Lin Xun explained the situation to Wang Anquan and Zhao Jiagou.
Zhao Jiagou was baffled. “There’s a Turbo C interface above my head? Isn’t Turbo C a fossil by now? It was discontinued years ago!”
Wang Anquan was even more lost. “Clearly, that’s not the issue here! More importantly, why are you hallucinating this, of all things?” He looked up, above his head. “There’s nothing’s there.”
Lin Xun stared at the screen above his head. “Nope, that’s definitely Turbo C. High-definition and everything.”
He paused. “Luo, where should I check in?”
“I’ve already made an appointment with the psychiatry department,” Luoshen replied.
Wang Anshen chuckled. “Seems like Algo’s taking a vacation to the psych ward.”
Zhao Jiagou’s voice was proper and detached, like the narrator of some nature documentary. “Here stands Lord Xun, a person who can’t even get sick without standing out from the masses.”
The Jetta continued cruising steadily towards the nearest hospital.
Inside the consultation room, a middle-aged doctor in a white coat sat upright in his seat. His voice was warm and amiable. “What seems to be the matter today?”
“I’ve started to hallucinate,” Lin Xun replied.
Before he even finished, the doctor’s eyebrows had already risen. Carefully, the doctor gave him a once-over. “How old are you? Twenty?”
“Twenty-two.”
“That’s pretty young—and you look the part, too.” The doctor took notes as he spoke, typing on the keyboard at his desk. “What do you do for work? Are you a student?”
“Not anymore. I’m a programmer.”
“Programmers……” The doctor’s voice took on a cautious tone. “Hm, programmers do tend to have problems. Do your hallucinations take on a specific form?”
Lin Xun looked at the blue square hovering above the doctor’s head. “Above people’s heads, I see a… I guess it looks like a projection of some kind, of a… programming input screen.”
The doctor’s hands paused on the keyboard, his expression solemn. “Is it blurry?”
“It’s quite clear.”
“Do you hear voices?”
“No.”
“Have you seen anything else?”
“Not yet.”
“Do you have a history of mental illness?”
“No.”
“How long has this been going on for?”
“It started this morning.”
“Your mind seems quite sharp,” the doctor said, looking over at Wang Anquan, who’d accompanied Lin Xun in. “Does he normally act strangely?”
“Not really,” Wang Anquan replied, “besides spending the whole day on the computer, anyway.”
“What’s his mental state usually like?”
“Pretty stable.”
“What about his personality? Do you feel like he has a tendency to think in black and white, or go to extremes?”
Wait, what kind of person do you think I am?
“Kind of.”
Lin Xun was speechless.
“Oh?” The doctor seemed fascinated.
Wang Anquan scratched his head. “He’s kinda… you know that type, always competitive, kind of a sore loser? Like, if he can’t figure out how to code something right, he’ll keep grinding it out until he figures it out. And if someone else figures it out first, then he’ll hold a grudge.”
“Well,” the doctor said, amused. “That’s understandable, I suppose.”
The doctor turned back to Lin Xun. “Around the time you started to hallucinate, was there anything else going on?”
“Today, I saw my… idol. I guess I was a bit overexcited.”
The doctor clucked his tongue, handing him a form. “Here, fill out this assessment first, and we’ll see.”
Wearily, Lin Xun filled in the two-hundred-question assessment.
The doctor took a look at the results, scanning it over. “Seems like you’ve got quite the positive mindset! But it’s true that you’re a bit too zealous, maybe. After all, being too sour about other people’s successes will turn you into a lemon!”
Lin Xun had no words.
I wasn’t even that salty about the Lions thing, right?
“I don’t think you have a mental illness,” the doctor said. “Whatever the problem is, I don’t think it’s psychological. I’d recommend you go see a neurologist and have an MRI done.”
Lin Xun was tossed over to the neurology department.
After his consultation, he was passed over again to the optometry department, like a diseased football.
The final conclusion: no matter what the problem might have been, it was probably best that he went home and got a good night’s sleep first, before coming back in.
By the time Lin Xun’s exhausting ordeal was over, the sun had already set, the sky pitch-black.
The minute they got home, Wang Anquan and Zhao Jiagou collapsed onto the sofa in a fit of laughter. “Algo’s finally lost it. He’s coded his way into a qi deviation, huh?”
Lin Xun didn’t have the energy to protest. Grabbing ice from the fridge, he poured himself a cup of cold water, taking a few gulps.
Wang Anquan strode forward, snatching the cup from his hands. “Your brain’s already fried, and you’re drinking water? Have you lost your mind? Don’t answer that.”
He tossed Lin Xun a warm thermos filled with goji tea.
Under the watchful eyes of his two jailors, Lin Xun obediently finished off the thermos’ contents. “You guys know I don’t like warm drinks. Or sweet things.”
“Get out of my face,” Wang Anquan groaned. “You lost our thirty million. You don’t have the right to speak in this house anymore.”
Lin Xun was summarily chased into bed.
To tell the truth, he wasn’t worried. The doctors had agreed that there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with his body—if anything, it was probably just in his mind, a symptom of overwork. Things would be better, hopefully, after he got some rest.
Luoshen’s overall framework was already done; after filling a few sheets of scrap paper with ideas for future optimization, Lin Xun figured it was time to sleep. After getting into bed, he thought back to his meeting with Milky Way’s CEO, his heart still fluttering at the thought. He grabbed his phone, opening Weibo. Flipping to his Special Focus page, he tapped on Dong Jun’s icon.
The CEO’s ID was short and sweet: “Milky Way – Dong Jun.” His profile picture was a string of mysterious numbers, resembling some kind of code. The numbers were light grey on a white background, minimalist and sterile.
It seemed that Dong Jun barely touched social media. There was only a single post on his page, written ten years ago, before Milky Way Enterprises had even been founded—when Dong Jun was only eighteen.
Lo asked me why I look up at the stars.
I think that both the Milky Way and code are made of the same thing—and that this, too, is a certain kind of answer.
Underneath the post were hundreds of thousands of comments. Lin Xun could scroll for ages without ever reaching the bottom.
Some of the comments were from casual passersby, come to pay their respects: “Bowing down to the legend himself! Glax is the world’s best programming language.”
Others were filled with incomprehensible screaming: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA DONG JUN!!!”
Some were rather concerning: “hehehehehe teenage dong jun…”
The rest were tinged with jealousy: “who tf is lo?? don’t do this to me.”
The jealousy was understandable, Lin Xun thought. After all, Dong Jun had only ever posted a single, cryptic post—and in that single post, filled with hidden meaning, he’d mentioned a specific person. Theories abounded: some people guessed that Lo was a friend of Dong Jun’s, while others even bet that Lo was his first love.
Either way, Lin Xun wasn’t interested in his idol’s personal life. Before, he’d always visited Dong Jun’s Weibo after checking out his latest code, leaving behind praises for his idol’s new work.
But what could he praise this time? He’d exhausted his list.
Suddenly, an idea flashed through his mind.
Lin Xun posted a new comment: “So handsome!!”
His praise was quickly lost in the flood of comments beneath Dong Jun’s post, but Lin Xun was satisfied.
He turned off his phone, finally closing his eyes.
After a beat, his eyes flew open—his breathing ran ragged, as if he’d suffered a scare. A moment later, Lin Xun slowly let his eyes close a second time.
As if sinking into another world, when he closed his eyes, a giant blue screen floated before him in the darkness—it was a C compiler screen.
He felt himself sitting on a swivel chair; slowly, he raised a cautious hand to touch the blue surface in front of him.
The minute his finger grazed the screen, a robotic voice suddenly echoed from all around him.
“System loading.”
“Turbo C platform activated.”
“Tree diagram activated.”
“Quests activated.”
“Tutorial quest now active.”
“Quest objective: Absorb qi.”
“Quest rewards: Sect territory expansion, +10 Spirit.”
“Quest progress: 0%.”
On all levels but physical, Lin Xun’s brain had become one giant question mark.
Suddenly, something began to glow next to his right hand. He looked down, only to find that a hovering golden scroll had materialized from thin air. The writing on the scroll was identical to what the voice had just read aloud, detailing his “quest objective,” “rewards,” and “progress.”
Absorb qi? Sect territory? Those kinds of things seemed to make sense together, but—what did they have anything to do with programming?
Cautiously, he inspected the scroll once more before looking around at his surroundings.
It was an endless expanse of darkness, but floating around him were tiny silver specks, like stars in the night sky. The particles seemed to be moving, rising up from the ground and giving off a faint glow, lightly illuminating the space. He looked closer, realizing that they weren’t stars at all—rather, they were tiny numbers: some were 1’s, and others were 0’s.
In front of him was the huge, blue screen; to his right was the scroll detailing his “quests.” On his left, there was nothing at all—but when he turned around, he found himself face to face with a giant tree.
He stood up and walked closer. On second glance, it wasn’t a real tree at all, just the flat image of one. The tree’s silver roots gave off a bright glow; as the tree’s trunk extended upward, the glow slowly faded into darkness—only the faintest outlines of the tree’s upper trunk could be seen. A large “C” was written at the juncture between root and trunk.
Usually, the letter alone would have been meaningless—but combined with the compiler screen, its significance was as clear as day.
As far as programming languages were concerned, C was quite a special one.
Programming languages were split into high-level and low-level languages. Low-level languages worked at the level of the computer’s architecture, like machine code or assembly language: made up of confusing numerical mnemonics—or even streams of pure binary—they were the language of machines themselves, and could be run directly.
High-level programming languages mimicked human language, and were what most people used to write code. When the code was run, it would be translated into a low-level programming language by the compiler: only then could it be run on a system.
But C was a bit different.
C was a high-level programming language with its own syntax, but at the same time, it could directly interact with certain parts of system architecture without modification, providing low-level access to memory and certain machine instructions. Because of this, some people dubbed it a “mid-level programming language.”
The roots represent machine language, or the computer itself. The trunk and its branches might be the user, then, and C is the bridge between the two, Lin Xun thought to himself.
There’s a C compiler, and a tree with the letter C on it. I guess if the tree lit up more, we’d see C#, C++, or Python as we went further up the trunk. Who knows, maybe we’d even reach Glax.
But more importantly—what was the point of all this?
He couldn’t help but glance over again at the scroll. It looked strangely out of place, Lin Xun thought, as he turned his gaze back to the huge screen in front of him.
Well, if there was a compiler, he may as well code.
To a programmer like him, it was as easy as breathing. Besides, he was already familiar with C.
The question was, how was he supposed to input text? Lin Xun raised his arms, his hands hovering in midair.
A ray of silver light surged forward, and suddenly—a milky white keyboard materialized under his hands!
With a keyboard under his fingertips, Lin Xun could breathe easy. Like scratch paper to a mathematician, a keyboard brought a programmer a certain kind of comfort. A sense of security, even.
He fell back into the familiar rhythm of writing code.
The program he was working on was universally acknowledged as the first lesson of any programming language. Whenever he was working in an unfamiliar environment, this program would naturally spring to mind as a test run, a tradition deeply ingrained in the programmer psyche.
First things first. He typed out the standard header, to make sure that the compiler would read his inputs properly.
#include ＜stdio.h＞\
Next, he created a function.
int main（）
Underneath, he typed a curly brace—the body of the function would go inside of it.
{
The goal of the program was to print out a single sentence.
printf(“Hello World\n”);
He ensured that the function would return an integer, so that it would know to end properly. Finally, he closed the function body with another curly brace.
return 0;
}
His program was complete.
After hitting run, the screen changed, swapping over to a pure black operating environment. Two words popped up on the screen—the first words ever spoken by a computer.
Hello World.
Something flashed by his right hand.
Lin Xun looked down, only to find that his “quest progress” had increased to 100%.
The robotic voice suddenly spoke again. “Tutorial complete; user has begun cultivation. Sect territory expansion in progress. Spirit +10.”
That… that was it?
Lin Xun was still deep in thought, when the robotic voice interrupted him once more.
“Main questline unlocked.”
“Quest objective: Unblock meridians and establish qi foundation.”
“Quest rewards: Sect funds +50, Spirit +30.”
“Quest progress: 0%.”
Staring at the compiler screen, Lin Xun’s brain was swimming with basic C programs, his hands itching to put them to the test.
If coding was the name of the game, then things were about to get very interesting indeed.
Building his foundations? If cultivation was this easy, he’d be an immortal in no time.
And Lin Xun was eager to find out just what, exactly, “sect territory” and “sect funds” would end up being.
xiatranslates 