Chapter 242: Borrowing a Boat to Set Sail

At 9:15 that morning, Lin Chen arrived at the School of Computer Science building ahead of schedule. The elevator stopped on the seventh floor, where the corridor was filled with the mingled smell of old carpet and printer toner. He leaned against the wall by the fire door, shifting all the weight from his left foot onto his right leg, and pulled a folder from his backpack. Inside were the materials he had reorganized the night before: a technical self-test report, a sandbox architecture diagram, a data desensitization workflow chart, and a drafted Agreement for Borrowing the Security Credentials of a Joint University Laboratory. He had pressed neat creases into the edges of the pages with his fingernails. At exactly ten o’clock, he pushed open the door to Professor Zhou’s office on the dot.

Professor Zhou was marking graduate students’ thesis proposals, his reading glasses halfway down his nose. Several stacks of journals and half a cup of cold tea sat on his desk. Lin Chen handed over the documents. Without exchanging pleasantries, he went straight to the point. “Professor, the City First Hospital has updated its intranet security policy. They need Level 2 classified protection penetration-testing certification before Friday. Commercial providers can’t fit us into their schedule in time, and their quotes are beyond our budget. I’d like to borrow the filing credentials of the college’s Joint Laboratory for Intelligent Computing and submit a temporary whitelist application through that channel.”

Professor Zhou set down his red pen and opened the agreement. His gaze lingered for a long time on the sections labeled “Division of Responsibility” and “Boundaries of Data Use.” The only sound in the office was the low hum of the air conditioner vent. Outside the window, the shadows of camphor trees fell across the blinds, swaying slowly with the wind.

“The credentials can be lent.” Professor Zhou finally spoke, his voice even. “But the college will not assume any commercial joint liability. Add a clause to the agreement: all test data may circulate only within the college sandbox and must not be exported to any third-party server. Also, your mid-term demonstration must be filed under the name of a joint college research project. First authorship on the paper will remain with your side, but the college will be listed as corresponding author. If this later involves cross-border data transfer or commercial monetization, it must go through ethics review again.”

Lin Chen nodded. These were the expected conditions. Academia wanted results and compliance; commercial companies wanted a window in which to stay alive. He took out a pen, added the supplementary clause in the blank space on the agreement, signed his name, and pushed it back across the desk. Professor Zhou glanced it over, picked up the official seal, pressed it into the ink pad, and stamped it down. With a sharp click, the red seal landed on the paper.

“Go to the college office and find Director Liu to start the equipment office filing process.” Professor Zhou handed the agreement back. “The whitelist won’t take effect until the network center signs off. Get the receipt back to the Information Department before three this afternoon. Don’t hold things up.”

Lin Chen thanked him and stepped out of the office. Three people were already waiting outside the college office at the end of the corridor. He took his place at the back of the line, and the tendons around his left ankle began twitching uncontrollably. He slipped a hand into his coat pocket, pressed his fingertips hard against the side of his knee, and forced the pain down until it dulled into a kind of lucid numbness. Closing his eyes, he ran through the next sequence in his head: college office verifies the seal → equipment office registers the lab asset number → network center configures ACL policy → electronic receipt is generated. Every step required signatures, stamps, and system entry. There were no shortcuts, only the order of the process. He thought of the old village accountant in Qingshi Village working an abacus, flicking bead after bead into place; miss one position, and the whole count had to be redone. Real-world procedures were like an abacus too: they recognized only fixed increments, never emotion.

The process proved even more cumbersome than he had expected. Director Liu checked the authenticity of the seal and demanded the signature of the laboratory director as well. The staff at the equipment office questioned the scope of authority covered by the temporary whitelist and asked for a sandbox port-mapping table. The technician at the network center insisted on seeing the complete topology before he would approve anything in the system. Lin Chen dealt with them one by one, calm and unargumentative, simply handing over the required materials. He knew that inside the gears of an institution, impatience was the most useless thing a person could spend. Only when every supporting document was in place would the machine begin to turn. At 2:40 p.m., he finally obtained the network center’s electronic receipt. He took a screenshot, compressed it, and sent it to Old Chen through the university’s encrypted channel.

By the time he returned to the temporary office, Su Man was debugging the compensation module. The logs on the screen were visibly scrolling faster. “Whitelist approved?” she asked.

Lin Chen plugged the USB drive into the isolated machine and updated the connection string. “Approved. But there’s an additional condition.” He sat down, opened his laptop, and pulled up the hospital’s latest notice. “For Friday’s penetration test, the hospital wants one security officer from the joint lab on-site to supervise. Our core parsing logic and compensation algorithm have to run through a complete process on a designated terminal. The code can’t leave the server room.”

Su Man’s fingers stopped over the keyboard. “They want to see the source code?”

“Not see it—run it. But while it runs, memory snapshots and the process tree will leave traces.” Lin Chen stared at the progress bar on the screen. “Zhiyi Cloud has already been on-site for two weeks. If we can’t deliver a compliant report by Friday, the gray-scale pilot ends immediately. We’ve got twelve thousand yuan on the books. After servers and payroll, it won’t carry us into next month.”

The room fell silent. Only the fans in the machine case kept spinning. Lin Chen knew what that meant. Once their technical barrier was exposed on the hospital’s terminal, a competing product would need only a reverse-engineering pass to replicate the core logic. But if they didn’t submit, the company wouldn’t survive the month. He picked up a pen and quickly wrote two lines on paper: 1. Split the core algorithm into an independent dynamic library; on-site, load compiled binary only. 2. Encrypt memory, add anti-debugging to the process, desensitize logs.

He turned to Su Man. “Tonight we refactor the loading layer. Wrap the critical functions into a .so file. On-site, we expose interface calls only. What the security officer gets to see is input, output, and performance metrics. The underlying logic stays on our own server. Add obfuscation at compile time and strip the symbol table completely. Before loading the dynamic library, run an integrity check to prevent replacement.”

Su Man looked at him, said nothing, and simply reopened the IDE. The sound of typing resumed, dense and restrained.

Lin Chen did not rest. He opened the old V3.0 script and began peeling away the core modules line by line. Regex matching, dynamic backtracking, dictionary mapping—each segment of logic was pulled out and recompiled into an independent shared library. He had to ensure that the wrapped interfaces were stable enough while revealing none of the algorithm’s identifying features. Code rolled constantly across the screen, and his breathing gradually synchronized with the rhythm of the keyboard. His left foot had gone completely numb; he could keep himself seated only by bracing his calf with his right hand. From time to time, he would stop, take a drink of cold water, and keep writing. Compilation failed. Errors surfaced. He checked the documentation, adjusted parameters, and compiled again. The process was tedious. There was no shortcut, only repeated trial and error. He was used to that rhythm. From the notebook of corrected mistakes in a county-town high school, to handwritten code in the university library, to outsourced scripts now, he had always believed that if a complicated problem could be broken into executable steps and fought through one step at a time, then sooner or later a path could be forced open.

At eleven that night, the refactor was finished. Lin Chen packaged the compiled dynamic libraries and copied them onto a new encrypted USB drive. Leaning back in his chair, he closed his eyes. His phone screen lit up with a text from Old Chen: Friday, 9:00 a.m., IT Department server room on the third floor. The security officer is in place. Also, notice from the hospital office: next Wednesday the hospital president will lead an inspection of the pilot ward, and you and Zhiyi Cloud are required to give a side-by-side demonstration. Prepare a comparative testing environment in advance.

Lin Chen stared at the words “side-by-side demonstration,” his thumb slowly rubbing the edge of the USB drive. The chill of the metal casing seeped into his skin. He locked the screen and slipped the drive into his inner pocket. Outside the window, the city lights were sparse, distant neon blurred by the mist. He knew compliance was only the admission ticket. The real strangling would begin next Wednesday. And tonight, he had to make sure that thin layer of encapsulation could withstand the hospital terminal’s memory scans. He stood up, set his right foot down first, touched his left lightly to the ground, and made his way slowly to the washroom. Cold water splashed across his face. In the mirror, the man looking back had hollowed eyes, but his pupils were bright. Tomorrow, there was still one final round of stress testing to run.