Chapter 252: Phased Harvest and New Beginning

"How many words do you plan to write in this novel?"

Kaiyuan sent a message after a long time. Recently, he has been busy expanding his author library, and has indeed communicated less with Li Yan, who has entered a stable period.

However, Li Yan is also gradually shifting his focus to other things. On the one hand, the plot has indeed entered a period of steady progress, and readers' enthusiasm for discussing the underlying plot has long dissipated. Before the next wave of outbreak comes, the lukewarm trend will continue for a while; on the other hand, the stimulation of online literature itself to him has decreased a lot.

The reason is simple: money.

In addition to the lofty motivation of "creating works that will go down in history", he also had a strong driving force to make money when writing online articles.

But now the 30,000 or 40,000 yuan a month earned from online writing can no longer excite him.

Sometimes if you don’t spend the money you earn, you may not understand the meaning of making money.

The number of readers of "Nangong Youth" is decreasing little by little every day, which is inevitable.

For a long novel, even if 10,000 words are updated every day, it is still not enough for the readers who follow it.

The experience of reading tens of thousands of words continuously is definitely better than reading a little bit every day. People will start to grow old with the book, but as time goes by, the fun in following the book is gone, the atmosphere is gone, and it can never be regained.

Sometimes I haven’t read for a long time and have forgotten the previous plot. When I click on the latest chapter, I still don’t find myself very interested, or even the development direction is different from what I expected, and my enthusiasm drops to zero.

There is no other way, unless tens of thousands of words are updated every day, and it can be completed in one or two months, everyone can finish reading the book when they are in high spirits, and the reading experience will be very good.

Even for Li Yan, it would be difficult to do this.

Li Yan's income can no longer be supported by readers who continue to read her books, and she basically relies on new readers.

What’s worse is that as his book becomes more and more popular, more and more pirated copies are made.

Kaiyuan only had one thing to say about this: There is really no way, some people are typing manually, what can you do.

Li Yan is a programmer himself, so of course he knows that reporting the website is meaningless. Many new readers go to read pirated copies. Li Yan has no other choice but to thank the genuine readers in the comment section.

He now has only one motivation for writing online novels: after finishing this wonderful story, future generations will think of him when they mention online novels.

This kind of high-level sense of accomplishment takes time to acquire.

"About three to four million words." Li Yan replied.

Kaiyuan just said, "It will take a while longer. I will try to get more recommendations for you." That was all.

Mr. Shenxu's enthusiasm for his story remains unabated. He can still discuss some plot details, which can be regarded as an intermittent motivation for Li Yan.

Good brothers are good brothers.

Now Li Yan is thinking that according to the plot arrangement, the next wave of foreshadowing will explode in mid-June. He hopes that it can set off a sensation in the online literature world so that he can hear Nangong Li's name from the mouths of those awesome authors when he attends the awards ceremony.

At the end of May, Li Yan spent an extremely busy Dragon Boat Festival.

First, he took Chen Fan and Deng Yudi to find Fang Shu who was working overtime, and made it clear that they could use a small workbench to research the development of mobile phone systems - Fang Shu could provide them with some very basic engineering files, and could also find colleagues in the technical department for some simple answers.

However, don't even think about further technical support.

Li Yan was not surprised. After all, it was all thanks to Wang Peihua's face. Wang Peihua's face had to be passed on to the mail bureau... At present, Li Yan had no value to Fangshu or even the Chuang clan. It was basically a favor transaction.

Bringing along the awesome Deng Yudi only made Fang Shu feel that "they were taking this matter pretty seriously."

Why is it so awesome? Because on May 5, the results of the Linjiang Youth Informatics Olympiad selection competition came out.

Deng Yudi won the first place in the selection and became the number one player from Linjiang Province participating in the national competition.

Zheng Da and Rao Feng were also shortlisted. Amazingly, Deng Yudi’s female partner, who cried because she felt like a burden, also won the only “must have” female contestant spot.

Chen Fan represented Linjiang Junior High School in the national Class C competition with the second place in the junior high school group.

As for Li Yan...miraculously, a separate column was given for her in the announcement.

Category B of the national competition was originally an informal competition. The contestants were those who won the first prize in the provincial league's high school improvement group but failed to make the 15-person list for Category A. The list is very long and in a sense it should not be considered an honor roll - because the first prize of the provincial league had been announced long ago, and now that they had been eliminated in the qualifiers, they might not be happy about being eliminated again.

However, in the announcement of Linjiang Province’s selection results, it was clearly written “National Competition Category B: Li Yan, first place in the junior high school group (New Taipei First High School)”.

It is really a situation that outsiders are confused after watching it, and experts are puzzled after watching it.

This also resulted in Chen Fan, who ranked first in the junior high school group, being clearly marked as "second place". Just by looking at such an awkward announcement, Li Yan could guess what kind of big discussion had taken place within the society.

It should be a point of view that multiple parties insist on and compromise on in turn.

It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s the same set of test papers, I can turn the exam room upside down.

Li Yan originally wanted an access card, but Fang Shu said that he could only come in when he was in the office.

"That's very reasonable." Li Yan said with a smile.

But next I'm going to make you wish I was in the Chuang Clan Lab.

As long as the value is in place, two-level reversal of offense and defense are natural things.

In the afternoon, Li Yan took them to Linjiang University again. With the announcement of the provincial computer selection, Li Kai obviously showed much more respect to the three juniors in front of him.

Although he knew that Deng Yudi was the teacher's son, they were more concerned about Li Yan.

Ever since they last met, Hu Xinyue had been brainwashing the group members every day about how extraordinary Li Yan was, and she had actually instilled a sense of awe in them.

The point is, he clearly said that he got full marks in all subjects, had great essays, was very strong in sports, and had connections with all kinds of bigwigs, but how come when I see him today, he only has computer science grades?

This isn't the way to play Almighty, right?
In one afternoon, Li Kai and He Bo analyzed the home delivery mechanism they learned from Colonel Ken, and presented a fancy PPT to explain the food delivery platform system conceived by the team.

It looked like he was reporting to Li Yan, because Chen Fan and Deng Yudi looked confused.

Of course, Li Kai didn’t think he was reporting, he thought he was demonstrating.

He even collected information that there was a group of people at Shanghai Jiaotong University who were developing a food delivery platform - but it was still in the data collection stage, and he felt quite proud of his team that had already achieved some phased results.

Then, Li Yan hit back with a sentence, "ZTO's system is completely different from that of the food delivery platform." Before the two college students could even speak, they were stunned by Li Yan's rapid-fire remarks, including "not forward-looking," "lack of use of mobile terminals," and "failure to start from changing human lifestyles."

"It is not enough to just focus on takeaway. Takeaway is just a breakthrough. The mechanism studied from it is truly valuable."

Li Kai was just about to start a debate when he saw Li Yan take out a whole business plan, which explained clearly the various problems and response mechanisms that he had thought might be involved in the food delivery platform. In the end, he summarized a set of platform operation models, which he promoted, and envisioned the lifestyle after the popularization of smartphones.

The two college students were still amazed at Li Yan's ideas. Li Yan opened his computer to show a PPT, which contained the algorithm requirements for his plan. Chen Fan and Deng Yudi felt very involved in this.

Although Li Kai was skeptical about things like "popularization of smart phones", "mobile payments" and "GPS positioning services", he couldn't resist Li Yan's logically self-consistent ideas and many wonderful thoughts worth discussing, so he plunged into the heated discussion.

Finally, they agreed to conduct a pilot project on the platform according to Li Yan's idea, expand some new merchants, and have their team members and recruited volunteers (classmates) act as deliverymen to collect a wave of basic data for testing the algorithm developed by Li Yan and his team.

Later, I will try the algorithm myself to see how to debug the algorithm's dispatching, route planning, and time estimation.

There is definitely no need to think about mobile payment. I can only pay the merchant first and then ask my classmates to collect the money later.

"Delivery fee..." He Bo said in a low voice.

"Just take the research funds as a subsidy."

"The funding for our project is so limited..." He Bo smiled bitterly.

Li Yan suddenly took out ten red bills from his pocket and said, "Subsidy."

The two were stunned, and their first reaction was "Whose rich kid is this?". Deng Yudi also widened his eyes - although he couldn't actually open them that wide.

Chen Fan was used to it. He didn't know how much this person had earned from physical articles and online articles, and he recently received a bonus of 50,000 yuan - in fact, all the bonuses added up to almost 80,000 yuan. Giving him 1,000 yuan would be like buying a set of real test data for his own algorithm, which was quite worth it.

"Everyone went home during the summer vacation, so the only time we can test is in June..." Li Yan was interrupted by He Bo who had collected the money.

"We can still test in July. Not everyone will go home so soon. We still have internships. When there are fewer people, we can expand the scope of research."

So positive?

"Okay, seniors, when the workload increases, the subsidies will be provided."

"Well, let's just do research, don't talk about this."

On the way back, Li Yan sighed from the bottom of his heart:
College students are really top-notch cheap labor...

(End of this chapter)