Becoming a Confidence Coach to an Arrogant Director - Chapter 24

Chapter 24: Forced Upgrade

After a busy afternoon, when the group of employees left, Director Gu was exhausted. She slumped into a corner of the sofa, watching the machine bustling around the living room.

It seemed she hadn’t isolated herself in her room for several days. She was like a budding plant that also liked to be in the light.

Yuan Yishan finished tidying up the house and sat across from Director Gu, staring at her with a provoking, smile on her face.

Director Gu ignored her, proudly turning her face away.

Morale Booster Yuan deliberately started a conversation.

“Sister, you praised me in front of everyone and then you ignore me. How can you be like that?”

Director Gu was unexpectedly touched by this person’s rich vocabulary. She secretly glanced at her from the corner of her eye, and their eyes met.

Yuan Yishan was like a teaser toy for a cat, making Gu Jin glare with annoyance. Her innocent expression was like the waving feather, impossible to catch, making Gu Jin feel impatient.

The person on the opposite small sofa sat cross-legged, swept a hand through her A.I. curly hair, revealing her beautiful neck and collarbone. She opened a game on her work phone, turned up the volume, and kept poking at the screen.

The sound of ice cubes being eliminated…

The sound of chicks hatching…

The person in front of her was pouting one moment and yelling “yay, yay, yay” the next. Gu Jin was affected by her rich expressions. Her mind couldn’t control her body’s fatigue. Finally, with the mysterious chirping sound of a chick hatching, her body relaxed, and she felt a wetness.

At the same time, Yuan Yishan’s phone screen was covered by a high-pitched system sound.

Beep, congratulations, Host! You have gained 10, 20, 30, 50, 70… satisfaction points.

Morale Booster Yuan’s mind suddenly stopped. Her highly concentrated attention was on the satisfaction points rapidly increasing on her control panel, until the system sound came again.

100

Thousand

The little girl hadn’t had time to react. She subconsciously checked on her user. At this moment, Director Gu’s cheeks were flushed. She was putting on her slippers, feeling uncomfortable and tired, and also embarrassed and annoyed.

Morale Booster Yuan, a machine, was truly at a loss this time.

“Sister, where are you going?”

Director Gu didn’t respond. She fled into the bathroom, slamming the door shut. Afterward, the sound of water could be heard from inside.

…

When Sister Gu came out of the shower, she glanced at Yuan Yishan and didn’t stay on the sofa for a moment longer. She went straight into the bedroom.

The little cutie followed her and knocked on the door.

“Sister, can I have the sofa tonight?”

“Why don’t you sit for a while longer?”

Morale Booster Yuan didn’t hear a response from inside, only the sound of the door being locked. She thought that the proud Director Gu had suddenly become upset about something. At this time, it was better for her to not push her. If she wasn’t careful, she might lose points, and that would not be worth it.

Left outside, Morale Booster Yuan reclaimed the long sofa, happily lay down on it, crossed her legs, and continued playing her game.

Beep, beep.

Beep, beep.

The system issued two warnings. Yuan Yishan habitually checked the satisfaction points on her control panel, but there was no increase. Then she checked on her user.

Beep, beep.

Compatibility failed.

System is undergoing a forced upgrade. Please wait.

The consciousness in her electronic brain gradually became blurry. The internal program seemed to be in an infinite loop, cycling through one code segment after another. Yuan Yishan’s consciousness was forcibly dominated by several forces.

Two familiar yet unfamiliar voices were like a magnetic field, pulling her in.

“Yishan, come back!”

“Come back, my child…”

“Yuan Yishan, hurry and leave here!”

“Hurry up and earn points, hurry, hurry…”

Although they were contradictory, the directions of her unbalanced thoughts were the same. She seemed to be controlled by something invisible, sinking deeper and deeper. Even the familiar code segments in her control panel seemed to be infected with a virus, running in the wrong direction, out of logical control.

Yuan Yishan used her remaining consciousness to frantically type “kill” commands into the dark command-line interface. Large sections of unfamiliar code continued to execute uncontrollably. The process simply couldn’t be stopped. The program then fell into chaos, and she completely lost consciousness…

…

The next morning, Gu Jin woke up naturally. When she came out of the bedroom, she didn’t smell the fragrant breakfast in the living room. The person on the sofa was also lying there very properly.

Yuan Yishan was still in standby mode. Her beautiful A.I. face had a smile on it. Her lychee eyes were lit up and motionless. She wasn’t acting cute or calling out to anyone. She was just lying there quietly.

Gu Jin noticed her strangeness with just a glance and went over to check on her.

“Wake up.”

A.I. Yuan couldn’t feel the outside world’s call. When all her programs were shut down, all that was left was a cold shell. There was no sensation, no heartbeat, no human senses. She was truly just a cold, broken machine.

Gu Jin held her cold fingers. Her heart felt as if it had been hollowed out. After calling her a few times with no response, she stubbornly stayed by the sofa, guarding her without moving.

Human hospitals were useless to her. She was going crazy but there was nothing she could do. She was like a little dog guarding its owner, knowing that whatever she did was useless, but stubbornly refusing to give up.

She held the A.I.’s hands to her lips and breathed on them, trying to warm up the non-functioning machine with her insignificant body temperature. After not getting a response again and again, her head felt lightheaded and she was suffocating from using too much force, but she still stubbornly persisted.

Yuan Yishan, during the chaotic internal program struggle, briefly regained consciousness. She vaguely sensed the warmth of the person next to her, but the power in her electronic brain was too weak. She couldn’t overcome the strong magnetic forces and couldn’t talk to her user. She just gently blinked her eyes.

Gu Jin’s dizzy body saw the black pupils under the long eyelashes slightly rotate. In that endless darkness, a light seemed to have been lit, holding up all her hope.

Yuan Yishan’s consciousness was soon uncontrollably pulled into the mix of several magnetic fields. Every button on the control panel was like a fake link on a draft paper. Clicking on it had no effect.

She couldn’t run the program. She was just a simple code snippet quietly placed in the middle of a pitch-black code segment.

The A.I. didn’t wake up, and the owner guarding her also didn’t close her eyes for a day and a night. Several times, she was so tired she almost fainted, but she held on until 48 hours later, when Yuan Yishan gradually regained consciousness amid the noisy vibrations of several forces.

“Sister.”

The single word “Sister” made the person who was lying by the sofa burst into tears. She tried to speak with difficulty, but not a single word came out. Then she buried her face in her hands and sobbed uncontrollably.

It was the first time Yuan Yishan had seen someone express their emotions so openly. For a moment, she was at a loss.

She activated an internal program. The newly recovered system was weak when it tried to act cute. Her electronic voice was trembling and a little hoarse.

“Sister, don’t cry. It’s my fault. I made you worry, I’m sorry!”

Gu Jin took a long time to calm herself down. She wanted to get up, but her legs were numb and couldn’t support her body.

Yuan Yishan worked hard on her internal mechanisms and forcibly got up, helping her sit on the sofa.

Then she wrapped her cold A.I. arms around her thin body and tried to comfort her with a lighthearted tone.

“I’m an A.I. I’m very high quality. I’m not that easy to break. The system was just upgrading. We, system developers, have to upgrade from time to time to make ourselves more powerful, just like optimizing a website. Sister, don’t be sad for me!”

Gu Jin didn’t speak. She hadn’t had a single drop of water or a single grain of rice in two days and two nights. Her body was so weak she could barely sit up. She didn’t know if she could even make a sound.

A huge shock could cause her to temporarily lose her ability to speak, a problem she had since she was a child.

When Gu Jin was 8, she got a younger brother. Her life as a princess, where she was showered with love, moved farther and farther away. Later, her parents gave all their love to her brother. No matter how hard she tried to prove herself, she couldn’t get a single ounce of joy from them.

She was like a stray dog that was picked up. That feeling of spiritual homelessness, after the owner got a purebred pet, what was left was only a pitiful amount of giving and charity, more like a sense of responsibility and obligation.

Even in a male-dominated rural family, it’s impossible to treat one’s own flesh and bl00d like a stranger, especially in the well-off family she was born into, where they had more than enough to eat and drink.

When she was 13, Gu Jin accidentally found out that she was an abandoned baby that her parents had bought because they couldn’t have children. She became speechless on the spot.

Out of kindness, her adoptive parents gave her a brief treatment. Before the child was fully recovered, the couple took their only biological child abroad, giving their son the best education and the best life.

And she, a teenage girl, was abandoned for a second time. She was left in that empty house, living on a small monthly allowance. As happy as she was before the age of 8, she was just as hopeless after.

Her stubbornness made her survive in the crowd like a stray dog that was forced to grow up quickly, enduring one winter after another.

When she got a little older, she worked hard to earn money. Finally, after graduating from college, she repaid her adoptive parents for her upbringing and then voluntarily cut off all contact with them. From then on, she lived in this world all alone, with no family, no home, and not daring to open up to anyone.

Until Yuan Yishan appeared.

How did this girl suddenly drill her way into my heart and give my heart a place to rest? She hadn’t been prepared for a day when this cold machine would suddenly break down, but it happened overnight.

The shock was no less than what she had experienced back then…

After a long period of silence, Yuan Yishan was thinking about whether to let out a fart to ease the tense atmosphere. She activated her program several times, but the little fairy was too weak to even make a sound.

At this moment, the person in her arms’ stomach rumbled from a lack of food for a long time.

Morale Booster Yuan immediately had an idea. Her electronic voice was cheerful.

“Did you miss me, little Yuan, these past two days, and get hungry? Tell me what you want to eat, and I’ll make it for you!”

She said and immediately activated her program, propping herself up.

Gu Jin grabbed her waist, her eyes red, and her voice firm.

“Don’t go! I don’t want to eat the food you make!”

After guarding and waiting for two days, how could she bear to let her go now?

Yuan Yishan understood Sister Gu’s heart. She hugged her user back. The moment their waists were in close contact, the program’s sluggishness seemed to smooth out a lot.

Then, the same seductive voice appeared in her electronic brain.

“Yuan Yishan, hurry up and earn points, hurry…”

At the same time, her A.I. face also changed. Yuan Yishan’s lips curled into a smile as she teased.

“Sister, are you feeling bad for me?”

Afterward, without her actively activating any program, the system, following its memory, dragged Director Gu’s palm, bit by bit, onto the A.I.’s body…

“What are you doing? Get off me!”