On the day after the Dragon Boat Festival, Lashou Network submitted its IPO prospectus to the Lighthouse Country’s Securities and Exchange Commission, planning to raise 100 million US Dollars.

Ah Li announced that Yitao Network would operate independently and added a price comparison search function. Unable to compete with FoxTao in the brand-specific flash sales sector, it pivoted to strengthening its utility features.

Shortly after, Lei Yijun announced the R&D progress of the Xiaomi Mobile Phone for the first time, stating that the first model would be released in August.

Far away in Hu City, after receiving one million US Dollars in funding from Jinsha Venture Capital, Zhang Xuhao rapidly expanded his team and extended his business from the Jiaoda campus to the surrounding areas.

The increasingly fierce competition in the Group Buy industry made Zhang Xuhao realize one thing: he had to seize more market share in the food delivery sector before other internet giants entered the game.

However, at this time, mainstream domestic venture capital firms were not optimistic about the profitability of the food delivery model.

Market promotion, rider recruitment, technology R&D, and merchant management all required massive capital investment, and the revenue from both merchants and users could hardly cover the costs.

It was destined to operate at a loss for a long time!

Soon after forking over one million US Dollars, Jinsha Venture Capital regretted it. The money was only enough for Zhang Xuhao to upgrade his website to version 2.0 and make initial inroads into the white-collar market.

By early June, the website had only 30,000 registered users and fewer than 4,000 daily orders.

This was why Chen Yansen wasn’t in a hurry to get into food delivery. For one, the cost of cultivating the market and user base was too high. For another, smartphone penetration was low, and the 4G network had not yet launched.

Although the 3G network was trending toward higher speeds and lower prices, data plans remained exorbitant.

In the future, Zhang Xuhao would spend over a billion to cultivate the market, only to turn around and face his greatest rival—Meituan Takeout.

Relying on his "iron army" of tens of thousands of on-the-ground promoters, Wang Xin beat Eleme into a steady retreat, forcibly knocking the market leader down to second place.

But in this life, whether Wang Xin could emerge victorious from the Thousand Group Buy War was still an unknown.

After all, the first half of the year was almost over, and Meituan’s market share had yet to break into the top three, being firmly suppressed by Juhuasuan, Lashou, Gao Peng, and Nuomi Network.

Chasing from behind were WoWo Group, 58 Group Buy, F Team, and Dianping, not to mention FoxTao stirring up trouble.

Even though Meituan promptly launched its thoughtful "refunds on expired deals" service, it failed to make a big splash in the industry.

Because Lashou, Gao Peng, and Nuomi Network immediately followed suit, turning Meituan’s unique feature into an industry standard.

On June 8th, Chen Yansen moved Orange Technology to the Zhuxianzhuang Science and Technology Park. The Aurora OS R&D team was on the second floor, while the third floor served as the office space for a dozen or so hardware and industrial design engineers.

There were only a few flower baskets from property management at the entrance. With no celebratory firecrackers, the move was very low-key.

But Chen Yansen was much more high-profile online. He added a pop-up ad to the FoxTao homepage, announcing the launch of the Aurora OS beta version.

At the same time, on the Orange Technology official website, the Orange Community, third-party app stores, and developer forums, he either pinned promotional posters to the top or spent heavily on ads.

FoxTao users who downloaded and installed Aurora OS would also receive a random red envelope reward of 3 to 88 yuan.

If they found a functional flaw in the system and submitted it to the feedback section of the Orange Community, they would receive a reward of 1,000 to 10,000 yuan upon acceptance.

This was different from the FoxTao launch. Back then, Chen Yansen only had 500,000 to 600,000 yuan and had to rely on clever tactics.

Now, with ample funds, he went straight into cash-burning mode.

FoxTao, with its 3.2 million daily active users, generated 280,000 new downloads that very day.

To Chen Yansen, this only cost a few hundred thousand yuan—less than paying for promotional slots on Wandoujia, Yingyongbao, and 360 Mobile Assistant.

On the day of its launch, Aurora OS reached a staggering 890,000 downloads across all channels!

The figure Chen Yansen announced on Weibo was 1,000,000!

This caused a sensation in the industry. Someone like Chen Yansen, who was not only willing to invest capital but also had his own website to drive massive traffic, possessed a tremendous advantage during a product’s launch phase.

Day Two: 1.41 million total downloads!

Day Three: 1.17 million total downloads!

Day Four: 930,000 total downloads!

Day Five: 840,000 total downloads!

Day Six: 730,000 total downloads!

Day Seven: 520,000 total downloads!

In just one week, Aurora OS downloads totaled 6.49 million. However, based on deduplicated data from launch counts, page views, and user session duration, the number of active installations was 7.8 million.

This was because many users had received the installation package from classmates, friends, or relatives, so they were not counted in the official channel statistics.

As usage increased, more and more bugs began to surface.

For example, tapping a phone number in a text message to dial would cause a crash; the lock screen wouldn’t display song information while music was playing; and the "confirm" button would become unresponsive when changing permissions.

All sorts of minor issues kept popping up, forcing Wang Teng to spend his entire day on the Orange Community forums gathering user feedback.

A week later, Aurora OS was updated to version 1.01, fixing dozens of minor bugs in one go.

Users who had flashed their phones to Aurora OS discovered that its memory-cleaning function was incredibly powerful.

Users could manually clear the cache with a single tap. They could also authorize the system to automatically clean up every 30 minutes by categorizing cache and app junk files into three types based on age and frequency of use: "new generation," "old generation," and "meta-space" data.

This was the generational garbage collection algorithm Chen Yansen had previously mentioned to Wang Teng!

It greatly alleviated the problems of insufficient memory and phone lag!

Upon hearing this news, Lei Yijun immediately had his R&D center staff use decompilation tools to convert Aurora OS’s binary code into pseudocode and analyze the calling logic of its memory management module.

But they soon reported back that the Aurora OS code had obfuscated key class and method names, making decompilation significantly more difficult. The core elements—such as memory partition ratios, cleanup trigger conditions, and concurrency handling methods—were extremely hard to reproduce.

"This kid is that good?" Lei Yijun asked Lin Bing, sitting in his office.

Although he had over twenty years of programming experience, his work had shifted to management in recent years. He knew Aurora OS’s garbage collection function was excellent, but he couldn’t gauge the difficulty of its implementation.

"Extremely impressive! Our MIUI system has also been optimized for memory management and garbage collection, but the actual results are nowhere near as good as Aurora OS," Lin Bing said with a frown and a sigh.

"Don’t bother trying to reverse-engineer Aurora OS’s original algorithm," Li Wanqiang suddenly interjected. "I just checked the official website of the Intellectual Property Association—they’ve applied for patent protection."

"Generational garbage collection is a common technology," Lin Bing retorted instinctively. "As long as we figure out their generational strategy and algorithmic logic and then release a similar feature set, they won’t be able to prove we copied them."

"They’ve proposed brand-new optimization points for adaptive thresholds and hybrid GC strategies. The fact that I can look it up means the Intellectual Property Association has already recognized Orange Technology’s innovation," Li Wanqiang said, shaking his head and dashing Lin Bing’s hopes.

"Can’t we try to continue our own optimization and develop a cleaning algorithm similar to Aurora OS?" Lei Yijun asked after listening to their discussion.

Li Wanqiang and Lin Bing exchanged a look, then finally nodded with determination, deciding to give it a try.

They had investigated the Aurora OS R&D team. It was mostly composed of R&D personnel from OPPO, Huawei, and Meizu; they had even poached two engineers from Xiaomi.

If they could do it, there was no reason they couldn’t do it themselves!

At that moment, Chen Yongming of OPPO and Huang Zhang of Meizu were thinking the exact same thing.

One company was developing Color OS, the other Flyme OS. They had both felt good about their progress, but a comparison with Aurora OS immediately revealed a stark gap.

In 2011, smartphones had little memory, suffered from severe data fragmentation, and lagged easily. For young users, this was a fatal flaw, and it would remain a point of criticism for over a decade.

Even later, when Android smartphones no longer lagged thanks to both system and hardware upgrades, most people still held onto the stereotype that they would start to slow down after two years of use.

Just as domestic phone manufacturers were scrambling to catch up to Aurora OS’s cleaning algorithm, the trend of flashing phone ROMs spread from the online world to the offline one.

Whether in first- and second-tier cities or small fourth- and fifth-tier towns, many digital accessory shops had recently added a new service: flashing phone operating systems for customers.

The fee for flashing a phone was 10 yuan, though less scrupulous owners charged 20.

Some were even bolder, charging as much as 50 yuan.

Although flashing tutorials were available on the official Orange website and the Orange Community forums, an information gap and a technical barrier still existed for many people, giving rise to a large number of flashers-for-hire.

Once Aurora OS downloads surpassed 10 million, Chen Yansen stopped paying attention to the numbers.

In mid-June, he spent all his days on the third floor of the new office, deeply involved in the exterior and structural design of the Orange Mobile Phone.

Cao Dahua was away overseeing work and had not yet returned.

He and Zuo Hongyu were old partners. After more than twenty days of running around, they had purchased most of the necessary equipment for the production lines, including assembly, packaging, and testing machinery.

With eight production lines running at full capacity, the annual output could reach 4.8 to 6 million phones.

The two were busy assembling the production lines, and they had also asked Zhou Jinling to bring the former HR manager from Ouhan Mobile Phone into the Orange Technology phone factory to prepare for the next phase of recruitment.

After all, this manager knew Huaqiang North like the back of her hand and had contact information for numerous recruitment agencies. While it might take others two or three months to hire 500 workers, she could get it done in a week.

When Chen Yansen heard Zuo Hongyu’s report, he didn’t question Zhou Jinling joining Orange Technology, since it was just for an ordinary worker’s position.

However, when the new HR manager planned to recruit workers through agencies, he immediately rejected the idea.

In any case, the hardware design for the Orange Mobile Phone wasn’t even finished yet, so there was plenty of time to hire directly. There was no need to use agency channels.

These days, some agencies signed contracts with factories where wages were first paid to the agency’s account before being distributed to the workers.

’The contracts for agency and outsourced employees aren’t under my company’s name. Can I still receive Human Dao Fire from them?’ Chen Yansen wondered.

’Most likely not!’

This was the main reason for his refusal!

Although Zuo Hongyu thought it would be troublesome after hearing Chen Yansen’s instructions, he still nodded in agreement.

"Oh, and one more thing. The factory’s daily working hours should be the same as yours—an eight-hour workday. Overtime pay must be calculated strictly according to labor laws," Chen Yansen added just before hanging up.

"Huh!?" Zuo Hongyu was stunned for a moment. In his ten-plus years of working in Shencheng City, this was the first time he had ever encountered a boss like this.

The base salary for workers was 1,980 yuan a month for an eight-hour day (which included a two-hour lunch break). Weekday overtime would be paid at 1.5 times the hourly rate, with double pay on weekends and triple pay on public holidays.

"Boss, if we do this, some workers might literally work themselves to death for the overtime and refuse to go home," Zuo Hongyu cautioned.

"Just set daily, weekly, and monthly caps on overtime hours. A good policy is only as good as its implementation."

With that simple instruction, Chen Yansen hung up the phone.

’For a smartphone that sells for 2,000 yuan, labor costs only account for 6 to 10 yuan. Even if I double their wages, it won’t affect Orange Technology’s profitability.’

’But an annual labor expenditure of tens of millions of yuan could generate several thousand wisps of Human Dao Fire. Once the Orange Mobile Phone’s sales stabilize, getting tens of thousands of wisps a year won’t be difficult at all.’