Chapter 195: Peak Loads and Follow-Up

At 5:40 a.m., Lin Chen woke on his own before the alarm ever rang.

The rental room held only the low hum of the computer fan, like the steady mechanical heartbeat of a machine that never stopped running. He sat up. The swelling in his left ankle had already spread into his calf, and the elastic bandage had left purplish-red marks pressed into his skin. He did not touch it. He simply threw back the blanket and got out of bed. The floor was icy underfoot. He shifted his weight onto his right leg; his left foot only brushed the ground lightly. He walked to the desk and pressed the power button.

The cold light of the screen fell across his face as the terminal window popped open. He entered the command and launched the stress-test script. Peak-traffic simulation, concurrency pushed to thirty thousand. The progress bar crawled forward. The CPU usage curve began to climb. He kept his eyes locked on the monitoring dashboard, fixed on the memory-leak indicators and GC pause times. At seven o’clock sharp, the run finished. He exported the CSV, dragged it into Excel, and plotted a scatter chart. The red line shook violently at the edge of the threshold, hit the ceiling three times, then dropped back. He wrote down the timestamps of the abnormal spikes, cross-checked them against the log files, and pinned the pauses to Full GC events.

The problem was not the code logic. It was memory allocation. He adjusted the JVM parameters, changing the young-generation to old-generation ratio from 1:2 to 1:1.5, raising the Metaspace cap, and disabling adaptive SizePolicy. He saved the config file and ran a lighter validation pass. The curve smoothed out. Latency dropped back under 150 ms, and CPU usage stabilized at 78 percent. He took screenshots, added notes on the parameter changes and the relevant log excerpts, and sent them to the technical group chat. He appended one line:

"Peak-load stress test V2 complete. GC pauses optimized. Latency back down to 150 ms. Raw data archived."

At 7:40, he closed the computer. In the bathroom he splashed cold water over his face. In the mirror, the man staring back at him had deep-set shadows under his eyes, blue stubble on his jaw, and bloodshot veins in his pupils. He shaved, then changed into a clean pale-blue shirt. When it came time to put on his left shoe, he deliberately loosened the laces by two eyelets to avoid the most swollen part of his foot. Then he went out.

Rush hour on the subway. The carriage was packed. He held onto an overhead strap and swayed with the train. His reflection floated in the glass window. Tired, but clear-eyed. In his head, he ran through the defense he had to give that afternoon, almost word for word. Old Chen would ask about boundary conditions. Director Li would want the cost offsets. The security team would ask about gray-release interception rates. Finance would want the ROI conversion. He walked the entire chain of logic through his mind once more, like checking the gears of a precision instrument. Not memory—deduction. Every step backed by data, every conclusion with redundant support.

At nine o’clock, he arrived at Municipal Third Hospital. He lined up at the self-service machine, took a number, and printed the report. The paper came out still warm. Standing in a corner of the corridor, away from the carts and the flow of people, he read it line by line.

"Motor conduction velocity of the bilateral common peroneal nerves is slowed, with reduced amplitude. Findings suggest possible peripheral neuropathy. Correlate clinically. Repeat electromyography and specialist neurological evaluation are recommended if necessary."

The medical terminology was cold and exact. He did not understand the pathology in detail, but he understood what slowed and reduced meant. It meant nerve signals were being obstructed. It meant the risk of muscle atrophy. It meant neurotrophic medication, physical therapy, perhaps even long-term follow-up. He opened the calculator on his phone and made a rough estimate: specialist consultation, eighty yuan; repeat EMG, three hundred; methylcobalamin and similar medication, around four hundred a month. Not expensive for a single visit, but it would take time. And time was the variable he lacked most right now.

He called the neurology triage desk and confirmed that a deputy chief physician still had openings on Wednesday morning. Then he hung up. He folded the report in half and slid it into a hard-shell document folder. His movements remained steady, without a pause.

At 11:20, he took a taxi to the high-speed rail station. Train G1420 arrived on time. The exit was crowded. Broadcast announcements, suitcase wheels, and overlapping conversations blended into one mass of sound. He rose onto his toes, searching through the crowd. His father was wearing that deep-blue jacket washed pale with age, a woven bag slung over his shoulder, his back slightly bent. His mother walked very slowly, her left hand on the suitcase handle, her right foot landing with a faint hesitation, her knee unwilling to fully straighten.

Lin Chen went to meet them. “Dad. Mom.”

Lin Jianguo nodded and handed him the woven bag. “Heavy. Your mother packed it all.”

Wang Guiying smiled, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes deeply etched, her voice a little hoarse. “You can’t buy good dried vegetables in the city, so I brought some. And some dried mugwort too. Good for soaking your feet.”

Lin Chen took the bag. It was heavy. Besides the dried vegetables, there were several bundles of herbs wrapped in old newspaper and a jar of homemade pickled radish. He did not ask about any of it. He only said, “Let’s go. The car’s outside.”

Back at the apartment. One bedroom, one living room, forty square meters. He settled his parents into the bedroom. The bed was a folding one he had bought earlier, now made up with clean cotton sheets. Wang Guiying sat down and rubbed her knee. “This bed’s soft.” Lin Jianguo stood by the window, looking at the elevated road and the traffic outside. “A lot of cars.” Lin Chen boiled water and made tea. He stored the dried vegetables in the cabinet and put the mugwort into a drawer. Then he took out his phone and checked nearby community hospitals and physical-therapy clinics. Two kilometers away, twenty minutes on foot. He wrote it into his memo app and marked it: Wednesday follow-up route.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, he had to leave for the office. Before he went, he pointed out the frozen dumplings, eggs, milk, and dried noodles in the refrigerator to his mother. “Boil something for dinner yourselves tonight. This button turns the induction cooker on, and this dial controls the heat. I’ll be back at six.”

Wang Guiying nodded. “Go do your work. Don’t worry about us.”

Lin Jianguo said nothing. He only pushed the woven bag under the bed and bent to straighten the slippers on the floor.

At 1:30, he was at the office. Lin Chen sat down at his workstation and turned on the computer. He packaged the raw stress-test data from the morning and organized it in the format Old Chen wanted. File name: "Raw Data for Interception Rule Stress Test_V2_20140515.xlsx". He checked the fields three times to make sure the headers, units, and timestamps were all correct. At two o’clock, Director Li sent a message:

"Old Chen just got out of a meeting. Defense moved up to nine tomorrow morning. Finance and operations will both be there. Tonight, go over the underlying ROI logic one more time. Tomorrow morning we’ll go straight through the PPT."

Lin Chen stared at the screen. One day earlier. Which meant tonight he had to finish the cross-validation between the financial model and the operations conversion rate, and every assumption had to land on a concrete number. He replied:

"Received. Final version tonight."

At 5:50, he left work early. He stopped by the market and bought pork ribs, greens, and tofu. Back at the apartment, his mother was already busy in the kitchen. She was not used to the induction cooker replacing a wood-burning stove; her finger hovered over the control panel, afraid to press anything. Lin Chen walked over, took her hand, and taught her where to press. “This one first, then adjust the heat here. Once the water boils, turn it down.” Wang Guiying copied the motions, her hand trembling slightly. Lin Jianguo sat on a small stool, silently picking vegetables.

Dinner was simple. Pork rib soup, stir-fried greens, rice. Not much was said at the table. Lin Chen asked about the farm work back in the village. His father said transplanting had just finished, and his old back pain had flared up again, so he had been using medicated patches. His mother said Xiaoman had been well-behaved at school; his homeroom teacher praised his handwriting, and he had received a certificate at the end of term. Lin Chen nodded and placed more food into his mother’s bowl. After dinner, he washed the dishes. Water ran over porcelain, bubbles fine and dense. He dried his hands and went back into the living room. His parents were already asleep, their breathing steady.

He turned on the computer, and the screen lit up. The financial model had to be rerun. The operations conversion-rate API data still had not been aligned, and the coefficient for latency’s impact on bounce rate needed to be corrected. He brewed a strong cup of tea and sat down. His left foot rested on a low stool. The bandage had been loosened, and the skin beneath it had darkened to an unhealthy red. He typed the first line of code.

Outside, the night was deep. The city’s neon lights cast blurred patches of color against the glass. His phone vibrated. A new message, from the head of the security team:

"Lin Chen, Old Chen just notified us that before tomorrow’s defense, Compliance wants another review of the data-desensitization flow. In your script, are the user privacy fields hashed? Submit a desensitization plan before 8 a.m. tomorrow."

Lin Chen’s fingers stopped on the keyboard. Hashing. Desensitization. Compliance. A new variable. He took a deep breath and opened a new document. Title: "Data Desensitization Plan_V1". The gears were still turning, but one more cog had joined the mesh. He could not stop.