Chapter 190 I have lived in a poor mountain village for more than ten years

Chen Fei finished asking the questions she wanted to ask at the studio. Not long after, she received a message from Zhu Yingning saying that she and Xu Sirui were on their way back and planned to complete the subsequent cooperation procedures.

"Really? Are you planning to cooperate again?" she asked.

Zhu Yingning felt a little embarrassed: "Well, I'm sorry I was a little capricious before."

"It's just a small matter."

"But I still want to know, were you the one who told Xu Sirui last night that I didn't want to cooperate? Are you on my side or his?"

Chen Fei's hands trembled, and he pulled the corners of his mouth, then silently picked out a crying emoticon and sent it over.

Half an hour later, she and Xu Sirui arrived together and completed all the necessary procedures.

It was noon. Before leaving, Xu Sirui treated them both to a meal, and then drove them to the high-speed rail station in his Land Rover, which was said to be rented.

After the short business trip, they returned to the small mountain village in Province G and devoted themselves to the monotonous and repetitive construction work day after day.

Wen Wenxu had already sorted out all the village's tangled and outdated accounts and was currently working on standardizing the village's accounting system, aiming to establish a formal system that could be passed down to future generations. Influenced by him, Chen Fei had also recently been pondering how to achieve something more effective.

Zhu Yingning understood their urgency. As the initiator of the breeding project, she had made the greatest contribution. Wen Wenxu and Shen Fei certainly also made considerable contributions, but if she wanted to have a better advantage in her future promotion, from an objective perspective, it would definitely be best to have a project that she could initiate herself.

More than half a year has passed since the two-year service period, and there is not much time left for them to achieve results.

She doesn't think it's a bad thing for others to strive for fame and fortune.

It's difficult to motivate a person solely on the belief in selfless devotion. There's nothing wrong with striving for fame and fortune; the problem lies in pursuing them in the wrong way. As long as the process is legitimate and positive, and genuinely good deeds are done, even if the ultimate goal is personal advancement, it truly benefits the people. As the old saying goes, "A great reward begets a brave man," and talented individuals are attracted by generous benefits.

She told Shen Fei not to be too anxious: "We can visit the village again during this period, and I will go with you."

Sometimes Chen Fei found it strange. Before coming to the village, she'd actually had some concerns, like whether her companions were scheming and scheming. She'd also heard that people within the system were often slick, their words intricate and complex, making it difficult to understand without a bit of intelligence. Even her mother had said, "You're such a straightforward person, you'll definitely suffer where you go. When you do, you'll realize how good the path I've arranged for you is."

But everything was different from what Shen Fei had worried about. The words "I'll go with you" might be interpreted by sensitive people as stealing credit, but the person who said this was Zhu Yingning - she had this kind of sincere power that made people trust her sincerity 100%.

They picked a good day to start the second round of visits.

After more than half a year of getting along, the villagers have become more familiar with them, and the visit process went relatively smoothly.

After watching for a while, Zhu Yingning asked Chen Fei if she had any feelings or discoveries. She pondered and said, "...It feels like everyone is playing with their phones."

With the internet now so advanced and the mobile phone market so competitive, many elderly and children living in the village now own their own phones. However, the village lacks entertainment, especially spiritual entertainment, leaving bored left-behind children and elderly people with nothing to do but watch Douyin, Kuaishou, and other apps to pass the time.

The children in the village are full of popular Internet memes such as "Ji Ni Tai Mei", "Lao Tie 666", "Wo Wo Tou, four for one dollar", and "Oli Gei".

School teachers have also reported to Zhu Yingning and others that it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach children in lower grades. Lack of concentration is secondary. What is even more worrying is that even after being criticized, they do not repent. Instead, they keep saying "Ji Ni Tai Mei" and "Lao Tie Niu. Bitch", making it completely impossible to communicate with them.

Cities and villages each have their own cages and walls.

People living in cities think that only in the countryside can they have the opportunity to get in touch with nature and that the countryside is a paradise. People living in poor rural areas envy the various exhibitions, dramas and unpopular sports in the city.

The poverty of the spiritual world affects cities and rural areas equally.

"Should we introduce other entertainment projects? Like opening an activity room for the elderly and children?" Shen Fei said tentatively.

"Don't we already have an activity room for the elderly and children?" Zhu Yingning smiled bitterly, "It's just that the effect is very poor."

The previous village work team opened an activity room for the elderly and children, hoping to provide a collective activity space for the elderly and left-behind children. They originally arranged many entertainment facilities and educational programs, including a reading corner, a handicraft corner, and a movie corner.

It is said that the villagers were indeed very enthusiastic at the beginning, but unfortunately they could not keep it up for long and the activity room became abandoned. The number of people going there gradually decreased. When the previous village work team left, the activity room was directly converted into a mahjong room, and only a few old people often went there to play mahjong and gamble.

"It's easy to understand. For children, reading in the activity room is definitely not as fun as playing with their phones at home. For the elderly, those manual labors are too demanding on their eyesight and back strength. Many elderly people have eye and joint problems and can't do fine manual labor. For them, this is not entertainment, but torture."

"And then there's movies. Kids definitely want to watch movies like The Avengers, but the elderly can't understand these newfangled things. Besides, many people have internet-connected TVs at home these days, so why bother going to the activity room to watch them? The original intention of the activity room was good, but many good things encounter unexpected practical difficulties during implementation."

After Zhu Yingning finished her analysis, Chen Fei felt even more overwhelmed: "Then what should we do? Introduce some better entertainment programs to help everyone quit using their phones?"

She smiled and said, "That's a bit unreasonable. It's hard for us to quit using our phones, let alone them. Let's take it slow. Since everyone in the village uses phones now, why not think about it a little bit and think about what conveniences we can provide them with phones?"

"For example... is there any software that could be embedded in mobile phones? Ideally, it could have a voice chat function that could provide timely answers to villagers' questions. Many villagers don't know which unit to contact for specific matters or who to turn to for help when encountering difficulties. It could also monitor screen time and remind them to get up and move around, or drink water. Some elderly people, without children to care for them, are prone to accidents at home. If this software could automatically call or send a message to an emergency contact if they haven't used their phone for a long time, could it prevent some tragedies?"

Chen Fei suddenly had an epiphany: "I think it's possible. Don't take too big a step at once, thinking of completely changing something. Instead, make changes that benefit the people under the existing conditions. Is that what you mean?"

"Hmm." Zhu Yingning pushed aside the dogtail grass by the roadside. "We can be radical in terms of material things, building roads and houses with great vigour, but we can only support them spiritually, step by step. Because changing other people's thinking habits is the most difficult and the most painful."

"Captain, why do you have so many...practical ideas?" She and Wen Wenxu came here, and they could not avoid having some wild ideas or idealism to a certain extent, but Zhu Yingning seemed to have never made such a mistake.

Hearing this, Zhu Yingning smiled helplessly: "Maybe it's because I lived in an impoverished mountain village for more than ten years."

**

After this conversation, Shen Fei went back and thought about it carefully, and finally came up with a preliminary project plan.

She plans to make a mobile phone desktop pet.

Compared to the cold, text-only apps, Desk Pets were more vivid and lifelike, attracting children and making the elderly feel more at home with this emerging technology. After much discussion, she and Zhu Yingning decided on a smiling, genderless child.

Since it was still in the drafting stage, Chen Fei only designed a few practical functions for the desk pet - fixed-point reminders to drink water, reminders to relax eyes based on screen usage time, automatic sending of reminder messages to emergency contacts when the screen is on standby for a long time, and most importantly, as long as the elderly ask the desk pet about a difficult matter, the desk pet can provide specific solutions and contact information through keyword search, and can also automatically help call the relevant department.

The desk pet not only moves, but also has different facial expressions. If it does not drink water for a long time, it will show a thirsty state. If it uses the screen for a long time, its eyes will become uncomfortable.

The programming itself wasn't difficult; the challenge lay in the 3D animation and big data technology involved. Zhu Yingning suggested she outsource some of the functionality and not take on too much herself: "Just master the underlying code and the general direction."

Zhu Yingning also suggested to her: "Some of the elderly here don't speak standard Mandarin, and some even only speak dialects. Let's first produce a basic Mandarin version. If there is spare capacity later, we can produce a dialect version."

Chen Fei nodded and plunged into the construction work of this project.

While she and Wen Wenxu were busy, Zhu Yingning wasn't idle either. She would contact Xu Sirui once a week to check on his game's progress. Xu Sirui wasn't shy about keeping his details secret, and would send her detailed progress reports. Worried that she wouldn't understand the code and technical terms, he would explain them to her in plain language.

He was very clever in designing the game. Instead of selling wild boars directly in the store, he created two types of pigs: ordinary domestic pigs and wild boars. Ordinary domestic pigs can be purchased in the store, while wild boars need to be captured and tamed by yourself. The contrast with ordinary domestic pigs makes wild boars, which require you to capture and stumble upon by chance, seem more "precious" and more interesting.

The game was proceeding in an orderly manner. The breeding farm run by the breeding company was being prepared for construction, and the breeding farm of the cooperative was also proceeding step by step. Everything was busy and orderly, but the abandoned activity room was the only thing that always occupied Zhu Yingning's mind.

She felt it was a shame that the space had been left abandoned. Learning that there was local opera here, she wondered if she could invite the troupe to perform regularly in the activity room.

When I asked Wang Shengju about this, he laughed and said, "Ask your sister Yan Zi about this question. She learned to sing in a troupe when she was young."

Zhu Yingning was overjoyed. She discussed her ideas with Yan Zi and Yan Zi agreed to take her to the opera troupe in the next town this weekend to learn more about the situation.

On the weekend, Zhu Yingning got up very early. Since it was still far from the agreed time, he could only move around the house by himself.

She picked up her phone and wanted to check her friends circle when a call suddenly came in. She looked closely and saw that it was Zhu Zhiwei calling. She was quite surprised. When she picked up the phone, she heard Zhu Zhiwei's voice mixed with thick fatigue: "Ningning, I disturbed you so early, did you wake me up?"

"It's okay, I woke up a long time ago."

"That's good. I'm calling mainly to ask...are you free today?"

"I'm available before 2pm. What's wrong?"

"Oh, that's right. I...maybe I'll bring someone to your place this morning."