Chapter 208: Night Journey and the Markings

At 2:40 in the morning, the motion-sensor lights in the office building’s underground garage cast a ghastly white glow. Lin Chen pulled open the car door and tossed his backpack onto the passenger seat. When his left foot pressed down on the clutch, a sharp pain pricked his ankle like a cluster of needles. He gritted his back teeth and didn’t let up. The navigation app showed forty-two minutes to the high-speed rail station. He dialed the direct line to the county hospital ICU. It was picked up on the fifth ring.

“This is Lin Xing’s family. I got the call just now. Go ahead with the medication plan according to the attending physician’s judgment—I authorize the signature. Please take a photo of the informed consent form and send it to my WeChat. I’ll sign it electronically and send it back. If you absolutely need a paper signature, I’ll have Old Li from the village clinic go over and sign on my behalf. I’ll call him right away.”

There was a lot of noise on the nurse’s end, but her tone steadied. “Mr. Lin, the situation is urgent. We’re taking him into emergency treatment first. Please come back as soon as you can. Some of the long-acting sedatives require a family member to confirm in person.”

“I understand. I’ll take the earliest high-speed train and be there before noon.”

He hung up. Working his phone one-handed, he sent Old Li a voice message, then texted Chen Hao on WeChat: “HQ video call tomorrow at 9. The Demo environment is already deployed on the test server, and the stress-test logs are on the shared drive. I’ve got an emergency and have to step away. If the VP asks about technical details, answer with the 0.85 threshold. If compute becomes a bottleneck, cover it with the async queue. I owe you one.”

Sent. The screen went dark. Inside the car, the only sound was the dull thump of the tires rolling over speed bumps. He closed his eyes. What ran through his mind wasn’t fear, but a checklist: train schedules, transfer times, the route to the hospital, backup cash, script progress, contingency answers for the VP’s questions. Too many variables. He had to reduce the dimensions. He pulled out his mistake notebook and, by the light of the dashboard, wrote: “Crisis: no family on-site / medical decisions / Demo milestone. Solution: remote authorization + technical handoff + physical relocation. Bottom line: do not delay emergency treatment; do not destroy the project’s credibility.”

At 4:10 a.m., the station waiting hall was empty. He swiped his ID to enter and bought the earliest ticket out, a 5:30 train to the provincial capital, where he would transfer onward toward the county. The plastic chairs in the waiting room were hard as boards. He propped up his left foot on his backpack, opened his laptop, and the IDE came back to life exactly where he had left it. He connected to the company test server and checked last night’s async queue configuration. The logs showed that the batch-processing job, downgraded for CPU use, was stuck at 68 percent, while the lingering process tied to GPU memory cleanup had already been cleared. He manually triggered a full validation pass, and the data flow went through smoothly.

At 5:20, boarding was called. He shut the laptop and squeezed into the carriage with the rest of the passengers. Window seat. As the train started moving, the city skyline outside was sliced by dawn into gray-blue silhouettes. He put on his headphones without playing any music, using them only to shut out the noise. His fingers slid over the trackpad as he ran through the Demo presentation again. The architecture diagram on the third slide needed one small adjustment: mark the dependency on the third-party annotation platform in red, with a note—“Inconsistent source-data formats will drive adaptation costs up exponentially.” That was the card he meant Director Li to see. Big tech wants results, but it also wants to know the cost.

At 7:15, the train pulled into the provincial capital hub. He dragged himself to the intercity bus transfer. By then, the numbness in the sole of his foot had spread into his calf. Every step felt like walking on a mix of cotton and broken glass. He refused to dwell on it. He only counted time. The bus jolted along the road. He leaned against the seatback, and his phone vibrated. Chen Hao had replied: “Got it. I’ll hold off the VP on this end. You keep it together there—don’t let anything go wrong.”

Lin Chen replied with a single “Thanks.” No extra words. He knew Chen Hao was taking incoming fire for him, but workplace credibility is a consumable asset: every time you spend it, you have less left. He had to make this work if he wanted to pay it back.

At 11:40 a.m., he reached the third floor of the county hospital inpatient building. The smell of disinfectant mixed with damp, aging wall paint rushed at him. Through the glass outside the ICU, Xiao Man lay on the bed, connected to a heart monitor. A tube ran into his nose. Dried blood marked the corner of his mouth. Their mother, Wang Guiying, sat on a bench in the corridor, her hands twisted tightly together, her knuckles white. The moment she saw Lin Chen, she sprang to her feet. Her lips trembled. No sob escaped; she only reached out to clutch his sleeve.

“Mom.” Lin Chen’s voice was low. He gripped her hand back. It was icy cold and rough.

“The doctor said... this episode lasted a long time. There was abnormal discharge on the EEG. They need to add more medication, and they also want to do an MRI.” Wang Guiying’s voice was barely above a whisper, as though afraid to startle something. “Your father’s downstairs paying the fees. There’s... only a little more than two thousand left on the card. The doctor said the follow-up may require long-term medication adjustments, and one month of medicine could cost...”

“I know.” Lin Chen cut her off, his tone steady. “I’ll speak to the attending doctor. I’ll handle the money.”

He pushed open the ICU door. The attending physician was adjusting an infusion pump. Seeing him, the doctor nodded. “The family’s here? His condition is stable for the moment, but frequent epileptic seizures can damage cognitive function. You have to think about a long-term plan. You can’t rely on emergency intervention alone. Also, the MRI and the follow-up medication adjustments won’t be cheap.”

Lin Chen looked at the numbers pulsing on the monitor. Heart rate 92. Blood oxygen 91. A little higher than last night’s 86, but still fragile. He asked, “If we do genetic testing or an assessment for targeted medication, what kind of timeline are we talking about? And roughly how much will it cost?”

The doctor pushed up his glasses. “A Class 3A hospital in the provincial capital can do it. The turnaround is two weeks to a month. The initial screening is around eight thousand. After that, medication depends on the match results. Insurance will reimburse part of it, but the out-of-pocket share is still high.”

Eight thousand. One month. Lin Chen did the conversion in his head at once. With his current salary, after rent, living expenses, and the money he sent home, he had less than ten thousand left over each month. One seizure could wipe out most of it. If he got the thirty-day Demo project bonus, it would cover this round. But what about after the project? What about the next seizure? A salaried job runs on a fixed rhythm; a family illness arrives at random. Using fixed income to fight random risk was, mathematically, a dead end.

He stepped out of the ICU and leaned against the corridor wall. Slanting sunlight poured in from the windows, spreading across the terrazzo floor. Dust drifted slowly in the beam of light. He took out his phone and opened the banking app. Balance: 4,217.6 yuan. Add the projected project bonus, and it would barely be enough. But not for long.

He flipped open the mistake notebook and wrote on a fresh page: “Variables: fixed salary / random medical expenses / uncontrollable time. Solution: get out of the employment model and build an independent cash flow. Technical path: medical data cleaning / edge-computing monitoring. Risks: startup capital / compliance / trial-and-error costs. Bottom line: do not gamble with life; do not go into debt.”

His pen paused. He knew exactly what that meant: leave big tech, give up a steady salary and social insurance, and walk an unpaved road. But if he stayed where he was, he would keep trading away his health and time to patch other people’s KPIs, while watching his younger brother’s life leak away bit by bit on a monitor.

His phone vibrated again. A WeChat message from Director Li: “The VP is satisfied with the Demo. But he wants the full deployment plan delivered by next Monday, with a performance-bet agreement attached. Raise throughput another 20% and keep the error rate below 1%. If you can do it, you’re on the year-end promotion list. If you can’t, the project team will be reorganized. Think it over.”

Lin Chen stared at the screen. Performance-bet agreement. Promotion list. Reorganization. Big tech’s language was always efficient and cold. He lifted his head and looked toward the nurses’ station at the far end of the corridor. An orderly was pushing a wheelchair past, its wheels making a harsh, grinding sound against the floor—shrill and utterly real.

He replied to Director Li: “Understood. I’ll have the plan tonight. The terms of the agreement need to go through legal review; I’ll give you my answer tomorrow.”

He neither agreed at once nor refused. He needed time. Not to procrastinate—to calculate. He closed the notebook and got to his feet. The pain in his left foot was still there when it touched the ground, but his center of gravity was steady now. He walked toward the stairwell, preparing to return Old Zhao’s message about the compute-rental deal. Gray-market channels were out of the question, but compliant distributed compute nodes might yet become the starting point of his independent project.

A draft from the corridor swept over him, carrying the first hint of autumn chill. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and took one between his fingers without lighting it. The next step was already marked out. All that remained was to put the pen down.