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

This battle is now truly over.

In early March 2023, the SEC's investigation proceeded step by step according to the established procedures.

Three months later, in June, the file was filed as scheduled.

Archive.

An English word, stamped at the top of the file, means that the matter is closed, sealed, and will not be pursued further.

The gazes cast from across the ocean gradually receded.

The dim light is safe.

Abyss is safe.

The proposal that once hung over our heads and was to be included in the list, along with the report that insisted on system autonomy, ultimately became two bricks protecting the v4 framework.

Lin Che won.

They won cleanly, leaving themselves no trace.

He should have been able to breathe a sigh of relief after this battle.

In the first few days, he did relax.

There is only one person in the world who knows the whole story.

The modification made in the early morning of January 3, 2020, was not done by a program; it was Lin Che himself sitting in the blank space under the operator's column.

He entered those three numbers one by one, based on his memory of tomorrow.

He kept this secret very well, and no one could prove it afterward.

He thought that this matter was over, and that there was nothing left in the world that could reach him.

But just after everything had settled down, one day, while browsing through the running logs of Abyss v4, he saw something.

Those are some new judgments that emerged from the core 20%.

They landed in that area marked as having no historical verification.

This means that these judgments do not correspond to any of the tomorrows he remembers.

In other words, he never fed them.

Abyss has made countless judgments over the years, but every single one, if traced back to its origin, eventually leads to a certain tomorrow that he remembers.

These are the only ones I can't catch up with.

They seemed to spring up out of thin air, appearing from some corner of that two-tenths core.

Lin Che stared at those few lines of text for a long time.

Over the years, he always thought he understood Abyss perfectly.

Those 20% cores are frighteningly accurate, and they never relied on any algorithm, but on the tomorrow that he inserted, which no one else had.

The machine is just a shell; what truly matters is what's inside his head.

But these judgments are not in the tomorrow he gave us.

Where did they come from?

One possibility is that he misremembered, or perhaps his prophecy was actually a little deeper than he thought.

There is another possibility.

It was this thing he built with his own hands that quietly grew something that truly belonged to it from the two-tenths gap that even he himself couldn't fathom.

Eighty percent of the data, two-tenths of the core, and those two-tenths were designed by him personally back then. But after it was designed, even he, the one who created it, might not be able to see everything that happened inside.

He tried to trace back to find the origin of these judgments.

When he finally reached the end, that area without historical verification was like a wall of fog; if he went any further in, he couldn't see anything at all.

He raised this machine himself.

But is it possible that, as he feeds it, it becomes, in some place he isn't paying attention to, no longer entirely his mirror?

He didn't dare to think about this idea too deeply.

He didn't know which one it was.

He stared at the screen, and for the first time, looking at something he had created with his own hands, he felt a chill that he couldn't quite explain.

He set a price for the truth, leaving the whole world unable to answer that question.

But in the end, he realized that there was still one question left in the world that even he himself could not answer.

This whole thing sounds a bit like a joke.

He went to such great lengths to weld that deepest secret into a problem that no one could ever solve.

In the end, he himself was also left with an unsolvable problem.

He created it, but in the end, he couldn't explain what it actually was.

He will probably think about this question many times in the future.

But he knew he would never have the answer in his lifetime.

Nobody will have it.

He didn't linger on those lines of text.

He's seen plenty of things in his life that he can't understand.

He reached out and gently closed the notebook.

At some point, the aroma of tea wafted into the room.

It's Biluochun tea.

On the corner of the long table, the enamel mug remained in its usual spot, the chipped edge still facing the door.

The tea leaves in the jar sank to the bottom, while the steam rose slowly.

This jar has been with Lao Zhou for many years, and the crack has been there for just as many years. He has never been willing to replace it.

There are specific rules about where to place the jar and which side the rim should face. Placing the rim facing the door is a decades-old habit he has never broken.

Old Zhou came out from the inner room, holding a stack of printed blueprints in his hand.

He walked over, glanced at the still-lit screen in front of Lin Che, and frowned slightly.

It was already this late, so he picked up the enamel mug and took a sip.

"The matter is all done, why stay up any longer?"

He paused for a moment, then put the stack of drawings on the table.

"Go home early, don't stay up all night again."

After saying just those two sentences, he lowered his head again to look at his stack of blueprints.

Over the years, the world outside has been in turmoil, and no matter how big the waves, he has seen Lin Che weather them all alone.

No matter how many times the company's valuation increased or how big of a figure Lin Che became, Old Zhou seemed to have never paid any attention to it.

In his eyes, Lin Che was still the same young man who needed someone to keep an eye on him so he wouldn't ruin his health.

In his eyes, what mattered wasn't any of that, but that the kid had stayed up all night again, whether the tea had gone cold, and that it was time for him to go home.

This house is the only place in the world where no one considers him the richest man, nor does anyone consider him an irreplaceable core figure.

Here, he's just an ordinary person who should be reminded to eat and sleep on time.

Lin Che sat there, watching him.

Looking at the chipped jar, at the Biluochun tea that had sunk inside, and at Old Zhou's expressionless yet reassuring face.

The slight chill from before has faded away without me even noticing.

Along his journey, he went from being driven to a dead end to reaching a position where he could set a price for the truth.

The wind was strong up there, and there stood a question that even he himself couldn't answer, a question that was always open.

But right now, he's sitting right here in this room.

From that high vantage point, he was the one who set the price for the truth, the one no one could touch.

In this room, he was just a young man being urged to go home early and hadn't even had dinner yet.

In front of him was a jar of hot Biluochun tea, and beside him was Old Zhou, who kept nagging him not to stay up all night.

No matter how strong the wind is up high, this room is warm.

Those judgments he hadn't fed into his mind were still lingering in the 20% core of Abyss v4.

He never fed them.

Was that 20% core merely a prophecy of Lin Che alone, or had something real already grown in a place beyond his reach?

He will never know.

Nobody would.