Techniques and Dao

Chapter 194 Genius Zhang Jia
Zhang Jia is affectionately known as "Little Strawberry" by those around her because of the freckles on her nose.

The creator of "Strawberry," a super intelligent entity that plunged all of humanity into a long slumber in the future, slain over a million immortals in the Bodhi War, killed a host of high immortals including Dao Ling Xing Jun and Tian Ji Zi, and fearlessly pushed Sheng Ping Ning to the brink of despair despite the heavy military force of the Heavenly Court.

But at that time, she was just a little child.

Zhang Jia has been discharged from the hospital for some time now.

During this period, she returned to the hospital for two follow-up examinations and found that she had fully recovered without any problems. All the doctors who treated her were amazed by this "miracle of life".

Only Zhang Jia knew it was because of that coffee-flavored candy. She never saw the young man who saved her again, but she silently recalled his appearance in her heart.

After being discharged from the hospital, she lost two baby teeth, and the new teeth that grew in were two canine teeth. Looking in the mirror, she was very satisfied with her "fierce and majestic" appearance.

She soon started primary school, but since then she has almost never passed any of her tests. The reason is that many of her peers attend preschool tutoring classes, while she has never attended any due to illness.

Zhang Jia's father is a policeman and her mother is a full-time housewife; their family income is average. Coupled with the significant medical expenses, even with spare time for tutoring, her parents cannot afford the exorbitant cost of several hundred yuan per class.

Therefore, although her name is Zhang Jia, her grades are not good at all.

Her only strong subject was computers. But it was a minor subject, and the school only valued it more than "self-study." Even though the computer class was originally only held once a week, it was often taken over by other main subjects.

The teachers demanded that students work extremely hard in Chinese, math, and English.

The homeroom teacher said sternly in the classroom, "If you are unwilling to endure the hardship of studying now, you will suffer the hardship of life in the future!"

The learning here mainly refers to Chinese, mathematics, and English, subjects that will be tested in the future, such as the entrance exams for junior high school and high school. Apart from these, subjects like computer science, which are not graded, cannot be considered "the hardship of learning" no matter how much effort is put into them.

But Zhang Jia, nicknamed "Little Strawberry," loves computers so much that she becomes so engrossed in them that she forgets to eat and play, which is what she should be doing at her age.

Perhaps because of the coffee-flavored candy that saved her life, everything she sees in the world every morning when she wakes up is now compiled into lines of code in her mind.

She asked her mother to give her the tablet she used to watch TV series every day, along with a keyboard. That way, she could enter "her own world" at any time.

Turning on her tablet and connecting to the internet is Zhang Jia's happiest moment of the day.

On one occasion, in order to test the importance of the computer science elective course, she spent two minutes clearing all the BIOS on the motherboards of the computers on the computer lab's local area network, causing the computers to fail to boot.

Zhang Jia was secretly pleased with herself for a long time, waiting to see her classmates walk into the computer lab and show expressions like, "I went swimming and found there wasn't a drop of water in the pool." Unfortunately, she was very disappointed, because it took a full ten days for the truth to be discovered.

This made her very discouraged in two ways.

First, computer courses are not valued at all in schools.

Secondly, such a simple task took her a full two minutes. After all, her tablet computer was four years old and too slow. With the latest model, it shouldn't have taken her more than thirty seconds.

So Little Strawberry begged her mother to buy her a new computer. But her mother said they didn't have any spare money, and she asked where she could make money quickly. Her mother said that besides working, some people could make money by buying stocks.

So she used her mother's account to log into the online stock trading app to buy stocks. Her mother knew she only had 100 yuan in her account and couldn't argue with her child, so she gave her the account and told her to "go play somewhere else."

The next morning, Mom accidentally saw that the balance in her stock account had increased from one hundred yuan to more than three hundred thousand yuan.

So, Little Strawberry was hit for the first time in her life.

While spanking Little Strawberry's bottom, Mom scolded, "What stocks could you buy that would rise so much? Stock market investors are all just韭菜 (a metaphor for easily exploited people), how are they supposed to profit from you now that you've made so much?" Little Strawberry cried and argued, "I've never bought a single stock! And I don't know how to buy them!!"

"Nonsense! If you don't buy and sell, where would all this money in the account come from!"

"I didn't buy it, I just changed the numbers! Who gave this system the right to change numbers so easily?"

"You little rascal, how could you possibly let someone else's stock trading system be modified like that? You must have hacked into it again to cause trouble."

Zhang Jia broke free from her mother's embrace, rubbing her bottom as she cried out, "If we hadn't hacked in, how would they have known about the system's vulnerabilities! This was for their own good; I only added three zeros to the account number. If it were a bad guy, he might have added thirty zeros!"

"You're still trying to deny it! Your dad's a policeman, how dare you change the money in our family account? If your dad finds out, he'll break your bones!"

As she spoke, her mother raised her hand and slapped her across the face.

That evening, Little Strawberry, her face burning hot and her eyes red from crying, had to hack into the brokerage's system again. She needed to change her account balance back, but the brokerage had closed for trading. So, she first had to hack into the stock exchange's back-end system to release the brokerage's trading privileges, and then return to hack into the brokerage's back-end system to change her account balance back from over 300,000 yuan back to 100 yuan.

Because of Zhang Jia's unstable emotions and the overly complicated procedure, she was delayed by as much as 20 minutes from going to bed at 9 p.m. every night.

Despite going to bed late and being exhausted, Little Strawberry tossed and turned in bed, unable to fall asleep. Not only did her face sting, but she also couldn't understand why her mother would be so cruel as to hit her.

She did all these pointless things just to buy a better computer.

Dad is always away on business trips, and when he's not, he usually comes home very late. It's as if there are endless bad guys in this world, leaving Dad with very little time to spend with her.

If there were no bad people in the world, if everyone could have everything they wanted while lying comfortably in bed like I do now, how wonderful that would be! If that were the case, Dad wouldn't have to work so hard, and I could lie between my parents and drift off to sleep sweetly, just like when I was a child.

Before the grand dream of "no more bad people in the world" is realized, Little Strawberry first realizes her own small dream.

Even though I got a beating, a few days later my mother still bought me a brand new laptop. It wasn't very expensive, but it was the latest model. It was many times faster than that old, broken tablet.

In exchange, Little Strawberry promised her mother that she would no longer sabotage the backend systems of important public systems, and would never again alter the amounts in her stock, fund, or bank accounts, regardless of whether those accounts belonged to her family or others.

With this laptop, Little Strawberry felt like she had wings, carrying it everywhere she went. Every time she sat down, she would input her daily new ideas into the code.

That day, after school and dinner, Zhang Jia was idly sitting on her bedroom balcony, coding on her computer. She could hear the opening theme song of a TV series her mother was watching in the living room next door.

She glanced at the time in the bottom right corner of the screen: 18:50 PM. Her mother loved this popular TV series; two episodes aired every day, which meant she could linger for at least another hour before her mother would urge her to take a shower.

Only then did Zhang Jia feel at ease holding the laptop, her hands flying across the keyboard.

Suddenly, she saw a figure flicker outside the balcony. This startled her; she lived on the seventeenth floor, how could there be anyone outside?

But when Little Strawberry saw the clothes the person was wearing, she was so excited she almost jumped up. She clearly saw a young man wearing a light blue taekwondo uniform.

"Hey handsome!?"

She placed her laptop on the coffee table on the balcony, leaned over the edge, and asked, "Hey handsome! The handsome guy who gave me the brown candy! Is that you?"

(End of this chapter)