After breaking up with my boyfriend, I made a fortune and rose rapidly in my career.

After seeing off the group of disheveled section chiefs, the air in the conference room felt much fresher.

Zhang Chao tidied up the documents on the table, a smile on his face: "Director, they won't dare to come again for a while now."

"They will come back." Chen Ping's voice was devoid of emotion. "But next time, they will come knocking on our door obediently with the resources we want."

He didn't say much on the matter and turned to walk into the office inside.

Jiang Fan was lying on the planning map, constantly marking and calculating with red and blue pencils, muttering to himself, as if he hadn't heard the noise outside.

This is the person Chen Pingfang is looking for.

"Engineer Jiang." Chen Ping walked up to him.

"Hmm?" Jiang Fan didn't even look up, and drew a circle on the blueprint with his finger. "The load-bearing structure of Factory Building No. 3 has problems. That idiot Hu Jinshan cut corners. The active damping layer of the foundation is made of inferior rubber. Forget about EUV, even the most ordinary DUV equipment at full power can make the whole building resonate, ruining all the precision."

Chen Pingfang's gaze fell on the spot where Jiang Fan had just drawn a circle.

That was the core area of ​​the entire No. 3 factory building.

"That blueprint you drew back then," Chen Pingfang suddenly spoke up, "was the provision for an ASML interface just a theoretical concept?"

Jiang Fan stopped writing.

He slowly straightened up, adjusted the black-rimmed glasses he had somehow found on the bridge of his nose, and his expression changed.

"It was a theory, and also a deduction I made at the time." He paused for a few seconds, as if recalling something. "I studied all of ASML's publicly available patents and equipment parameters, and based on their technical roadmap, I derived the extreme requirements for the factory foundation of the next-generation lithography machine. That interface was an obsession of mine; I thought... what if one day we could buy it?"

His voice trailed off at the end.

In those days, it really seemed like a joke.

Chen Pingfang shook his head, looking directly at Jiang Fan: "No, I don't believe it's just an obsession. An engineer wouldn't leave behind a pure fantasy on official engineering drawings. You must have discovered something."

Jiang Fan's pupils suddenly contracted.

He looked at Chen Pingfang as if he were seeing him for the first time.

"I..." Jiang Fan's Adam's apple bobbed, and he finally slumped against the table, his voice hoarse. "When I was surveying the geological data, I found anomalies in the rock strata data beneath Factory Building No. 3. The density and magnetic field feedback in one area were very strange, as if it were wrapped in a huge metal shield. But at that time, Hu Jinshan was rushing to meet the construction deadline and didn't give me a chance to explore in depth. He just sealed it off with cement."

"So, you left the label for that interface?"

"Yes." Jiang Fan nodded. "That's a coordinate, and also a warning. I think if someone can understand this diagram in the future, they'll know that there's a problem with that area, and it absolutely cannot be touched."

Chen Ping's face remained expressionless.

"Now, the opportunity has come." Chen Pingfang pointed to the blueprints. "I need you to immediately use precision instruments to re-examine the foundation of the entire No. 3 factory. I need to know what's hidden underneath."

"Great!" Jiang Fan's eyes lit up immediately.

……

Two days later, late at night.

The entire Chipfire Industrial Park was silent, except for the brightly lit Factory Building No. 3.

Jiang Fan and his hastily assembled seven-person technical team have been working continuously for forty-eight hours. Instant noodle containers and empty energy drink bottles are scattered on the ground.

In front of a computer screen connected to a ground-penetrating radar, Jiang Fan stared intently at the constantly changing data stream, his eyes bloodshot.

"Deep exploration reached 15 meters... Rock strata structure is normal..."

"Twenty meters... Damn it, the electromagnetic interference has increased."

"Increase the power, block out all noise, and focus the signal on the coordinate point," Jiang Fan whispered into the walkie-talkie.

hum-

The image on the computer screen shook violently for a moment, and then a clear three-dimensional structure slowly appeared.

Twenty-five meters directly beneath the foundation of Factory Building No. 3, the outline of a huge, regular cuboid was clearly visible. It was surrounded by a thick layer of lead shielding, blocking most signals.

"This is..." A young engineer nearby gasped, "An underground fortress?"

"No." Jiang Fan's breathing became rapid, and his hands trembled as he typed rapidly on the keyboard, retrieving models from the database in his mind for comparison.

Size, structure, shielding method...

When the last data match was successful, a red word popped up on the screen.

"ASML-TWINSCAN-NXT:1950i."

At that moment, the entire control room fell into a deathly silence.

Everyone stared blankly at the device model on the screen.

That was the core component chamber of an immersion lithography machine. Although it was an older model from several years ago, it was still something that China had been dreaming of.

"My God..." Jiang Fan suddenly stood up from the chair, staggered, and almost fell.

He didn't care about any of that. He grabbed the safety helmet from the table, rushed out of the control room, and headed straight for Chen Pingfang's temporary office.

"Director, Director."

The door was pushed open.

Chen Pingfang was reading documents when he heard the sound and looked up.

He saw Jiang Fan's flushed face and his bloodshot, yet unusually bright, eyes.

"Found it." Jiang Fan's voice trembled as he slammed the tablet computer on the table. "It's real, it's really here. That bastard Hu Jinshan, he built a tomb, trying to bury this thing forever."

Chen Ping's gaze fell on the tablet screen, looking at the clear structural diagram, and his mind went blank.

He finally understood.

Everything makes sense now.

Why did Hu Jinshan use an empty shell company and risk incurring billions of yuan in debt to acquire the land and factory buildings of the Xinhuo Industrial Park?

Why did his first reaction after discovering that things had been exposed not to destroy the ledgers, but to immediately initiate a debt-to-equity swap and legally raze the entire industrial park to the ground?

Because beneath this land lies something far more sensitive and astonishing than 12 billion yuan in state-owned assets.

This is a set of core components of a lithography machine that were disassembled and smuggled into the country through gray channels.

Its very existence is illegal. Its exposure would trigger international diplomatic disputes and technological sanctions. However, its research value for the entire nation's semiconductor industry is immeasurable.

Hu Jinshan was just a minor figure, responsible for guarding this device. Now that things have been exposed, what he wants to do is destroy the evidence along with the equipment.

Chen Ping slowly stood up, walked to the window, and looked at the deep night in the distance.

This matter has gone beyond the scope of what Nanzhou City, and even Jiangbei Province, can handle.

It must be reported immediately.

He took out his personal cell phone, a specially encrypted one. He was about to dial a number he knew by heart.

Just then.

hum.

The phone screen lit up, and an email notification popped up.

The sender was anonymous, and the message was redirected multiple times, making it impossible to trace.

The email's title, consisting of only one short sentence, caused Chen Pingfang's pupils to contract instantly.

"County Chief Chen, would you like to know who the real owner of the Corefire project is?"