At 3:17 in the morning, the lights on the 27th floor of Tower B of Differ Group were still on.
Only the LED desk lamp at Lin Xia's workstation was still on on the entire floor. The pale light was like a scalpel cutting through the thick darkness.
He was sitting on an ergonomic chair, his back straight, and his fingers tapping on the keyboard at a rhythm that was as steady as a living person. He hadn't closed his eyes for thirty-two hours in a row. His eyelids were swollen and blue, and his eyeballs were bloodshot, but two clusters of cold, sharp, and almost inhuman light burned deep in his pupils.
On the screen was Excel—not a template, not a daily report, but a dynamic financial model densely nested with 13 layers of formulas.
The left side is the original data of Differ's Q3 financial report, and the right side is the "server cost/daily active users" ratio publicly disclosed by seven competitors that he manually captured.
