Chapter 198: Delivery Day

Friday, six in the morning. Gray-blue light seeped through the gap in the curtains of the rented apartment. Downstairs, the breakfast stall had already started setting up its stove, and the sulfur smell of burning coal briquettes slipped in through the window crack. Lin Chen sat at his desk. On the screen, the terminal window was frozen on the last line of the log:

[INFO] ETL pipeline rebuilt. Data consistency check: 99.98%.

He leaned back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose. Forty-eight hours of rewriting, remapping, and stress testing had felt like a silent forced march. His left foot had gone completely numb beneath the desk; only the occasional muscle spasm reminded him that this body was still functioning. He saved the script, exported the corrected data funnel as a CSV, and replaced the core charts in the PPT. He checked the formula references again, standardized the cell formats, and kept all decimals to two places. No redundancy, no emotion—only numbers that could be verified.

Seven o’clock. His mother was heating porridge in the kitchen. The scent of rice mingled with the dampness of the old wooden cabinet. Lin Jianguo was already up, sitting on a low stool and smoking dry tobacco, the smell of the burning shreds faint in the air. Lin Chen walked over and put last night’s washed bowls and chopsticks back into the cupboard.

“I’ve got the defense today,” he said softly.

“Mhm.” Wang Guiying handed him a bowl of porridge. “Eat your fill before you go. City people care about that.”

He nodded and sat down to drink. The rice had been cooked until it was soft enough to melt down his throat, warming his stomach as it went. He glanced at the calendar on the wall. Beside the circle around May 18, written in red pen, was: “1200.”

The number was cold, but it had to be set aside.

Survival was subtraction. Every expense had to be carved out in advance.

He put down the bowl, picked up his jacket, and checked the USB drive and paper backup in his bag. Before leaving, he casually tied up the trash bag by the entryway.

Eight-thirty. Metro Line 3. The carriage was packed with suits and briefcases, the air stale and murky. Lin Chen held on to the hanging strap, keeping his weight on his right leg and his left foot off the floor. His face reflected in the window glass—dark shadows under his eyes, but his gaze was steady. He closed his eyes and ran through the presentation flow in his mind. What would finance ask? What would operations challenge? Where was Director Li’s bottom line? He didn’t memorize a script; he memorized the chain of logic. The workplace didn’t reward suffering. It rewarded closure. Better to lay problems out on the table than hide them and wait for them to explode.

One fifty in the afternoon. Conference room, seventeenth floor. The air conditioning was blasting, cold air hitting the back of his neck. Around the long table sat the data engineering team, the finance BP, the head of operations, and Director Li. Old Chen sat off to the side and gave him a slight nod.

Lin Chen connected the projector. The PPT opened to the first page. He skipped the pleasantries and went straight to the point.

“Based on the ROI model rebuilt from the new event-tracking table, the delay depreciation coefficient has been corrected to 0.87, and the upper limit on scaling costs remains within threshold. The inflated conversion-rate issue caused by deprecated upstream fields has been removed. The current funnel now reflects real user behavior.”

He pressed the key to advance the slide. The charts were clear, the data sources explicitly labeled, and the outliers had already been anonymized. The finance BP adjusted his glasses.

“If we go by this conversion rate, then Q2 ad spend needs to be cut by fifteen percent. Can operations accept that?”

“Yes.” Lin Chen pulled up a backup slide. “We ran A/B split testing. After removing invalid dwell time, the conversion path for high-intent users shortened by 0.4 seconds. The budget goes down, but precision goes up. Overall ROI is projected to rise by 3.2 percent. A risk buffer has already been built into the model’s foundation.”

The conference room went quiet for a few seconds. Only the hum of the projector fan remained. Director Li flipped through the printed report in his hands and lightly tapped the table twice with his fingers.

“You made contingency plans for the upstream reconstruction risk ahead of time. But next time, don’t wait until you get an email notice before moving. The data flow is the company’s bloodstream. If it breaks, it has to be reconnected. A technical role can’t just wait for requirements—you have to see the whole picture.”

“Understood,” Lin Chen replied. “The ETL script has already been packaged into an automated validation module. Future table-structure changes will trigger alerts. There won’t be another break in the flow.”

Director Li closed the folder. “Proposal approved. Starting next week, you’ll follow through on the gray release. Old Chen, give him production-environment access.”

There was no applause, no extra praise. Only the sound of chairs shifting and papers being gathered. Lin Chen unplugged the USB drive and packed up his computer. Old Chen walked over and patted him on the shoulder.

“Well done. But don’t relax yet. The gray-release phase is the real hard fight. Director Li values results—but he values even more who can withstand volatility. You’ve got the permissions now, and the responsibility has come down with them.”

“I know.” Lin Chen nodded.

Back at his workstation, he opened the internal system and submitted the deployment ticket. The process advanced, and the status changed to “Pending Approval.” He leaned back in his chair and let out a long breath. A dull ache shot through his left foot, like rusted gears suddenly grinding into place. Adjusting his posture, he opened the drawer and took out the mistake notebook with the curled edges. On the newest page, he wrote:

"2014.05.16 Response to event-tracking definition change. Conclusion: passive response is inferior to proactively embedding a validation layer. Cost: 48 hours of reconstruction. Gain: model closure, permission upgrade. Note: need to supplement knowledge of stream computing; current batch-processing architecture has a latency bottleneck."

His handwriting was neat, unadorned. He closed the notebook. There were no shortcuts in technology—only the work of breaking big stones into pebbles and moving them one by one.

Seven in the evening. He returned to the rented apartment. Wang Guiying was applying a medicated patch to Lin Jianguo, and the air smelled of traditional medicine and alcohol. Xiaoman’s drawing book lay open on the coffee table. On the newest page was a very tall building, with a crooked little star on top. Lin Chen walked over, flipped the drawing book to the back, and wrote the date in pencil.

“Did it go smoothly today?” Wang Guiying asked, her hands never stopping.

“It passed.” He took off his coat. “It goes live next week. This weekend I’ll take you all to the county hospital.”

Wang Guiying’s hands paused for a moment. “There’s still enough medicine for another half month. No rush.”

“The EEG needs a follow-up,” Lin Chen said evenly. “The dosage may need adjustment. We can’t delay it.”

Wang Guiying didn’t argue again. She only smoothed the patch flat. Lin Jianguo sat on the sofa watching the evening news, the volume turned very low. Lin Chen went into the kitchen and reheated the leftovers. While eating, he opened his mobile banking app and checked the balance. His salary would arrive next Friday. After deducting rent, food, and the reserved medicine money, a little over four hundred yuan would remain. He created a new memo folder and named it:

"Xiaoman - Dedicated Fund"

Then he marked the 1,200 yuan as frozen.

He typed in the number and saved it.

Survival wasn’t gambling on luck. It was keeping accounts.

Nine-thirty. His parents had finished washing up and gone back to their room. Lin Chen sat at the desk and turned on the computer. The gray-release monitoring dashboard was already in place, and every metric was stable. He made a cup of tea and looked out at the city nightscape beyond the window. Neon lights connected into a single vast web. Within that web, he had just managed to plant his feet firmly on one node.

His phone screen suddenly lit up.

Not a text message—an internal email.

Sender: Technical Committee Subject: “Notice on the Selection of the First Group for Overseas Advanced Technology Study Tour”

He tapped it open.

The body was brief: the company planned to send key technical staff to Silicon Valley in late June to visit and study AI infrastructure and distributed architecture. Spots were limited. Applicants needed at least three years of core systems development experience, fluent English, and a recent performance rating of A. Applications closed next Friday. The company would cover 70 percent of travel expenses; the individual would need to front the remaining portion and the visa-related fees.

Lin Chen stared at the screen.

Silicon Valley. AI. Distributed architecture.

Those words felt both very close and impossibly far away.

His current rating was B+, and he had only just obtained gray-release permissions. He had been teaching himself English all along, but spoken English was his weak point. More importantly, going would mean at least two full weeks away from work, along with a considerable amount of upfront money. Late June also happened to overlap exactly with Xiaoman’s summer follow-up checkup cycle. His mother couldn’t manage it alone. The busy farming season for his father had only just passed, and his back injury still hadn’t fully healed.

He lifted his teacup. The water had already gone cold.

He set it down, opened the calendar, and created a new document titled:

"Feasibility Assessment for Study Tour Application_V1"

He listed the requirements, the gaps, and the response plans.

English: add one extra hour of listening and shadowing practice every day; simulate interviews. Permissions: push for an A rating by ensuring stable performance during the gray-release period. Family: coordinate in advance to reschedule the county hospital visit, or ask the village clinic to issue the basic testing orders on its behalf. Funds: temporarily borrow from the dedicated budget, then replenish it with next month’s salary.

There was no hesitation, only decomposition.

The times provided the elevator; the individual decided which floor to press.

He didn’t know what level this elevator would lead to. But he knew that if he didn’t press the button, he would remain where he was forever.

Eleven o’clock. He saved the document and shut down the computer. His left foot was still numb, but his heartbeat was steady. He lay down and closed his eyes. Outside the window, the wind threaded through the buildings, carrying the distant sound of traffic from the elevated highway.

Tomorrow was Saturday.

They had to go to the hospital, buy medicine, and face the next round of test results.

But the gears had already meshed.

The road was still moving forward.

His breathing evened out as he sank into sleep.