NOVPUB"Damn Lai Niao Ming, stole my veggies again!"
"Haha~ Stupid idiot, who told you not to buy dog food!"
"I really don’t get what’s so fun about QQ Farm, it’s just a pirated game. I almost maxed out on Happy Farm!"
"Then don’t play. What crap is Renren Net, QQ is ten thousand times better!"
"Pirated dog!"
"Superiority dog!"
"..."
In the school’s computer lab, the class erupted into noise the moment the computer teacher stepped out.
It wasn’t long before the teacher returned from the restroom, and the verbal battle escalated online.
Watching the class group chat fill up with accusations of QQ Speed copying Kart Racing, QQ Hall copying Dan Dan Tang, and CF copying CS, Xu Qingfan couldn’t help but laugh.
[These cute middle schoolers, actually quarreling over such things.] he thought to himself.
"Tsk tsk tsk~ such childish middle schoolers." Xu Qingfan shook his head helplessly, how could they not be mature like him.
Not long after, his phone buzzed in his pocket. Xu Qingfan immediately closed the chat screen and clicked on the QQ Zone icon; his crops were about to ripen!
However, when he clicked in, he discovered that two-thirds of the crops in his field had been stolen. Had it not been for the system’s minimum guarantee mechanism, probably not even that two-thirds would have been left.
After Xu Qingfan collected his crops with one click, the next second their six-person group chat started buzzing nonstop.
He didn’t need to check to know what was happening—his crops had been stolen by a few people.
[Brother Qing Fan, I stole your crops again!]
[Thanks to the generosity of nature.]
A few girls took screenshots of their successful crop theft and posted them in the chat group, simultaneously laughing loudly at Xu Qingfan.
[Ah~ Brother Fan, why didn’t you tell me your crops were ripe!]
Xiao Ruawen opened the lively chat group, feeling a regret akin to missing out on WeChat red packets in the future.
"Browsing Potato Net again?" The seats in the computer room were arranged by student number, Xiao Ruawen was sitting next to him. Xu Qingfan patted the girl’s shoulder and asked.
"Yep, Brother Fan, let me show you." The girl immediately opened her Potato Net homepage, "We already have fifty thousand followers, the last video broke a million views, and there are lots of comments!"
"Brother Fan, look, many are asking for an update." Xiao Ruawen blinked furiously to hint.
"I’ll write it for you during the summer break then." The power of flirty eyes was immense, Xu Qingfan had to agree reluctantly.
"Okay! Then I’ll tell them it will be updated during summer break." The girl beamed joyously, then went back to engaging with netizens online.
Xu Qingfan shook his head and turned his gaze back to the computer screen, planting white radishes in the empty yellow soil of his farm.
After Lin Wanning saw that Xu Qingfan had planted the crops, she immediately picked up her phone and set an alarm for two hours later, so she could steal the crops the moment they were ripe.
Although Xu Qingfan planted the least valuable crops, because it was stealing from Brother Qing Fan, the girl still felt happy, even happier than successfully stealing from a hundred other friends!
[Brother Qing Fan, why do you always plant radishes? They’re not worth much!] Lin Wanning curiously asked in the group.
[Because radishes give the most experience, they mature every two hours. Didn’t you see I’m the highest level in our friends’ list?] Xu Qingfan typed with a smile.
"Soga!" The girl suddenly realized, and then typed: [I thought Brother Qing Fan secretly spent money on fertilizer!]
Xu Qingfan didn’t reply anymore and quit the QQ farm before opening the page to snatch a parking spot.
All four parking spots at his house were filled, naturally by the five girls from the group, who also fiercely demanded that Xu Qingfan not seal off the spots, threatening to fall out with him if he did!
Perhaps because he had company, playing these two games again brought back the feeling from his past life. The sensation of stealing vegetables from each other and competing for levels and coins was still pretty good.
Xu Qingfan remembered that the peak popularity of QQ Farm was around 2010 and 2011, coinciding with the World Cup, during which the World Cup betting event in the farm attracted countless eyeballs.
Then came QQ Ranch, and both games made a fortune, profits that many public companies could only dream of.
As he was reminiscing, the QQ icon suddenly shook. He clicked it and, to his surprise, it was his mom!
[You little rascal, aren’t you supposed to be in school? How come you just stole my vegetables? Are you playing with your phone in class again?]
Xu Qingfan helplessly shrugged his shoulders, realizing he had accidentally stolen his mom’s vegetables just now.
[Good afternoon, Auntie. I’m Wu Lingyu. We are having a computer class at school, and Brother Fan is doing his math homework. I was the one logging into QQ.] He immediately typed, imitating Wu Lingyu’s tone.
[Oh, it’s Yu! Sorry to disturb your class then!] Yao Jiping’s attitude changed 180 degrees, and after finishing, she even sent him three roses.
"At the crucial moment, it’s Yu who’s reliable." Xu Qingfan patted Wu Lingyu, seated to his right, who looked completely baffled.
[What’s Brother Fan talking about?]
Wu Lingyu stared at him for a long time, and seeing no follow-up, turned back to playing Obi Island.
The internet in 2009 really didn’t have many fun games, much less in a school computer room. Xu Qingfan checked some news for a while but soon lost interest and pulled out his phone to play.
They were all currently using the latest Meizu M7, which was their first touchscreen phone change. They had been initially uncomfortable with typing and even chose T9 keyboards. But for Xu Qingfan, who had already been used to touchscreen phones in his past life, this was no issue.
He opened the Good Taste Takeout app. Even though it hadn’t achieved national coverage yet, the embedded community section in the software was still quite interesting, so he didn’t have to worry about the app becoming useless after leaving Lingnan Province.
Before entering the community, he had to turn on the location system, of course, manual positioning was also possible. Then the page would smartly recommend local specialties, travel tips, or interesting gossip, a bit like a certain popular app from his previous life.
The early posts were all copied one by one by programmers using crawlers, and of course, they paid many ghostwriters to write high-quality promotional posts. One post Xu Qingfan personally wrote, ’How to spend Valentine’s Day with five girls in one day,’ even got nearly a hundred thousand likes.
Of course, he wrote these while surfing with a burner account, keeping it secret from the five girls. Mr. Xu was just trying to generate some traffic for the app, he wasn’t really planning that way, writing strategies in advance, right!
No matter what, as long as the community operated well, separating it from Good Taste Takeout and going public in the future would make it another Redbook worth over ten billion dollars!
He clicked into the real-time leaderboard and discovered the hottest post was discussing whether a Massachusetts Institute of Technology postdoc should return to develop their career in their home country.
Xu Qingfan got excited and commented:
[Diarrhea, on the plane, just left the moldy country...]
