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

Zheng Xian stood there, repeating the words "handling official business strictly" in his mind, and felt a chill rise from the soles of his feet.

These four words are harsher than any rebuke.

This means the good days for the Jinzuo Group are over. Everything, from taxes and fire safety to land planning, will be thoroughly investigated.

He Qishan wanted to make peace, but Chen Pingfang wouldn't give him the chance and even tried to attack him.

Chen Pingfang ignored the matter and returned his attention to the draft plan in front of him. He Qishan seemed to be just an insignificant little episode.

For him, ensuring the safety of the Corefire project is the most important thing.

~

Three days later, the EDA laboratory was officially inaugurated.

With the cooperation of Li Wei, director of the High-tech Zone Management Committee, all the procedures for the land that He Qishan had originally set his sights on were completed in the shortest possible time.

The laboratory's security level has been raised to the highest level. The power supply and network systems are completely independent, the server room is physically isolated, and the security team was personally selected by Zheng Xian to ensure the place is kept extremely secure.

Inside the laboratory, Gu Weizhen and his core team, which he brought back from the United States, along with key technical personnel drawn from within the province, were holding their first plenary technical meeting.

The atmosphere was somewhat tense.

"I disagree!" A bespectacled man suddenly stood up. His name was Zhao Lixin, around forty years old, and he was an associate researcher recommended by the Science and Technology Department.

"Professor Gu, your architecture is too closed! Starting from scratch completely, it's incompatible with any existing mainstream development environments, which will greatly slow down our research and development progress! We should do secondary development on existing open-source frameworks; that's the most pragmatic choice!"

Zhao Lixin's words were echoed by several local technicians who nodded in agreement.

They were used to working within a mature framework, and the hardcore model proposed by Gu Weizhen, which was entirely self-developed and self-contained, made them very uncomfortable.

Gu Weizhen adjusted his glasses. This academic giant was somewhat clumsy when it came to interpersonal communication.

He simply stuck to his point of view, repeatedly explaining: "Security must be absolutely guaranteed. Any open-source framework may contain vulnerabilities unknown to us. Our EDA is built for the country, and it cannot have any backdoor risks."

"Risk? Professor Gu, that's technical obsession!" Zhao Lixin raised his voice. "Are we going to abandon efficiency and work in isolation just because of some unfounded possibilities?"

The meeting room was filled with constant noise.

Meanwhile, in another office building, Chen Pingfang was quietly watching the surveillance footage in the conference room through a tablet computer.

There was no sound on the screen, but he could tell it was very noisy.

Zheng Xian stood aside and reported in a low voice: "Director, this Zhao Lixin was personally selected by Director Sun Heming to be a representative expert from the Science and Technology Department to 'temporarily serve' in the project team. In the past few days, he has been promoting the idea of ​​'openness and compatibility' within the team, which conflicts greatly with Professor Gu's philosophy."

Chen Ping's finger lightly swept across the screen, stopping at Zhao Lixin's excited face.

"Let him jump," Chen Ping said, turning off the tablet. "The bait's already in the water; now it's just a matter of when the fish bites."

He had long anticipated that Sun Heming would not give up.

If they fail to openly seize a project, they will definitely resort to underhanded tactics, such as sending people in to steal technology or cause sabotage.

This Zhao Lixin was sent by Sun Heming.

Chen Pingfang wanted to catch him red-handed when he made his move, so that he could completely resolve this problem and also give Sun Heming a warning.

That evening, the technical meeting ended on a sour note.

Gu Weizhen insisted on his own opinion, rejected Zhao Lixin's plan, and announced that the team would start writing the first phase of the core algorithm according to the closed architecture he had set.

It was late at night, and the entire laboratory campus was quiet.

Only the server indicator lights in the core computer room are still flashing.

A dark figure appeared silently at the entrance of the server room.

It's Zhao Lixin.

He skillfully swiped the access card and slipped inside.

He looked around to make sure no one was there, then quickly walked to a core server.

He pulled a USB-shaped solid-state drive from his pocket, his eyes darting around, his breathing slightly unsteady.

Although he criticized Gu Weizhen's architecture as worthless, he knew in his heart that the original underlying logic was extremely valuable. As long as this initial architecture was copied out, whether it was given to Director Sun or sold to some company, it would be a great achievement.

He plugged the hard drive into the server's maintenance interface, and a window immediately popped up on the screen asking for authorization.

Zhao Lixin sneered and then took out a small decoder and connected it. As an expert recommended by the Science and Technology Department, he had long ago used his position to create a backdoor for himself.

The progress bar began to jump slowly.

One percent... five percent... ten percent...

Zhao Lixin's breathing became rapid, and his eyes were fixed on the screen.

Just as the progress bar jumped to 37 percent.

pat.

The lights in the entire server room suddenly turned on, so bright that it was impossible to open one's eyes.

Zhao Lixin froze and turned around abruptly.

The heavy metal door to the server room had been opened at some point, and two people were standing in the doorway.

The one leading them was Chen Pingfang.

Behind him, Zheng Xian held up a mobile phone, its camera pointed directly at the bright copy progress bar on the server screen.

"Researcher Zhao, are you still working overtime so late?"

Chen Pingfang's voice was calm, but in the quiet server room, it sounded like a thunderclap.

Zhao Lixin's mind went completely blank, and his face drained of color. His first instinct was to reach for the hard drive.

"Don't move." Zheng Xian shouted, quickly stepped forward, and grabbed his wrist. "Keep all the equipment as is and wait for the cyber security personnel to come and collect evidence."

Zhao Lixin's body went limp, and he slumped to the ground, his back soaked in cold sweat.

He's finished.

Chen Ping walked up to him, looked down at him, then bent down and picked up his employee ID card that had fallen to the ground.

"Zhao Lixin, Associate Researcher, Provincial Department of Science and Technology."

Chen Ping read the words aloud and then threw the employee badge back at him.

"I will personally call Director Sun and ask him to come and pick them up."

~

The next morning, an emergency cleanup was carried out inside the Chipfire Project laboratory.

All technical personnel recommended by the Science and Technology Department or who had dealings with Zhao Lixin were dismissed without exception.

Chen Pingfang solved the problem for Gu Weizhen, acting swiftly and ruthlessly to eliminate all the people Sun Heming had planted.

There were no more dissenting voices within the team.

After dealing with these miscellaneous tasks, Gu Weizhen was finally able to devote himself fully to his work.

He locked himself in his office, working day and night to organize the data he brought back from M~Tek and the brand-new EDA architecture he designed himself.

Late at night, Chen Ping received a call from Gu Weizhen. The other person's voice was trembling, sounding both tired and excited.

"Director Chen, please come to the laboratory immediately. I have made a very... very amazing discovery."

When Chen Pingfang arrived, Gu Weizhen was sitting in front of the main computer with bloodshot eyes.

On the huge screen are two seemingly unrelated pieces of low-level code.

"Look here." Gu Weizhen pointed to a piece of code on the left screen, which was the backdoor logic he had extracted from the latest version of AetherX's design software. "And look here."

His finger then moved to the right side of the screen.

"This is the underlying driver architecture of 'Golden Shield Security Guardian' antivirus software, which has the highest market share in China."

Gu Weizhen took a deep breath and circled several modules in the two code snippets with his mouse.

"Their underlying logic, encryption methods, and even naming conventions for some variables are more than 70% similar."