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

"And while you're at it, help me find the hidden surprise inside." After hanging up the phone, Chen Pingfang didn't explain any further.

Three days later, in the No. 6 backup warehouse of Corefire Phase II.

Forty-two pieces of equipment are tagged in the middle of the warehouse, each with a blue numbered label, numbered from A-01 to A-42.

Three people from the Provincial Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision arrived, carrying portable testing equipment. The leader, surnamed Zhao, had a round face and would flip through documents as soon as he spoke.

Ma Donglin's technical security team of four, dressed in black windbreakers, with their laptops connected to data cables, squatted behind the devices and ran firmware scans on each one.

Han Zhengke didn't come. He sent two technicians, one in his early thirties, wearing silver-rimmed glasses, holding a stack of factory inspection reports; the other, short, carrying a tool bag, was responsible for unpacking and assisting.

He stood next to the equipment with silver-rimmed glasses, his hands behind his back, a slight smile playing on his lips.

When the firmware scan reached the fifteenth device, Ma Donglin walked over to Chen Pingfang and lowered his voice.

"The software is completely clean, with no abnormal communication modules or pre-installed remote ports."

Chen Ping nodded without replying, his gaze sweeping over the technician with silver-rimmed glasses. The man was bending over, helping Old Zhao from the Quality Supervision Bureau search for the serial number plate of A-09; his movements were efficient and his cooperation was impeccable.

It's too clean.

If Han Zhengke had nothing to hide, he wouldn't have trained the technicians to be so obedient. The fact that no problems could be found at the software level precisely indicates that the problem isn't at the software level.

Chen Ping glanced at the west side of the warehouse.

Lin Yuanzhou was squatting in a corner, with two graduate students beside him, a man and a woman, both wearing the white uniforms of the Corefire Center. The three of them had been circling around device A-17—the TPS-9X 3D topology scanner—for nearly forty minutes.

Lin Yuanzhou did not use any testing equipment.

He removed the scanner's casing, revealing six neatly arranged Allen screws on the floor. The casing was then flipped over and placed on a foam pad. The internal power supply module was exposed, with three ribbon cables connecting to the signal processing motherboard. The green PCB gleamed coldly under the fluorescent lights.

Lin Yuanzhou knelt on the ground, his left hand supporting the inner wall of the computer case, and his right hand holding a pair of precision tweezers used by watchmakers, the tip of the tweezers tracing the edge of the motherboard millimeter by millimeter.

The male graduate student next to him moved a little closer.

"Teacher Lin, the wiring on this board matches the design drawings perfectly. The traces, solder joints, and component numbers all match."

Lin Yuanzhou didn't look up.

"The schematics are correct, but I feel there's something wrong with the power consumption of this power supply module."

The boy was stunned after hearing that.

Lin Yuanzhou used tweezers to touch a group of closely packed capacitors in the lower right corner of the motherboard.

"Look, this scanner has a rated power consumption of 320 watts, but the power supply module is designed for 350 watts, leaving a 9% margin. Go and measure the total capacitance of this row of capacitors."

The female graduate student squatted down and used the probes of the multimeter to touch the two ends of the capacitor. The reading jumped a few times and then stopped.

"385 micro-laws".

"The standard design is 340 microfarads. The extra 45 microfarads are not for fault tolerance redundancy; they are for something that is consuming power."

Lin Yuanzhou switched the tweezers to his left hand and took out a miniature flashlight from the toolbox with his right hand. He turned the beam to its thinnest setting and scanned the surface of the motherboard.

The light spot glides across the packaging area of ​​the signal processing chip, passes through a row of surface-mount resistors, and reaches the position closest to the bottom data bus interface on the motherboard.

The flashlight stopped.

There was a gray object, smaller than a pinky fingernail, about four millimeters square. It was ceramic-encapsulated, with extremely rounded edges and no silkscreen markings on its surface. It was soldered to the underlying channel of the data bus via four tiny flying wires, each as thin as a human hair.

The solder joints are very fine, with a high silver content, and the craftsmanship far exceeds the manufacturing standards of this scanner itself.

Lin Yuanzhou's flashlight paused on the gray chip for ten seconds.

"Get a magnifying glass."

The female graduate student handed over an 8x desktop magnifying glass, which Lin Yuanzhou placed directly above the chip and peered inside.

On the back of the chip, in the gap right next to the PCB board, was a black cylinder the size of a grain of rice. Lin Yuanzhou gently touched it with the tip of tweezers; the cylinder didn't budge, indicating it was securely soldered.

"What is this?" the boy asked.

"Miniature energy storage unit".

Lin Yuanzhou straightened up, took the magnifying glass off the shelf, and handed it to the two students.

"See for yourself. Those four flying wires connect to the physical layer of the data bus, not the logic layer. Although the capacity of this energy storage unit is small, it is enough to maintain the low-power operation of this chip for at least seventy-two hours after the device is powered off."

The two graduate students leaned down, their heads huddled together, staring at the gray object under the magnifying glass.

"Is this component on the factory drawings?" Lin Yuanzhou asked.

The boy opened the design document on his tablet and scrolled through it page by page until he reached the bottom.

"No. This number isn't in the entire BOM list; it's not even listed for reserved pads."

Lin Yuanzhou stood up, his knees clicking loudly.

He didn't say anything, but turned and walked towards the other two devices whose casings had been removed: the epitaxial control module A-23 and the wafer alignment instrument A-31.

Fifteen minutes later, he found the same gray ceramic chip on power management board A-23. It was in a different location and had a different model, but the packaging method and flying wire soldering process were exactly the same.

No discovery was made for A-31.

Two out of three were successful.

Lin Yuanzhou put the tweezers and flashlight back into the toolbox, dusted off his trousers, and walked towards Chen Pingfang.

The technician with silver-rimmed glasses was standing in the middle of the warehouse, holding a paper cup of tea, chatting with Old Zhao from the Quality Supervision Bureau. He glanced at Lin Yuanzhou out of the corner of his eye, paused for a moment at his lips, then casually took a sip.

Lin Yuanzhou walked to Chen Pingfang's side without speaking in front of everyone. The two of them moved a few steps side by side toward the back door of the warehouse and stood behind a row of empty shelves.

The fluorescent lights in the warehouse were humming, the quality inspection bureau's testing instruments were beeping intermittently, and Ma Donglin's people were still typing on their keyboards.

Lin Yuanzhou kept his voice very low.

"On the TPS-9X signal processing motherboard, there is a ceramic-packaged chip, four millimeters square, not shown on the schematics. It has no silkscreen markings and is not listed in the BOM. It is directly connected to the underlying data bus via a physical layer jumper wire and has its own independent energy storage unit, which can continue to activate after power failure. It is also present in the A-23 epitaxial control module, using the same packaging process."

Chen Ping's thumb was on the metal clasp of his briefcase, but he didn't move.

"The firmware scan couldn't find anything?"

"We can't detect it. This thing doesn't run through the operating system or any software protocol stack; it's embedded directly in the hardware physical layer. Conventional scanning tools can't even cover this layer."

Chen Ping glanced down at Lin Yuanzhou's hands. His fingertips were covered in silvery-gray solder powder, and his right middle finger had a shallow cut from the edge of a bolt, with beads of blood seeping out, but he was completely unaware of it.

"What do you think this chip's function is?"

Lin Yuanzhou took a breath, his eyebrows furrowing together.

"Lie it flat, this isn't a data backdoor."

Chen Ping pressed his thumb against the lock by an inch.

"If I'm not mistaken, this thing is used to 'kill' people."