Chapter 122: Capital Is a Major Issue

That evening, Xue Jianfeng invited Sun Jian out for dinner alone.

The other three men in the dormitory teased Xue Jianfeng for being stingy and inviting only Sun Jian, but Li Mu knew perfectly well that Xue Jianfeng must have wanted to talk to Sun Jian about Chen Jiao.

When Li Mu returned from swimming, he happened to see Xue Jianfeng helping Sun Jian back from outside. Only after asking did he learn that Sun Jian had had a little too much to drink.

Li Mu asked him, “How much did the two of you drink?”

Xue Jianfeng spread his hands. “At first, I wanted to have a little beer, but after I told him what was going on, Brother Jian insisted on getting something stronger. We ordered a bottle of Erguotou and split it evenly.”

Li Mu looked somewhat surprised. He glanced at Sun Jian, who was flushed and swaying with drunkenness, and asked, “What was the matter? Was it really serious enough for this?”

“Not exactly. There was something else involved too. Let’s get Brother Jian back first, then I’ll tell you about it privately.”

“All right.”

The two of them helped Sun Jian back to the dormitory and settled him in bed. Xue Jianfeng instructed the other roommates to look after him properly: bring him a basin if he felt like vomiting, and give him water if he was thirsty.

Hu Zhengdao thumped his chest. “Leave it to me. I’ve been looking after drunks since I was little. I’m practically an expert.”

Xue Jianfeng nodded. “Thanks, Zhengdao.”

Then he gave Li Mu a meaningful glance. The two brothers went downstairs and found a secluded corner of the sports field to sit in.

“Big Brother has had a pretty miserable time,” Xue Jianfeng said. He lit two cigarettes, handed one to Li Mu, and took a drag from the other.

“What do you mean?” Li Mu asked.

“In high school, he had a girlfriend for two years. They only ever held hands and kissed—very innocent. They agreed they would both take the entrance exams for Renmin University. But a little over a month before the exams, he discovered that the girl had slept with his childhood friend. He failed the exam that year. Those two went off to Wuhan University together, while he repeated the year and finally made it here.”

“So today mainly brought back some painful memories for him?” Li Mu asked.

“Exactly.” Xue Jianfeng nodded. “He didn’t really have feelings for Chen Jiao, either. He just thought she was pretty good and that they clicked when they met at the mixer. They exchanged a few messages afterward. When Chen Jiao turned him down, he didn’t take it to heart. But after I told him about it today, he said I had been considerate of him. He was quite grateful, and then he remembered that childhood friend of his. His mood turned sour, so he drank a little too much.”

Li Mu nodded. “There’s nothing we can do about what’s in his heart. But it’s good that the two of you have talked everything through.”

Xue Jianfeng gave a quiet assent. After hesitating for a moment, he said to Li Mu, “Li Mu, that night, when Chen Jiao climbed into my arms, you saw it, didn’t you?”

Li Mu asked curiously, “Why are you suddenly asking about that?”

Xue Jianfeng sighed. “I hadn’t intended to tell anyone, but I had a vague feeling that you might have seen it. That was why I confessed everything to you when we came back the next morning. To be honest, my thoughts were a little dirty at the time. Looking back now, I feel I wasn’t being very loyal to my brothers.”

Li Mu flicked away his cigarette butt and stood up. “It was mutual, and you both wanted it. There was nothing dirty about it, and it can’t really be called disloyal. But if you had chosen to keep it bottled up instead of saying anything, that would have looked a little underhanded.”

Xue Jianfeng nodded. “That’s right. Brothers have to treat one another properly.”

…

The first weekend after classes began coincided with the National Day holiday. The break ran from the twenty-ninth all the way to October eighth. Taking a holiday after only one week of classes made Li Mu extremely happy, but he had failed to buy a ticket home. It was the peak travel season, so after discussing it with Zhao Kang, he decided to stay in Yanjing for a few days and take a train home on the evening of the second.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth, Xue Jianfeng invited everyone from Dormitory 606, along with the girls from Yanjing University’s women’s dormitory, out for dinner. During the meal, he formally announced that he and Chen Jiao were now together. Sun Jian offered his congratulations on the spot, without showing the slightest trace of discomfort. Everyone was finally able to relax and celebrate properly.

They had originally planned to go singing afterward, but Zhao Ziqiu and another girl said they still wanted to go back and study. So once dinner was over, everyone went their separate ways.

Li Yawei and Han Xiaoxiao were both natives of Yanjing, so after dinner they took a bus home for the weekend. Xue Jianfeng had bought four movie tickets and planned to take Chen Jiao, along with Hu Zhengdao and Wang Yanan, who were also a couple, to see a movie.

Those two couples left as well.

Zhao Ziqiu and the other two girls from the dormitory said goodbye to Li Mu and the others. In the blink of an eye, only the three single men remained: Li Mu, Sun Jian, and Liu Nian.

On the way back, Sun Jian, who had been silent all along, suddenly spoke.

“Li Mu, Liu Nian, don’t you think there’s something wrong with our names? The three of them all have girlfriends, while none of us does. Xue Jianfeng, Hu Zhengdao, and Li Yawei all have three-character names, but the three of us have only two characters.”

Liu Nian laughed. “Brother Jian, Brother Mu just doesn’t want a relationship. Otherwise, wouldn’t Zhao Ziqiu have become his girlfriend long ago?”

Sun Jian scratched his head and said dejectedly, “That’s true.”

Then Sun Jian turned to Li Mu. “By the way, Li Mu, the Jiangsu alumni association at our school is holding a gathering tomorrow at Wind Shelter by the south gate. They say everyone has to contribute thirty yuan for expenses. Are you interested?”

Li Mu smiled. “Do you want the honest answer?”

Sun Jian immediately understood what he meant and hurriedly said, “Just come along for my sake. Alumni gatherings are a great place to meet girls. Maybe I’ll even find happiness of my own there.”

Since Sun Jian put it that way, Li Mu had no objections. “All right. I’ll go.”

“That’s more like it!”

Sun Jian checked the time and said, “What should the three of us do? Going straight back to the dormitory would be a little boring, wouldn’t it?”

Li Mu nodded. “Let’s go play at an Internet café for a while. My treat.”

Neither of the other two objected, so they headed straight for an Internet café.

There were several Internet cafés near Renmin University, but at that time, they were all fairly ordinary in both size and environment. The three chose the largest one, Zero Point Internet Café. It was crammed with more than thirty computers. The space was narrow and poorly ventilated, but it was still considered the best in the area.

Counter-Strike and Red Alert were all the rage in Internet cafés at the time, while hardly anyone played Stone Age anymore. Sun Jian and Liu Nian were both Counter-Strike fanatics, so as soon as they entered the café, they began looking for a room on the local network. But Li Mu could tell at a glance that their skills were nothing to boast about. They played only on the Warehouse map and did not dare touch maps such as Desert or Bridge.

Li Mu did not particularly like the smoky, suffocating atmosphere of Internet cafés. In a place as expensive as Yanjing, even the owner here was less generous than Er Bin back in Haizhou. At least Er Bin had set up a private room on the second floor, whose environment was far better than this.

Still, Li Mu saw a business opportunity in it. Internet café licenses were easy to obtain at the moment, and a higher-end Internet café could probably find a very good market. Internet fees in Yanjing were not cheap. Even a place with an environment like this charged three yuan an hour. An overnight session, from midnight until eight the next morning, cost twenty yuan. It was safe to assume that the computers in an Internet café were occupied almost around the clock.

A rough calculation was enough to reveal how astonishing the profits could be. If a computer operated for twenty hours a day, with twelve hours charged by the hour and eight hours charged as an overnight session, it would bring in fifty-six yuan daily. And how much did a computer cost? Even buying machines in bulk, a computer with an excellent configuration for the time would cost no more than five or six thousand yuan.

At five or six thousand yuan per computer, the gross profit would recover the investment in at most half a year. If that was not a highly profitable business, what was?

Li Mu suddenly thought that once he had sufficient cash flow, opening an Internet café to earn some pocket money might not be a bad idea. At the very least, he would have somewhere to relax.

Over the past few days, Li Mu had not paid much attention to EasyListen Network or Baidu Forums. Although the dormitory now had an Internet connection, there was nothing important he could do on a computer during those days. More importantly, with so many people in the dormitory, everyone was fighting to use the machines, and he had not bothered squeezing in.

At noon that day, Kong Lingyu called to say that EasyListen Network’s traffic had already reached the 1.5-million mark. Baidu Forums was even more impressive, with more than two million visits a day. It was practically a miracle.

The forums had also opened pages for celebrities in other fields. Stars with even a little fame in film and television, sports, variety shows, and entertainment now had forums of their own, and these celebrity forums had drawn in a great number of users.

A few days earlier, the forum homepage had also introduced a service allowing users to create their own forums. Users could search for a keyword, and if no forum existed for it, they could apply to establish one.

After these several moves, Baidu Forums, despite having gotten off to a late start, had used the singer forums incubated by EasyListen Network as a springboard and begun its meteoric rise. By now, it was far beyond anything EasyListen Network could compare with.

Baidu Forums had become immensely popular. It was not only users who liked it; people within the industry were paying close attention as well. A few celebrities had even cleverly realized that they needed to maintain their own forums and cultivate their fan communities, so they took the initiative to visit the forums themselves. The development of Baidu Forums was now riding a rocket.

But rapid development also brought enormous problems.

The greatest problem was funding.

Maintaining the forums technically required a larger technical team, as well as more powerful hardware. Hiring people and purchasing servers all cost money. Content moderation also required a large number of part-time workers and a small number of full-time employees, and that expense was extremely high as well.

The several hundred thousand yuan in EasyListen Network’s account had already been spent a few days earlier.

Li Mu urgently transferred one hundred thousand yuan from his personal savings into EasyListen Network’s account.

He did not want to trouble the people at Simple Plan by asking them to pay for him again. This project was no longer the simple music and audiovisual website he had originally envisioned. The amount of money required going forward would only grow larger, and the problem had to be solved through capital investment.

Li Mu felt it was time to raise a Series A round. Once they had the money, Baidu Forums could begin aggressively spending on promotion, and its development would accelerate even further.

But before raising the Series A, there were two key questions to resolve: whose money should they take, and how much?

Different investors would assign Baidu Forums different valuations. On that point, they could not simply choose the investor offering the highest valuation. They also had to consider the exchange of resources and assess the investor’s overall strength. Someone who offered only money was naturally inferior to someone who offered both money and support. They would also have to compare how much money each investor was willing to provide and how much practical help they could offer.

Moreover, different investors had different ambitions. Some felt that simply getting on board was enough, so their demands for equity would not be too high, generally remaining below ten percent. Others felt that merely getting on board was not enough and that they also needed a certain degree of influence. Those investors would demand a larger share. All of this had to be weighed carefully.

In his heart, Li Mu most wanted to take Baidu’s money.

Baidu Search had enormous traffic that could be converted directly into traffic for Baidu Forums. After all, Baidu Forums was originally a product of Baidu, and under the Baidu platform, Baidu Search was the ideal soil for its survival.

But the Series A offer Baidu had made last time was simply absurd!

(To be continued.)

P.S. Here is today’s first update. Within the first twenty-four hours after we went premium, we received nearly one hundred monthly votes. The last-ranked book on the new-release monthly-vote chart now has around 680 votes, and there are still more than ten days left this month. Do you think we still have a chance to make a push? I believe that people can only win if they dare to dream. So please help us, brothers and sisters. Let’s work together—you vote, and I’ll release more chapters!