After a short while, an Asian mixed-race man walked into the company. He greeted Thor, crossed his arms, and watched David Carter install the equipment. Soon, Thor finished his call and beckoned Miss Jenkins aside for a brief conversation. Miss Jenkins, visibly agitated, took her leave... After that, only three men remained in the room.

Mr. Thor called over the busy David Carter, pointed to the Asian man who had just entered, and introduced him: “I’m getting old, my hands aren’t as nimble as they used to be. This young man will play a competitive game with you to test the machine’s response speed. You know, for companies like ours, speed is everything—a one-second delay could cost us hundreds of millions, so we require the machine’s response time to be fast enough…”

Chapter 7: Joy Turns to Sorrow

Before coming, David Carter had pre-installed several Chinese-localized games on the computer, but the other party couldn’t read Chinese and was clearly dissatisfied with the localized games, while David Carter himself couldn’t understand the English versions... After a few minutes of discussion, they decided to download an English version of CS from the internet that both sides were familiar with.

After several hours of effort, the game was finally downloaded, but as soon as the interface opened, David Carter noticed that this version was slightly different from the publicly released market version of CS. Its scenes were more complex, the graphics more detailed, and there were more game variables. David Carter recalled with surprise the download website—it was the Asian mixed-race man who had downloaded the game, and he vaguely remembered that it wasn’t the official CS website.

Running such a large-scale game truly tested the machine’s performance. Fortunately, David Carter had brought a pile of spare parts, allowing him to tweak and test while running the game. Whenever he noticed any lag, he would immediately swap in new components and optimize the program from time to time—this process was repetitive and tedious. But Mr. Thor was generous; he had already promised to buy David Carter’s machine at a 30% premium and was also willing to pay a 30% tuning fee. Because of this, the boss Brian Cooper instructed David Carter: even if the other party wanted to test for a whole week, he should stick with it, and during this period, David Carter didn’t need to worry about the shop.

With Brian Cooper’s promise, David Carter did some calculations himself. After deducting the boss’s share of the profit, he could pocket about thirty thousand yuan from this deal—almost equivalent to more than half a year’s income for him. So, no matter what the other party requested, he would comply without a word of complaint.

After two days and nights of hard work, all the computer components were finally tuned and optimized, and the competition reached a fever pitch. The Asian man took off his shirt and went into battle bare-chested, shouting as he and David Carter began their duel.

In shooting games, the unpredictability of human-versus-human competition is much greater than that of human-versus-machine. David Carter was a CS veteran, but after being headshotted five times in a row, and hearing the other party constantly shout, “Faster! Faster... still not enough, still not enough,” the self-proclaimed expert David Carter couldn’t help but feel a surge of anger. He went to splash his face with cold water, pulled himself together, and sat back down for a new round.

This time, the match lasted a long while, with both sides trading wins and losses, the score neck and neck. During the intense battle, David Carter vaguely felt that Miss Jenkins had come by, perhaps handed Thor a resume, and maybe even paused briefly in front of their computer screens... but David Carter’s attention was entirely on the game, and he didn’t have time to greet her.

He didn’t know how much time had passed, but the score had reached eighteen to nineteen. It felt like they had battled all night, and dawn was breaking. David Carter finally achieved a rare victory, locking the score at twenty to eighteen—this time, after emptying his AK47’s magazine, he didn’t have time to reload and simply pulled out his pistol to blow the opponent’s head off.

The joy of victory made David Carter stand up and cheer uncontrollably, but just as he relaxed his focus, he suddenly felt dizzy and lightheaded, as if his consciousness had jumped into a tunnel. The tunnel’s terrain resembled a computer’s circuit board, with capacitors, resistors, and integrated chips towering like buildings, forming a maze of roads. His consciousness was running through this city made of integrated circuits, capacitors, and resistors...

He sat down instinctively, but his body was swaying unsteadily. At that moment, he vaguely felt the Asian mixed-race man supporting him, and faintly heard him ask, “What’s wrong?”

As the Asian man spoke, his hand naturally touched David Carter’s neck. The moment his fingers landed on David Carter, David Carter’s consciousness gave a loud “boom,” as if it had been pulled out of his body. His soul floated into the air, looking down coldly at his own body, which was still fiercely battling in front of the computer screen, as if his body was still intently playing the game with the Asian man.

Immediately after, David Carter’s thoughts sped up, the scenes seemed to rewind, and time traced backward from the present: David Carter saw himself starting to tune equipment at Sauron Capital, saw himself and Miss Jenkins moving the machine into Sauron Capital... As the playback sped up, in the blink of an eye, David Carter seemed to return to the time just after graduating from university.

His consciousness paused briefly here, then quickly rewound again. David Carter’s short life flashed before his eyes in that instant, and in the blink of an eye, he was back in his childhood. Those long-forgotten fragments of memory surfaced one by one. He saw his mother worrying day and night about his father’s illness, he saw many things from his childhood that he couldn’t understand at the time, and in this moment, he understood it all.