Chapter Sixteen: Total Domination

Li Mu slept until after noon, but even so, he had barely gotten six hours of rest. His mind had been consumed with thoughts of the Stone Age Overlord, so the quality of his sleep was far from ideal.

When he awoke, his parents had already left for work. Li Mu prepared to call Zhao Kang, planning to head to the internet café together to check on the current spread of Stone Age Overlord.

Before releasing the program, he had specifically registered a new QQ number, which he left on the cheat tool with a note stating, “For business cooperation, please contact.” He was eager to see if anyone would reach out to him.

Just as he stepped into the living room, the phone rang.

It was Zhao Kang.

Like Li Mu, Zhao Kang hadn’t slept well. Although he didn’t understand much about technology or cheat programs, he had battled through the night at his computer, experiencing firsthand the concept of “water armies” that Li Mu had mentioned, the elaborate traps of self-questioning and answering, and the subtle, pervasive power they wielded.

Once tasted, he was eager to see how their labor would be received by the online community. The two agreed over the phone to meet at the entrance of their apartment complex and then headed straight to the Big Spider internet café.

The first forum post had already reached eighty thousand views, with 54,301 downloads, and 9,791 replies.

Even Li Mu was stunned, not just Zhao Kang.

Zhao Kang excitedly tallied the downloads across several forums—within twelve short hours, the total downloads had soared to around 120,000.

A free, quality tool in this age of scarcity could indeed unleash tremendous collective power, gathering netizens together. After downloading the free cheat, they rushed to use it, then returned to the forums to post their thanks, and of course, spread the good word to friends and fellow players in the game.

Li Mu reflected: back then, the free candle cheat for Legend, with its single, feeble function, had quickly spread to nearly all Legend players. Truly, this was the diamond age of the internet—plant a seed anywhere online, and there was a chance it would grow into a towering tree.

…

Far away in a residential flat in Zhongguancun, Yanjing, seven or eight young men were sweating bullets.

These were the entire staff of Abe Cheat.

They had formed from the merger of the Abe and Qianyu cheat teams. Initially, the two groups had been fierce rivals—Qianyu released a paid version first, Abe’s team grew envious of their earnings and soon launched a similar cheat, offering it for free to disrupt the market. Qianyu suffered, and eventually, for mutual profit, they merged.

For months since the merger, they had nearly monopolized the Stone Age cheat market and had made considerable profits—the June settlement alone exceeded two hundred thousand yuan.

They had planned to ride the summer holiday wave in July to push earnings to three hundred thousand, had begun reorganizing their sales team, aiming to bypass provincial agents and root themselves directly in the retail end. But at the height of their confidence, last night, a developer from their team happened upon Zhao Kang’s post.

At first, the developer downloaded the Stone Age Overlord trial version with a dismissive attitude. After a brief test, he felt as if he had plunged into an icy abyss, chilled from scalp to soles.

The whole team was soon stunned by this suddenly emergent cheat tool.

Abe’s team had once been the disruptor themselves, using a free trial version to catch Qianyu off guard, like a rogue offering two choices: either neither makes money, or both profit together. Qianyu eventually compromised. Disruptors like these had nothing to lose—they’d never made money, so had nothing at stake. Qianyu, having tasted success, was reluctant to let go.

Now, someone else was using the same tactic to shake up the market.

The most damning part: Stone Age Overlord’s functions were vastly superior to Abe Cheat’s, and it was much more convenient and smooth to use.

It was like “Sunrise Yanggang” preparing to hold a ticketed concert using “Springtime” as a gimmick, only for Wang Feng himself to show up in the same city and host his own concert—for free.

It was bullying—how could they compete?

The man in charge after the merger was Sun Peng, formerly the founder of Qianyu. After Abe’s disruption, he absorbed their team, splitting the pot with them. Since Abe’s free version had garnered massive popularity, everyone decided to stick with Abe Cheat.

Sun Peng had thought that, with the merger, there would be no real competitors left in the market. But now, this Stone Age Overlord had appeared out of nowhere.

Since morning, Sun Peng’s phone had not stopped ringing.

In those days, when both incoming and outgoing calls were charged—several cents per minute—Sun Peng felt his heart bleed with every call.

Every call was from his agents.

Agents were generally divided by province. Abe Cheat would appoint one agent per province, responsible for expanding into city and county internet cafés, with the sales terminal being the countless internet cafés below.

Now, many customers who had bought Abe Cheat at internet cafés were demanding refunds. The reason was simple: they felt cheated. Having just bought the cheat, a vastly superior and free version appeared online—who could tolerate that?

Although the customers demanding refunds were somewhat unreasonable, the situation lent itself to righteous indignation. Paying users had nowhere to vent their frustrations and couldn’t reach Sun Peng’s team, so they targeted the internet cafés that had sold them the cheat.

For café owners, cheat sales were merely a side business—the main business was the daily flow of gamers. Offending these clients would hurt their livelihood.

So, café owners immediately protested to their agents. Agents, unable to withstand the pressure from so many cafés, turned to Sun Peng with a single demand: refund customers whose subscriptions hadn’t expired.

Some agents even proposed what seemed a fair refund plan: fifteen yuan per month, fifty cents a day, and whatever days remained in the customer’s account would be refunded in cash at fifty cents per day.

Sun Peng wanted to refuse, but he couldn’t.

Their current marketing model was unhealthy, and he had no real say.

He handled cheat development and issued monthly activation codes to provincial agents, who then distributed them to the internet cafés.

Because the sales terminal had sunk all the way down to internet cafés, and cheat sales were only a side business, cafés were unwilling to prepay agents. Thus, the cash flow and activation code distribution were reversed.

Funds were collected by cafés, settled monthly with agents, who then paid Sun Peng. Every activation code sold required the café owner to guarantee a four-yuan profit; otherwise, with only a few dozen or at most a hundred codes sold per month, the money was too little to bother—sales, record-keeping, remittance to agents, all for just three or four hundred yuan, barely enough to pay a system administrator.

After all, an internet café had only a few dozen machines, so how much business could it generate? Among the customers, some came to chat, some to play offline games, and only a small fraction played Stone Age—of those, an even smaller fraction would pay for cheats.

Thus, each activation code reaching the provincial agent was further docked by three yuan—the agents weren’t easy either, as they had to send people to visit each café, which was costly and labor-intensive.

After layer upon layer of deductions, Sun Peng was left with only eight yuan per code, which had to cover substantial costs—rent, equipment, server fees, several technicians earning thousands per month (just their salaries totaled twenty or thirty thousand), plus living expenses.

Within the team, there were two core members with equity who also took shares. After all was divided, Sun Peng himself had little left each month.

Looking at the agents’ refund demands, Sun Peng realized that even if he refused, it wouldn’t matter—the money from this month’s sales was all still with the cafés, who could simply refuse to hand it over. Even the provincial agents were powerless.

Sun Peng gritted his teeth. “Fine, refunds can be done, but after refunding, all accounts must be reported to us so we can deactivate them!”

The distributors ignored him. They were shrewd enough to realize that Stone Age Overlord’s sudden popularity could wipe out Abe Cheat in an instant, and future cooperation seemed unlikely.

After more than an hour of continuous calls, Sun Peng’s face was ashen, and the seven or eight people in the studio were equally despondent. All had some programming skills, but to be honest, their technical level was mediocre. A glance at Stone Age Overlord was enough for them to see the gap—like the special effects team of a web drama seeing those of a Hollywood blockbuster, they knew their place.

“Boss, what do we do?”

In this guerrilla-like team, Sun Peng played the leader—distributors depended on him, everyone relied on him for their income.

Sun Peng’s expression was grim. “The distributors are adamant about refunds, so it looks like we won’t get any money for July.”

“That’s over a hundred thousand!” They had calculated sales, and after subtracting distributor and sales profits, the studio’s own profit had just topped one hundred thousand, now seemingly out of reach…

At that moment, a technician blurted out, “Their total downloads just broke two hundred thousand!”