Hong Kong films: From street thugs to Hong Kong financial tycoons

Chapter 100 The Roar of the Steel Beast, Illuminating the First Ray of Light!

Tai Po Industrial Zone, Top Secret Factory Area No. 0

The heavy explosion-proof steel door, weighing over ten tons, slowly opened to both sides with a dull metallic friction sound as it was pushed open by the hydraulic rod.

There was no blinding light as I had imagined, nor the noise typical of a factory assembly line.

The moment the door opened, a gust of cold wind, carrying the distinctive smell of a server room and accompanied by a low, rhythmic hum, rushed in.

Lin Yao walked in front and stepped through the door. Even Chen Zheng, who was used to all kinds of big scenes, couldn't help but gasp and stop in his tracks when he followed Lin Yao in.

This is not a traditional factory at all; it is clearly a cyberpunk dungeon made of black steel and eerie blue indicator lights!

In the huge space with a ceiling height of nearly 20 meters, there are rows of black server racks that seem to stretch as far as the eye can see.

Twenty thousand Loongson mainframes were specially disassembled and repackaged, removing the unnecessary civilian-grade casings and retaining only the core motherboard, CPU, and the dedicated GPU for graphics processing.

They resemble precision black bricks, densely embedded within these three-meter-high server racks.

On the front of the server rack, countless tiny blue LED status indicators, each the size of a grain of rice, are flashing rhythmically.

Thick black fiber optic cables and power networks, like blood vessels in the human body, are neatly bundled on the ceiling racks, perfectly connecting the 20,000 brains scattered throughout the vast space into a unified whole.

"Whoosh—whoosh"

The entire space was filled with a chilling wind noise.

Those are high-powered industrial cooling fans installed at the back of each server rack, tirelessly drawing away the heat generated by the hardware operation.

"This...this is a computing power farm?"

Chen Zheng pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, tilted his head back, and looked at this quiet yet oppressive industrial behemoth. His mouth, which could usually calculate accounts clearly, was now somewhat slurred.

"Old Chen, aren't you shocked?"

Lu Qiu, wearing a safety helmet and holding a test terminal recorder, couldn't hide his pride.

Pointing to the thick pipes overhead, he began to explain with great familiarity: "In order to suppress the heat generated by this monster, we abandoned the traditional air cooling and directly buried three independent industrial-grade water cooling circulation systems underground in this factory."

"The water is drawn from deep seawater outside. After being cooled by the cooling tower, it circulates through these specially made copper pipes inside the cabinet."

"This cooling system alone cost more than ten million US dollars."

When Chen Zheng heard this number, his heart skipped a beat.

He turned to look at Lin Yao, but Lin Yao showed no sign of distress. Instead, he looked at the flashing indicator lights with great interest, as if he were admiring a perfect work of art.

Have you calculated your daily power consumption?

Lin Yao asked casually, his tone very calm. In this place where there were no outsiders, he didn't need to put on airs.

Lu Qiu opened the notebook in his hand and glanced at the data.

"Boss, currently only the first phase of the project, with 20,000 machines, is operating at full capacity."

"If we were to perform image rendering and processing 24 hours a day without interruption, the daily electricity cost would be around HK$1.2 million. If we were to expand the scale to 100,000 units later on..."

Electricity costs 1.2 million a day!

This is like throwing a top-of-the-line Mercedes into the sea every day, and you won't even hear a splash. This isn't running a machine; it's burning money for warmth!

"No need to worry about the electricity bill."

"7

Lin Yao walked slowly along the aisle in the middle of the server racks, his hands in his suit trouser pockets. The sound of his leather shoes hitting the anti-static floor was quickly swallowed up by the humming of the surrounding server racks.

"As long as it can produce the images I want, even if it consumes ten million in electricity a day, I can afford it."

Lin Yao walked to the door of a central control room with a full glass partition at the deepest part of the factory and stopped.

"Lu Qiu, just listening to the buzzing isn't enough. Take it out for a spin and let me see if the billions of cash that's been poured in over the past two weeks can even understand human language."

"Understood, I'll demonstrate for you right away!"

Lu Qiu excitedly pushed open the glass door of the central control room, where more than a dozen control consoles were connected together. Several core programmers with messy hair were sitting in front of the computers, typing away with bloodshot eyes.

Upon seeing Lin Yao walk in, the programmers quickly stood up to greet him.

Lin Yao gestured for them to continue working, then pulled up a chair and sat down at the main control panel.

Lu Qiu pulled up a document and explained, "Boss, Director Wang sent us a fax a couple of days ago with a concept sketch. It's an Yinglong that only exists in ancient mythology."

"Our modelers spent three days creating a rough outline in the system using simple polygons, but to add realistic scale textures to the surface, incorporate physically based ray tracing, and calculate the movement of the hair—"

Lu Qiu glanced at Chen Zheng beside him and gave an analogy: "If we were to use the most advanced single-machine graphics workstation currently on the market to run this model, even if it's just a static high-definition image, it would probably take three months of continuous operation. If there's a power outage for even a second, we'd have to start all over again."

Running a single image every three months means that the traditional film industry simply cannot use this technology to produce a two-hour feature film.

"Enough talk, let's run."

Lin Yao leaned back in his chair and gave the order calmly.

"good!"

Lu Qiu took a deep breath and pressed his finger heavily on the Enter key.

"Beep—Task distribution countdown begins!"

A progress bar appeared on the screen in the central control room.

The instant the Enter key was pressed, Chen Zheng keenly sensed that the deep humming sound throughout the factory suddenly changed in tone.

It was like a lion that was dozing, suddenly opening its eyes and letting out a low roar as if it were preparing to hunt.

Through the glass of the control room, it was clear that the blue indicator lights on the 20,000 server racks outside, which had been flashing smoothly, suddenly began to jump wildly.

That's massive amounts of data being distributed evenly to every computing node through the fiber optic network.

Ten seconds, only ten seconds have passed!

"boom!"

The compressor of the industrial-grade water-cooled air conditioner started running at full power, and the huge fan outside made a roar like a helicopter taking off, and the ground of the entire factory was trembling slightly.

The progress bar on the control room screen was advancing rapidly at a dizzying pace.

10% — 50% — 90%!

"Ding!"

A crisp notification sound rang out. Lu Qiu wiped the sweat from his forehead, his fingers trembling slightly. He moved the mouse and clicked on the newly generated image file.

The moment the screen popped up, the entire control room fell into a deathly silence.

Chen Zheng's eyes widened, and he subconsciously leaned forward, his face almost touching the screen.

It's so realistic! It doesn't look like a painting at all. It's as if someone actually took a camera, traveled back to ancient times, and took a high-definition close-up photo of a living mythical beast.

On the screen, the enormous creature named Yinglong was coiled in the sea of ​​clouds, its layers of dark golden scales gleaming with a cold yet realistic metallic luster under the sunlight.

The most terrifying thing is that you can vaguely see the rough texture of the stratum corneum in the gaps between the scales!

As the light and shadow of the clouds changed, the translucent wing membranes on Yinglong's enormous fleshy wings revealed the distinct outlines of blood vessels.

Even the wisp of white mist exhaled from its nostrils, under the refraction of light, presented a flawless, realistic graininess.

"This—this is impossible—"

Chen Zheng opened his mouth, but couldn't utter a complete sentence for a long time.

Although he didn't understand the technology, his eyes didn't lie. If this scene were shown on the big screen in a movie theater, even the most discerning audience would believe that dragons really exist in the world!

"How long did it take?"

Lin Yao looked at Yinglong on the screen, and a hint of satisfaction finally flashed in his eyes.

"Reporting to the boss—"

Lu Qiu looked at the data in the console backend, his voice hoarse.

"Twenty thousand nodes were mobilized, and the computation time was thirty-five seconds."

Thirty-five seconds—the massive workload that would have taken a traditional computer three months to complete was compressed into just thirty-five seconds.

This is an absolute dimensional reduction attack!

I can't beat you in a one-on-one fight?

I'll just throw money at you and send out 20,000 henchmen, one punch each, and you'll be turned into mincemeat in an instant!

"It's alright, it barely meets the starting standard."

Lin Yao stood up and straightened his suit collar.

"But we're not shooting still photos; we're shooting dynamic footage at 24 frames per second. With this amount of computing power, we can manage to make trailers, but we're far from being able to make an entire movie."

Lin Yao turned to look at Lu Qiu.

"Continue the expansion. Within a month, the remaining 80,000 machines must all be put online and tested. I want this farm to have 100,000 brains working on our movie at the same time."

"Yes, boss, as long as the equipment and power supply are available, I'll do everything in my power to install all 100,000 nodes for you!"

Lu Qiu stood up straight abruptly and made a loud promise.

At the same time, at Kai Tak International Airport in Hong Kong, at the international arrivals exit.

A Boeing passenger plane from Los Angeles, USA, landed smoothly. Fatty Wang, wearing his signature Panama hat and smoking an unlit cigar, swaggered ahead of the plane.

Behind him followed a large group of over a hundred foreigners, all of whom were Hollywood's top visual effects artists, concept artists, and physics engine architects.

Kevin, the chief technology director of Dream Maker Studio, pushed a trolley full of luggage, looking around the city full of oriental charm with great curiosity.

Hey, Kevin.

A bearded colleague leaned over and lowered his voice.

"Do you think that fat director's boast in Hollywood was true—a computing farm made up of 100,000 supercomputers?"

"This is too sci-fi. Even the Pentagon's military labs don't have such a massive computing cluster. How could a place like Hong Kong have this kind of technology?"

The bearded man clearly still harbored some doubts about the engineering blueprints that the fat man had produced. After all, in the eyes of these white elites, Asia's technological level had always lagged behind that of Europe and America.

Kevin glanced at Fatty Wang walking ahead and took a deep breath.

"I don't know either, but those two boxes of US dollar cash are real."

Kevin shrugged.

"If they really are lying to us, we can just treat it as a tourist trip to Hong Kong, and make a fortune in travel expenses along the way."

Several buses that had been waiting outside the airport picked up the more than one hundred Hollywood elites.

The bus did not head towards the bustling Central district or the Mid-Levels hotel, but instead drove directly onto the highway leading to the New Territories.

Inside the train carriage, the foreigners looked out at the increasingly desolate scenery and couldn't help but start whispering among themselves.

"Where are we going? We can't even see any skyscrapers anymore. Is their studio in the mountains?"

Fatty Wang sat in the first row, listening to the chattering English behind him, a meaningful smirk curling at the corner of his mouth.

He turned his head and looked at Kevin, whose face was full of confusion.

"Brother Kevin, don't rush."

Fatty Wang is famous for his broken English and hand gestures.

"Our boss said he'll take you straight to the office. You guys are using junk in Hollywood, today we'll show you what real firepower is."

The bus traveled on the highway for about forty minutes before finally turning into a heavily guarded internal lane.

When the five-meter-high electrified barbed wire came into view, and when two rows of fully armed security personnel with bomb-sniffing dogs coldly stared at the convoy, the foreigners in the carriages all fell silent, and the atmosphere became somewhat eerie.

The convoy finally stopped in front of the row of huge blast-proof steel doors. Kevin and the others got out of the car with trepidation, before they could even figure out what was going on.

"Boom—"

'

The massive steel doors slowly opened to the sides, and a gust of cold wind, accompanied by a loud buzzing sound, rushed out from the bottomless black space.

Kevin subconsciously looked up at the world behind the door.

The next second, the white engineer, who prided himself on being a visual effects genius in Hollywood, dropped his duffel bag to the ground with a thud.

His mouth dropped open, his eyes fixed on the endless sea of ​​black server racks and the 20,000 blue indicator lights flashing wildly in the darkness.

"My God—"

Kevin's legs went weak, and he almost collapsed to his knees.

His mind was blank, with only one thought echoing wildly within him.

This is no exaggeration. The people of the East have truly created a terrifying miracle deep underground that is enough to overturn the entire Hollywood film industry!