Chapter 93: A Small Matter Concerning the Fact That My Father Is Actually a Hidden Big Shot, Part Three

The assets under the young man’s name were funneled into the stock market, and everything was left in its hands to handle with full authority.

An avatar like this was far more capable than a human for such work. After all, it never needed sleep. So long as the equipment could keep pace, in theory it could work without rest until the end of time.

Even the capitalists would be moved to tears by such devotion.

Money, at least, was easy enough to deal with. Qin Ye was not truly afraid of underhanded tricks.

But it would be troublesome.

It would be best to stand behind the nation. If anyone wanted to lay a hand on him or the Qin family, they would first have to get past the power backing him.

A monstrous family of the sort that made one want to clamp on handcuffs and call in the law—better to let the light of righteousness shine upon the world.

Run someone down on purpose and break their leg, then afterward pay nothing more than a little money, something utterly insignificant to them, and consider the matter settled.

How very pleased with themselves they must have been.

As he complained, Qin Ye also quietly reminded the avatar, “You can borrow server power from other people’s systems, but don’t mooch too hard, got it?”

The avatar nodded and said in a clear male voice, “Understood, Father.”

?

Wouldn’t your father be the young man instead?

Though Qin Ye was puzzled, he thought that being called “Father” was still better than being called “Master,” so he let it go at once.

Likewise, he did not mind the small matter of the avatar using Qin Yancheng’s voice.

Qin Yancheng, still recovering his leg, suddenly let out a huge sneeze.

He had already been kneeling in defeat for an entire day.

When playing with friends, he could always dump the blame on a lousy teammate, saying the friend was too terrible. But once he started solo queueing, Qin Yancheng kept shifting the blame onto his own teammates and even the enemy side—anyone but himself.

And then it was one loss after another.

He lost so badly that his rebellious streak rose up, and he stubbornly refused to believe he would not win even a single match today.

It was then that he noticed someone had added him as a friend.

The other person’s avatar was a selfie that looked a lot like Qin Yancheng.

But upon opening it and looking closely, one would still find differences between them.

Qin Yancheng was a little more mature, while the other seemed more youthful. The former was sunny and handsome; the latter was green and innocent.

Qin Yancheng did not think much of it. Assuming they simply looked alike, he accepted the request.

Afterward, he was pulled into a team and started duo queueing with the other player.

From that point on, Qin Yancheng went from a string of losses to the joy of a winning streak carried by a powerhouse.

The only thing was: why did this guy keep calling him “brother” over and over?

Your profile says you’re a man, doesn’t it?

A male little sister?

Qin Yancheng did not understand, but he did not dwell on it.

On the other side, while helping his father manage the assets and watching a string of numbers multiply and multiply under his meticulous operations until they became a very long line of digits that kept jumping and shifting—

while also playing games with his brother and building their bond, the avatar tilted the head of the human form it had sculpted to resemble Qin Yancheng.

Then it used too much force, and the head bent all the way back.

Mm. It seemed brother was not very happy.

Blue data flickered in the avatar’s eyes before quickly settling on Tan Yuanyuan, whose name had already been changed.

Ah. Brother liked Tan Yuanyuan, but Father would not allow it.

So Father had broken brother’s leg, yet brother still seemed unwilling to give up.

The avatar felt that it should help Father share the burden.

Qin Ye had no idea about the strange logic and behavior of the avatar that had just come into being. He returned to the ward and fell asleep in the chair.

The next day, after washing his face and waking himself up, Qin Ye opened his phone and was first startled by the enormous string of numbers sent by the bank.

Back in the day, even when he handled things himself, he had never gone from penniless to the richest man in the world in a single night.

Was the avatar a little too overpowered?

Wouldn’t the young man get points deducted for giving him such a cheat?

Qin Ye: ...

He was only letting his thoughts wander a little, but after seeing that endless chain of numbers, he immediately told the avatar to stop harvesting the stock market.

Although the avatar’s rampage had already alerted the giants of the financial world, and they were all trying to figure out which side this intruder had come from to smash up the place.

Still, their technology and the avatar’s were separated by a dimensional wall; all they could do was be toyed with by it.

After thinking for a moment, Qin Ye told the avatar to turn itself in—no, not to the international financial titans, but to the state.

He also wondered whether, after turning itself in, the money in his bank account would be seized.

By rights, it should not be. He had neither stolen nor robbed; all of it had been squeezed out by the avatar’s harvesting of the market.

Besides, the avatar did not even gouge too hard. It only took a little from each stalk, while in truth everyone in the stock market was its crop.

On the other side, the highest official in the relevant department discovered that he had received a letter of surrender.

At first, the official did not take it seriously and assumed it was some prank, until the other side sent a second letter saying it could prove itself by breaching the protective wall of the royal palace across the sea.

Then a colleague in the information division reported that the other side seemed to be under hacker attack, and that the opponent’s skill was so terrifying that the people across the sea, driven to desperation, had actually asked them for help.

The official: ...

A bit surreal.

The letter claimed it was an artificial intelligence, that it had been born only the day before, and that it had helped its father with work. But its father seemed dissatisfied, so he had sent it here to turn itself in, and afterward it might be handed over to the nation and so on.

No wonder the official thought it was a prank.

It really did sound like one.

Especially since there are always gifted people who teach themselves to hack, who have talent and ability and like to make trouble just to prove themselves.

Of course, many such troublemakers are eventually brought into the fold.

Some are not, but those are very, very few, as rare as phoenix feathers or unicorn horns—and most of the rest simply had not caused trouble, which was why nobody had gone looking for them.

But now, on closer inspection, this did not seem to be a prank after all.

What in the world?

Everyone was still struggling to conquer artificial intelligence, and unless there was a breakthrough, progress was impossible. And you’re telling me you just succeeded outright?

That was rather unbelievable.

The avatar was duly taken seriously and met the official in person.

However, its line of thought was different from that of ordinary people, and the official felt he could not persuade a truly artificial intelligence—one that had only just been born, yet would likely become the most learned intelligence in all of history.

So the official decided to start with its so-called father.

Yes, it made sense for a creation to call its creator Father.

The avatar understood Qin Ye’s intention, so it did not deliberately conceal his information. On the contrary, it very openly presented the relevant details before the official.

The official: ...

“Is it true that, to you, the entire world’s networks are actually defenseless?”

“In private network domains that are not open to the public, entering them requires camouflage, which takes a little effort.”

“Just a little effort? They’re not even open to the public.”

“But their members do not operate only within that domain, and they cannot keep everything completely secret.”

The official felt a chill. Such a thing should never have existed at this point in time.

No wonder. No wonder artificial intelligence villains endure so long in science fiction films. This really was terrifying.

No one could guarantee they would keep silent about something forever. Psychological behavior, an unconscious habit, microexpressions, and so on—anything at all could leak information, even if the person in question had not intended to.

And human beings could never guarantee they would never make a mistake. But artificial intelligence could.

Thinking of it that way was truly frightening. Fortunately, whoever created this thing was not some anti-social maniac.

The official wiped away the sudden cold sweat beading on his brow and continued reviewing the information.

When he saw that the children had been switched at birth, and that it happened to be switched with the child of a well-known local tycoon, he paused.

Ah, life was full of melodrama.

As he kept reading, he saw that after discovering the switched children, the Tan family had gone straight to the door, taken back the daughter they had raised for eighteen years, yet their own biological daughter had never been returned.

And the other side had been utterly powerless, while a whole series of troubles had struck their own home, which was what drove them, in a fit of emotion, to successfully create artificial intelligence.

The official: ...

Ah, so many people only get angry in the midst of anger, that instant burst of fury, that old saying about a man’s wrath staining the ground with blood within five steps—such wild men are rare now.

Reality is not anime. The protagonist cannot always break out in a dramatic surge at the critical moment. But this was even more unbelievable than a protagonist’s power exploding at the decisive instant.

The avatar recounted the story on behalf of its father, letting the official know that he had always been deeply interested in the field of artificial intelligence, but his own company did not deal with that area.

So he taught himself, tinkered on his own, and quietly conducted research by himself.

The crucial point was that he was not devoting every ounce of body and soul to it; his real center of life was his family.

Meanwhile, experts in the field had buried their heads in years of painstaking research, and after great effort had achieved only the tiniest progress, still far from the goal they had imagined.

And then this nonprofessional, someone who merely liked the subject and dabblingly worked on it here and there, half-fish and half-dry for three days at a time, finally, in middle age, after a little stimulation, solved the whole thing?

When exactly will reality start following logic?

The official was completely stunned.

“Father checked the Tan family’s information and found that Mr. Tan Jian’s moral character was not very good.

He was not truly all that attached to his own bloodline. He only brought the child back because he discovered the truth about the switched children and decided to set things right, so the media would have nothing to sneer about.

He did not want the Tan family’s biological bloodline to remain outside, nor was he very willing to send back the adopted daughter they had raised for eighteen years.

Instead, he wanted to use her as a marriage alliance and gain more profit for the Tan family.

With Father’s connections and influence alone, there was no way to shake the Tan family, so he placed all his hopes on me. Fortunately, he succeeded.”

The avatar served as a competent narrator.

“What had your father originally planned?”

“To obtain more money than the Tan family, and crush them with money.”

“Then why did he change his mind?”

The avatar paused.

Why, indeed?

Clearly, with my existence, Father is a god of the internet. If he wished, he could even rely on his advanced technology to wage an information war online that no one could withstand.