Chapter 4: Eight Hundred Thousand in Three Days—Even the Cyber Police Were Alarmed!
On the evening of the third day, at eight o'clock, in a modest rented room in Jinling City, the cold glow of a screen lit up He Yu's face.
He opened his livestream right on time.
No warm-up. No pleasantries.
The moment the screen came alive, the number of viewers in the room shot up from a nondescript four digits at a terrifying speed visible to the naked eye.
Thirty thousand.
Forty thousand.
Fifty thousand!
In barely half a minute, more than fifty thousand viewers had flooded in, and the number was still swelling.
The barrage of comments instantly turned into a white waterfall, swallowing He Yu whole.
["He's finally here! I thought the streamer had run off with his tail between his legs!"]
["Three whole days. Do you know how I got through them? I was dreaming about that official site!"]
["Cut the nonsense. Where is it? You talked a big game, so don't tell me you're going to trick us with some template page in the end!"]
["Relax, everyone. I've already prepared a screenshot to post on my feed, with the title: 'Shocking! This university website built by a streamer in three days is actually like this...' I'm just waiting for the joke he's about to give us."]
Mockery, anticipation, doubt, urging.
Countless emotions intertwined and collided in the tiny livestream room, forming a tidal pressure that seemed to crash down from all directions.
He Yu's expression did not change in the slightest.
He did not even glance at the scrolling comments. He merely raised his hand and moved the cursor to the announcement bar in the livestream room.
A crisp click rang out through the microphone and across the network.
He posted a URL directly.
No extra explanation, only a single line, stripped down to the barest essentials.
"Dragon Sea University official website. Welcome to visit."
At that moment, the tens of thousands watching seemed to receive a single command at once, and every one of them clicked almost simultaneously.
Most of them were there to watch the joke.
After all, a university website involved modules, data, and design of such complexity. Not to mention three days; even three months might not be enough for a professional team to perfect it.
What could a nineteen-year-old youth, a three-time failure in the college entrance examination, possibly produce?
Yet when the browser loading bar reached its end, and that brand-new page unfurled before their eyes—
every hand that had been poised over the keyboard to mock him froze in midair.
The entire internet fell into a strange, dead silence in that instant.
The website's UI design showed not the slightest hint of gaudiness or clutter. Instead, it possessed a simplicity and grandeur that seemed to sink straight into the bones.
Its main color was a deep, mysterious blue, like the darkest reaches of the cosmos, evoking endless imagination.
The background was not a monotonous slab of color, but a flowing, scrolling sea of billions upon billions of stars. Each star seemed to breathe, gathering together into a magnificent galactic expanse.
At the center of the visual field was the school emblem.
It was a golden dragon soaring upward, its body coiled, its scales distinct, each one gleaming with metallic luster. Around the dragon were two ancient seal-script characters.
Epic.
That was the first word that rose in everyone's mind.
This was not a university website. It was the opening sequence of a science-fiction epic blockbuster!
The viewers subconsciously scrolled.
School profile, departments, faculty, admissions brochure, research achievements, campus scenery...
Every module a top-tier university website should have was present.
With trembling hands, they clicked into the school profile. The content inside was detailed to an outrageous degree. From the founding vision to development plans, from campus culture to future aspirations, the logic was clear, the prose outstanding, and the level of professionalism surpassed even ninety-nine percent of domestic university websites.
After a dozen seconds of stillness, the barrage in the livestream exploded with a force ten times fiercer than before!
["Holy hell?! Holy hell?! Holy hell?! Am I seeing things?!"]
["Th-this... you made this in three days?! You call yourself a small streamer? Do you have some misunderstanding about the word 'small'?!"]
["This UI design... this animated background... this modular architecture... Without ten years of experience, could even a top designer make something like this? Are you trying to fool ghosts?!"]
["I just checked the source code for this site. It's as clean as a poem! Not a single line of redundant code! This is absolutely something only a world-class programmer could write!"]
["Go look at the 'Faculty' section! I'm completely stunned!"]
Someone immediately switched to the faculty module.
There was no long-winded introduction to professors, only eight bold and forceful words.
Positions open. Open to the world.
Below that was a line of smaller text: Dragon Sea University is committed to gathering the world's top talent and creating a new frontier of human knowledge together.
Good grief!
The aura was maxed out.
Instead of introducing what famous professors it already had, it was directly telling the whole world: I am waiting for you famous professors to come here!
Just as the audience was reeling from the website's grandeur and professionalism, the boldest among them moved the mouse to the most central and conspicuous module on the page—
the donation channel.
A gentle click.
The next second, the entire Chinese internet was shaken to its core.
On the page, there were no gaudy words of thanks, only a few cold, yet lethally seductive terms, detonating in everyone's mind like thunderbolts.
[In gratitude for the support of all sectors of society for the founding of Dragon Sea University, all donors to the school shall receive the following privileges:]
[1. For every one hundred yuan donated, the entrance examination score threshold for a donor's direct relative applying to the school will be lowered by one point. This privilege may accumulate, with a maximum reduction of one hundred points.]
[2. For every ten thousand yuan donated, if a donor's direct relative scores four hundred points on the college entrance examination, the school will grant an exceptional guaranteed admission qualification!]
[3. The names of all donors, regardless of amount, will be permanently engraved upon the "Founding Sages Monument" within the school and revered by generations of students to come.]
The moment these terms appeared, the entire network erupted!
If the website design before had only shocked people, these rules were a complete and utter subversion.
["This streamer has gone insane! Donating money lowers the score threshold? This is outright trading education quotas!"]
["One hundred yuan for one point, ten thousand for one hundred points! That's even more outrageous than robbing a bank!"]
["The second one is the real insanity! As long as you score four hundred, donate ten thousand and you get guaranteed admission? How many candidates in Southern River Province would kill for a chance like that!"]
["My reason tells me this is a scam, but... but why is my heart beating so fast? My son got exactly 401 points this year. I... I might actually be tempted, what do I do?"]
["It's definitely a new kind of fraud! Precisely exploiting the anxiety of college-entrance-exam parents to reap them dry! I've already taken screenshots and reported it to the police! Cybercrime units are on their way!"]
Doubts and curses poured down like a flood.
And yet He Yu's [Livestream King] skill, together with the resentment called "unwillingness" that had been building in the hearts of millions of families across Southern River Province, erupted at this moment with unimaginable power.
For families whose children hovered at the edge of the undergraduate cutoff, one point was the distance between heaven and hell.
For parents worn down in body and spirit by the college entrance examination, even a vague and distant hope was enough to make them stake everything.
A scam?
So what!
What if it was real?
"Treating a dead horse as if it were alive"—that ancient saying became, in this instant, the only rule by which countless people acted.
The moment the donation channel opened.
A user in the livestream with the ID "One More Fight For My Son" sent a blood-red barrage.
["I don't care whether this is a scam or not, I'm in! Ten thousand! I'll treat it as buying my son some hope!"]
The next second, the donation total in the backend jumped straight from zero to ten thousand.
That number seemed to light the fuse of a powder keg.
One hundred.
Five hundred.
One thousand.
Five thousand.
Ten thousand!
Countless donations, surging in from all over the country through a tiny network portal, poured madly into the bank account He Yu had only just opened.
The backend total began to flicker upward at a heart-stopping pace.
One hundred thousand!
Three hundred thousand!
Five hundred thousand!
Within just three days, although few truly believed, the total amount of donations had still miraculously broken through the eight-hundred-thousand-yuan mark!
Such a massive, high-frequency, and highly abnormal flow of funds immediately drew the intense attention of the Jinling City cyber police division. The alert system let out an ear-splitting shriek.
Meanwhile, in the rented room, He Yu's expression remained calm.
A clear voice, audible only to him, rang in his mind.
[Ping!]
[Detected that several thousand people have developed genuine trust and taken concrete action. The event has sparked initial widespread social attention. Rewarding credibility points: 800!]
[Current credibility balance: 850.]