Chapter 160: Thresholds and Measures

The time in the lower-right corner of the screen flipped to 2:14 a.m. Lin Chen pressed his left hand against his left ankle, the pads of his fingers feeling the stiff tendons beneath the skin. The towel he had used as a hot compress had long since gone cold, lying on the desk like a dust-soaked wet rag. He did not bother to replace it. He only shifted half an inch of his weight onto his right leg and let the left hang suspended.

Inside the terminal window, the regular-expression matches were scrolling by line after line.

re.findall(r'CVE-\\d{4}-\\d{4,7}', text)

The vulnerability database Old Zhao had given him was a plain-text export, messy in format—some entries wrapped in parentheses, some mixed with full-width Chinese punctuation, some with the ID and description crammed onto the same line. Hitting an external API directly would trigger rate limits, so he could only write a local parser.

He typed out a try-except block, logging every failed line to error_log.txt. Memory usage held steady at around 142 MB. The get() and task_done() calls in the concurrent queue were properly paired; no deadlock. He lifted the enamel mug on the desk. The water inside had gone completely cold, with a rusty taste when he swallowed it. Outside the dormitory came the shrill cries of fighting stray cats. From the next bed over, someone’s snores rose and broke in uneven bursts. He closed all unrelated webpages, leaving only the terminal and the code editor. The blue light from the screen cast itself across the wall and stretched his shadow into something long and thin.

The numbness in the sole of his foot had begun creeping up the back of his calf, like fine needles slowly threading beneath the skin. He drew a deep breath and pulled his focus back to the screen. Queue.maxsize was set to 50 to prevent memory overflow. socket.timeout was set to 3 seconds. The logic loop was closed.

At four in the morning, the stress-testing script and the CVE extraction module were packaged together. He ran a local simulation: five hundred virtual terminals sending requests at the same time. The memory curve stayed smooth. Vulnerability signatures were sorted by ID and written out to CSV. No errors.

He shut the laptop, unplugged the power. Outside, dawn had turned the sky gray. An early sanitation truck rolled over a speed bump below the building, giving off a dull, heavy thud. He stood up, and the moment his left foot touched the ground, a sharp stab shot from the top of his foot to his knee. He braced himself against the edge of the desk for half a minute, waiting for the blood to return, then slowly made his way to the cabinet. He pulled out a clean shirt, a spare flash drive, a multimeter, and a roll of electrical tape. He packed the flash drive and the offline dependency package into separate sealed bags and labeled them.

The ledger lay open on the desk. He flipped to the latest page and wrote in pencil:

Wednesday 20:00 deliver to Old Zhao. Estimated settlement: base contract 800 + commission on valid entries (estimated 1200) = 2000.

The numbers looked dry and skeletal, but solid enough.

At 7:20, he boarded Bus 302 for the industrial district. The bus was packed with workers in shop uniforms, the smell of sweat and machine oil mixed thickly in the air. He held onto the handrail, letting his right foot take his weight while the toes of his left only brushed the floor. After he got off, he walked another eight hundred meters to the factory complex. The iron gate of Workshop No. 2 stood half open. Director Li was already waiting outside the control room, half a cigarette pinched between his fingers.

“You’re here.” Director Li crushed out the cigarette. “The script’s been copied over. The internal network’s isolated, so use your own hotspot for the stress test. Old Wang will watch from the side.”

Lin Chen nodded and connected his laptop to the workshop’s debugging interface. The Ethernet cable clicked firmly into place. The terminal lit up. He launched stress_test_v1.py.

The concurrency count on the screen began climbing: 50, 100, 200…

The robotic arms in the workshop hummed in steady rhythm. The conveyor belt ran at a constant speed. The log window flashed:

INFO: Connection pool stable.

He kept his eyes on the memory monitor. The curve rose slowly, then leveled off at 420 MB. No leak.

“What’s the drop rate?” Director Li asked.

“Three per thousand,” Lin Chen answered. “Within tolerance. Heartbeat keepalive is normal.”

Director Li said nothing. He stood watching the screen for ten minutes. The data flow stayed stable, and the production counter never reset. Then he turned, took a printed document from a drawer, and handed it over.

“Draft maintenance contract. Twenty percent off, two on-site days a week. Go through the terms again before you sign. I had legal revise the breach clause. No more unlimited joint liability.”

Lin Chen took the document. The paper was thick, the clauses dense and packed together. He read it word by word, focusing on the payment schedule and the acceptance criteria. There were no traps in it—only the cold logic of business. He took out a pen and signed his name on Party B’s line. His handwriting was steady.

“Cycle starts next Monday.” Director Li patted the document. “Don’t drop the ball.”

“Understood.”

By the time he left the factory grounds, it was already two in the afternoon. The sunlight was harsh, heat shimmering up from the asphalt. He walked slowly back to the bus stop. His left foot had swollen visibly, the side of his shoe biting into it with painful force. He sat down on the bench, took a cold steamed bun from his bag, chewed twice, and washed it down with bottled water.

His phone vibrated.

A WeChat message from Old Zhao:

Send me the script.

He connected to his phone hotspot and sent over the packaged scan_stress_cve_v3.zip along with the documentation. The progress bar crawled to 100%. He leaned back against the bench and closed his eyes. The smell of machine oil from the workshop still clung to him; his nose was full of dust and sweat. He did not need to relax. He only needed to wait for the result.

At 7:50 that evening, his screen lit up again. A voice message from Old Zhao. He tapped it open.

“Ran it. CVE classification accuracy is 92%. I’ll have ops fill in the rest manually. Final payment plus commission comes to twenty-one hundred total. Finance will transfer it to your card tomorrow. Next month there’s an internal-network asset inventory project—bigger volume. You taking it or not?”

Lin Chen opened his eyes.

Twenty-one hundred.

He sat up straight and typed back with his thumb:

I’m in. Send the requirements document.

It was almost nine by the time he got back to the dorm. His roommate had not returned yet. He took off his shoes. The top of his left foot was swollen and glossy, and there was a raw streak at the ankle where the shoe had rubbed the skin open. He filled a basin with hot water and soaked his foot. The heat made him frown slightly, but the warmth of returning circulation slowly seeped into the muscle.

Leaning against the head of the bed, he opened the ledger again. After “Estimated settlement,” he crossed out the pencil entry and wrote in pen:

Received: 2100. Total: 2135.3.

The number had broken four digits.

He did not smile. He only closed the ledger and slid it into the bottom drawer. This money could cover Xiaoman’s medicine for the next two months. It could buy him a new pair of shoes that would not tear up his feet. It could let him add one more meat dish in the cafeteria next month. It could not change where he came from, but it could buy out a stretch of anxiety.

His phone vibrated again.

This time it was a text from Professor Zhou:

Lin Chen, tomorrow at 2 p.m., Department Building 304. The Provincial Department of Science and Technology has a special grant application for “Industrial Internet Data Collection.” They need a student who understands low-level protocols and script automation. Bring your project logs and codebase. Don’t be late.

Lin Chen stared at the screen.

A special grant application. The Provincial Department of Science and Technology.

He straightened where he sat, his left foot still soaking in hot water that was already beginning to cool. He picked up a pen and wrote on a sheet of scrap paper:

Application framework / data flow diagram / protocol mapping table / cost accounting

The pen scratched across the page with a dry rustling sound. Outside, the night had deepened. The halo from the streetlamp filtered through the glass, cutting a bright rectangle across the desk.

He dried his foot and pulled on a sock.

Tomorrow, two in the afternoon.

He needed to turn the last six months of freelance logs, the factory’s stress-test data, and the fault-tolerance logic of his CVE extraction into a package of materials that could pass formal review. Freelance code was rough-and-ready street craft. What a grant proposal demanded was rigor, reproducibility, theoretical support. He would have to take the dirty-data handling inside try-except and write it up as a “multi-source heterogeneous data cleaning algorithm”; take the queue and memory monitoring and recast them as a “resource scheduling strategy under high-concurrency conditions.”

It was not packaging. It was translation.

Translating the experience buried in the dirt into a language fit to be placed on the table.

He opened his computer and created a new folder. The screen lit once more, illuminating the worn copy of Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach lying at the corner of the desk.

The night was still long.

But the road had already been laid beneath his feet.