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

The email arrived the following afternoon.

Lin Che sat in the Weiguang office flipping through the CCPS weekly report. The data for the second batch of four cities was still steadily rising, and there was nothing for him to handle.

He had already put the printed documents and notes on the table into the drawer. The BVI matter was temporarily put on hold until there was new information from Chen Wei.

At 2:14 PM, I received a notification in my email.

The sender was an address he had never seen before; it was neither a domain within Weiguang nor an email address he had saved in his contacts.

The title has only two words.

"Evaluate".

He clicked on it.

The email body contained only one line: "The attachment is encrypted; the password to unzip it has been sent via another channel."

He glanced at his phone.

Sure enough, Shen Nan sent a WeChat message two minutes ago, which contained only six characters: two capital letters and four numbers.

That's all.

The password was forwarded by Shen Nan, which means that this email still uses the 010 password.

The national security official delivered the assessment results to Lin Che in an indirect manner.

He downloaded the attachment, entered the password, and the file was unlocked.

A PDF file with no headers or footers, no document number, and no stamp.

Twelve pages.

The file was less than two megabytes in size, but he stared at the download completion notification for several seconds before clicking on it.

The first page is the abstract.

The PDF has a simple layout with white text on a gray background, and even the font is the default SimSun.

He pulled it down.

"Preliminary Technical Assessment Opinions for the Abyss System (Internal Discussion Draft)"

Discussion draft.

This is not a conclusion, not a qualitative assessment; it is a discussion draft.

The wording itself carries a sense of caution, leaving room for maneuver.

He continued reading.

The main text begins on the second page.

It is divided into two parts: "Architecture Assessment" and "Risk Assessment".

The architecture assessment section took up four whole pages.

He turned the pages one by one.

Data source compliance, predictive model interpretability, input and output log completeness, and hierarchical design of access control.

Each item is followed by a conclusion, using a three-level labeling system: acceptable, needs improvement, unacceptable.

He read all four pages.

Most items were marked "acceptable," with only a few marked "needs improvement." The items marked "needs improvement" were all technical details concerning log retention periods and audit interfaces.

None of them were "unacceptable".

80%.

Approximately 80% of the architectural designs were deemed acceptable.

This ratio was higher than he had expected.

When he was in Beijing, his bottom line was 60%; anything above 60% was considered good news.

Turn to the risk assessment.

This section occupies three pages and is divided into three levels.

Tier 1: 80% of the architecture has been made public.

Conclusion: The risks are manageable. It is recommended to include it in a common regulatory framework and conduct routine audits.

Second tier: 20% of the core algorithms are retained.

His finger paused on the touchpad for a moment.

Conclusion: There are unpredictable risks. It is recommended to set up an emergency circuit breaker mechanism, with both parties jointly holding the right to activate it, and neither party can trigger it independently.

Emergency circuit breaker tripped.

Jointly owned by both parties.

It cannot be triggered independently by one party.

The third level: the overall technology verification cycle.

Conclusion: A 60-day technical verification period is recommended, during which the Abyss system should remain in its current operational state. A formal evaluation report will be issued upon completion of the verification.

60 days.

two months.

He went through these three conclusions in his mind.

80% is acceptable, 20% requires a circuit breaker, and there is a 60-day verification period.

It's neither approved nor rejected.

It means, "You've passed most of it, but we need to leave the rest open and give us two months to confirm."

This is not a trial, it is a negotiation.

A list of conditions, not a judgment.

He continued flipping through the pages.

Pages 10 and 11, appendix data tables and references.

Page 12, the last page.

The last page was almost empty.

The document contained only two lines of text: "The above are preliminary discussion opinions, for internal reference only, and do not represent the final conclusion."

The date is December 25, 2022.

Christmas.

Then he saw the line of text.

Below the printed content, about three centimeters below the blank space, there is a line of handwritten text.

Blue ink, small characters, written in the blank space of a PDF scan.

It wasn't printed; someone wrote it on a paper copy and then scanned it in.

The ink was pressed down a bit during the scanning process, but every word was still clearly visible.

"This system should not be defined as a 'threat,' but rather as a 'national capability that needs to be protected.'"

Lin Che stared at this line of text for a long time.

The mouse is hovering in the center of the screen, and the arrow remains motionless.

He didn't feel the warm air blowing from the air conditioner vent.

Handwritten.

It is not a conclusion in the main text of the assessment report, nor is it part of any official wording.

It is a line of personal judgment written by someone in the blank space of the last page after reading all eleven pages of the evaluation.

This line was not printed in the main text, indicating that it was not part of the formal evaluation content.

But the fact that it was scanned into a PDF indicates that the person who scanned it knew it was there and chose to keep it.

He wasn't sure who wrote the line.

But he recognized the style of that handwriting.

The characters are very small, each stroke is tightly controlled, there is no cursive writing, and there is no sloppiness.

In conference room 607, a female member of the technical evaluation team placed a handwritten note sheet next to her ThinkPad.

The characters on that piece of paper are almost identical to those in this line in size, spacing, and stroke order.

"National capabilities that need to be protected."

It's not a "threat".

It means "needs to be protected".

These nine words completely reversed the direction of the entire assessment report.

The conditions, restrictions, circuit breakers, and verification periods in the first eleven pages are all "preventive" language.

But the last line of handwritten words reads "protect".

Prevention and protection.

The distance between these two words is the distance between review and approval.

He scrolled to the bottom of the last page to make sure the handwritten text was displayed completely on the screen.

Then I took a screenshot.

The system pops up a save dialog box; the default filename is automatically generated.

Screenshot_20221226.

He did not change the file name.

I clicked save.

A small icon appeared on my desktop, but the thumbnail was too small to see anything; it was just a grayish-white area.

The file appeared on the desktop, next to the three empty folders.

Lv4.

Abyss-v4.

in case.

Screenshot_20221226.

He leaned back in his chair, looking at the fourth icon that had appeared on the desktop.

Three empty folders and a screenshot.

The first three were empty, but the fourth had a line of handwritten blue text.

The office was quiet, with the hum of the air conditioner and the faint sound of wind outside the window mixed together.

The desk lamp was still on, illuminating the location of the printed document that Chen Wei had already put away in the drawer.

The drawer was closed, and the desk lamp illuminated a clean tabletop.

The handwritten blue text on the screen is still there.