2009, Magic City Airport.
"Welcome to Pudong~"
The sweet voice of a female announcer drifted over the broadcast system.
Ren Kurogane slung his high-capacity hiking backpack over one shoulder and stepped out of the terminal at a leisurely pace.
"Shanghai? Pudong!"
With a faint chuckle, Ren adjusted the straps of his pack, a fiercely arrogant smile gracing his features.
"Sir, your passport clearance is complete. Welcome home!"
Accepting the passport from the custom official, Ren stepped fully out of the airport boundary.
"It's a rare occasion to visit Shanghai during this era. I might as well wander around for a bit. The next time I drop by, it'll probably be around 2013."
Exiting the main terminal hall, Ren scanned his surroundings and charted a vector toward the express shuttle buses bound for the city center.
"Shanghai truly is phenomenal. Connecting to the city center is barely a stone's throw away, yet they still deploy dedicated luxury shuttle buses," Ren laughed softly.
Suddenly, he perceived a kinetic rustle behind him, followed by a distinctly young, somewhat naïve voice: "Um, hello! Excuse me, are you heading toward the city center as well?"
Ren turned around, intending to offer a casual response, but his pupils dilated violently in absolute, universal shock the very next instant!
Standing entirely frozen in place for several seconds, Ren finally managed to force three syllables past his lips with immense difficulty!
"Holy freaking crap!"
Lu Zhanbo stared blankly at the man before him. He had merely stepped up to ask for basic directions; it felt entirely unnecessary for the guy to execute a verbal explosion right out of the gate.
Fortunately, the domestic framework has been completely strictly regulated for years. I don't have to keep my systems on maximum alert to avoid someone drawing a weapon like they do overseas...Zhanbo thought to himself.
After pulling his cognitive functions back online from the sudden shock, Ren asked experimentally, "Excuse me, are you... Mr. Lu Zhanbo?"
Zhanbo blinked, completely surprised. How did this random stranger possess his specific identification parameters? He nodded frantically. "Yes! I'm Lu Zhanbo! May I ask who you are?"
"My name is Ren Kurogane!" Ren replied with absolute finality. "Don't bother searching your memory banks! Your system has zero data on me. I am merely one of the endless millions of ordinary masses who once looked up to your trajectory!"
Zhanbo nodded slowly. That aligned with his personal logic; given his apex, high-capacity brain structure, if he had ever cataloged this man's face before, it would be an absolute impossibility for him to lack an impression.
"Are you charting a course toward the city center?" Ren asked.
Zhanbo nodded repeatedly. "Yes! I've just finished my advanced degree programs abroad, and I'm currently mobilizing to establish contact with my sister!"
"Your sister resides within the central district?"
"Right! My primary operational directive upon returning to the country is to anchor myself at her unit!"
Zhanbo was an incredibly pure, straightforward individual. Ren merely deployed a few casual conversational prompts, and the boy systematically leaked his entire data profile without a single firewall.
Leading Zhanbo along, the two smoothly boarded the express shuttle bus bound for the city grid. Under Ren's precise navigation, Zhanbo didn't commit a tracking error or board the wrong vehicle this time.
As for the legendary eldest miss of the wealthy Lin conglomerate? Ren decided that they simply existed on entirely different dimensional planes. Forcing an artificial convergence would yield zero strategic utility and only pile up unnecessary psychological baggage for both factions.
Holding the handwritten coordinate address Zhanbo provided, the duo successfully localized their target and tracked down Hu Yifei.
A woman clad in a highly fashionable, off-the-shoulder crimson top paired with sleek, form-fitting black trousers and high heels stepped sharply into Ren's visual field.
The exact millisecond his optics locked onto her, Ren's eyes flared with intense brilliance!
As expected of Hu Yifei in her absolute youth, completely untouched by modern cosmetic updates! This visual aesthetic scales perfectly to my personal baseline tastes!Ren celebrated internally. He extended a hand, offering a smooth smile. "You must be Zhanbo's legendary sister, Hu Yifei! I'm Ren Kurogane! Just a casual friend he ran into on the transit shuttle!"
Hu Yifei didn't bother greeting him initially. Her razor-sharp gaze swept across Lu Zhanbo's posture, and the boy instantly began nodding his head like a mechanical toy processing a command!
The very next second, Yifei flawlessly swapped her stern expression for a brilliant smile, locking her optics onto Ren as she laughed, "Massive thanks for escorting my completely brainless little brother safely to the perimeter! Otherwise, my primary task tomorrow morning would be marching down to the local police precinct to claim his custody! Alright! Today is a high-priority wedding for one of my close associates, and as the chief director of ceremonies, my administrative schedule is completely packed. Feel free to raid the buffet at your leisure! We won't be staying to keep you company!"
Executing a rapid verbal deployment, Yifei grabbed the simple-minded Zhanbo and completely vanished from Ren's perimeter.
"Sigh..." Ren extended a hand into empty air, ultimately failing to stall their departure.
"Whatever. Once I anchor myself in this sector, there will be infinite opportunities to establish deep contact..."
Turning his head toward the banquet spread, Ren couldn't help but swallow his saliva. Heaven alone knew what kind of absolute biological waste he had been forcing down his throat during his month-long deployment overseas...
Half an hour later.
Because the luxury motorcade carrying the bride and groom had hit a severe logistical bottleneck along the highway, the main ceremony had been systematically delayed. Ren spent thirty uninterrupted minutes executing a total offensive against the buffet tables before pulling his utensils back.
Had my data models verified earlier that this was the absolute structure of the iPartment universe, I wouldn't have ground my assets to dust trying to liquidate my entire net worth to secure those tech stocks over the last two years... Ren sighed deeply in his mind.
It had been twenty years since his transmigration into this world. During his early career, he had accumulated a decent pool of capital by publishing best-selling manuscripts and screenplays. Anticipating the upcoming global macroeconomic shifts, he had completely drained his financial reserves just two days prior, going completely all-in to buy up Apple stocks at a baseline parameter of ten dollars a share.
Plugging fifty million dollars entirely into Apple... I suppose my profile now registers as a minor corporate shareholder across their database, heh~
He wanted to laugh, but a profound urge to weep hit his systems instead.
If he had isolated the historical markers of the iPartment world sooner, he wouldn't have locked his liquid capital into fruit stocks. Wouldn't it have been a vastly superior strategic deployment to invest directly into the human engine sitting right next to him, Lu Zhanbo?
A literal world-class, apex programming prodigy! He had completed his advanced computer science curriculum at MIT by the age of twenty—a absolute titan of software architecture! A single brain of his caliber could out-compute an entire corporate development team.
All Ren needed to do was trade a fractional equity slice to Zhanbo, order him to construct a high-tier short-video application architecture today—right when personal computing was hitting its mass-market surge—and they would systematically emerge as an untouchable internet conglomerate! Furthermore, as chronological vectors advanced and smartphone hardware underwent rapid generation shifts, the exact moment they launched mobile short-video platforms would be the exact moment their corporate valuation scaled into the stratosphere!
They could rake in an astronomical, historical fortune, flip the corporate entity to a buyer, and break orbit to spend the remainder of their lives enjoying absolute luxury on a massive estate in Canada!
Unfortunately, his current liquid reserves had plummeted to a mere hundred thousand yuan. The upward spike for the fruit stock's valuation was still locked down on the timeline, though Ren estimated the trigger was close; the moment the iPhone 4 cleared production, the entire global market would go absolutely rabid.
But that operational payout is still months away on the chronological register. As it stands today, my profile only controls a hundred thousand in liquid savings, rounded out by twenty thousand completely unvalued, utterly irrelevant tokens called Bitcoins~
Ren casually scooped up a miniature pastry from the tray, only to see Lu Zhanbo marching back toward his coordinates.
"Ren!"
"What's the verdict? Did your sister grant your system authorization to interact with an unverified, high-risk character like me?" Ren teased.
Zhanbo, however, was holding his laptop open, his eyes wide with intense, unmitigated excitement. "Ren! Your profile is registered as a domestic best-selling author! You're an internationally recognized director! At your current age parameter, your asset evaluation is on the verge of crossing the hundred-million threshold!"
Ren held up a hand, pressing down in a cooling gesture as he laughed. "Low profile, keep it on a low profile, kid! It's all nothing more than passing clouds."
As the two were exchanging notes, Ren's perimeter sensors locked onto Lu Ziqiao—who had successfully retrofitted himself into a priest's vestments—and Chen Meijia, who had infiltrated the security grid to pillage the food trays. The moment their paths crossed, Ziqiao initiated a standard flirting protocol, only for Meijia to immediately bypass his cover, identifying his fraudulent priest metrics and delivering a brutal, unmitigated physical strike that caught Ziqiao completely off-guard!
Ren watched the comedic exchange for two seconds before completely withdrawing his attention. Wanderers of the rivers and lakes... high-risk profiles. Best to leave them alone.
He turned back to the prodigy beside him. "Zhanbo, does your residential complex currently have any vacant units listed on the terminal?"
"You're looking to secure a lease?! Fantastic!" Zhanbo's face lit up with pure delight. "The suite my sister and I currently occupy is missing a final roommate parameters to balance the ledger! Are you willing to integrate into our cell?"
"Is that so? The structural alignment of that vector is flawless! In that case, I shall be in your care moving forward!"
"Not at all, not at all! To lock down a celebrity profile of your caliber as a roommate is a massive boost to my social network!"
Zhanbo frantically dragged Ren across the hall, approaching Hu Yifei, who was currently fighting off a wave of logistical fatigue. He rapidly pitched Ren's intent to split their rental ledger.
Yifei turned a deeply skeptical gaze toward Ren, her brow furrowing. "A high-net-worth profile like you is actively seeking to share a standard communal lease?"
"Is there an administrative clause specifying that a wealthy bro is barred from shared leasing?" Ren smiled smoothly. "Besides, I recently ran an absolute macro-scale play in the overseas markets. As it stands today, my entire liquid capital account has bottomed out to barely a hundred thousand or so~"
"A macro play?"
Yifei's brow furrowed even deeper as her psychological evaluation of Ren plummeted. A reckless gambler, she calculated. Just as she was about to execute a flat rejection protocol to deny his lease entry, Ren smoothly added a single syllable:
"...Dollars."
The very next microsecond, Hu Yifei's facial features completely melted into the exact, flawless, exquisitely welcoming smile from their very first meeting.
"My dear Mr. Kurogane! Would your profile be interested in locking down a double-rent matrix to select any premium room within our suite that aligns with your aesthetic tastes? Oh, by the way! The only restricted vectors are my personal quarters and my brother's room!"