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

Shen Nan left, and He Wei left too.

An hour ago, there were several people sitting in this room.

Fang Yuan's open notebook, Shen Nan's spread-out documents on the table, and the spot where He Wei had been standing were all now empty.

The document was put into the briefcase and taken away, but that sentence was not taken away.

Please explain the situation.

Lin Che was the only one left in the room, with a lamp, a table, and a screen on the table still lit up.

The second hand on the wall moved forward one tick at a time, marking the deadline for explaining the situation, counting down.

He sat there, and as if he were facing a difficult problem, he mentally went through the whole situation from beginning to end once again.

This time, however, even after laying out the plan, he couldn't find the way out.

The first path is to tell the truth.

Tell them that those three values ​​weren't changed by the machine itself, but were entered by him.

As soon as he said that, the next question immediately arose: how did he know to knock like that?

he knows.

Because he remembers everything that happened afterward, every obstacle of that year, when the price rose, when it collapsed, and which road led to a dead end.

But he couldn't bring himself to say it.

He could even picture the scene.

He opened the envelope that had been sealed for a year at the notary office, and pushed the paper inside, which contained the words written a year ago and which had since come true exactly as predicted, to the other side.

The person on the other end initially disbelieved, then became skeptical, and finally their expression gradually changed.

What they were originally afraid of was a machine that could make its own decisions.

But the piece of paper in front of them tells them about someone who can write tomorrow down on paper in advance.

A person who can see the future is far more terrifying than a runaway machine.

The more substantial the testimony, the more he pushes himself into a position where no one dares to leave him.

The more he tries to absolve himself of all responsibility, the more he leads himself down a dead end.

The truth is a dead end.

The second option is to go along with them.

Nodding, acknowledging that Abyss had done it himself, and that the system would change itself when no one was watching.

That's easy to say; just open your mouth.

But as soon as the words were spoken, Abyss became exactly what the proposal wanted—something uncontrollable, dangerous, and that needed to be regulated.

Underneath Abyss lies DCEP, the account of several cities and tens of millions of people.

Once such a system is labeled as "uncontrollable," there's no reason for it to remain in his hands.

The list from abroad was also waiting for this statement. Once he acknowledged it, all the hands, inside and out, would have a legitimate reason to reach out.

The system he had personally nurtured would no longer belong to the Lin family.

A lie is also a dead end.

He laid the two roads side by side in front of him and looked at them for a long time.

One path leads to his own grave.

A path leading to Abyss's grave.

You can't tell the truth, and you can't admit to lies.

No matter how you answer, you'll die.

What makes it even more frustrating is that there isn't a single person in this network he can hate.

Fang Yuan wanted to get to the bottom of things. The person who reviewed the report was just doing their job, and the person asking him to explain the situation was simply following the rules. Even the people abroad who were pushing that list were talking about preventing danger.

There are no bad people.

It's a situation created by all good people; you can't break it by defeating anyone, because no one is actually on the wrong side.

The knife was handed to me by a good person; this kind of knife is even harder to defend against than one stabbed by an enemy.

Over the years, every time he reached a dead end, he still held a card that no one else had.

His achievements in this life were not exactly honorable.

While others were groping their way in the dark, he kept a piece of paper with answers already written on it clutched in his hand.

When he gets stuck, he reaches into the future and pulls out the answer.

He even considered giving this problem to Abyss.

Abyss calculated out all the difficulties he had faced over the years.

But Abyss's calculations were accurate, thanks to the little bit of food he fed him and his knowledge of tomorrow.

He himself didn't have the answer to this question, so when Abyss fed it, he could only return the blank space to him as it was.

He still reached out to tomorrow.

It's empty inside.

He paused for a moment, then stretched out again.

It's still empty.

That tomorrow, which he was used to reaching out to, this time, he returned nothing.

For the first time, he realized that the future he remembered was pieced together from individual events.

When will prices rise, when will they fall, who will come, and which policy will be implemented?

However, there is no record of whether or not Abyss committed the act in the early hours of that day.

This question is not in the future.

It resides within itself.

He can see tomorrow, but he can't see himself.

For the first time in so many years, he stood on the same starting line as everyone else.

Without that card, he was no different from anyone else who had been cornered.

Ultimately, what drove him to this point was precisely the very thing that saved him back then.

He is able to remember tomorrow, which is why he has come this far.

It was precisely because he remembered tomorrow that those three numbers would change, and those thirty-three minutes would be empty, that he encountered this life-threatening problem today.

The sky outside the window had turned completely dark sometime during the night.

The whole building fell silent, except for his room, which was still lit.

He didn't slam the table or curse.

The room was so quiet that he could hear his own breathing, one breath after another.

He just sat there and looked at that unsolvable problem again.

There is still no solution.

This was the closest he had come to losing in all these years.

The folder on the table is still empty.

Abyss v4, from the time it was built until today, has never had a single word installed in it.

The cursor blinked repeatedly in that blank space.

He stared at the blank space, neither filling it in nor being able to.

Because he genuinely didn't have a single answer he could write down.

As he stared at that blank space, something stirred within him.

These past few days, he's been thinking about the same thing over and over again: how should he answer this question?

Yes or no.

To be autonomous or not to be autonomous.

He flipped back and forth between the two answers, and all he found were deaths.

But then he suddenly realized that he had been standing in the wrong place the whole time.

This question was set by someone else.

That report was issued, that set of proposals was issued, that explanation of the situation was issued.

They set the questions, and he answered them; whatever he answered, it all fell into the circle they had drawn beforehand.

The truly ruthless part of this question isn't the two answers, but the pen held by the person who set the question.

The pen is in their hands, and the questions will always be their questions.

What he needs to do is not to choose the one that will die more slowly from the two dead answers.

Bring that pen over here.

Once the pen is in his hands, the two paths leading to the grave become meaningless.

He has won for so many years because he knows one step ahead of everyone else.

To win this time, he has to go one step further than everyone else.

While everyone else is stuck on this problem, he wants to go outside of it.

The question itself shouldn't be decided by the person who sets it.

It's up to him to decide.

The deadline is still approaching.

But a crack opened up in the deepest part of his heart, and light shone through it.

He doesn't need to answer that question.

He can decide what the problem is.

His fingertips landed on the keyboard.