48 Hours a Day

He was dressed like a tourist and appeared to have just disembarked the plane. He was also carrying a small suitcase with him; its gilded handle was engraved with a magical creature. It had a snake-like body and the heads of a lion, bull, and human. He walked out of the airport gate, reached his hands out and hailed a cab.

“Excuse me, please take me to The Westin Palo Alto.”

After shutting the car door, he took out a travel brochure from his pocket and read it.

“Okay, sir.”

The black driver glanced at the old man through the rearview mirror.

“Oh, by the way, I want to listen to hip hop. Don’t you like hip hop too?” The old man put his suitcase aside.

“I’m afraid I do anything about it. You know, it all depends on what’s on the radio.”

“Hey, is that how your boss teaches you to entertain your customer? Can’t even fulfill such a small request?” the old man leisurely replied. The driver got annoyed when he heard that. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t waste your time. Believe me, boy. No one in this world can spend more time than me. You don’t want to waste your time on

me.”

The old man then opened a box of gum and poured ten pieces into his mouth in one go. After a short moment of silence, the driver finally started the car. “Good lad, now you can play me some hip hop.”

The driver pulled an iPod from his pocket and handed it with a pair of headphones to the old man behind him. “It’s got Nicki Minaj, Post Malone, and Jay-Z...” “Oh, Nicki Minaj? Just my favorite. Great! You’ve got to admit that technology has indeed made life more comfortable,” said the old man as he placed the headphones across his ears.

Half an hour later, the car arrived at Silicon Valley. This wasn’t an administrative division. Initially, the term only referred to the areas surrounding Santa Clara Valley. It gradually expanded to areas that included Santa Clara County and San Mateo County in the southwest, and San Francisco Bay and parts of Alameda County to its east.

Silicon Valley was the melting pot of all American tech industries, also famous worldwide for its forefront in electronic technological innovation. A series of internationally renowned tech conglomerates such as Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Oracle made it their home. It is also a tech geek paradise.

The cab finally stopped at the gate of a startup corporation. Compared to big companies like Intel and Tesla, this company was negligibly small. Its main business was developing online photo albums, and there were less than ten employees in the entire company.

The old man carried the box and came to the door of the office of the CTO, who was also the CEO and the boss of the company. Seconds later, the door opened automatically.

“Cool,” the old man exclaimed and walked in.

The door closed automatically behind him, and the lights in the room were dimmed to sufficient brightness. The old man saw that the entire floor he was standing on happened to be a massive display screen, but it felt like a carpet, and there were even electronic water ripples displayed beneath his feet. When a mechanical dog saw a stranger coming in, it got up from its and started to bark at the old man. A circuit board was thrown to it, to which it laid down obediently and started to lick it.

The man named Einstein that Zhang Heng saw in the quest was sitting behind his desk. At its corner was a model of a Saturn V rocket. He then stretched out his hand and made a welcome gesture. With his eyebrows raised, the old man walked to where he pointed. Immediately, the wall in front of him folded and turned into a couch.

“Impressive.” The old man sat down, deliberately plopping down with force. He could feel his butt touching the surface of an unknown material. Somehow, it felt unexpectedly soft and plush.

“Your arrival today made me realize that I have wasted my life.”

The man named Einstein was watching a technology conference. He swiped the screen with his finger and silenced the video, his face expressionless as he spoke to the old man.

“So, what brings you here?” “You know the reason, don’t you? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have sent your people to the airport’s gate to block me. Right?”

The old man spat out a piece of now tasteless chewing gum to the ground. Immediately, the mechanical dog, still licking the circuit board, suddenly alerted its ears. Its eyes scanned the gum on the ground. It let go of the circuit board and rushed toward its discovery. In less than five seconds, the floor was cleaned without a trace of messy gum.

After that, it returned to its kennel obediently.

The old man then poured out another ten pieces of colorful gum onto his hand. “Why did you modify the number of players allowed to complete the quest? It made it a lot more difficult for my people to complete it. Whatever you did violated the rules of the game, right?”

“Aren’t you ashamed of yourself, talking to me about these things? You really thought I wouldn’t notice his abnormal rate of development? No ordinary person could achieve what he achieved in such a short period of time. This is clearly your doing. You and your tricks that allow you to mess with time. You really thought you could hide it?”

“Well... fortunately, I’ve always had good connections. Now, I’ll just have to pray harder that everyone turns a blind eye to what I did.”

The old man continued on his road to diabetes by eating an entire lot of gum in his hands.

Einstein frowned. “What are you planning to do with your disciple? I don’t believe you’ll spend more than 80% of your power on him. Such a price is too hefty for you. You’re different from some frail idiots who are about to be buried into the ground. Although your strength has been weakening over the years, you’re still a long way from leaving this world, right? Why choose to make such a desperate move at such times? From what I know about you, you expect a greater return after investing so much in him.”

The old man shrugged. “I told you the truth a long time ago, but why can’t you believe that I just want to win this game and take a share of the new market. I want to revive my past glory and make myself famous again.”

“Do you really think those ridiculous clothes will allow you to integrate into a completely different society?”

“Why not give it a try? After all, KFC introduced Beijing chicken rolls in China.” The old man blinked, “survival of the fittest, that’s what you’ve always been talking about, right? Although I prefer you as Jordan Bruno and being tied at the stake, we can never go back to those good times, right?”

“Be careful, Cronus, don’t set yourself on fire.”

“I will try to keep this advice in mind, Sainz.”