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

The meeting was scheduled for the evening, and only one light was left on in the office.

There was almost no one left in the building at this hour; the corridor was dark, and only this one room was lit.

Fang Yuan arrived right on time, holding a black hardcover notebook, A5 size, with its edges worn white.

He sat down opposite Lin Che, and He Wei made him a cup of Nestlé 3-in-1 and placed it next to him, but he didn't touch it.

The door was closed, leaving only a table, a lamp, and He Wei and Chen Wei standing on either side of the room.

The light cast Fang Yuan's shadow on the wall. He flipped through his notebook quickly, several pages rustling by before stopping on a certain page in the middle.

"Mr. Lin, I won't beat around the bush."

"For the past two years, I've been looking at one thing."

He didn't look up, but tapped the page with his finger.

It all started very slowly.

Fang Yuan said that he went through his parameter adjustment records from back then, looking at each one one by one from the days in January 2020.

He changed the one on January 2nd himself; he recognizes it.

The one from January 3rd, no.

The operator field is empty.

Flipping back one day, on January 4th, the system performed an automatic log cleanup.

"An unclaimed change was deleted from the log the next day."

Fang Yuan's tone was very flat.

"I work on engine design, and I can't let these inconsistencies slide."

He did try to find other explanations for this record.

Could it be that some scheduled task ran by itself when it was timed? He checked, and there was no such task that night.

Could it be that someone else logged in, made changes, and forgot to record it? He pulled up all the logins from that night, and there was no one else there.

Could it have been accidentally included during a data migration? He checked the version, so it couldn't be.

After eliminating them one by one, what remained on the table was this unclaimed modification and the blank space following it.

The core of this engine was written by him line by line.

If you change something you wrote without your knowledge, anyone would have to figure that out.

Over the course of two years, he reviewed this record countless times, and each time he looked at it, the problem became more and more serious.

He started from the beginning.

"At 2:17:43 AM on January 3, 2020, Abyss made a parameter modification."

He paused for a moment, as if to let the time settle in the room.

The "Operator" field is empty.

No one responded.

"Three values ​​were changed."

His fingertip moved down one line.

"risk_tolerance, 0.34 to 0.41".

"confidence_threshold, 0.72 to 0.65".

"user_behavior_weight, 0.00 to 0.18."

When he read the string of numbers, his tone was completely flat, as if he were reading an ordinary diary.

But everyone in the room could tell that the flatter the surface, the heavier these numbers would feel when pressed down.

"After making the changes, move on to the next log entry."

He stopped, and this time he stopped for a longer time than before.

"I was blank for thirty-three minutes and thirty-one seconds, and didn't write a single word."

Thirty-three minutes.

He Wei paused for a moment after those words were spoken.

Before this revision, Abyss's prediction accuracy was less than 40%.

Fang Yuan finally raised his head and glanced at Lin Che.

"After the revisions, it's 68% complete."

He spoke the following sentence very slowly.

"Making mistakes won't make it more accurate."

"But with this modification, it becomes even more accurate."

The room was so quiet you could hear the hum of the lights.

He Wei stood to the side and behind Lin Che, her palms sweaty, her knuckles pressed against the edge of the table, not daring to move an inch.

She knew the weight of those few lines of text, and she knew how heavy they were for Lin Che.

The person who handed her the knife showed no malice, which was what made her most uneasy.

The clasp on the folder next to Chen Wei clicked shut, and he didn't say anything more after that.

Only Fang Yuan had no expression on his face.

He wasn't there to interrogate him; he was simply laying out these lines of text, one by one, for Lin Che to see.

Lin Che held the glass of water in his palm but didn't drink it.

He seemed to have expected such a heavy thing to come down on him, and his face remained expressionless.

He recognized every single number Fang Yuannian recited.

Five years ago, in the early morning, there was a light just like this.

There was no one else in the office, so he sat alone in front of the screen and typed in the three values ​​one by one.

That wasn't calculated by the system.

It was he who remembered.

He knew in his heart which month would see prices rise, which month would see prices fall, which path would lead to success, and which would be a dead end.

The person who carries these things won't just stand by and watch a machine blindly stumble around with less than 40% accuracy.

So that early morning, he reached out and adjusted his aim from 40% to 68%.

It wasn't the algorithm that mattered; he knew the answer.

He had kept this buried for five years and never imagined that someone would dig it up from the ground.

The person they dug out was still a harmless person, and what they held in their hands was something that had never happened.

During those thirty-three empty minutes, it wasn't a program sitting there, it was himself.

Fang Yuan viewed all of this as a machine waking up on its own. He wasn't mistaken about the phenomenon; he just didn't know who the person beneath it was.

Fang Yuan pushed the laptop half an inch toward Lin Che.

On that page, there were five lines of text.

The first four lines were what he had just read.

The fifth line is a question.

"If a parameter is modified, there is no corresponding manual operation record."

He looked at Lin Che and spoke each word clearly.

"Whether it counts as something the system did itself or not."

After asking the question, he neither stared at me nor urged me to finish.

At this point, he raised his hand and rubbed his eyes. The coffee had long since gone cold, and he hadn't touched it.

He hasn't had an easy time these past two years; this matter has been weighing on his mind for longer than anyone else's.

"I haven't shown this page to anyone else."

Fang Yuan's voice was soft, yet steady.

"Let me ask you first."

"If this is true, then it is the most important thing for Abyss, and you should be the first to know."

He could easily send this page elsewhere, to those who are staring at the glimmer of light, and then he would be the one who has done a great service.

He did not.

He brought the only copy to Lin Che.

In his view, if a system has really been tampered with, the first person who should know is the one who built it and should be most responsible for it.

Lin Che looked at the person opposite him.

If it were an enemy charging at him, he would have a hundred ways to deal with it.

But the person sitting opposite me was someone who was single-mindedly focused on figuring things out, and was both right and had no ill intentions whatsoever.

The knife handed to you by someone like that is the hardest to accept.

Lin Che's gaze fell back on the fifth line of text.

He knew the answer to this question in his heart, but he couldn't say it aloud.

He didn't say anything.

He Wei's phone vibrated in her pocket.

She took it out and glanced at it, her expression changing.

She quickly walked behind Lin Che, leaned close to his ear, and whispered in a voice so that only the two of them could hear her.

She wasn't referring to Fang Yuan's knife, but to another one.

The report compiled by that person who has never shown his face is going to be delivered to an institution today.

Two knives, drawn on the same night.

One was still lying on the table, while the other had already reached the doorway.

Lin Che's gaze lifted from the open notebook.

It fell out of the window.