The richest man started taking advantage of loopholes after joining Alibaba.

In Hangzhou in late December, the temperature dropped to three degrees Celsius at night.

The streetlights in that Binjiang residential area dim after 11 p.m., switching from normal brightness to energy-saving mode, and the light changes from orange to dark yellow.

Lin Che stood by the window, watching the streetlights below dim.

At 11:02, the lights went out.

He didn't draw the curtains and stood by the window looking outside for a while.

The neighborhood was very quiet, with only the occasional gust of wind blowing through the gaps between the buildings, making a very low whooshing sound.

Today is Wednesday.

He spent the entire afternoon dealing with year-end wrap-up work.

CCPS's annual operational reports for each city, follow-up documents from the NMPA inspection, and confirmation of the renewal of several cooperation agreements.

Everything was done, and there were no problems.

He returned to his residence at 8:30 p.m.

I changed my shoes and hung my coat on the coat rack in the entryway.

There were only two pieces of clothing hanging on the clothes rack: a down jacket and a trench coat. The two of them probably didn't have much more in their wardrobes.

He went into the kitchen and took a bag of frozen dumplings from the refrigerator.

He's been eating the same brand of pork and cabbage filling for three months now.

I boiled eight of them, dipped them in vinegar, and ate them standing up on the kitchen counter.

After finishing the meal, I washed the dishes, put them on the drainer, and went to the living room to sit on the sofa.

There are no new messages on my phone.

Shen Nan sent him a document during the day, a revised version of LM-001. He read it but did not reply.

It's not that I don't want to reply, it's that I don't know what to reply.

The revised LM-001 includes an additional chapter titled "Supplement to the Key Points of Procedural Defenses".

Shen Nan is preparing for the next meeting.

The phrase "next time" means that 607 will be opened again.

When that person said, "We'll meet again," it wasn't just a polite remark.

He put his phone on the coffee table, stood up, and walked to the window.

I just stood there, watching the streetlights go from bright to dim.

He stood there for a few more minutes after it got dark.

The outside world appeared as a dark scene through his window; the dim yellow light of the streetlights couldn't reach very far, and beyond a dozen meters it was pitch black.

He remembered the way the person in room 607 wiped their glasses.

With a casual gesture, he wiped himself down using the hem of his shirt and put it back on.

That was the only action during the entire meeting that was unrelated to work.

A person who wipes their glasses during an interview is unlikely to be nervous.

He wasn't nervous because he had the cards in his hand.

Lin Che was nervous because he didn't know what cards his opponent was still holding.

He left the window and went into the bedroom.

I lay down on the bed without turning on the lights.

The blankets are a little cold. In Hangzhou at the end of December, if the indoor heating isn't on, it takes several minutes for the blankets to warm up.

He pulled the blanket up to his chin and put his hands outside the blanket.

The crack in the ceiling was invisible in the darkness, but he knew it was there.

It's always been there, from the base of the chandelier to the corner of the wall.

He closed his eyes.

My mind is quiet; no images popped up like they did a few days ago.

It's not because I'm no longer afraid, but because fear has changed from a sudden state to a continuous one.

Consistent things won't keep you awake at night; they'll just make you tired.

I don't know if I'll be able to sleep tonight.

At the same time.

On the sixth floor of Weiguang Technology's headquarters, a desk lamp was still lit at Chen Wei's workstation.

The rest of the floor was dark except for his lamp.

The security guard patrolled the building around 11 o'clock, saw his light was on, paused at the door for a moment, but did not come in.

It's not uncommon to see people working overtime in this building.

The desk lamp has adjustable brightness; he turned it to the lowest setting, which was just enough to see the keyboard and screen clearly.

The low-powered lighting only illuminates the desktop, leaving the rest of the room dark.

He was sitting in a circle of light.

He had already written most of the annual summary that afternoon, but the fourth quarter section was still unfinished.

But he is not writing an annual summary right now.

The file manager is open on the screen.

The directory tree of FA-Operations unfolds, with FA-R-2022 at the very bottom.

He looked at the folder icon.

The icon is the default yellow folder, which looks exactly the same as other folders.

But it's different.

The other folders contain work records.

This folder contains evidence.

He didn't think about this using the word "evidence".

But tonight, sitting in my office with only one desk lamp, the word came to mind on its own.

Twenty screenshots.

The correspondence between twenty transactions and twenty market events.

If someone sees these screenshots, they won't need any professional analysis; they can simply put the dates together to see the difference.

Each transaction occurs before the corresponding market event.

Not after, not at the same time, but before.

Intervals can range from a few days to several weeks.

Without exception.

Chen Wei picked up the water glass on the table and took a sip.

The water had long since cooled down. After he finished drinking it, he put the cup back, and the bottom of the cup tapped on the table.

The sound echoed briefly in the empty building before quickly disappearing.

He remembered those five seconds in the corridor that afternoon.

The sound of keyboards could be heard coming from under the door, which was three meters away from Lin Che's.

He stood there, hands in his pockets, wondering whether he should go inside.

In the end, no.

He turned around and walked back.

After walking back, I sat down at my workstation and continued writing my annual summary.

I wrote for an entire afternoon, and I wrote very slowly.

It was late at night, and the annual summary window was minimized in the taskbar; he hadn't opened it.

He opened FA-R-2022.

double click.

The folder is open.

Twenty screenshot thumbnails filled the window.

The thumbnails were small, but he could make out the general content of each one.

The first image is a screenshot of a transaction confirmation and a news report side by side.

The last one is a cross-border remittance record and a receipt confirmation from an institution in Southeast Asia.

The eighteen in the middle all have the same format: operation records on the left and market events on the right.

He looked at them one by one.

He wasn't looking at the content; he remembered all the content.

He was looking at the timestamp.

Each screenshot has a timestamp in the bottom right corner, which is the system time at the time the screenshot was taken.

The earliest one was nine months ago.

The latest one was two months ago.

nine months.

Over nine months, he discovered these things little by little.

I saved the screenshots one by one.

He wasn't keeping a diary; he was recording other people's secrets.

He didn't know why Lin Che was able to do these things.

He hadn't guessed, nor did he want to.

He was just making a record.

Documenting this event is itself a choice.

He doesn't have to record it.

Once you see the pattern, you can pretend you didn't, close the page, and move on to the next operation.

But he didn't.

He chose to take a screenshot, create a folder, and change permissions.

Visible only to this user.

These four words represent the biggest decision he has ever made.

It's bigger than any of the Ark Fund's operations.

Because those operations were done on behalf of Lin Che.

This decision was made for myself.

He closed the FAR-2022 window.

The screen returned to the desktop, and the default wallpaper was blue sky and white clouds.

Like the wallpaper on Lin Che's office computer, it was the system default, and no one had changed it.

He stared at the blue sky and white clouds for a few seconds.

Then I turned off the table lamp.

The screen light shone on his face, a bright blue-white hue.

He neither turned off the computer nor stood up.

He sat in the dark, with only a glowing screen in front of him.

The streetlights in the parking lot downstairs were still on, and the light shone in through the window, drawing a rectangle on the ground.

He stared at the rectangle for a while.

Then I reached out and touched the mouse, and the screen woke up from its locked state.

The directory tree for FA-Operations is still open.

FA-R-2022 is still at the very bottom.

Visible only to this user.

He closed the directory tree and opened the annual summary document.

The cursor is hovering below the fourth quarter's title, flashing.

In the fourth quarter, Ark Fund made two transactions.

He was familiar with the details of both transactions, and there was no need to consult any materials to include them in his annual summary.

He started typing.

The streetlights outside the window illuminated the empty parking spaces, and his car was parked in the innermost spot.

The sound of typing was clear in the empty building, one word at a time, neither too fast nor too slow.