But now, he naturally associates Douyin with cultural invasion, blurting it out as a matter of course. This is probably the biggest change the golden dome has brought him, making his thinking deeper and broader.

Of course, Grace Bennett was never a fool to begin with. Among the four brothers in the dorm, Grace Bennett has always been known as a know-it-all. He loved reading miscellaneous books since childhood, looking at all sorts of random things, and is someone with extremely broad interests.

William Clark stroked his chin. “Hearing you say that, Douyin really does seem to have a bright future.”

“Of course,” Grace Bennett said. “The important thing isn’t Douyin itself, but the cultural phenomenon behind it. Plus, Douyin’s parent company is ByteDance. The app Toutiao is also from their company.”

“If I’m not mistaken, Douyin will definitely surpass Baidu and, in the future, become a player on the same level as Tencent and Alibaba.”

Although Grace Bennett said this, he actually didn’t care much about whether Douyin could really become a giant. After all, no matter how strong Douyin and Toutiao get, their boss Zhang Yiming wouldn’t give him even a penny.

Grace Bennett was just thinking about how to ride the wave of Douyin’s global popularity and make some money.

Global popularity...

Grace Bennett suddenly froze. Domestic Douyin and overseas TIKTOK are not connected, which means foreigners can’t see domestic Douyin content, and domestic Douyin users can’t see overseas content either.

If a platform could be made to convert content between the two sides...

No.

Too simple, not attractive enough.

Then how about making a ranking list?

If all the short videos from Douyin, both domestic and overseas, were brought together to make a global ranking...

Chapter 003 Borrowing Money

Lenin said, don’t be a giant in thought and a dwarf in action.

Grace Bennett already had a money-making idea. The only problem was how to put the idea into practice.

Not long after, Ryan Carter and Edward Harris came back from playing basketball. The four of them went to the cafeteria for dinner together. When they returned to the dorm, the three roommates, as usual, threw themselves into the world of gaming.

Grace Bennett used listening to a novel as an excuse, lay on his bed with headphones on, closed his eyes and thought, going over the afternoon’s ideas again and again, tirelessly perfecting the structure and details.

The ticking sounds in his ears continued. Grace Bennett’s brain was like a hard drive, constantly receiving new data. As the transmission went on, the knowledge stored in his mind was gradually refined.

With his eyes closed, Grace Bennett seemed to walk into that mysterious alien civilization’s library. He selected from his memories, trying to turn knowledge into code he could write. Thinking things through before taking action was a habit Grace Bennett had developed since childhood.

As night deepened, his roommates climbed into bed one after another and drifted off to sleep.

But Grace Bennett, like a night wanderer, suddenly opened his eyes, sat up from bed, flipped open his laptop, and his fingers flew across the keyboard.

As his fingers danced rapidly, lines of code appeared at the top of the screen, more and more, like swarms of little tadpoles.

Grace Bennett’s eyes followed the cursor, gradually entering a state of total absorption.

When people work in a state of flow, their efficiency is astonishing. By the time he noticed his surroundings, dawn was already approaching.

Using his programming software to check, Grace Bennett found that in just one night, he had written over two thousand lines of code.

You know, even the Windows 10 operating system is made up of about seventy million lines of code. That’s the top masterpiece in human programming history, the result of tens of thousands of veteran programmers working for years.

Grace Bennett wrote, in just one night, the equivalent of one thirty-five-thousandth of Windows 10’s code. This level of efficiency could definitely be called terrifying.

According to Grace Bennett’s calculations, the first version of the program would require about forty thousand lines of code in total. There was still a long way to go.

Grace Bennett closed his laptop, plugged it in to charge, then pulled the blanket over himself and fell asleep. His head had barely touched the pillow before he was already dreaming.

He woke again close to eight in the morning. Even though he’d only slept three hours, Grace Bennett felt full of energy. It even seemed like he’d improved the program again in his dreams—something that had never happened to him before.

His roommates had already washed up and were getting ready to buy some buns at the cafeteria, eating as they went to class. They’d had a great time gaming last night, so they got up a bit late.

“I’m not going today. Remember to answer roll call for me,” Grace Bennett said from under the covers.

“Got it, you lazybones,” Ryan Carter muttered, closing the door.

After they left, Grace Bennett jumped up with his fully charged laptop.

In the school’s four-person dorms, the upper bunk is a bed, and the lower is a desk and chair. He opened his computer on the desk, felt that going to the cafeteria was too time-consuming, so he just grabbed a pack of instant noodles to eat dry, then drank a cup of coffee.

In just one morning, Grace Bennett wrote another two thousand lines of code. He felt like his speed was getting faster and faster, probably because he was becoming more and more familiar with the knowledge.