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

Beijing.

January 15th.

morning.

The buildings without signs were well-heated.

The second-floor corridor was covered with a deep red carpet, thick enough to make no sound when stepped on.

The corridor is lined with dark brown wooden doors, each with a brass nameplate that does not have a room number but only a Chinese character.

Walk to the door in the middle of the corridor; the sign on the door reads "Wen".

The door was ajar.

A hand pushed the door open.

The man's hands had short, clean nails, and a few bluish veins on the back of his hands. His skin wasn't young, but it was well-maintained.

There was no ring on his ring finger, and no watch on his wrist.

The room wasn't big.

There was a mahogany table with nothing on it except for a table lamp and a dark green pen holder.

There were two calligraphy brushes and one ballpoint pen in the pen holder.

The table lamp was off; the room's light came from the window.

The window faces east.

In mid-January, around nine o'clock in the morning in Beijing, the sun had already risen. The winter sunlight streamed in through the window, golden and thin, shining on the mahogany table and illuminating the wood grain very clearly.

The wood grain on the tabletop is composed of concentric rings of annual growth, with alternating shades of color.

The hand moved from the doorway to the table.

The owner of the hand sat down.

The chair is a dark brown leather swivel chair, quite old, with light-colored marks worn into the leather of the armrests.

The chair made no sound when I sat down, so the hydraulic rod is working properly.

There is a tray in the upper left corner of the table.

It was made of wood, rectangular, and shallow, and contained a document.

The binding of the documents was extremely simple.

The cover is dark blue, without gold foil or embossing, with only a very small logo printed in the upper center.

The logo is the national emblem.

It's very small, about two centimeters square, with a gold national emblem on a dark blue cover that's almost invisible unless you look closely.

The hand picked up the document.

He picked it up very gently, pinching the bottom right corner of the cover with his thumb and forefinger and turning it open slowly, as if he were flipping through a book whose contents he already knew but still had to check each page.

The first page.

The paper is white with a faint watermark of the national emblem at the top, visible only when light shines through the paper.

A line of text was printed in the very center of the paper. The font was small, Song typeface, and bold.

The text content is not fully visible from this angle; what you can see are the first few words and the closing signature format.

It begins with a number, and the number format is very formal, consisting of square brackets, year, and serial number.

At the end, there is a red stamp, round, about four centimeters in diameter, with neat edges and a very pure red color, the kind that can only be seen in specific institutions.

Turn to the second page.

The second page contains the main body of the document, densely packed with text divided into several paragraphs, each preceded by a number.

The hand didn't linger on that page for long, about five or six seconds, before turning it over.

Page 3.

The format of the third page is different from that of the second page; the top half is a table, and the bottom half is a footnote.

The column headers of the table are not very clear, but you can see that the leftmost column is the numbering, starting from 1.

My finger paused on a row in the table.

I pressed my fingertip on the paper for about two seconds, then released it.

After loosening, a very faint fingerprint was left on the paper.

Turn it over.

Page 4.

The fourth page was almost empty, with only a few lines of text printed on the top half.

This page has a special format; the font size is larger than the previous ones, and the line spacing is wider, with at least two centimeters between each line.

Four characters are printed at the top of the page.

"Core Participants"

Four characters, centered, in bold, black font.

Below is a list of names, arranged vertically from top to bottom.

The first name.

A name he recognized, but it wasn't important; it wasn't the focus of this page.

The second name.

Lin Che.

The hand stopped.

It wasn't just the act of turning the page that stopped; the entire hand stopped.

Press your thumb on the bottom right corner of the paper, place your index finger on the back of the paper, and slightly tuck your middle, ring, and little fingers in.

All five fingers stopped moving.

The sunlight outside the window shone on the back of my hand, the golden light overlapping with the blue veins on the back of my hand, the lines so clear they looked like an enlarged map.

The lamp's shadow was cast obliquely on the table, the edge of the shadow meeting the edge of the sunlight at wrist level, half bright and half dark.

It paused for about three seconds.

Then the finger moved.

His thumb loosened from the paper, and his entire hand left the document.

It wasn't turning the page; it was leaning back in the chair.

The chair back made a very soft creak.

The hand reached into the pen holder and picked up the ballpoint pen.

The pen has a black metal barrel and a silver ring around the cap, which makes a slight metallic scraping sound when unscrewed.

Then he put the pen down again.

No signature was found.

No annotations.

Not a single word was written anywhere.

I just picked it up and then put it down again.

My hand returned to the document.

Turn back to page four and flip from back to front: four, three, two, one, cover.

The file was closed.

When it closed, the dark blue cover made a soft "pop" sound as the air was compressed between the pages.

The national emblem faces upwards.

The hand picked up the document and turned around.

Behind him was a safe.

The gray metal cabinet is about 1.2 meters high and has a mechanical rotary combination lock with three sets of numbers.

I dialed three sets of numbers, and each time the dial turned a number, there was a slight clicking sound.

The lock is open.

The cabinet door was opened, revealing three layers inside. The top layer contained several file boxes, while the middle layer was empty.

The file was placed in the middle layer.

The dark blue cover faced upwards, and the national emblem appeared as a dark golden dot in the shadows where the lamplight couldn't reach.

The cabinet door closed.

The turntable is reset to zero.

Click.

It's locked.

The room fell silent.

The person did not stand up immediately.

He sat in a chair with his hands on the table, both hands flat and his fingers naturally spread out.

There was nothing on the desk. The files were in the safe, the pen was back in the pen holder, and the desk lamp was off.

Only the light from the window.

His gaze shifted from the table to the window.

Outside the window is Beijing in winter.

In mid-January, the sky in Beijing was incredibly blue, almost unreal, the kind of blue that only appears after the north winds have blown through winter.

The sun hung low in the southeast, casting a slanted light that gilded everything outside the window with a thin layer of gold.

far away.

A few streets away, a few walls away, and a few old locust trees that had lost all their leaves.

You can see a corner.

The corner tower of the Forbidden City.

The golden glazed tiles gleamed white in the sunlight, and the upturned eaves pointed towards the clear blue sky without a single cloud.

The reflection of the corner tower cast a blurry golden line on the frozen surface of the moat. The ice was not completely frozen, and a small patch of water glistened in the sunlight at the edge.

It's been six hundred years.

The corner tower has stood there for six hundred years.

That person stared at the corner tower for a long time.

The sunlight shifted a little on the tabletop, and the golden light moved from the third growth ring of the wood grain to the fourth.

Then he stood up.

The chair was pushed back a little, and the leather surface bore the marks of someone sitting on it, a slightly dented human shape.

He didn't look at the desktop again.

I walked to the door.

My hand is on the doorknob.

Push open the door.

The deep red carpet in the corridor stretched to the end.

The footsteps disappeared into the carpet.

The door slowly closed, and the character "文" on the doorplate swayed for the last time.

The room was empty.

The corner tower is still visible outside the window.

Cut to the next scene.

Hangzhou.

Microlight Headquarters.

Fifth floor.

Lin Che's office door was closed and the lights were off.

He's not in now.

There's something new on my desktop.

A dark blue folder sits neatly to the right of the keyboard, parallel to the edge of the desk.