua was one of the very few brain-domain evolvers in the world, Lin Zhao’s current public identity was one of the only two S-class ability users in the entire country.
This both made others wary of his strength and prevented them from acting rashly, while also giving a reasonable explanation for the treatment he received.
At first, the higher-ups had discussed finding a way to make Lin Zhao an A-class ability user. A-class was also rare enough. They had not expected Lin Zhao himself to be so capable.
Yes, the ability level detected from Lin Zhao was a proper, genuine S-class.
Country A had not even had time to rejoice for long about being the only country in the world with two S-class ability users before China also had two.
In Country A’s secret statistics, they had originally known that China had one.
Just as they had only one brain-domain evolver.
Brain-domain evolution was far too special and was not counted within the ABC letter-grade system. It was a separate field of equal importance.
In short, Country A had always felt that they were special, that they were the chosen nation. Otherwise, how could they possess a pair of S-class twins all at once?
But China was not inferior either.
It was even better, because among all known S-class ability users in the world, Lin Zhao was the youngest one.
![After Waking Up I Inherited the Earth [Interstellar]](https://i1.wp.com/panda-translations.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/20220822190944_300_420.jpg?resize=151,215 "After Waking Up I Inherited the Earth [Interstellar]")
