I met my whole family through Baidu Tieba.

"...Why?"

After telling the story, Ma Liang was still puzzled: "Boss, why is that?"

Shen Kang avoided answering, but simply picked up his water glass and silently took another sip.

Ma Liang, however, stared at him relentlessly.

"Why, boss?"

Ma Liang originally didn't want to talk about this, but now that he's already brought it up, he's genuinely come up with an answer.

Shen Kang cleared his throat and finally put down the cup. "This..."

He organized his thoughts.

"Uh... this girl you found, she's a legitimate person in this line of work, right?"

"..."

Ma Liang felt that Shen Kang's choice of words was strange—what does it mean to "do this job properly"?

However, he still nodded.

"Yes, a proper... professional in this line of work."

Shen Kang suddenly clapped his hands. "Then that's settled! You're just using my stories and forcing them into your own narratives; that's nonsense!"

Ma Liang looked at Shen Kang, a hint of confusion in his eyes.

"But the story you told..."

"Old Ma," Shen Kang interrupted him, his tone becoming more serious, "the girl in my story, the first thing she did upon entering the hotel was to take a shower, and your girl did the same. It's the same thing here."

"But things changed later."

"Yes, things are different later on. What's the difference?" Shen Kang asked himself and answered, "The difference is that the 'I' in my story, and that girl, are both fictional characters."

Ma Liang frowned. "What do you mean?"

"What I mean is, I made up that story."

The air fell silent for a moment.

Ma Liang slowly opened his eyes wide.

"You...made that up?"

"Nonsense." Shen Kang said matter-of-factly, "Where would a decent person like me find girls for the whole night? And serve them food, put on their clothes, and make them silver jewelry? Of course, it's all made up."

Ma Liang couldn't accept it. "Why did you make this up?"

Shen Kang still felt wronged: "Wasn't it you who insisted on saying I was definitely experienced and made me explain? I already told you I'm a respectable person, a very respectable person, and I've never done anything like this before, but you wouldn't believe me!"

"What could I do? The simplest way to shut you up back then was to go along with your wishes and make up a story."

Ma Liang remained silent for a moment before speaking.

"So, instead of 'put on some clothes and come out to dinner with me'?"

"no."

Shen Kang shook his head and said, "Old Ma, you know me."

"If that's true, I've already paid for this. Why would I treat you to dinner? Dream on. We should make sure you get your money back before the night is over."

"..."

Ma Liang thought to himself, "With the boss's habit of tasting the saltiness of the manure cart whenever it passes by, he's really something!"

But Ma Liang was still somewhat unwilling to give up and was still struggling in his death throes.

"So, the scene where 'the city's neon lights reflected in her eyes still held some brilliance, she lit a cigarette, and the light and shadow in her eyes vanished in an instant' is also false?"

"What is that long string of things?" Shen Kang wondered.

Ma Liang: "You described what she looked like when she was eating a late-night snack."

He immediately thought the scene was incredibly beautiful and artistic, reminiscent of a Wong Kar-wai movie.

When Ma Liang tried to cook it himself, he discovered that "she" only complained that the pig lungs didn't taste good and kept asking for a sausage.

It's from Shuanghui!

Ma Liang vowed that he would never eat Shuanghui ham sausage again in his life!

"You have a pretty good memory," Shen Kang complimented.

He himself couldn't remember what he had said, but unexpectedly, Ma Liang remembered even the specific sentences.

Then Shen Kang gave the answer.

"Fake."

"How about going to the movies?"

"Fake."

"Does the silver jewelry store make Y-shaped jewelry?"

"Fake."……

After completely rejecting the story, Ma Liang leaned back and slumped onto the sofa, a look of relief on his face.

The same thing, but with completely different outcomes, even made him doubt himself—was he really that bad? Even Xiao Hong didn't think much of him.

Knowing now that Shen Kang's story is fake makes me feel much better.

But after feeling better, a strange feeling welled up again.

That's a kind of...

How should I put it? It's like this: you're a hardworking farmer, and the landlord tells you, "Work hard, and if you work hard, you can drink and eat meat every day like me."

You were full of energy and worked hard. Even after several years of bumper harvests, you couldn't drink and eat meat every day. You didn't doubt it and thought that you just hadn't worked hard enough.

Then one day, you suddenly realize that the landlord was lying—even the landlord himself, at most, ate only white flour buns every day; how could he possibly drink and eat meat every day?

Seeing his expression, Shen Kang spoke again, his tone softening.

"Old Ma, you're a tech guy, how come you can't even make this much of a judgment? Think about it, how many inconsistencies are there in that story?"

"What's wrong with this?" Ma Liang suddenly looked up.

He himself didn't realize that there was a hint of unwilling struggle in his tone: "I think it's quite reasonable. A man pays for an all-nighter, but when it comes to the crucial moment, what he wants isn't that, but... something deeper. Isn't that reasonable?"

"...How is this reasonable?"

Shen Kang listed them one by one: "First, he spent a thousand yuan. What does a thousand yuan mean? It's enough for our Beiming community to hire a part-time college student for a month. He spent a thousand yuan to treat people to meals, to movies, and to have silver jewelry made, but in the end, he did nothing and quietly left the next morning. This isn't pursuing something deeper; this is being mentally ill."

Ma Liang: "..."

"Second," Shen Kang continued, counting on his fingers, "that girl. A woman who does that kind of business, being taken all over town by a strange man, eating out, watching movies, having rings made, and she didn't find it strange at all? Didn't she think there was something wrong with this guy? In the end, she was even moved by him and went to work at a silver jewelry store to wait for him? Old Ma, if you encountered this kind of logical flaw when you were writing code, how would you handle it?"

"I..." Ma Liang opened his mouth, "I'll report an error."

"Yes, it gave an error. But think about the story I told you. Did you not even consider the logic? You just used it directly?"

Ma Liang remained silent.

The sunlight outside the window had been obscured by clouds at some point, dimming the light in the living room. The two glasses of water on the coffee table were still there; Shen Kang's glass was empty, while Ma Liang's glass was still full, the surface of the water perfectly still, reflecting the unlit light on the ceiling.

"...You're right, I didn't go against the logic."

Ma Liang finally spoke.

Although Shen Kang's analogy was strange, it actually touched on a topic familiar to Ma Liang, making it easier for him to accept.

Shen Kang patted him on the shoulder, "But you didn't waste that thousand yuan. At least you've created an unforgettable memory, right? When you're older, you'll look back and have a fun memory. Such a precious memory isn't something you can buy for a thousand yuan. So, hey, you actually made a profit! You hit the jackpot! I'm so envious..."

Shen Kang spoke at length.

The two chatted for a while.

Half a morning passed by so quickly.

Ma Liang also fully accepted the reality: "Huihui" in Shen Kang's story only exists in the story. In reality, there is only Xiaohong.

It's like a function that doesn't define a return value. Syntactically, every semicolon is in the correct place, and every line of indentation is neat and orderly. But if you call it with actual arguments, it returns nothing.

No, it's worse than returning nothing—it makes your actual argument an undefined variable as well...

Shen Kang chatted with Ma Liang for a long time, and seeing that Ma Liang seemed to be alright, he left.

Ma Liang saw him to the door.

As he was leaving, Shen Kang casually asked about the slippers.

Ma Liang seemed to have truly let go and accepted it, and he even spoke about it.

"Actually, these slippers were bought specifically for her. It's not Xiaohong, it's 'her,' but I didn't even know who 'she' was at the time."

"It's like an uninstantiated abstract class."

"..."

Many people say that Shen Kang is abstract, but Shen Kang discovered that Ma Liang is truly abstract—he himself couldn't understand what Ma Liang was saying, it was too abstract.

"Speak like a human being," Shen Kang couldn't help but say.

Ma Liang shrugged. "Okay."

Then he continued speaking, not quickly, as if he had mentally processed every line before uttering it.

"Before I wrote this program, I first defined an abstract class. I declared all the wonderful attributes and methods for her—gentleness, understanding, companionship, not minding me typing on the keyboard in the middle of the night, and turning around in the kitchen to ask if I want spicy food. This abstract class is syntactically perfect, inherits from the parent class 'Ideal Partner', and implements the interface 'Won't suddenly leave'."

"Then I created a variable of this abstract class. The variable name is 'She'. The declaration statement was written, the compilation passed, and there were no red lines. I'm just waiting for the day in the future when I can find a concrete class to inherit from her and instantiate her. Those slippers are the default parameter I'm preparing for this future instance—no matter what's passed in, this parameter is already waiting."

Shen Kang leaned against the door and rubbed his head.

Okay, although it's still a bit abstract, at least it's not as abstract as it was at the beginning, and at least I can understand some of it now.

Ma Liang continued speaking, his tone still flat, as if he were reviewing someone else's code.

Shen Kang rolled his eyes at him. "Do you fucking think I'd find out?"

Ma Liang nodded, took over the conversation, and gave the answer.

"clacatcptn, type conversion exception. Runtime error, program crashes. In the end I could only write logs in the catch block."

Ma Liang paused, then looked away from the shoe cabinet and onto his own feet.

"Later, I took a closer look at the abstract class itself. It wasn't perfect. Its biggest problem wasn't the lack of instances, but that I hadn't defined a constructor for it at all. A class that can't be instantiated shouldn't be declared as an abstract class in the first place; it should be marked as pcat. I took it upon myself to add too many imagined implementations, treating a piece of pseudocode as a formal requirement."

Shen Kang had a headache.

Can someone translate this divine language for him? Is this even Chinese?

However, he still understood Ma Liang's carelessness.

"So these slippers?" Shen Kang asked.

"Dependency packages".

Ma Liang said, "When we introduced this dependency, the version number was written as 'latt,' but we ended up pulling down an incompatible older version. It has since been removed from the project."

Ma Liang closed the shoe cabinet door.

"Dependencies have been uninstalled. The project has been archived. It will not be reopened."

Although he still couldn't understand the specific technical details, it didn't stop Shen Kang from understanding Ma Liang's meaning.

So Shen Kang left, taking with him a small trumpet that Ma Liang had prepared for him.

After Shen Kang left, Ma Liang intended to go back to his computer, but stopped as he closed the door and was about to leave the entryway.

He stood there thinking for a while, then opened the shoe cabinet door, took out the slippers, opened the front door, went out, went downstairs, came to the entrance of the building, and went to the large trash can at the entrance of the building. He opened the lid with one hand and threw the slippers in with the other.

Finally, after taking one last look, as if a funeral had been held, the lid of the large trash can was closed.

Ma Liang didn't go upstairs. Instead, he stood by the trash can, looked up at the sky, and saw a long-lost azure blue, which made him feel incredibly relaxed.

The things that had been troubling him these past few days finally vanished with the end of the funeral.

"We should celebrate!"

Thinking this to himself, Ma Liang didn't go upstairs. Instead, he went straight out of the main gate of the residential area, intending to find a restaurant on the commercial street to have a good meal to celebrate.

Unfortunately, he hadn't thought of that and let Shen Kang leave. So now, who should he invite out for a meal to share his current feeling of relief and relaxation?

Ma Liang stopped at the crossroads leading to the commercial street, head down, holding his phone and scrolling through his contacts.

"What a coincidence?"

A voice came from the side.

Ma Liang subconsciously looked away from his phone screen, turned his head, and his hand trembled, almost dropping the phone to the ground.

Beside him stood a woman, smoking a cigarette.

After taking a drag, the woman removed the cigarette from her mouth, exhaled a straight, thin line, then turned to look at Ma Liang and smiled gently.

"Hello, boss."

"..."

Looking at the face before him, Ma Liang felt as if twenty error windows were popping up in his mind simultaneously, each labeled with the same tag:

unhanl cptn.

……

Shen Kang was unaware of what had happened after he left; otherwise, given his personality, he would never have left!

Unfortunately, he couldn't predict the future, so he didn't know and returned to his dormitory.

Then, he turned on his computer, logged into the alternate account that Ma Liang had set up for him, and started writing posts.

While writing, Shen Kang also thought of Lu Tinglan.

Yes, this post must have surprised her greatly.