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

Zhou Zhixing was handed over to Zheng Xian's men overnight.

Chen Ping didn't go home. He lay on the sofa in the office for three hours. At 5:30, his phone alarm went off. He got up, washed his face, and changed into a clean shirt that was in the closet.

The code name "Shadow" weighed heavily on my mind, grinding over and over again.

It wasn't He Qishan, Zhao Yiming, or the remaining network of Sun Heming. It was another direction, another force, hidden deeper than anyone else.

But I can't worry about that today.

Today is the provincial party committee's inspection day. Secretary Deshan personally led a team to the Chipfire Laboratory. This "major test" has been in preparation for half a month and cannot afford any mistakes.

At eight o'clock in the morning, Chen Ping put it in the laboratory.

Gu Weizhen had been busy in the main control room all night, his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, his face flushed from staring at the screen for so long.

"Ready?"

Gu Weizhen looked up from behind the worktable, adjusted his glasses, and gestured toward the center of the computer room.

A silver-gray server rack stood in the center, half a head shorter than a standard server. There were no brand logos on the front panel, only a number printed on it: SH-X01.

"Chipfire's first fully autonomous server. From CPU, network control chip, storage interface, firmware layer to operating system kernel, everything follows Chipfire's EDA design process, without borrowing a single line of code from an external protocol stack."

Gu Weizhen patted the side panel of the server rack.

"We ran the final stress test last night, 72 hours without interruption, and the stability met the standards."

Chen Ping took two steps closer and bent down to examine the cabling on the back of the server rack. It was neat and tidy; each cable was secured with a cable tie, and tamper-evident seals were affixed to the connectors.

"Where's the script for the attack and defense demonstration?"

"It's written as you requested. It simulates the three publicly disclosed backdoor activation methods in the AetherX architecture to launch a remote attack on SH-X01, with the entire process displayed in real time on the large screen. The attack source uses a real environment, not a sandbox simulation."

Chen Ping nodded, asked no further questions, and turned to leave the server room.

The corridor had already been set up with a signpost. Wu Jianping, the director of the office of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, was with three people wiping the floor, adjusting the lights, and setting up table signs. Chen Ping called out to Wu Jianping.

"Remove all those PowerPoint projectors."

Wu Jianping was taken aback.

"Director, the presentation slides are all ready..."

"No slides needed. Today it's all live demonstration. What Secretary Deshan wants to see is whether the machine can run, not how many diagrams we've drawn."

Wu Jianping didn't argue anymore and waved for his men to move the projector away.

At 9:45, news came from the convoy: three minibuses belonging to the Provincial Party Committee had entered the High-tech Zone.

Chen Ping walked to the entrance of the laboratory building. The sun was very strong, and the cement ground was bleached white by the heat.

The convoy came to a stop at 9:53.

The door of the first car opened, and out stepped Luo Guodong, the Secretary-General of the Provincial Party Committee, a thin man with a brisk walk. Luo Guodong glanced at the sign on the exterior wall of the laboratory building and stepped aside to let the car out.

Secretary Deshan bent down and got out of the car.

He wasn't tall, just over 1.7 meters, and wore a dark blue jacket. His hair was shaved very short, and his sideburns were completely white. His hands hung at his sides; he carried no briefcase and had no attendants to hand him documents.

Chen Ping stepped forward to greet him.

"Secretary Deshan."

Deshan reached out and shook his hand; the grip wasn't strong, but it was very steady.

"Forget the formalities of hospitality, let's get straight to the stuff."

There were quite a few people accompanying him, including the deputy director of the Provincial Development and Reform Commission, people from the Provincial State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, and two faces that Chen Pingfang had never seen before. Luo Guodong introduced them in a low voice, saying that they were observers from the Cyberspace Administration of China.

People from the central government also arrived.

Chen Ping felt a chill run down his spine, but remained expressionless as he led the group toward the computer room.

Gu Weizhen greeted them at the entrance of the server room, and his fingers trembled slightly when he shook hands with Secretary Deshan. Chen Ping noticed it out of the corner of his eye, but didn't say anything.

"Secretary Deshan, this is Professor Gu Weizhen, the chief scientist of the Chip Spark Program."

Deshan nodded and sized up Gu Weizhen for two seconds.

"I heard you rewrote the register allocation algorithm from scratch?"

Gu Weizhen was taken aback when the provincial party secretary asked such a specific technical question.

"Yes. Traditional graph coloring algorithms are not efficient enough under the Corefire architecture, so we switched to an allocation strategy based on constraint propagation."

Deshan didn't reply, his gaze falling on the SH-X01 in the center of the server room.

"Is this all you've accomplished?"

"The first engineering verification machine of a fully autonomous architecture server." Chen Pingfang took over the conversation and gestured for Gu Weizhen to start the demonstration program.

The large screen lights up. On the left is the SH-X01 system status monitoring panel—CPU load, memory usage, network traffic, firmware verification status—all showing green lights. On the right is the attack console, a red interface listing the names of three attack scripts.

"Secretary Deshan, the following presentation will be divided into three rounds." Chen Ping walked to the side of the large screen, without taking a laser pointer or flipping through documents, and put his hands in his pockets.

"In the first round, we simulated the firmware-level backdoor instructions of the AetherX chip that have been publicly disclosed. This backdoor allows a remote operator to wake up the control module hidden in the chip's underlying layer through a specific sequence of data packets. Once activated, the attacker can bypass all software-level security protections and directly read all the server's data."

The computer room was eerily quiet. The two people from the Cyberspace Administration simultaneously pulled out their laptops.

"start."

Gu Weizhen pressed the start button.

The first set of scripts on the attack console began running. A red data stream rushed toward SH-X01, and the hexadecimal encoding of the attack packets scrolled on the right side of the screen.

On the left, the status panel of the SH-X01 flashed a yellow light.

Three seconds later, the yellow light disappeared, and the system automatically popped up a log: Firmware layer abnormal instruction intercepted, source IP has been isolated, integrity verification is normal.

The green light has been restored.

Deshan neither clapped nor commented; he simply tilted his chin slightly, signaling for them to continue.

Round Two. Supply Chain Contamination Attack. This involves microcode trojans implanted during the simulated chip manufacturing process, triggering abnormal computations under specific temperature conditions.

The attack script ran for eleven seconds. The SH-X01's temperature sensor detected an abnormal thermal signal, and the trusted computing module in the firmware layer automatically initiated the microcode verification process.

Verification output: The microcode hash value is consistent with the factory image. The abnormal hot signal was determined to be externally injected interference, not generated locally, and an alarm log has been recorded.

The green light is still on.

The people from the Provincial Development and Reform Commission whispered among themselves, their voices low, but you could see the shock in their expressions.

The third round was the most ruthless.

Chen Ping raised his hand and pointed to the last set of scripts on the attack console.

"This round of simulations is a state-sponsored APT attack. It assumes that the attacker has obtained the chip design blueprints, which is entirely possible when using foreign EDA tools, and has used this information to construct a targeted hardware-level exploit."

He paused for two seconds and glanced at Deshan.

"If this server uses the AetherX architecture, the success rate of this attack is close to 100%."

Gu Weizhen pressed the last button.

The density of the red data stream suddenly doubled, and the number of attack packets on the large screen increased by thousands per second. The status panel on the left was flashing yellow lights, and the system load soared to 92%.

The air conditioner vents in the computer room were making a whooshing sound.

A full twenty-three seconds.

One by one, the yellow lights turned back to green. The system log rolled out its last line: All attack vectors have been terminated. The Corefire firmware trust chain is intact. Service continuity has not been interrupted.

Gu Weizhen let out a long breath.

The two people from the Cyberspace Administration of China stopped writing and looked at each other.

Luo Guodong stood behind Deshan with a subtle expression on his face—not entirely surprise, but more like the caution of an old bureaucrat reassessing the chessboard.

Secretary Deshan did not sit down from beginning to end.

After the demonstration, he stood in front of the SH-X01 for a long time, tapping the metal casing of the cabinet intermittently with his right index finger seven or eight times before pulling it back.

Everyone around him was waiting for him to speak.

He turned around and looked at Chen Pingfang.

Those eyes weren't sharp, but they were deep. So deep that when someone stood before them, they naturally swallowed back any unnecessary words.

Lay it flat.

"exist."

Deshan took a step forward, less than an arm's length away from Chen Ping, and lowered his voice.

"You need to be prepared for a protracted battle."