It was a rainy night in City A. The air was thick with the scent of damp mold.
In the corner of the "Galaxy Internet Cafe," Li Ruixue, a Chinese girl nickname Snow, was curled up in a broken chair with exposed yellow foam. She had pulled her hoodie low, as if trying to wall herself off from the noisy world around her.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard. The screen didn't show the cafe's billing system; instead, it displayed a frantically flickering remote control terminal.
She was stealing computing power.
Taking advantage of the boss's absence, she had quietly hijacked the private computer hidden in the VIP suite, a machine the owner treated like a holy relic, equipping it with a market-scarce, exorbitantly priced NVIDIA RTX 5090.
On her screen, streams of green code were converging, constructing a blurry 3D facial model. It was being pieced together from low-pixel videos stored on the flash drive hanging around her neck.
The videos were of her grandmother.
The memory was from when she was seven years old. The old woman lay in a leaking mud house, her withered hand gripping Snow's tightly. Her eyes were unfocused, her lips trembling as she used her final breath to try and say something.
"Little Snow, actually, Grandma..."
Right before the sentence could be finished, the video cut out. The battery on that cheap knock-off phone had died that day, and her grandmother's hand had gone limp at the exact same moment.
That unfinished half-sentence had become Snow's greatest nightmare, a permanent void in her heart.
On the screen, the AI model's lips moved slightly, attempting to use massive data calculations to autocomplete the dying words.
"Grandma actually... actually..."
The progress bar stalled at 99%.
Suddenly, the screen flashed violently.
[WARNING: VRAM Overflow. Insufficient Compute.]
Zzzzt. With a faint hiss of static, the remote connection severed. The elderly face that had just begun to look alive instantly shattered into a cascade of green garbled code.
Snow's fingers froze in mid-air.
Still not enough. Even an RTX 5090 was a drop in the bucket when it came to constructing a "Digital Soul" with genuine consciousness. She didn't need consumer-grade toys; she needed industrial-grade computing cards that cost tens of thousands of dollars each.
Exhausted, she pulled off her headphones and shoved a lollipop into her mouth, trying to drown out the bitterness in her heart with the cheap taste of saccharin.
Ding.
Her phone screen lit up on the desk.
Snow glanced at it, and her eyes instantly went cold. The contact name read: "That Man."
The message was simple:
"Li Zhaodi, you got paid today, right? Transfer 200 Dollar. Don't play dead with me, I know you're at the internet cafe."
Li Zhaodi.
Every time she saw that name, Snow felt like she had swallowed a fly.
In certain backward rural parts of China, naming a daughter "Zhaodi" (Beckon Brother) carried a naked, cruel meaning: Your only value is to bring a son to the family. If you fail to bring a brother, you are just a money-losing burden.
Another text followed immediately:
"Hurry up! I had bad luck and lost everything. The loan sharks said they're coming for you. You don't want to lose this job you barely managed to find, do you?"
Snow unlocked her phone with a blank expression. She checked her balance: $212.50.
That was the money she had been saving for months to buy a GPU.
She typed the amount, hit transfer, and blocked the number. All in one breath.
After doing that, she looked out toward the darkness beyond the cafe's glass doors.
Through the rain, she could vaguely make out shadows lurking outside. Thugs holding buckets of red paint and baseball bats. They were debt collectors. Loan sharks didn't care about the law; if they couldn't find the father, they hunted the daughter.
Just as one of the thugs was about to push open the door, his partner grabbed him, pointing frantically at the street.
"Shit, don't move! Look at that!"
Blinding headlights tore through the curtain of rain.
A fleet of luxury cars pulled up arrogantly in front of the rundown cafe. Leading the pack was a custom Rolls-Royce Phantom, flanked by two Porsches.
The thug, being street-smart, instantly recognized the license plate starting with "HA."
"That's... the Wang family's car? Wang Congcong?"
"Why would he come to a dump like this?"
"Don't cause trouble. We can't afford to mess with him." The leader of the thugs cowed instantly. Capital hit much harder than baseball bats. He quickly pulled out his phone to call his boss: "Hey boss, sticky situation. Wang Congcong is here. We can't get in..."
The thugs retreated into the shadows like rats afraid of the light.
The internet cafe door was pushed open.
Wang Congcong (known online as Principal Wang) walked in wearing a limited-edition IFA Team jersey. His face was dark enough to murder someone. Behind him trailed four or five thin but sharp-eyed young men—the starting lineup of the IFA pro team.
The Legendary Champions League(LCL) Spring Quarterfinals were being held in City A, and as the owner, Principal Wang had come to supervise personally. IFA had been in great form, but Principal Wang's mood was currently absolute trash.
The reason was simple: a personal grudge.
Three days ago, in his "Grandmaster" promotion series—a life-or-death match—he had played his signature champion, only to be utterly slaughtered by a random passerby playing Jinx with the ID "Snow."
If he had just lost, that would be one thing. But after that Jinx fountain-dived and killed him, she typed a message in all-chat:
"That's all it takes to tilt you? My dog could micro the mouse better than you."
That sentence was a slap in the face to Principal Wang, who prided himself on being the "100% Win Rate ADC."
He didn't believe anyone could destroy him like that with pure skill. He was convinced the opponent was hacking.
So, he used his money and tech connections to physically locate the IP address.
[City A, West District, Galaxy Internet Cafe.]
"Welcome. Machines are upstairs. Top up 100, get 20 free." Snow didn't even look up, reciting the welcome script mechanically.
SLAM.
A hand hit the counter heavily.
Principal Wang took off his sunglasses. His eyes, bloodshot from lack of sleep, stared dead at the girl in the grey hoodie who looked like she had no life left in her.
"You are Snow?"
Snow paused, then looked up.
"I'm the net admin. Pay to surf. If you're looking for someone, the police station is a left turn out the door."
Wang let out a cold laugh. He pulled out his phone and flashed a screenshot of a post-game lobby. The Jinx's exaggerated 25/0/0 KDA was blindingly bright.
"Stop acting. Snow, I've checked all your data."
Wang gritted his teeth, his rich-kid arrogance fully on display.
"I was wondering how anyone could destroy me that badly. Turns out you were hiding in this broken internet cafe."
He leaned down, staring into Snow's eyes, his tone dripping with disdain.
"If you hadn't toggled your scripts, how could I have possibly lost to a little bitch like you? You have the guts to cheat but not the guts to admit it?"
Snow glanced at the screenshot, then looked at the furious man in front of her.
"Oh." She calmly crunched the lollipop in her mouth. "You were that support who moved like a stroke victim?"
"I was the ADC!" Wang roared, as if he had suffered the ultimate humiliation. "You only won because you were using auto-aim scripts!"
"No difference." Snow shrugged. "Both trash."
The entire internet cafe went deathly silent. The pro players behind Wang gasped.
Wang laughed out of pure anger. He pointed at Snow's crappy cash register computer.
"Fine. Still stubborn. Since I caught you, let's verify it right here."
"Solo. You play Jinx, I play Jhin. I'm going to show you exactly what you are without your scripts."
Principal Wang pulled a thick stack of Franklins—about five thousand dollars—from his wallet and slammed it onto the greasy counter.
"Win against me, and this money is yours. The past is forgotten. But if you lose..."
Wang looked around the dirty, messy cafe and smiled viciously.
"If you lose, you come back to the IFA base with me and be our free cleaner for two months. And I'll make you lick my leather shoes clean every single day."
Snow originally had zero interest in this boring provocation.
Until her gaze landed on the stack of cash.
$5,000.
That was enough to buy half an H100 chip.
Her eyes, which had looked dead to the world a moment ago, finally lit up.
"Deal."