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

The tall, thin old man stood behind the second-floor window, his face partially obscured by the gauze curtain.

Chen Pingfang withdrew his gaze, didn't linger, and got into the car. The moment the car door closed, Chen Pingfang dialed Gu Weizhen's encrypted number.

"Mr. Gu, how's the fake code feedback going?"

Gu Weizhen's voice came through the receiver, hoarse.

"Director Chen, you need to come over."

Twenty minutes later, Chen Ping appeared in the data monitoring room on the basement floor of the Chipfire project office. The room had no windows, and three walls were covered with screens, with green data streams constantly rolling on a black background.

Gu Weizhen sat at the control panel, dark circles under his eyes reaching his cheekbones. He pushed aside a cold cup of coffee and pointed to the screen in the center.

"It started at 2:17 a.m. M~Tek's European headquarters launched a full-scale test of the fake code we had embedded."

On the screen, strings of hexadecimal addresses were rapidly changing.

How large is the test scale?

"Forty-seven servers running concurrently." Gu Weizhen traced a line on the edge of the keyboard with his index finger. "This level of operation exceeds ordinary technical verification; it's a real-world stress test. They're inserting this code into their own chip architecture."

Chen Ping stared at the fluctuating numbers and pondered for a moment.

After receiving the fake code from Jingwei Microelectronics, M~Tek did not immediately recognize it. Instead, it invested significant resources in testing it. This indicates that the fake code written by Lin Shaofeng was highly sophisticated, at least fooling M~Tek's initial screening team.

However, this window of opportunity won't last long. Once M~Tek's core technical team gets involved in in-depth analysis, the flaws in the fake code will be exposed.

Chen Ping had only 48 to 72 hours left.

"Is Shao Feng here?"

"The inner room." Gu Weizhen gestured towards the cubicle behind him. "He hasn't come out since last night."

Chen Ping pushed open the door to the cubicle.

Lin Shaofeng was curled up on a cot, his laptop propped on his lap, the blue light from the screen making his face appear deathly pale. Hearing the door open, Lin Shaofeng slightly raised his eyelids.

"You've come at the perfect time. I'll wait for your decision."

Chen Ping pulled up a folding chair and sat down.

"The nanometer-scale signal channel reserved in the fake code is still alive. Every time M~Tek executes a test, the channel will bounce back a handshake packet."

Lin Shaofeng flipped the screen over, showing Chen Ping the topology diagram on it.

"I can trace these handshake packets and insert a tracking script back into them. The script is extremely small, only forty-seven bytes, hidden in the checksum of the handshake packets. M-Tek's firewall doesn't scan the handshake packets it sends, so this thing can directly penetrate their perimeter protection."

What can scripts do?

"Location." Lin Shaofeng held up one finger. "It will jump along the internal network of M~Tek, record the physical coordinates of each relay node, and send them back to us."

"risk?"

"Once the script is identified, M~Tek will immediately cut off all data links with China, and we won't be able to touch anything."

Lin Shaofeng closed the laptop lid and rubbed his wrists.

"You only get one chance."

Chen Ping didn't hesitate.

"put."

Lin Shaofeng reopened the screen and placed his ten fingers on the keyboard.

In the adjacent monitoring room, Gu Weizhen stared at the main screen, his right hand hovering above the red emergency network disconnection button.

"Script injection." Lin Shaofeng's voice was calm, and he pronounced each word clearly.

On the screen, a tiny dot of light emerged from the bottom of the data stream and blended into the handshake packet sequence sent back by M~Tek. The dot flashed twice and then disappeared.

"First hop, Main River relay node, recorded."

"Second hop, Singapore relay node, already recorded."

"The third jump..."

Lin Shaofeng's finger hovered in place.

Instead of jumping to M~Tek's main server cluster in Silicon Valley as expected, the light spot on the screen took a detour and turned back towards East Asia.

"The third jump, the target is located within the territory of the Dragon Kingdom."

Gu Weizhen rushed in from next door.

"Within the country? M~Tek has a secret server in China?"

Lin Shaofeng didn't answer. Instead, he typed a series of commands on the keyboard, bringing up the detailed parameters of the third hop node.

Manufacturer information for IP address, encrypted tunneling protocol, and physical MAC address.

"This is not a commercial server," Lin Shaofeng said in a low voice. "It's custom-built hardware, using dedicated fiber optic lines, and the bandwidth configuration is at the government level."

Governmental level.

Chen Ping tensed up completely.

"Can you pinpoint the location precisely?"

"GPS coordinates are being transmitted..."

Lin Shaofeng stared at the string of numbers constantly changing in the lower right corner of the screen. Longitude, latitude, altitude, one digit after another popped up.

The last digit is locked.

Lin Shaofeng copied the coordinates into the map software and pressed Enter.

The satellite map was zoomed in three times. A cluster of gray buildings appeared in the center of the screen, surrounded by large green spaces, with an artificial lake to the east and a four-lane internal road to the west.

Five large red characters are engraved on the stone tablet at the entrance of the building complex.

Jiangsu Provincial Party School.

In the monitoring room, none of the three people uttered a sound.

Gu Weizhen's Adam's apple bobbed, and he withdrew his hand from the red button, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

Lin Shaofeng zoomed in on the map. The coordinates weren't on the main buildings of the Party School, but on a standalone building in the northwest corner. The building appeared L-shaped on the satellite image, surrounded by dense shrubs, and had only three parking spaces, making it very discreet.

"What is this building?" Chen Ping asked.

Lin Shaofeng pulled up the publicly available architectural floor plan of the Party School and compared it.

"There is no mention of this building in publicly available information."

A building that doesn't exist on official blueprints houses a government-grade custom server that connects directly to M~Tek's European headquarters via an encrypted dedicated line.

Chen Ping took out his phone and found a message that Han Zhiming had sent two hours earlier. One of the reports mentioned that Gao Ran was being held in the third ward of the provincial detention center. Since entering the center, he had not hired a lawyer or filed an appeal. He followed the daily schedule and spent his days reading the book "Probability Theory and Mathematical Statistics" that he had borrowed from the detention center's library.

A guard at the detention center reported a detail: Gao Ran would stand by the window at 3:15 pm every day, facing northwest, for a full five minutes.

Northwest direction.

Chen Ping put his phone back in his pocket, walked to the satellite map, and used his finger to measure the distance between the detention center and the L-shaped building of the Party School.

Due west, north of north, eleven degrees.

"Shaofeng, how long can the tracking script last?"

"Forty hours at most. After that, M~Tek's deep scan will trigger the self-destruct protocol."

Chen Ping turned around and picked up the encrypted phone on the table.

"I need to speak with Director Chu."

As he dialed the number, Lin Shaofeng typed a few more lines of commands on the screen. The server hidden in the Party School was currently processing a set of encrypted data packets, the source of which was marked as a string of gibberish.

Lin Shaofeng peeled away the garbled code to reveal a formatted signature field underneath.

The signature field contains only three letters.

RGD

"What is this?" Gu Weizhen leaned closer to take a look.

Lin Shaofeng shook his head and saved a screenshot of the three letters.

Chen Ping held the phone receiver, waiting for the National Security Bureau to connect.

Chen Ping looked at the screen, which displayed a satellite map of the L-shaped building.

This place is a Party school.

He recalled an old photograph from twenty-four years ago, showing three people standing in front of the Provincial Party Committee's Second Guesthouse. Now, a server from overseas was hidden inside a building at the Party School—a building that couldn't be found in any records.

The call was quickly connected, and Director Chu's voice came through the phone.

"Go ahead and say it."

Chen Ping took the phone and began to report in a low voice.

"Director Chu, we've made an important discovery. We've found out that M~Tek has a secret server in China, and we've located it."

"Where?"

Chen Ping gave him the coordinates. There was silence on the other end of the phone for about eight seconds.

Are you sure this is the right location?

"Yes, it's GPS-based, with an error margin of less than three meters."

There was silence on the other end of the phone. After a while, Director Chu finally spoke.

"Don't move yet."

Then the call ended. Chen Ping put down the receiver and turned his head to look at the screen.

On the satellite map, a dark-colored car was seen driving along the road into the courtyard of the L-shaped building and then parking in a parking space inside.