84: Chapter 84: Ten Thousand Hearts Win Loyalty, Five Hundred Thousand Tech Points Break the Stalemate

Sister Liu picked up her tray and shoveled rice into her mouth, chewing the grains mixed with tears.

"I'm not aggrieved."

Sister Liu swallowed her food. "I just feel like I've finally lived like a human being today. From now on, my life belongs to Chenguang Electronics. Once my daughter's illness is cured, I'll have her come to the factory to work for Manager Lu too."

"Manager Lu doesn't need your daughter to work; you just focus on doing your own job well." Zhang Xiufang bit off a shrimp whisker.

Thousands of tables were filled with people, and some started sobbing while they ate.

People at the same table held hands, and some picked up plastic cups filled with cold water. They raised their cups to toast each other from across the table.

Under the floodlights, dozens of half-meter-high iron buckets were all empty.

Lin Dayong felt his arms were too sore to lift. He threw the half-meter-long iron ladle into an empty bucket, the ladle hitting the wall of the bucket with a dull thud.

He took off his crooked chef's hat and used the white towel draped around his neck to vigorously wipe the sweat from his face.

Old Zhou walked over, carrying his chipped thermos. He unscrewed the lid, took a big gulp of warm water soaked with Pangdahai, coughed twice, his throat completely hoarse.

"Old Lin, you've worked hard," Old Zhou said.

"Hard work, my ass."

Lin Dayong kicked the empty bucket on the ground with his toe.

"I've been a chef for twenty years. At Jinlan, I spent every day frying ribs for those suited-up big shots. Those people ate that stuff just to look fancy."

"But today, these brothers are eating meat to survive. Seeing them enjoy it so much makes me swing my knife with real spirit."

Old Zhou put the lid back on his thermos and turned to look at the dense crowd in the square.

"Over ten thousand people in total, over ten thousand mouths," Old Zhou said, his voice tight.

"Serving ribs and shrimp for every meal for three days has cost millions in real cash. The factory manager's move is something even the gods couldn't have anticipated."

"You're telling me," Lin Dayong said, pointing to a corner not far away. "Old Zhou, look at those three over there."

Old Zhou looked in the direction Lin Dayong was pointing.

Three rough-looking men in their forties had finished all the ribs and rice in their basin.

They poured a bottle of mineral water into the greasy basin, swirled it around a couple of times, and then took turns drinking the meat broth from the basin.

After finishing, the three of them squatted on the ground, wiping their eyes.

Old Zhou turned his head and craned his neck to look toward the office building.

On the third floor of the office building, the floor-to-ceiling windows of Lu Chen's office were lit with a cold white light.

Lu Chen stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window, overlooking the brightly lit factory square.

He didn't go straight to the construction site in the north of the city; instead, he detoured back to his office to pick up the kraft paper bag containing the official red-headed document.

He pulled a silver windproof lighter from his pocket, flipped the lid open, spun the wheel to light his cigarette, and snapped the lid shut with a crisp click.

In his mind, the system's pale blue interface suddenly popped up, and the data bars on the screen scrolled frantically at a speed invisible to the naked eye.

Electronic notification sounds merged into a continuous stream, like a tsunami passing through.

[Ding~ Detected extreme emotional reversal in ten thousand new employees; loyalty is soaring across the board.]

[Employee Liu Cuihua's loyalty has exceeded 95%...]

[Employee Li Tiezhu's loyalty has reached a 100% deadlock...]

[Employee Sun Dafu's loyalty has reached a 100% deadlock...]

[Employee Qian Duobao's loyalty has exceeded 95%...]

The list scrolled extremely fast; the entire screen was filled with full golden loyalty bars.

Lu Chen took a drag of his cigarette. This was the logic of the grassroots.

If you treat them like cattle and horses, they will only smash the machines behind your back. If you treat them like human beings, they will dare to lay down their lives for the assembly line.

This afternoon, using Baldy Zhao's incident, he welded the doors shut to set the rules, using thunderous measures to immediately clear out over five hundred troublemakers who had been egging others on.

The remaining eleven thousand seven hundred-plus people were all honest folks pushed into a corner by life. Once honest people see the light, their hearts are set on following you to the end.

The system panel suddenly flashed with dazzling golden light, and the entire interface turned gold.

The font size instantly magnified, filling his entire field of vision.

[Ten Thousand People Slay critical hit triggered, loyalty overflow bonus calculation complete.]

[Host's net cash inflow for today: 117 million.]

117 million—this was just the single-day revenue brought in by this batch of new employees today.

Lu Chen exhaled a cloud of white smoke. Spending a few million to treat them to tomahawk steaks to calm their nerves—this amount of money wasn't even a fraction of a percent compared to the system's critical hit.

But that wasn't the main point. The system's voice suddenly rose an octave.

[Ding! Daily output of tech points has ushered in an epic-level quantum leap.]

[Detected a massive surge in the number of employees with maxed-out loyalty; calculating additional output bonus.]

Lu Chen looked up at the tech points balance bar at the very top of the system panel.

The original balance of over 180,000 tech points completely lost control; the numbers rolled so fast they created a blur.

200,000... 300,000... 400,000...

[Host's current tech points balance has surged past 500,000.]

The number finally locked firmly at 513,420.

The finger holding the cigarette paused.

500,000 tech points.

With this massive amount of data falling into place, the daily output stacked by two SSS-level employees, Chen Hao and Song Changming, along with these ten thousand-plus die-hard workers, had completely torn open the gateway to the system's highest-level permissions.

All the modified equipment needed for the Lithography Machine ultra-clean workshop, all the purification machines needed for the water curtain, even if it meant forcefully extracting physical parts from the system that weren't on the blueprints—these tech points were more than enough to splurge on.

Lu Chen stood in front of the mahogany desk and pulled open the bottom drawer.

Inside the drawer lay the top-secret red kraft paper bag handed over by Zhou Changming of the Provincial Party Committee. He tossed his car keys onto the desk, his gaze still fixed on that eye-catching string of numbers on his retina.

513,420 points.

Over ten thousand honest people with nowhere else to turn had forcefully smashed out this astronomical number with their maxed-out loyalty.

Chen Jianming and Wei Jianguo had received the blueprints for the Lithography Machine, Old Zhou had arranged five thousand experts, Zhao Tiezhu was digging a pit in the north of the city, and Song Changming was crouching at the bottom of the pit, drawing sketches of the water curtain wall.

But Lu Chen knew very well that this wasn't enough.

The Lithography Machine was a vital national asset. The core components on those blueprints required ultra-precision guide rail metal and grating shell materials with extremely high light transmittance.

No matter how skilled Wei Jianguo was, he couldn't conjure up this kind of ultra-low impurity special alloy. China's current traditional blast furnace metallurgy technology simply couldn't refine metal of this purity.

When foreign capital throttled you, they never did it in just one way. If you couldn't buy top-tier special steel, the Lithography Machine blueprints were just a piece of waste paper.

Lu Chen reached out and stubbed out his cigarette.

"System, open the high-level hidden page of the mall."

The pale blue screen instantly stretched, and countless dense, grayed-out entries scrolled before his eyes, with only a few at the top emitting a faint golden light.

Lu Chen's gaze skipped over those miscellaneous pieces of equipment worth thousands or tens of thousands, locking directly onto the line of large characters at the very top of the list.