Modifying the Black Marker

Li Yiru took over the hiring part from Zhang Heng and went to rent an office building in the city center, which served as the company's temporary workplace. She hired several accountants and staff for financial work as the head of the human resource department. Zhang Heng didn't have many requirements for those positions, as he only needed the staff to be college graduates.

Li Yiru then took those candidates to negotiate with the ones from the municipal commercial affairs department, as to fulfill Zhang Heng's intentions of building an entire office building exclusively for the company in Haizhou's development area. The negotiation went well with her putting her father's influence to use, and the contract was signed in less than a week later.

Zhang Heng initially thought that things wouldn't be going as smooth due to him having made an enemy out of the son of the vice mayor. He didn't expect the other party to be so gracious, or at the very least, willing to do a favor for Li Jianguo, that the people from the city council didn't end up giving him much trouble.

His team went on to work on the purchasing plans and hired designers, eventually deciding on a design plan for a building with a base area of 5000 square meters and 55 stories tall. Construction would last over the course of 15 months. Work would begin at the end of the month, with the initial investment being 800-thousand yuan.

However, Zhang Heng was very displeased with the time required and modified the plans. Despite Li Yiru's protest about him being too wasteful, he nonetheless insisted on doing it his way, which eventually meant adding 500-thousand yuan to the project and have three construction teams work on it to finish the construction in six months. That meant the building was being built at a frightening speed of one floor per day.

Li Yiru was exasperated at Zhang Heng's actions of just throwing money away like that, but there was nothing she was able to do about it, given that he was her boss after all. She had no choice but to yield to Zhang Heng's demands.

Zhang Heng wore a bitter grin on his face after watching Li Yiru leave the warehouse huffing and puffing away. There was no way she would have known that the one asset that he was unable to afford to waste was time. Furthermore, he definitely had to oversee the plans for that building of his. Other than that, he had also spent over a million yuan to hire designers in secret online using a fake name, to design a basement underneath the building. That was the ultimate goal he had for that building—an underground laboratory complex that no one else knew about for performing some discreet, top-secret experiments.

A month passed as the myriad of preparation work was attended to. Zhang Heng received a call all of a sudden one day from a delivery company, telling him to pick up his goods.

Zhang Heng gave them the address of the warehouse and a convoy consisting of several trailer trucks were seen parked at the compound of the warehouse in less than half an hour.

"Good day, sir. Are you Mr. Zhang? Here are your goods, please sort them out," A middle-aged man said and shook hands with Zhang Heng.

"I'm Mr. Zhang and please have your men move the goods into the warehouse." Zhang Heng pointed at the door behind him, "I can't possibly move all those goods in there myself."

"No problem, that's part of our provided services, sir." That middle-aged man gestured at his workers behind him, who then proceeded to move the one container after another using forklifts into the warehouse. The whole process went on from morning to late noon before everything was moved inside the warehouse, which was more than half-filled by the end of the day.

Zhang Heng gave that middle-aged man a few high-end cigarettes and chatted with him for a bit after the moving was down before sending the team away.

He then went on to pry open one of the containers, which was about 50-percent taller than a grown man, gleefully with a crowbar. The huge silver-white electronic components were laid before his eyes right there and then.

"So, this is the supercomputer made through custom order from IBM in the US huh?" Zhang Heng raised his eyebrows and scanned the pieces all around, before dragging the massive equipment that weighed hundreds of kilograms before the Marker. Due to Zhang Heng's physique surpassing that of regular humans, it was not that much of a trouble for him to move that supercomputer, despite its massive weight.

The custom-made supercomputer that Zhang Heng ordered came in 15 cabinets placed side by side, consisting of 5,000 nodes and every node consisted of three E52692 processors—the highest grade of processors made by Intel. The total count of the supercomputer's computing kernel was 915,000, and the array came with a liquid-nitrogen cooling system, capable of performing five trillion calculations per second. While such performance was far from that of the world-class supercomputers, the array was nonetheless more than enough to serve as auxiliary systems to the Black Marker.

However, due to the massive power requirement to run the supercomputer, Zhang Heng had also purchased three low noise generators rated at 2,000 kW. Each of the generators was seven meters-long and three meters-tall, making them look like three massive monsters.

Zhang Heng connected the supercomputer with the power generators according to the plans given to him by the Dimensional Star, before opening up the other containers and began piecing together equipment that he didn't know what they did. Despite Zhang Heng's T-Virus enhanced physique, the work was deemed extremely heavy. By the time he was done with everything, one whole day had passed.

He then looked at the warehouse which was almost filled up by then and felt himself to be a magnanimous baron of some sort. He then turned on the power generators with reverence before turning on the supercomputer, which caused the entire warehouse to shake slightly right there and then.

Having all three of the seven meters-long power generators and an array of supercomputer cabinets measuring over 30 meters in length felt like the march of an army after all. It was fortunate that Zhang Heng made a point to purchase low noise generators, as the entire warehouse would have been rendered too noisy to live in if common generators were used.

As the supercomputer was being turned on at that moment, that 130-inch 8K LCD on the wall where the door of the warehouse was lit up as well.

The Dimensional Star system in Zhang Heng's mind began feeding packets of data to him as the display was turned on. What he needed to do was to input all those codes that he was unable to read into the supercomputer, thereby changing the structure at which the supercomputer ran, enabling it to match the programming of the Black Marker.

That was a massive project which was not unlike writing programming codes. What he needed to do was to change the programming of that supercomputer altogether, to enable it to work with that of the Black Marker, which in turn would change the programming of the Black Marker.

The supercomputer's programming was significantly modified as the command codes were entered. If there were to be some computer science expert catching a glance at what Zhang Heng was doing at the moment, they would have been completely shocked by it all, as he was actually writing operation codes for that supercomputer.

Supercomputers had been running on binary operation codes for as long as they had been invented, which was something developed over decades by countless people toiling day and night at it. Yet, what Zhang Heng was creating at the moment, was to modify the supercomputer to run at some other operation methods that were tens of thousands of times more complex than that of binary codes.

Time passed with Zhang Heng, who knew next to nothing about computers, working away at the array while remaining totally oblivious at just how utterly shocking the codes he was entering to the world were. He was feeling as if the codes he was made to enter by the Dimensional Star seemed endless, and he eventually found that the keyboard that came with the supercomputer was no longer enough. He felt like he was entering several letters at the same time, just to form symbols that looked like a cross between cuneiform and hieroglyph into the computer.

Days went by with him ordering his meals through the phone and fetching the bottle of mineral water by his side to quench his thirst. The whole process went on for five days. Zhang Heng finally sighed in relief after entering the last set of codes into the supercomputer in the evening of the fifth day before rebooting the entire system. It was only then that he discovered that all 10 of his fingers were rendered completely swollen. His back was aching so badly that he was feeling like a sick dog.

"So, this is it huh?" Zhang Heng stood and stretched for a little bit, asking the Dimensional Star and feeling rather uncertain about things.

"That should do it. That piece of junk should be compatible with that of the Black Marker in terms of programming. With aid from the data transmitter, the Black Marker should be able to reboot and have its programming altered." Yurianne answered with a rather lethargic tone, leaving Zhang Heng to wonder why a program like her would feel exhausted as well.

"Alright, time to get some shut-eye then. Don't wake me up no matter what happens," Zhang Heng grumbled for a bit before slumping onto his bed and dozing off right away.

…

Ironically, he was eventually woken up by his phone ringing. He picked up his phone in a dazed state and picked up the call without bothering to look at who was calling.

"Boss, it's me, Fang Hao!" A familiar voice followed by some noise was heard from the other end of the phone.

"Fang Hao?" Zhang Heng checked the time and found the time to be noon the next day. He felt a little more awake by then and turned around, "What are you calling me for? Aren't you and Yiru still hiring people for the company?"

"We are. We've shortlisted over a dozen decent candidates and Ms. Li told me to ask you if you wanted to look at the candidates yourself."

"No need for that, I'll leave it to the both of you." Zhang Heng then added with an irked tone, "tell her that I'm handing everything about the company to her for the time being. Just report to me after everything is done."

"You sure are taking the hands-off approach down to the letter…" Fang Hao grumbled and then added, "What about the ground-breaking ceremony of the Stellar Biotech building? Things are going to start tomorrow and I assume you'd want to be there yourself, right?"

"Ground-breaking ceremony?" Zhang Heng's eyes shifted and he knocked his head for a bit. "Gosh, I've forgotten about the whole thing indeed. Well then, I'll be there tomorrow. By the way, did Yiru get the custom things that I asked her to get for me?"

"You mean those tens of thousands of pieces of steel alloy plates? Yes, the order is underway and they would arrive as soon as the foundation is laid," Fang Hao said.

"Okay, glad to hear that then." Zhang Heng hung up the phone before Fang Hao was able to say anything more, before making his way slowly out of the bed, rubbing his sleepy eyes and looking at the Black Marker with an intense gaze.