Chapter 17 The genius girl Xia Weiliang has been tricked into joining a pirate ship.

Chu Xuan was speeding down the asphalt roads of Donghai City in a borrowed black Santana.

"Young Master, our website orders are already backed up until next month!"

Chu Xuan shouted excitedly while honking the horn aggressively.

"At this rate, won't we be able to crush Bolang Mobile by the end of the year?"

Lu Jingming sat in the passenger seat, rolling the window down just a crack.

"Crush them? My ass."

He exhaled a ring of smoke, his eyes clear.

"The success of xinghai generation 1 relies on information asymmetry and aggressive marketing. This gadget has no technological moat."

"In half a month at most, those guys in Huaqiangbei will be able to copy it eight or nine times out of ten."

The smile on Chu Xuan's face froze, and he slammed on the brakes, nearly rear-ending the bus in front.

"Then what do we do? Old Li and the others are using soldering irons and flying wires all day; they can handle assembly, but that's about it."

"If we actually ask them to design a motherboard architecture, that's like asking a bull to do needlepoint—they'll just stare at each other in confusion!"

Lu Jingming stubbed out his cigarette and pointed to the white building ahead.

"That's why we're here to pick up some 'high-end goods'."

The Santana pulled up outside the main gate of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microelectronics.

Lu Jingming bypassed the security guard with familiar ease, following a route from his memory straight to the end of the third-floor corridor.

This was a state-level scientific research hub; the corridor was so quiet that only their footsteps could be heard.

He pushed open the half-closed laboratory door.

A thick smell of braised beef instant noodles wafted out.

At a workstation by the window, a girl in an oversized lab coat was slumped over.

Her hair was as messy as a bird's nest, with a ballpoint pen stuck in it to hold it in place.

The girl was staring intently at the dense circuit diagrams on the computer screen, her hands typing furiously on the keyboard.

With two heavy dark circles under her eyes and pale skin, she looked just like a research zombie that had just crawled out of the ground.

This was the target Lu Jingming was looking for, the future Mother of Domestic Chips—Xia Weiliang.

Chu Xuan leaned over to take a look at the screen and immediately felt dizzy.

"Miss, excuse me…"

"Get lost."

Xia Weiliang didn't even lift her head, her voice crisp but devoid of any emotion.

"Don't disturb me while I'm running data. If you're here to sell equipment, go out, turn left, and find logistics."

Chu Xuan was so choked up he rolled his eyes; this girl had quite the temper.

Lu Jingming wasn't annoyed; he strode over to the computer and lowered his head to scan the underlying architecture on the screen.

"The bus bandwidth is set too narrow; your redundancy mechanism can't even run with this."

He rested his hands on the desk, pointing out the crux of the issue with surgical precision.

"With this shitty blueprint of yours, forget about smart interaction; you'd get frame drops playing Tetris."

The sound of typing stopped abruptly.

Xia Weiliang turned her head sharply, her piercing gaze like two awls.

She pushed up the heavy black-rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose, looking at Lu Jingming as if he were an idiot.

"You understand underlying architecture? This is the most advanced X86 simplified scheme in the country!"

"Advanced?"

Lu Jingming sneered and fished a crumpled piece of A4 paper out of his pocket.

"Slap."

This partial blueprint of the "Xinghai OS Underlying Hardware Adaptation Architecture," produced by the system, was slapped heavily onto the desk.

"A frog in a well. See for yourself what a real future architecture is."

Xia Weiliang glanced at it with disdain.

But at that one glance, her gaze was glued to it as if by superglue.

Those eyes, originally full of bloodshot veins, instantly burst with astonishing light.

She snatched the paper, her face almost pressed against the blueprint.

"This... this chip routing logic! How can it be so clean?"

Xia Weiliang's voice began to tremble, and even her breathing became rapid.

"Completely abandoning traditional instruction set packaging? Directly calling system resources from the underlying hardware?"

She scrambled to pull a high-magnification magnifying glass from the drawer and leaned over the table to examine it inch by inch.

As she looked, she gasped.

A genius's intuition told her that this half of a partial blueprint was enough to forcibly push existing digital technology forward by ten years!

"Incredible! This is simply a work of art!"

Xia Weiliang suddenly raised her head and grabbed Lu Jingming's sleeve.

The original coldness of "do not disturb" completely vanished, replaced by fanaticism.

"Where is the second half? How is the memory scheduling part drawn? Show me quickly!"

Lu Jingming unhurriedly brushed her hand away and pulled the partial blueprint back.

"The blueprint is at my factory. Want to see it? Earn it with your skills."

Xia Weiliang froze for a moment, then bit her lip hard.

"You want me to do private work for you? No way, the institute has regulations; outsourcing requires the director's signature."

"Signature? Writing reports? Waiting for approval?"

Lu Jingming crossed his arms and looked down at this naive genius girl.

"To apply for 100,000 yuan in tape-out funding, how many people do you have to treat to dinner? How many pages of PPT that no one reads do you have to write?"

Xia Weiliang's eyes dimmed.

Lu Jingming's words were like precision-guided missiles, directly flattening her psychological defenses.

Just yesterday, her project proposal for a new motherboard architecture had been killed by the director for being "impractical."

"Come with me, to my Xinghai Technology."

Lu Jingming leaned down slightly, his tone carrying a deadly temptation.

"Funding is uncapped. If you want the stars in the sky, I'll build a spaceship to fetch them for you."

"No one will make you write reports, and no one will force you to publish papers. You just need to follow my blueprints and build the physical product."

Workshop, blueprints, unlimited funding.

For a hardcore tech geek, these three words were more effective than any sweet talk.

Xia Weiliang didn't hesitate for even a second.

She tore off her white lab coat, revealing the washed-out cartoon T-shirt underneath.

Then she bent down and dragged a huge canvas bag full of hard drives and drafts from under the table.

"Let's go."

She carried the bag on her back, crisp and decisive.

Chu Xuan was stunned on the side, his jaw almost hitting his feet.

"Miss, aren't you afraid we're human traffickers? You didn't even ask about the salary!"

"As long as I have that second half of the blueprint, a meal is enough."

Xia Weiliang pushed past Chu Xuan and walked out the door without looking back.

Lu Jingming watched her back, the corners of his mouth curling into the smile of a successful old fox.

This wasn't just poaching; this was moving the whole person along with the load-bearing wall.

Half an hour later, the Santana drove into the gate of Xinghai Electronics Factory.

As soon as Xia Weiliang got out of the car, she didn't even look at the surroundings and headed straight for the R&D laboratory.

"Bang."

The laboratory door was slammed shut, followed by the crisp sound of it being locked.

Shen Qingqiu was walking into the courtyard in high heels, holding a stack of financial reports.

She looked at the closed door, her beautiful eyebrows knitting into a knot.

"Lu Jingming, where did you kidnap this vagrant from? We are a high-tech enterprise, not a shelter."

Lu Jingming patted the dust off his hands, smiling meaningfully.

"That is our future chief scientist, the anchor of Xinghai."

He turned around and strode toward the conference room on the first floor.

"Chu Xuan, go call Dazhuang and Old Li over."

"Tell all executives to drop what they're doing and hold a meeting immediately."

Five minutes later, the conference room was full of people.

The air was filled with the smell of cheap tobacco and mung bean soup.

Dazhuang was wiping the sweat from his forehead, Old Li was still wearing an anti-static wrist strap, and Chu Xuan and Shen Qingqiu sat on opposite sides.

"Young Master, why did you get us all together so urgently? Are we planning the second-generation miracle machine?"

Niu Dazhuang grinned, looking eager to try.

"Competitors are all rolling out 3-megapixel cameras now; shouldn't we do one too?"

Old Li pushed up his thick-rimmed glasses and chimed in.

"Yes, yes, we need to arrange a color screen too. We have money in our account this time; we must beat them on appearance!"

Listening to the suggestions of these two rough men, Lu Jingming picked up the whiteboard marker on the table and spun it on his fingertips.

"Rolling pixels? Rolling color screens?"

He sneered, turned around, and drew a huge cross on the whiteboard behind him.

The chalk scratched across the blackboard with a harsh, grating sound.

The conference room instantly quieted down.

"Those are all cheap tricks played out by competitors. If we want to roll, we roll something that can flip their tables."

Lu Jingming rested his hands on the table, his gaze sweeping over everyone present, his eyes arrogant.

Old Li shrank his neck, intimidated by the aura.

He swallowed his saliva and tentatively tested the waters.

"If we don't roll hardware, then what exactly is the selling point of our next-generation machine?"