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

Before Chen Ping could deal with the bomb Wang Limin had thrown, his phone screen lit up.

Lin Shaofeng's encrypted text message contained only one line: "My sister-in-law is in trouble."

Chen Pingfang placed his phone face down on the table and gave Gu Weizhen a wink. Gu Weizhen understood and began a technical rebuttal based on the algorithm draft from ten years ago. Chen Pingfang excused himself to receive an urgent business call and got up to leave the meeting room.

In the corridor, he dialed Lin Shaofeng's number.

"What's going on?"

"Starting at 9:00 AM today, Nanzhou Metropolitan Daily received 27 letters of complaint with real names, all pointing to Su Qingwan. The content of the complaints is highly consistent: using her status as a family member of the deputy secretary-general to interfere with the direction of reporting on provincial industrial policies and provide positive public opinion cover for the Chip Spark Project."

Twenty-seven letters. On the same day. With the same wording.

This isn't a report; this is artillery barrage.

Has the whistleblower been investigated?

"We checked. There were 27 people registered under their real names, from 14 different organizations. But interestingly, the last nine of their ID numbers didn't match the records in the Nanzhou City social security system."

Fake ID cards. Nine are fake, the remaining eighteen are real. The real ones are most likely people who don't even know their names have been borrowed.

"What's the newspaper's attitude?"

Lin Shaofeng paused for two seconds longer than usual.

"President Zhou Yongfeng called Su Qingwan half an hour ago and suggested that she take a leave of absence. His exact words were, 'Lie out for a while and come back when things have calmed down.'"

Chen Ping hung up the phone and stood in the corridor for more than ten seconds.

He didn't return to the conference room. Gu Weizhen could handle He Yuanzheng's defense. The draft from ten years ago that Wang Limin dug up proved that Chipfire's technological genes could be traced back to Gu Weizhen's own academic accumulation—provided that the timeline and ownership of intellectual property rights were clarified.

But we can't wait for Su Qingwan.

The opponent's logic is clear. Since they couldn't break through Xinhuo's technological barriers on the front lines, they would flank him. First, they stirred up trouble within the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology with a whistleblower letter, then exerted pressure through an investigation team, while simultaneously creating an opening through his family to distract Chen Ping and force him to choose between the project and his family.

A clever plan.

Chen Ping drove back to his home in Nanzhou City. It was already 6 p.m. when he entered the house.

The living room lights were off. Su Qingwan sat on the sofa, a laptop spread out on the coffee table in front of her, its email open, the inbox full of unread emails marked in red.

She didn't look up.

"I saw it." Chen Ping placed the key on the entryway cabinet.

Su Qingwan's fingers rested on the edge of the keyboard, motionless.

"Zhou Yongfeng gave me a leave of absence."

"I know."

"Of the twenty-seven reports, nine are fake; I've checked. Of the remaining eighteen, six came from the same template printed at the same shop, with identical wording and even the same placement of typos."

Su Qingwan, having worked as an investigative journalist for over a decade, didn't feel wronged; her first reaction was to dismantle the situation.

But on the face she turned over, there was an overwhelming weariness.

Over the years as a journalist, she had been threatened, followed, and even had dirty water thrown at her. But all of that was because of her own writing, the hornet's nest she stirred up herself. This time was different. This time, she did nothing, simply because she married someone.

Chen Ping didn't sit down to comfort her.

"Change into flat shoes and come with me."

Su Qingwan was stunned for a moment.

"Where to?"

"Jizhou".

The car drove for forty minutes on the highway. Su Qingwan sat in the passenger seat, not saying a word, as the streetlights outside the window flashed past one after another.

7:30 PM, Jizhou Laboratory.

The moment the access card was swiped open, a whiff of air mixed with the smell of coffee grounds and circuit board solder rushed out. The glass partitions on either side of the corridor were illuminated by stark white fluorescent lights.

Chen Ping led Su Qingwan through the main passage, passing one workroom after another.

In the first room, three engineers, all under thirty, were slumped over their workbenches, the monitors beside them still lit, lines of code scrolling down screen after screen. A pile of instant noodle bowls lay on the table, chopsticks stuck in them, the noodles already mushy.

In the second room, a girl wearing an anti-static wrist strap was testing chip pins with a probe. The circuit board under the magnifying glass was smaller than a fingernail. Her left wrist was wrapped with medical tape, and red marks were faintly visible through the covered area—from repeated soldering.

In the third room, Gu Weizhen's two doctoral students were arguing heatedly over the topology diagram on the whiteboard. The words on the whiteboard were erased and rewritten, and the marker marks at the bottom layer had seeped into the surface of the whiteboard and could not be erased.

Su Qingwan stopped in the middle of the corridor and looked at the girl with the tape on her face through the glass.

The girl noticed the gaze, looked up at her, smiled, and then lowered her head to continue testing the pins.

Chen Ping stood behind her without urging her.

"These people have been working an average of sixteen hours a day for 130 days since the project started," Chen Ping said in a low voice. "They don't know you, they don't know me, they don't care who the deputy secretary-general is, and they don't care about those twenty-seven complaint letters. They only know one thing—China's industrial control chip certification system cannot be controlled by others forever."

Su Qingwan remained silent.

She slowly walked to a door at the end of the corridor. A sheet of A4 paper was pasted on the door, which read "Golden Shield Security Guardian ~ Compatibility Testing Environment", and next to it, a line of words was handwritten in red pen: "Unauthorized Entry Prohibited".

The door was ajar.

Su Qingwan glanced inside subconsciously. On the test bench sat a server with its casing removed, the motherboard exposed, and a log was running on the monitor next to it. The screen scrolled rapidly, but a red warning message was frozen at the top:

"WARNING: GoldenShield v3.2 kernel module~~ unauthorized external call detected. Source: 0x7F3A_OFFSET_TIANDUM."

Sky Shield.

Su Qingwan's footsteps froze at the doorway. She stared at the line of red characters, the hairs on her neck standing on end.

She was an investigative journalist, not a programmer, but she recognized the name "SkyShield." Last night, when Chen Ping went home to change his shirt, she found a handwritten note from Gu Weizhen falling out of the pocket of the sweaty shirt he had thrown in the laundry basket. The note contained only three words: "SkyShield interface," "military," and "kernel leak."

The code for Golden Shield Security Guard contains kernel calls to the TianDun platform.

What does this mean?

This means that Golden Shield, a civilian security software that claims to be completely independently developed, has components from a classified military system mixed into its underlying code. Either someone stole military code and inserted it into Golden Shield, or Golden Shield itself is a front for a military project.

Either way, it's a bombshell news story.

Su Qingwan took a step back, took out her phone from her pocket, and snapped a picture of the red warning sign. The sound of the shutter was drowned out by the hum of the air conditioner in the corridor.

Chen Ping walked over and saw the phone in her hand.

They confiscated it, but didn't stop them.

The two stared at each other for two seconds.

Su Qingwan put her phone into her pocket.

"I don't take vacations."

Chen Ping didn't respond.

"The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology's investigation team has arrived in Nanzhou, right?" Su Qingwan's jaw tightened. "According to procedure, there will be a public hearing after the technical defense. I need to go."

"What are you going to do?"

"I am a reporter from Nanzhou Metropolitan Daily. Public hearings allow media to attend. I am not present as a family member, but as a reporter."

Su Qingwan stared at the half-open door at the end of the corridor.

"They want me to shut up. Well, I'll just turn on the microphone in the biggest venue of all."

Chen Ping transferred the car keys from his left hand to his right and turned to walk towards the door.

"Registration for the media section of the hearing will close at 8:00 AM tomorrow."

Su Qingwan quickly followed, her phone digging into her thigh in her pocket. The screen was still lit, and the red warning characters in the photo were clearly visible, not a single pixel blurred.