Chapter 233: Hard Lines and Receipts

On the other end of the line came Old Zhao’s usual drawn-out voice, mixed with the crisp click of a lighter opening and closing. “Engineer Lin, that requirement of yours is a little hard-line. Proof of assets for an independent cabinet is easy enough, but physical hard isolation with a dedicated line—earliest the carrier can schedule it is three days out. Expedited classified protection? The evaluation center doesn’t work weekends. If we follow the process, we have to queue.”

Lin Chen did not answer. He merely switched the terminal window to the network topology diagram. The screen’s cold light reflected off his bloodless face. “Old Zhao, the approval node for the hospital purchasing office’s final payment is Friday at five p.m. If your resource pool can’t pass classified protection, this order gets stuck in compliance review. Your share is thirty percent, after tax. If we lose the bid because of qualification issues, the breach clauses in the contract will be triggered, and the depreciation on the servers we fronted early will be deducted from your security deposit.”

The phone went quiet for a few seconds. Old Zhao’s breathing grew heavier, and the lighter clicked again. “You little brat, you calculate the accounts more precisely than finance. Fine. I’ll find someone I know and cut the line installation queue. I’ll personally run the classified protection evaluation. But for the hard physical isolation line, you have to keep an eye on it yourself. The server room is in the neighboring city. Pulling fiber means drilling through walls, the property management people are hard to deal with, and the construction crew won’t understand your acceptance standards.”

“I’ll go over first thing tomorrow morning,” Lin Chen said. “The expenses come out of the project reserve fund, reimbursed against actual costs. Before noon on Friday, I want to see the acceptance receipt for the evaluation report.”

He hung up. Su Man put down her phone and rubbed her temples. “There’s only a little over eight thousand left in the reserve fund. Pulling a dedicated line plus an expedited evaluation will probably eat half of it. If the final payment drags out again, next month’s cloud resource renewal will be a problem.”

“We can’t afford a delay.” Lin Chen cut her off, his tone even. “So the certificate has to be submitted on Friday. You’re responsible for completing the stress-test report for the audit middleware. I’ll make the trip to the neighboring city. Seal the hotfix package tonight, and cut over to grayscale at two in the morning.”

He stood up. When his left foot touched the floor, that familiar dull pain crawled up from his ankle. He paused, waiting for the muscles to adapt, then slowly walked to the corner, picked up a half-full bottle of mineral water, poured it onto a towel, and pressed it over his left ankle. The icy water seeped into his skin, pushing the sting down a little. He opened a drawer, found two medicated patches, tore them open, and applied them. His movements were practiced, his face without any unnecessary expression.

Two in the morning. In the temporary rented office, there was only the low hum of server fans and the clatter of keyboards. Lin Chen sat on a folding chair. On the screen was the deployment script for the audit middleware. He wrote three layers of log interception: request entry, business logic layer, and database write layer. Each layer had a timestamp and tamper-proof hash verification added to it. The code was not long, but the logic had to be airtight. He typed the last line of configuration, saved, and committed.

Grayscale release. Traffic cut to 5%. The curves on the monitoring dashboard rose steadily. He watched the error-rate metric, holding it below 0.01%. His left foot started cramping again. He clenched his molars, fingers hovering motionless over the keyboard, waited for the spasm to pass, then slowly pushed the ratio to 20%, then 50%. The full cutover completed. Response latency had increased by eight milliseconds. Within threshold.

He let out a long breath and leaned back in the chair. The fluorescent tube on the ceiling flickered faintly, giving off a soft electric buzz. He took out his phone and sent Old Zhao a message: “Send me the dedicated-line construction crew’s contact information. Nine tomorrow morning. Server room.”

Early the next morning, the long-distance bus jolted for two hours. By the time Lin Chen got off with his tool bag, his left leg had already stiffened. He stood by the roadside and moved his ankle for a while before slowly walking toward the industrial park. The server room was in an old factory building converted for office use, its exterior walls covered in Boston ivy. Old Zhao was already waiting at the entrance, with two telecom construction workers in blue uniforms standing beside him.

“This is the one.” Old Zhao pointed to an iron door on the third floor. “The independent cabinet is in the corner, but the cable tray is occupied by the neighboring company’s equipment. We’ll have to drill through the floor slab again and route it through the low-voltage shaft.”

Lin Chen said nothing. He went upstairs first to inspect the cabinet. The cabinet door was unlocked, and the inside was packed with servers, indicator lights shining in dense clusters. He took out a cable tester, checked the direction of the existing network cables, and marked a new fiber route on the drawings. Drilling through the floor slab required the property management’s signature. He had printed the construction safety commitment letter and the fire-safety filing form in advance and handed them to Old Zhao. “Have the construction crew follow this. I measured the bridge space in the low-voltage shaft. There’s enough room for two single-mode fibers. After the wall holes are drilled, seal them with firestop putty and take photos for the record. The classified protection evaluation will check it.”

Old Zhao took the documents and glanced at him. “You even looked up the specifications for the firestop putty?”

“Rules are rigid. Processes are flexible,” Lin Chen said. “You handle the property management. I’ll supervise the construction. Before two this afternoon, the fiber fusion splice test must pass.”

The construction crew worked quickly. The noise of the electric drill echoed through the empty server room, dust falling through the shafts of light. Lin Chen stood nearby, watching the workers drill, thread the cable, and perform the fusion splice. He had been standing on his left foot the whole time, and the pain had already turned into a persistent numbness. Every twenty minutes, he shifted his center of gravity and put his weight on his right leg. At one forty in the afternoon, the fusion splicer’s screen showed a loss of 0.02 dB. Qualified.

He took out his phone, photographed the interior of the cabinet, the cable route, and the sealing details, then packaged the photos and sent them to the contact at the classified protection evaluation agency. Attached note: “Physical isolation hard line completed. Topology diagram and on-site photos attached. Request expedited on-site verification.”

The wait for the receipt was the hardest part. Lin Chen returned to the office and made a bowl of instant noodles. The broth was very salty, and he ate slowly. Su Man was organizing stress-test data at the neighboring workstation, her keyboard strokes crisp. There were only these two sounds in the room.

Four twenty in the afternoon. His phone vibrated. The classified protection agency sent over the acceptance receipt. The on-site verification was scheduled for tomorrow morning.

Lin Chen stared at the screen and tapped the desktop lightly with one finger. The first gate had been passed.

He opened his mistake notebook to a new page. The pen tip descended.

“Article 233: Closing the compliance loop. Risks: delays in physical construction, scheduling conflict for classified protection, reserve funds consumed too quickly. Countermeasures: front-load safety filing, use on-site photos in place of preliminary survey, strongly bind funding nodes to delivery. Execution: receive inspection tomorrow, submit certificate Friday. Before the final payment arrives, no expansion hiring, no new orders.”

He closed the notebook. Outside the window, the sky darkened, and streetlights lit one by one. The city’s neon cast blurred patches of light across the desktop through the glass. He knew compliance was only the threshold. What the hospital purchasing office wanted was not a sheet of paper, but a system capable of operating steadily for the long term. Behind the final payment approval were the department director’s signature, the finance office’s review, and the hospital affairs committee’s vote. If any one link jammed, the cash flow would break.

He stood and walked to the window. Downstairs, at the entrance to the convenience store, several delivery riders were swapping batteries. The notification tones of electric scooters rose and fell one after another. Watching those busy figures, he suddenly thought of the dirt road back in Qingshi Village. Back then, he had believed that as long as he got out of the mountains, the road would widen. Only now did he understand that roads never widened on their own; they had to be trodden out, step by step.

His phone screen suddenly lit up. It was not the work group, but a voice message from his mother, Wang Guiying. He tapped it open. The background was noisy, mixed with the ticking of instruments and nurses calling out.

“Chen, Xiaoman had another episode today. The county hospital says the dosage needs to go up, but the medical insurance quota is almost used up. Are you… busy over there? If you can transfer some money, we can pay the hospitalization deposit first.”

Lin Chen’s finger froze in midair. The screen’s light reflected off his expressionless face. He slowly put down the phone, went to the desk, and opened the online banking interface. Balance displayed: 8421.6 yuan. The dedicated line and expedited evaluation fees had not been settled yet. The final payment was still in the approval process.

He stared at that number for a long time. Then he entered the transfer amount: 5000. Note: hospitalization deposit. Clicked confirm.

Password accepted. The balance became 3421.6 yuan.

He sat back down in the chair and opened the terminal. The cursor on the screen blinked quietly. He knew tomorrow’s on-site verification could not go wrong. The final payment had to arrive on time. There was no way back, and no retreat allowed.

He moved his stiff left foot, and his fingertips returned to the keyboard. The progress bar had not yet reached the end, but the road was already laid beneath his feet. Outside the window, the wind passed between the buildings with a low howl. He typed the first line of code. Tomorrow, there would be another hard battle.