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

Lin Che's phone screen lit up briefly.

It wasn't a message; it was the screen automatically turning on after the charger was plugged in.

He glanced at the time: 1:47 PM.

It's the fourth day.

Put the phone back on the coffee table, screen down.

That same afternoon, Fang Yuan came to the debugging room again.

The air conditioning in the testing room was left unattended and was still running in December. The cold air blowing out of the vents mixed with the cross breeze coming through the window cracks, making the temperature several degrees lower than in the corridor.

Fang Yuan was wearing that gray hoodie, the zipper was undone, and he didn't feel cold.

He turned on three monitors and pulled up the data from last night.

On the left is still page 75 of the v3.0 architecture document, and that gray square is still right in the center of the screen.

The query script in the middle has finished running, and the log is now stuck on the last line.

He changed a few numbers in the comparison table on the right last night, and after reviewing it again today, he confirmed that it was correct.

Then he did something.

He created a new blank document.

The cursor was flashing in the upper left corner; he didn't type anything first.

He opened the black hardcover A5 notebook and stared at the four lines of text for a while.

The first line is the date, the second line is the module name, the third line is a question mark, and the fourth line is what I wrote last night.

The four lines of text arranged together resemble a catalog of some kind of chain of evidence.

He started hitting.

Fang Yuan doesn't type fast, but he rarely deletes anything.

He would pause for a few seconds after writing each paragraph, as if confirming whether to move on to the next one.

I've thought it through, let's keep playing.

What he wrote was not a technical document.

Technical documents have templates, format requirements, version numbers, and author fields.

There was no template for what he wrote.

He used his own methods to write down the data flow he had tracked down last night, step by step, into something that non-technical people could understand.

Pages one through four show the flow of data.

Which field was written to what, when, from which module, and where does the target path point?

Each piece of data is timestamped, accurate to the second.

Pages five through nine contain the analysis of that gray square.

It's called "Reserved" in the architecture documentation, but it's not empty; it's running.

It has been running for nine months, with data coming in and going out every day, but it is not shown on any architecture diagram.

Fang Yuan made a comparison table of its inputs and outputs, which took up three whole pages.

His conclusion is on pages 10 through 13.

No, it's not a conclusion, it's a question.

He did not write "What is this?"

He wrote, "The way this module interacts with external data does not conform to the design specifications of v3.0."

The following sentence stated, "Further confirmation of its functional definition and licensing source is needed."

Very restrained, very skillful.

But everyone who understands this will ask the same question after watching it: Who authorized it?

He paused when he got to the third page.

He pushed the chair back and said something in a low voice.

"Can I take a look at the architecture?"

After saying that, he pulled her back and continued hitting her.

I played from 2 PM to 6:30 PM, and went to the restroom once in between, where I poured myself a cup of Nestlé 3-in-1 but didn't drink it.

At 6:30, the document stopped at the end of page thirteen.

He dragged the cursor back to the first page.

No title.

There is no author.

No date.

Thirteen pages, A4 size, Song typeface, 1.5 line spacing.

Fang Yuan read it through once and changed two words.

I looked at it again, but didn't change it.

The cursor hovered after the period on the last line of page thirteen and flashed for half a minute.

Then he pressed Ctrl+P.

The printer in the corner of the testing room hummed and began to warm up.

Three seconds later, the first sheet of paper slid out of the paper outlet, carrying the heat from the hot rollers.

Fang Yuan stood next to the printer, receiving the sheets one by one.

I glance at each printout to make sure there are no printing problems, then I stack them neatly on the table next to me.

The printer makes a slight clicking sound each time it spits out a sheet of paper, like the sound of gears meshing.

There were no other sounds in the testing room except for this clicking sound, which occurred every five or six seconds.

The fifth one.

The ninth image.

The thirteenth image.

The printer stopped, and the debugging room became quiet again.

Fang Yuan took the thirteen pages of paper back to his workstation and placed them on the right side of his desk.

Next to the black hardcover notebook.

He did not bind it.

There was no name written on any page.

He thought for a few seconds whether he should put it in the drawer and lock it.

The drawer was locked, and the key was in his pocket.

I thought for a few seconds, then decided not to lock it.

Place it on the desktop.

Footsteps echoed down the corridor.

It wasn't the steady stride of Lao Zhou; it was fast, with the soles of his shoes making a dragging, scraping sound on the floor tiles.

Xie Yu appeared at the door.

He was wearing that thin black down jacket, which cost a little over three hundred yuan. He had worn it for two winters, and the zipper pull on the right pocket had fallen off, so he replaced it with a small piece of black cable tie.

He was holding a notebook, which was open, and several lines of numbers were written on it.

"Brother Fang."

Fang Yuan looked up.

"Um."

"The matter concerning the Wuhan node."

Xie Yu leaned against the door frame and glanced down at the notebook.

"The latency threshold of the SM4 module has dropped from 17.2 to 16.8. I've confirmed this with them; it's due to the hardware upgrade last week."

He turned a page.

"I've created a change log; do you want to sync it to the main document?"

Xie Yu said that when he said the word "write," it was very natural. He didn't say "remember" or "did," he just said "write."

From the moment he took over the CCPS system, he used this word for everything related to parameters.

Fang Yuan pointed to the left side of the table.

"Put it here."

Xie Yu walked in and placed the notebook on the table.

He didn't go into the debugging room very often.

Most of the time I deal with the various city nodes of CCPS. When I'm busy, I make seven or eight phone calls a day, all of which are about parameter confirmation and technical coordination.

As he put the laptop down, his eyes swept across the right side of the desktop.

Thirteen pages of white paper were neatly stacked, without binding or a cover.

The first line of the top page contains a few words that are neither code nor CCPS parameters.

"What is this?"

Fang Yuan didn't look up.

"It's nothing."

Two words.

The tone was flat, not like a concealment, but more like a habit of not wanting to explain.

Xie Yu had known Fang Yuan for four years and knew that when he said "it's nothing," he wasn't just being polite; he genuinely didn't intend to say anything.

Xie Yu didn't ask any more questions.

He retrieved his notebook and stood at the door for a second.

"There's still a parameter to follow up on at the Zhengzhou node, I have to go now."

Fang Yuan nodded.

Xie Yu's footsteps faded away down the corridor.

The dragging sound grew fainter and fainter, eventually disappearing around the corner of the stairwell.

The motion-sensor lights in the corridor went out.

Fang Yuan was left alone in the debugging room again.

He looked at the thirteen pages of paper on the table.

White paper, Song typeface, size 12, line spacing 1.5.

There is no title, no signature, and no date.

He neither put it in his bag nor locked it in the drawer.

It's placed on the desktop.

One of the overhead light tubes in the testing room had a poor connection and would flicker every ten seconds or so.

When it flashed, the edge of the stack of white papers on the table lit up briefly, as if to remind someone of something.

Thirteen pages.

I wonder who it will eventually end up in.