Old Wang's hand froze on the mouse.
For the first time in many years, a look of genuine astonishment appeared on his aged face.
"This… is impossible."
He leaned closer to the screen, his eyes narrowing as if afraid of missing even a single line of logic flow.
What he was seeing was not traditional Android architecture.
Nor was it iOS.
Not even a hybrid.
It was a completely unfamiliar system structure.
The calling logic between modules was concise to the extreme, yet every dependency was perfectly closed-loop. There were no redundant processes, no wasteful scheduling, no unnecessary background services.
Every instruction existed for one purpose only: execution.
"Old Wang?"
He Chendong swallowed and asked cautiously. "What's wrong?"
Old Wang didn't answer.
Instead, he reached out and began typing rapidly on the keyboard.
He called system APIs.
Queried kernel permissions.
Attempted to trace process scheduling paths.
One command after another.
The computer screen kept refreshing with data streams.
Ten seconds.
Thirty seconds.
One full minute.
Then—
Old Wang suddenly stopped.
He slowly leaned back in his chair, his chest rising and falling slightly faster than usual.
"This isn't a modified system," he said hoarsely.
"This is… something entirely new."
He Chendong's heart skipped a beat.
"Then… it really is a mobile phone system?"
Old Wang didn't reply immediately.
He stood up, walked a few steps back and forth, then suddenly turned around, his gaze sharp like a blade.
"Chendong," he said, his tone unprecedentedly serious, "do you know what level of technology this is?"
He Chendong shook his head subconsciously.
Old Wang took a deep breath.
"This system uses a non-public programming language."
"Not C."
"Not Java."
"Not Swift."
"Not any language currently recorded in our academic system."
"It's closer to a logic-based instruction language, directly mapped to hardware behavior."
"Which means—"
Old Wang paused, every word heavy.
"This system bypasses a large part of traditional abstraction layers."
"Efficiency loss is nearly zero."
"That's why it runs so smoothly on obsolete hardware."
He Chendong's scalp went numb.
"Is… is that even possible?"
"In theory?" Old Wang nodded slowly.
"Yes."
"But in practice?" He shook his head again.
"No."
"At least, no one in Kyushu has done it."
Old Wang suddenly turned back to the computer and began a deeper test.
He deliberately ran stress tests.
Opened dozens of processes simultaneously.
Simulated memory pressure.
Forced I/O contention.
The Kunlun System remained calm.
Stable.
Like a mountain.
No crashes.
No overheating spikes.
No abnormal memory consumption.
Old Wang's fingers trembled slightly.
"This system… is already complete," he muttered.
"Not a prototype."
"Not an experiment."
"It's production-grade."
He Chendong felt his throat dry.
"How… how long do you think it took to develop something like this?"
Old Wang laughed softly.
But there was no humor in it.
"If a national-level team worked on this," he said slowly,
"with thousands of engineers…"
"Ten years would be considered fast."
Silence.
Dead silence filled the laboratory.
He Chendong suddenly realized something and his pupils shrank.
"Old Wang… that student…"
"Yes," Old Wang interrupted, his eyes blazing with a strange light.
"That student is terrifying."
"He didn't just solve a technical problem."
"He solved a path problem."
Old Wang straightened his back, his old body suddenly radiating a powerful aura.
"Chendong," he said firmly,
"this matter cannot stay within the Entrepreneurship College."
"Notify the Dean of the School of Computer Science."
"Immediately."
"And—"
He paused, then added slowly.
"I want to meet this student."
"At once."
At that moment—
The quiet corridors of Yan University remained peaceful.
Students hurried to and fro, unaware of anything unusual.
But deep inside the School of Computer Science—
A storm had already begun to form.
Because a system had appeared.
One that no one could fight.
And the first person to realize its true value—
Was a centenarian academician who had seen the rise and fall of an entire technological era.