Reborn not to be a beast of burden, I set the rules.

Shen Zhiyi leaned against the wall, holding a plastic bag containing several parts.

She lowered her head, her long hair slipping down from behind her ears, obscuring her beautiful profile.

Hearing footsteps, she looked up.

Ye Ming noticed that she was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt today, with the cuffs rolled up twice, and her hair was tied up with a few strands falling against her chin.

Sunlight streamed in through the window, illuminating her profile and giving her pale skin a glow.

She stood there quietly, like a handful of moonlight falling into an old stairwell.

She saw him, paused for a moment, and then gave a faint smile.

He was stunned for a moment. His heart seemed to skip a beat, or perhaps it skipped a beat; he couldn't quite put his finger on it.

Have you given up? Here we go again?

"What are you doing here?" he asked first, his voice unconsciously softening.

Shen Zhiyi tucked her long hair behind her ear and raised the plastic bag in her hand: "Buying parts. Some components are out of stock, so these are the only things I can take back today."

She paused, looked at him, and said, "Just now, a boy came out of that building. He's the one who stopped me from talking badly about you at our school."

Ye Ming nodded without saying anything.

"I saw you go in." Her voice was soft, her fingers gripping the handle of the plastic bag, her knuckles slightly white. "I heard there are scam companies here, and I was worried you'd get ripped off."

Ye Ming looked at her, and the corner of his mouth twitched slightly.

This girl is certainly grateful.

"It's nothing, I'm here to collect my money."

Shen Zhiyi didn't ask what kind of money it was, nor how much it was.

She glanced at him for a few seconds, making sure there were no signs of injury on his face and that his clothes were neat, before nodding and saying, "That's good."

The two of them went downstairs together, their sneakers and canvas shoes making different, softer sounds as they walked on the terrazzo floor, yet surprisingly in sync.

Stepping out of the building, the sunlight was so bright it was hard to open one's eyes.

The sounds of horns, footsteps, and haggling from Zhujiang Road surged in again, and the aroma of roasted sweet potatoes mingled with car exhaust, sweet and cloying.

Shen Zhiyi stood by the roadside and glanced back at him.

"Are you going back to school?"

"Um."

"I'll go back too," she said.

The two of them walked together toward the bus stop.

After walking for a while, Ye Ming suddenly spoke up: "Haven't eaten yet, have you?"

Shen Zhiyi paused for a moment, then shook her head. She had finished making the list in the lab that morning and hadn't had a chance to look at it since.

"There's one up ahead, in the alley next to Ruyi Never Sleeps City," Ye Ming pointed in the direction of China Merchants Bank. "They have 'Overlord Cake' and egg noodles. I've heard people say it's pretty good."

What he didn't say was that he remembered the store.

One afternoon in his past life, he came out of the Zhujiang Road electronics market alone, his stomach aching from hunger. He turned into that alley and ate a bowl of egg noodles.

The noodle soup was very flavorful, and the noodles were chewy. The proprietress was from Anhui and spoke with an accent. She asked him, "Young man, would you like an egg?"

That was the best bowl of noodles he had ever eaten in Huijing.

The taste of a past life.

The store moved later, and he never found it again.

He had never been there before in his life, and for some reason, he wanted to take her there right now.

Shen Zhiyi followed his hand and nodded.

The alley is not deep, with residential buildings on both sides, and half-withered vines climbing on the walls.

The shop entrance is small, with faded red lettering on the glass that reads "Noodles, Rice Bowls, and King Cakes," the edges of which are curled up.

There were five or six tables inside, but there weren't many people around at this hour. The only person was a middle-aged man in overalls sitting against the wall, slurping his noodles.

The proprietress, sitting behind the counter, stood up and smiled when she saw someone come in: "What would you like to eat?"

Ye Ming glanced at the menu on the wall: "Two servings of egg noodles and one 'Overlord Pancake'."

The two found a seat by the window and sat down.

Sunlight streamed in through the glass window, landing on the tabletop, making it feel warm and cozy.

On the table were a tube of disposable chopsticks, a vinegar bottle, and a chili pepper jar. The bottles were a little sticky, but they were wiped clean.

Shen Zhiyi placed the plastic bag at her feet, rested her fingers on the edge of the table, and said nothing.

She originally wanted to ask him why he came to Zhujiang Road, what the five thousand yuan was about, and whether Wang Chao had also paid money.

But she didn't ask anything. She just sat there, looking at the sunlight outside the window, and felt that it was fine to not say anything.

The noodles were served. The soup was clear and bright, with a few green vegetable leaves floating on top. The noodles were lying at the bottom of the bowl, and a fried egg was placed on top, with the edges fried until crispy.

The king-shaped cake is cut into four pieces and arranged on a plate. The outer crust is crispy and the meat filling is savory.

Shen Zhiyi lowered her head, took a sip of soup, glanced at Ye Ming, and then lowered her head again.

She eats very slowly, taking small bites, and is so quiet that she hardly makes a sound.

Ye Ming ate a few bites, then looked up and saw her picking at the noodles, circling her chopsticks several times but managing to pick up only a few strands.

"It doesn't taste good?"

"No." Shen Zhiyi shook her head, thought for a moment, and then said, "I was thinking about something."

"What are you thinking about?"

She hesitated for a moment, then put down her chopsticks: "Your game is all finished, isn't it going to be released soon?"

"It'll be soon. The UI design will be finalized today, a first draft will be available next week, and it can be launched after integration and debugging."

"Has the ICP registration been completed? What about the server? Can it handle the load?"

Ye Ming was taken aback; he hadn't expected her to ask that.

He put down his chopsticks and answered seriously, "The ICP filing is indeed still in process, but I'm already looking for a solution. The server is rented from Nanxiang Data, 600 yuan a month, 100 Mbps shared. It's purely a word game, so the bandwidth pressure isn't high. Professor Zhang took a look and added a connection pool and indexes; it can handle 8,000 to 10,000 concurrent users without any problem."

Shen Zhiyi listened, her brows furrowing slightly, as if she were calculating something.

After a while, she said, "What about the database? In your game, the event database is a text file, and the user data is stored in MySQL, right?"

How did you know?

"I heard it from senior student Li Yue when I went to the computer lab last time." She paused, "The idea of ​​loading text files into memory all at once at startup is correct. But regarding user data, have you considered that the number of MySQL connections might be a bottleneck under high concurrency?"

Ye Ming looked at her and suddenly felt that she was different from usual.

She usually speaks with her head down and in a very soft voice, as if afraid of disturbing something. But now, sitting in the sunlight, she is gesturing with her fingers on the table, and speaking twice as fast as usual.

"Teacher Zhang helped us plan a connection pool," he said. "A batch of connections are built in advance, and whoever needs them can borrow them and return them when they're done, so a new connection isn't created for every request."

Shen Zhiyi nodded, her fingers stopping, but her eyes still brightened: "What about caching? The results of trending events can be cached so we don't have to recalculate them every time. That's how it works on my phone's system too; it stores frequently used calculation results in memory so we can call them directly next time, saving CPU time."

When she spoke of these things, she was alive. The faint timidity between her brows and eyes disappeared, replaced by a light that Ye Ming had never seen before.

It wasn't the quiet, cool light of moonlight, but the dazzling, intense light of the midday sun shining on the water, so bright it was almost blinding.

So she can be like that too.

He remembered the first time he saw her, on the sycamore-lined road. She lowered her head and said, "It's nothing," her voice so soft as if she was afraid of disturbing something.

Later at the police station, she sat next to him, her fingers gripping the bag strap, her knuckles turning white.

Later, on the bus, she said, "What if it could really be done?" Her eyes lit up, but quickly dimmed again. He thought it was just a fleeting glimmer of light.

But now he knows it's not true. That fire has always been there, but she hid it so deeply that even she herself thought it wasn't there.