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

It's been three days.

It has been three whole days since that message was sent, and there has been no reply.

Lin Che sat on the sofa with his phone on the coffee table, screen facing down.

On the first day, he checked his phone eleven times, glancing at the notification bar each time he turned it on before turning it off.

I checked the screen six times the next day, twice of which were when I was on the phone with He Wei, and my finger unconsciously pressed the screen-on button.

Today is the third day. He turned his phone upside down and placed it face down on the coffee table, and stopped looking at it.

The traffic on the elevated highway outside the window was half as light as during the day, and the streetlights cut through the gaps in the curtains, drawing a thin line on the floor.

He didn't stand up to look.

The daily operational data of CCPS in the four cities is still running on my laptop.

The parameters for the Wuhan node were slightly adjusted today, while the daily order volume for Hangzhou and Chengdu remained stable at over 5,000.

He glanced at the data and closed his laptop.

He hasn't replied to my messages for three days.

In normal social interactions, this would mean "busy" or "forgot," but between him and that system, three days of silence were more unsettling than a simple rejection.

Rejection is at least one outcome.

Silence means the other party is still evaluating, and you don't know what they are evaluating.

He got up and went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, glanced at what was inside, and then closed it again.

The vegetables in the refrigerator were bought the day before yesterday and haven't been touched yet.

I sat back down on the sofa.

The phone screen is still facing down.

Shen Nan didn't send any messages today, which means she didn't receive any signals either.

If there is any news, she will forward it to him immediately.

No news means no news.

In December in Hangzhou, the night wind sneaks in through the cracks in the balcony door.

The two-bedroom apartment in Binjiang Residential Complex wasn't heated enough, so he wore a fleece jacket with the zipper all the way up.

That same night, at 1:20 a.m.

West of the city, on the fourth floor of Weiguang Technology, the debugging room.

Fang Yuan sat at his workstation against the wall. The chair was the cheapest kind of black mesh office chair, the cushion of which had collapsed, and he could feel the hardness of the base when he sat down.

Three monitors were spread out on the table.

On the left is the v3.0 architecture document, currently on page 75.

A data query script was running in the middle, and the green logs were scrolling up line by line.

On the right is a comparison table he wrote himself, with two columns of data, the font size set to the smallest, densely packed and taking up the entire screen.

He has been sitting here for four hours.

A cup of Nestlé 3-in-1 instant coffee sat on the corner of the table; the moisture on the outside of the paper cup had long since dried.

The coffee color changed from light brown to dark brown, and a thin film formed on the surface.

He didn't drink it.

Fang Yuan last sat in this position twenty-one days ago.

That day, after reading page 73 of the v3.0 design document, he closed his laptop, rode his electric scooter back to his residence.

After that day, a third line appeared in the black hardcover A5 notebook beside him.

The first two lines are earlier.

Today is the fourth line.

No, he hasn't written it yet; he's still looking at the data.

Data flow direction of reserved slots in v3.0.

user_behavior_pattern and health_data_stream.

The function of these two fields in the design document is "reserved for extension interfaces, not enabled in the current version".

The fourteen characters clearly state that this feature is not enabled in the current version.

But Fang Yuan discovered something four hours ago.

These two fields are not empty.

They have data writing records in the background, with the earliest timestamp being nine months ago and the most recent being yesterday.

For nine months, I wrote every day, the amount of writing was not large, but it was never interrupted.

He scrolled to the top of the log and read it for the third time.

The data consists of four columns: date, write volume, source module, and target path. It spans nine months, with each row pointing to the same underlying module.

That module has no name.

In the architecture document, it is located in a gray square marked "Reserved".

Fang Yuan stared at the gray square.

Then he did what he always did whenever he encountered an architecture he couldn't understand: he pushed his chair back and muttered something to himself.

"Can I take a look at the architecture?"

I wasn't saying this to anyone in particular.

From his first year at Weiguang, whenever he encountered a complex code structure, he would say this first, as if he were authorizing himself.

Then we started disassembling.

He spent four hours dismantling it.

Now, at 1:20 a.m., he has finally traced the data flow of that gray square to an exit point.

Or rather, he caught up with a location he wasn't sure could be called an "exit".

That location is not on the architecture diagram of v3.0.

It's outside the architecture diagram.

Fang Yuan pushed the chair back, reached out to the far right of the table, and picked up the black hardcover A5 notebook.

Turn it over.

The first few pages are old technical notes, with several architecture diagrams and notes on several data formats.

Turn to the page with text.

Three lines of text.

The first line is a date.

The second line is a module name.

The third line is a question mark.

Fang Yuan picked up his pen.

His handwriting is not good; the spacing between strokes is too wide, and each character seems to be written after a moment's thought.

Below the question mark on the third line, he wrote the fourth line.

After writing it, I looked at it for a few seconds.

Close the laptop and place it back on the right side of the desktop.

The door to the debugging room was not closed.

The corridor lights are motion-activated; they turn off after ten minutes if no one walks around, and they've been off for a while now.

Fang Yuan was about to turn off the monitor when the corridor lights suddenly came on.

The footsteps were light but steady, each step firm and solid.

Old Zhou appeared at the door.

He was holding an enamel mug, most of the paint on the mug had peeled off, revealing a grayish-white base.

There's a notch at the mouth of the cylinder, facing the door.

"Still not gone?"

The sound wasn't loud, as if they were afraid of waking someone, but there was no one else on the fourth floor at this time except for the two of them.

Fang Yuan turned his head and glanced at him.

"Soon."

"What time is 'soon'?"

Fang Yuan did not answer.

Old Zhou didn't come in; he leaned against the door frame, his enamel mug resting on the low cabinet next to him, the notch facing the door.

The jar is filled with Tieguanyin tea, which has turned a deep black color.

He didn't pick it up to drink.

"Don't stay up all night," Old Zhou said.

Fang Yuan had heard these two words many times.

From his first year at Weiguang, whenever he stayed in the debugging room past midnight, Lao Zhou would appear at the door and say those two words.

Fang Yuan would always say "almost there" and then continue sitting until 3 a.m.

Old Zhou always says, "Don't stay up all night," and then leaves, arriving at 7 a.m. the next morning before anyone else.

But today is different.

After saying "Don't stay up all night," Lao Zhou didn't turn around.

He stood in the doorway, his gaze shifting from Fang Yuan to the black hardcover notebook on the right side of the desk.

I glanced at it for about two seconds.

Then he looked back and gazed at the end of the corridor, as if listening to some sound.

There was no sound in the corridor.

Fang Yuan noticed it.

He didn't speak, and neither did Lao Zhou.

The only sound in the testing room was the monitor fan spinning, very softly.

Old Zhou opened his mouth slightly, as if he wanted to ask something.

But he didn't ask.

His mouth closed again.

Half a minute later, Old Zhou picked up the enamel mug.

The Tieguanyin tea in the jar swayed slightly.

He neither drank nor left.

Fang Yuan turned off the middle monitor and then the one on the right.

The one on the left is still lit up, stuck on page 75 of the v3.0 documentation.

The gray square labeled "Reserved" is in the very center of the screen.

It was less than forty centimeters away from the fourth line of text in Fang Yuan's notebook.

Fang Yuan pulled the laptop towards himself.

It wasn't hiding; it was an unconscious action.

Old Zhou didn't say anything.

He stood at the doorway, holding an enamel mug with the notch facing the door.

The corridor lights went out again.

The lights in the testing room were still on. Looking through the door, Fang Yuan was sitting in front of three monitors, two of which were off and one was on.

Old Zhou didn't leave.