Chapter 183: Signature and Echo

The alarm went off at 6:50. Lin Chen did not hit snooze; he simply threw back the thin blanket and sat up. The air on the sixth floor felt heavier than the dormitory air, thick with the dampness peculiar to old apartment blocks and the lingering sulfur smell from the coal stove next door. Sitting on the edge of the bed, he loosened up his ankle first. The muscles under the bandage were stiff, like frozen rubber. He slowly set his left foot onto the cold terrazzo floor. Pain climbed up along the nerves, but it was lighter than it had been the night before. The minty smell of the topical medicine mixed with the astringent scent of iodine, spreading slowly through the ten-square-meter room.

Wash up. Rewrap the bandage. Put on his shoes. He tied the laces tight, partly to hold the ankle in place, partly to keep it from wobbling when his foot touched down. He took half a bag of dried noodles from the table, snapped them in half, dropped them into an enamel mug, and poured in boiling water. There was no gas stove, so soaking them was the only option. During the three minutes he waited, he opened his laptop and connected it to his phone hotspot. The terminal window popped up. He ran the environment-check script he had written the night before. The progress bar crawled forward. Package downloads failed three times, then finally went through after two retries. He noted the mirror address that had thrown the error and replaced it in his notebook with a domestic university mirror. He did not pursue perfection. He pursued usability. It was not a slogan. It was a survival strategy.

At 7:40, he went out. Locked the door. Walked downstairs. Two of the voice-activated lights in the stairwell were broken, so he kept one hand against the wall and took the steps one by one. Every time his left foot landed, he had to shift his full center of gravity onto the right. His gait still had a slight limp, but the rhythm held. By the time he reached the bus stop, the morning rush had not yet fully formed. He dropped in his fare and sat by the window in the last row. The glass reflected his face back at him. His eye sockets looked a little hollow, but his gaze was steady. He opened his notebook, crossed out “refund deposit” and “open bank card,” then put a check mark after “sign documents.”

At 9:45, he arrived at the administration building of Provincial Institute of Technology. The hallway walls were lined with faded photos of outstanding graduates. The paint was peeling in places, and a thin layer of dust had gathered along the baseboards. The counselor’s office door was half-open. Inside came the sounds of keyboard tapping and a desk phone ringing. Lin Chen knocked three times. After hearing “Come in,” he pushed the door open.

The counselor’s surname was Zhou, a man in his early thirties. His desk was piled with document folders, unopened parcels, and half a cup of tea gone cold. He looked up at Lin Chen, let his gaze rest for half a second on the slight limp in his walk, asked nothing, and slid two forms across the desk. “Graduation project review form. Internship acceptance certificate. Sign them and stamp your fingerprint. The school needs them on file. Keep your copy yourself. The diploma and degree certificate will be issued together in June, so don’t lose them.”

Lin Chen took the forms. They were ordinary A4 photocopies, the edges slightly rough. He uncapped the black signing pen he had brought himself and wrote his name where indicated. His handwriting was steady, without flourish. When it came time for the fingerprint, the ink pad was a little dry, so he pressed down harder. A clear red thumbprint bloomed onto the paper. Counselor Zhou took the forms back, scanned them quickly, and tucked them into a folder. “Your internship unit is that tech company in the provincial capital? Fine, then the paperwork is complete. Once you’re out working, follow the rules. Don’t cause trouble for the school.”

“Understood.” Lin Chen slipped his own copy into his document envelope. There was no extra politeness. He knew that for the counselor, this process was routine, but for him it marked a severing of identity. The embossed seal on the student ID was still there, but the official stamp on the forms had already pushed him into another system of evaluation. The standard had shifted from grades to deliverables, and the margin for error had changed from “makeup exam” to “deducted performance pay.”

When he stepped out of the administration building, the sunlight was almost too bright. He stood on the steps and pulled out his phone. The screen lit up with a bank text message: “Your account ending in xxxx has received 2400.00 yuan. Balance: 2435.30 yuan.” Old Zhao’s final payment had arrived. He stared at the numbers for three seconds. He did not smile; he only slipped the phone back into his pocket. Cash flow was safe for now, but still far from comfortable. Four hundred for rent, his younger brother’s medicine next month, a shirt, a top-up for the bus card—only what remained after that could count as room for trial and error. Every expense had to come with a clear expectation of return.

He turned and headed toward the School of Computer Science. The practical exam cleanup was not entirely finished. The lab was on the third floor of the experimental building. The door stood open, and inside, only the administrator remained, sorting through old desktop towers. Lin Chen walked to his station and powered on the aging machine. The screen flickered to life: a Windows XP desktop. He inserted his USB drive and copied out the V3.0 script he had successfully run the night before, along with the environment-configuration logs from the practical exam. The administrator glanced up at him. “Student, this machine’s getting wiped and reinstalled this afternoon.”

“I’m almost done.” Lin Chen plugged in the USB drive and ran the verification program. A green PASS flashed up in the terminal window. He pulled the drive, formatted the local hard disk, and erased all of his personal files. The movements were practiced, with no trace of reluctance. This machine had stayed with him through countless nights of power outages. It had run his first infinite loop and recorded the satisfaction of his first successful compile. But now it was only an asset awaiting replacement. He shut it down, unplugged the power cord, and pushed the chair neatly back into place.

As he left the lab, he paused for a moment at the bulletin board at the end of the corridor. On it were posted the names of those admitted to graduate school and the public notice for successful civil-service applicants. Several familiar names were there. Chen Hao’s name was among them too, marked “provincial government office.” Lin Chen looked at the list for a while, his expression calm. Different paths were not higher or lower than one another. They only came with different prices. Then he turned and went downstairs, his footsteps echoing through the empty stairwell.

At two in the afternoon, he made a trip to the secondhand clothing market. At an unremarkable stall, he picked out a dark navy long-sleeved shirt. The fabric was a polyester-cotton blend. The collar was a little stiff, but it had been ironed smooth. The owner asked sixty. He bargained it down to forty-five and paid by QR code. The shirt, packed into a plastic bag, felt almost weightless in his hand. He tested the cuff. It came just to his wrist. He would wear it to the company tomorrow. It did not need to look impressive, but it could not look awkward. A first impression in the workplace often hid in details small enough to escape notice.

By the time he got back to the urban village, it was already dark. The hallway smelled of frying oil and damp mildew. He climbed to the sixth floor, opened the door, and switched on the light. He hung the shirt from the crossbar of the iron bedframe, then sat down at the folding table and opened his laptop.

The terminal window lit up again. Following the checklist Director Li had given him, he configured everything item by item: the JDK installation path, the local Maven repository, the global Git username and email. The internal proxy settings were the hard part. The company did not use the public network; access had to go through a specific HTTP proxy, and the port changed often. He tried three times. The connection timed out. A string of red Connection refused messages appeared in the terminal.

He did not get impatient. He opened the browser and searched for public fragments of the company’s internal development manual. He found a note on proxy authentication: he first had to bind the intranet domain name in the local hosts file, then forward it through a specific port. He opened C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts, edited it with administrator privileges, and added two lines of mapping. Save. Restart terminal. Run the setup script again.

The progress bar began to move. Dependency packages downloaded, verified, and installed one by one. The log text streamed down the screen like flowing water. He leaned back in his chair and watched the characters flicker by. His left foot throbbed faintly under the bandage, but all his attention stayed fixed on the terminal. He knew this was not toy code. He was laying the foundation for a production environment. Every path, every permission, every dependency version determined whether the first module would run smoothly tomorrow. Error messages were not the frightening part. Not knowing where the error was—that was what mattered. By habit, he opened a new text file, named it env_issues.log, and recorded the proxy port, timeout values, and hosts mappings he had just used. The next time he hit the same kind of problem, he would check the log directly instead of reinventing the wheel.

At nine that night, the environment setup was complete. He opened the IDE and imported the sample project provided by the company. Compile. Run. The console output read: Build Successful. Server started on port 8080.

He let out a long breath, closed the laptop, and walked to the window. When he pushed it open, night wind poured in, carrying the sound of traffic from the elevated road in the distance. The city lights had connected into a single expanse. They were no longer blurred; they had taken on a distinct outline. He took out his notebook, turned to a fresh page, and wrote: Night of 2010.10.16. Documents signed. Final payment settled. Environment operational. Tomorrow: report for onboarding. Risks: intranet permissions / module boundaries / physical strain. Next step: run the first API and confirm the scope of requirements.

His pen paused. Then he added one more line: Do not pursue perfection. Pursue usability.

His phone screen suddenly lit up. It was an email alert from Director Li: “Tomorrow morning, 9 a.m., third-floor meeting room. Bring your computer. The first requirements document has been sent to your email. Read it in advance.”

Lin Chen opened the attachment. The PDF loaded with the title User Behavior Log Collection Module V1.0 Requirements Specification. He skimmed the table of contents: data format definitions, reporting frequency, exception handling, log rotation strategy. No filler—only technical metrics. He saved a screenshot, then closed the email.

The wind outside the window had died down. He lay back and pulled the thin blanket over himself. He closed his eyes. His breathing gradually evened out. Under the bandage, his left foot radiated a faint heat, like a branding iron in the process of cooling. He knew tomorrow would not be easier. But he was ready for it. And on the screen, the cursor was quietly waiting for the next press of Enter.