Chapter 14: The Leverage Point of the Sky-Stepping Technique

“Scraping together six hundred thousand, just barely enough, and what can I even do with it?”

The early April weather was far from warm. The drizzling spring rain only added to the chill. As he stepped out of WEMADE, Gu Cheng felt as though his “small goal” had suddenly collapsed.

Since his initial crossing and his escape from the clutches of S-M, he had resolved to seize his first fortune by acquiring the agency rights to Legend. This determination was closely tied to his understanding of the looming winter of the internet industry.

But after hearing the price just now, a sense of helpless bewilderment swept over Gu Cheng, as if his strength had nowhere to go. His first reaction was that Park Young-kwan was trying to rip him off, making outrageous demands. Yet, Park’s demeanor during the negotiation had been earnest, not at all like someone scheming to deceive.

Forcing himself to calm down once back at his lodgings, Gu Cheng investigated the current online gaming market with a practical eye, comparing deals struck by other companies. In the end, he realized that such a substantial game could not be bought for merely five or six hundred thousand yuan.

This led Gu Cheng to consider another possibility. In one of those “street history posts” he’d read in his previous life, it was recorded that “Chen Tianqiao started with five hundred thousand,” apparently meaning that in 1999, this figure invested half a million yuan to establish Shanda. Over a year later, when the bubble burst, a desperate Chen bet all of Shanda’s remaining assets on the game “Legend.”

The problem lay in the vague phrase “Shanda’s entire fortune.” There was no way that, in the year between founding Shanda and acquiring the Legend license, Chen did no other business. Given the boom in the internet sector in 1999, it was highly likely that Chen had made some money before making his pivotal investment in Legend.

Thus, when he finally bought Legend, the funds at his disposal were probably far more than five hundred thousand yuan. In fact, according to history, Chen Tianqiao ultimately paid over two million yuan in the initial payment to secure the deal—unfortunately, Gu Cheng’s grasp of history was too poor to know this.

Hence, the earlier blunder.

What now?

Having untangled his thoughts, Gu Cheng realized with concern that he might need two million yuan just to get Legend. And if he wanted to negotiate for minimal royalties for the Dongyi people, or even buy them out completely, three million would still fall short.

Yet the timing of his entry into the market was alarmingly close to the collapse of the internet bubble. There was no way he could turn his six hundred thousand into several million in such a short period.

He had traversed time, but not reincarnated—back in 2000, his past self hadn’t even been born yet.

He knew nothing about the stock market, futures, lotteries, or any black swan events. He had no knowledge of World Cups, the top five European leagues, or NBA results before the 2010s, so gambling was out of the question.

Being a plagiarism hack was also out of reach for now.

So, he would have to keep his feet on the ground. The six hundred thousand had already been invested in registering the company; he had to use this enterprise to do something real—there was no other way.

He had just over half a year’s window.

With money-making in mind, Gu Cheng racked his brain for two days straight. Besides attending classes, training, and eating, he scoured the internet for information, trying to uncover business opportunities suited to the times.

The entrepreneurial wave of the internet in 2000 was still surging. On various start-up forums, akin to the “Webmaster Home” communities of later years, one could always find snippets of practical “insider knowledge” being shared daily.

Gu Cheng, with his extraordinary insight and hunger for knowledge, could instantly judge the rough value of any information he came across. As the days blurred together, he gradually grasped the pulse of entrepreneurship in this era, though that final breakthrough remained just out of reach.

The anxiety was getting to him—he was breaking out in sores on his lips. The body he’d kept in perfect shape under strict nutrition and fitness regimens during his time at S-M had, in just over half a month since escaping their clutches, become soft and flabby from junk food and lack of exercise, gaining three to four pounds.

…

“Stay calm. I have to stay calm. There must be a way.”

In the cheapest, most obscure corner of Guro District, in the smallest office of a certain rundown building, Gu Cheng sat before a second-hand desk, a single computer, and a lone ethernet cable. He’d nearly finished two packs of Han Na Mountain cigarettes, still scratching his head, forcing himself to think clearly.

This office had been rented solely to provide a company address for registration. Since he was paying for it anyway, leaving it empty was a waste, and going to internet cafes would cost extra. So this week, he’d moved his computer and bedding in and was now living and working from the company.

There was no point in decorating the office, so it consisted of nothing but a computer, a floor mat, and a rice cooker. The cooker was for instant noodles, which saved him quite a bit compared to eating out every day.

The corner was piled with empty noodle packets and cigarette butts.

As the week drew to a close, Gu Cheng finally found a small business opportunity that seemed viable: providing data services to other internet companies.

This was a shrewd choice. Since the end of last year, as the bubble began to appear, some latecomer but sharp entrepreneurs had already pivoted to this line of work, rather than foolishly launching their own sites to chase traffic.

It was just like a gold rush: the first wave rushes to dig for gold, but for those arriving later, doing the same is sheer folly.

By then, the window for finding gold had passed; it was time to stand at the mine owners’ doors, selling shovels, jeans, or even excavators.

For the internet industry, businesses that “sell shovels and jeans” equate to selling traffic, selling data.

Big internet companies hoping to go public needed their website metrics to look impressive—higher daily clicks, more active IPs, larger registered user bases—to secure loftier valuations from venture capitalists and, eventually, raise more funds through IPOs.

Wherever there is demand, there will be a market.

Just as, a decade later, certain web-novel writers on Qidian, in order to stand out from the masses of formulaic stories, had to pay for data boosts; or as mobile game developers on the Apple App Store would hire third-party services to climb the charts.

From the second half of 1999, the industry’s data services centered around “helping websites inflate their click counts.” A slew of click-bot scripts appeared, earning service fees from site operators. A handful of early players made millions of dollars in pure profit from this.

But because the technical threshold for “click boosting” was so low, scripts soon flooded the market. Except for a few who got in early and made a killing, the rest of the imitators only enjoyed a brief moment before their profits vanished as “clicks” rapidly lost value.

By early 2000, no one was making real money solely from boosting clicks—this gray industry had devoured itself.

With every entrepreneurial trend, the cleverest always retreat upstream in the supply chain in time to find the next “value trough,” watching from above as the downstream turns bloody with competition.

When even the slowest have caught on to launching websites, the smart ones are already selling them traffic. When every neighbor’s fool is talking about making money in the stock market, the market-makers have already drawn their classic “double bottom” patterns, waiting to fleece the sheep.

By early 2000, the authoritative global ranking site Alexa showed all websites’ click numbers had multiplied many times over the previous year.

(Alexa is a subsidiary of Amazon, specializing in publishing authoritative global website rankings. The daily active IPs and effective clicks of the world’s major websites are based on Alexa’s published data.)

Until Alexa introduced a new, more reliable click-counting algorithm, “website click numbers” had temporarily lost their value for investors and the stock market—everyone knew these numbers were fake, just as, on Qidian in 2008, some star web novels boasted billions of clicks.

Consequently, venture funds, Nasdaq insiders, and authoritative financial media like the Wall Street Journal all switched to “daily active IPs” as the primary metric for assessing a website’s economic value.

Because, as of early 2000, most click-bot scripts and plug-ins could only use a small number of computers to repeatedly click webpages and links, unable to leverage thousands or tens of thousands of machines at low cost.

Therefore, “daily active IP addresses” remained a safe and trusted metric, and investors still had faith in it.

In other words, if Gu Cheng could find a technical solution—or even just a business concept—to artificially boost “daily active IPs” in a way nobody else had yet considered, there would surely be website owners eager to buy, and he could make some fast money.

And who was Gu Cheng? What seemed an insurmountable challenge to ordinary people was, to him, as easy as reaching for a willing beauty.