Chapter 326: Old Layout and Approval Form

The navigation display showed two kilometers remaining to the administrative building of the City First People’s Hospital. Lin Chen eased his speed down to forty, his right foot lightly tapping the brake while his left hovered just above the pedal, held in a slight bend. Pain crept up from the seams of his ankle bone, moving like a dull needle slowly gliding beneath his skin. He adjusted his posture, shifting his full weight onto the right side of the seat cushion and letting his left leg hang naturally. 9:15. Seven hours and forty-five minutes remained until the system deadline.

The hospital’s old campus was undergoing facade renovations. Scaffolding wrapped around the main building, and anti-dust netting billowed in the early winter wind. The administrative building stood at the northernmost edge of the compound, a five-story gray-brick structure built in the late nineties. Lin Chen parked in the underground garage, retrieved a portable scanner, a document folder, and a spare ballpoint pen from the trunk. The elevator was stuck on the first basement level, so he took the fire stairs up. There weren’t many steps, but with each one he climbed, the numbness in his left foot deepened. He braced himself against the wall, keeping his breathing steady and refusing to let himself gasp.

Third floor. The Hospital Administration Archives. A sign on the door read: Do Not Enter Outside Working Hours. He knocked. The sound of a chair scraping against the floor came from inside. The door cracked open, and a middle-aged woman wearing blue protective sleeves and reading glasses perched on her nose peered out. “Who are you looking for?”

“Supplementary retrieval of the 2016 Information Department infrastructure archives. Access slip approved by the Hospital Office’s Science and Technology Division.” Lin Chen handed over a screenshot of the electronic approval on his phone, followed by the paper copy stamped with a red official seal.

The woman took them, verifying the official seal, reference number, and the handler’s signature. Her gaze lingered on his face for a second before she stepped aside. “Come in. The 2016 paper files are in Zone B, Row 7, in the temperature-controlled storage. Find what you need yourself, and don’t go rifling through everything. Log your return after you’re done, and you’ll be charged for any damage.”

The temperature-controlled room had no windows. Fluorescent tubes emitted a faint, steady hum. The air carried a blended scent of aged paper, desiccant, and dust. Lin Chen switched on his headlamp and moved along the metal shelving. Row 7, November 2016. He lowered himself, his knees giving a soft crack. Unable to put weight on his left foot, he dropped to one knee, his right hand groping through the cardboard box.

The box was packed tight. Relocation inventories, equipment acceptance forms, invoices for consumables, low-voltage construction contracts. He pulled out a stack in chronological order and spread it across a nearby folding table. The network topology diagram wasn’t in the standard files. He opened his tracking notebook and wrote: 2016 server room relocation. Independent IT Department project. Topology likely archived with low-voltage construction blueprints, or bound separately.

He kept searching. His fingers brushed against a cardboard tube. He pulled it out and untied the binding string. Inside was an A1-sized print on tracing paper. Hand-drawn in blue ink were the routing paths for the core switches, aggregation layer, and access layer, with VLAN divisions and IP segments annotated alongside. The notation 10.128.4.0/24 was clearly visible. In the bottom right corner sat the joint official seal of the Information Department and the Infrastructure Department, dated October 12, 2016.

He unfolded the blueprint and captured a panoramic shot with his phone. Then he went back to searching for the approval form. At the bottom of another cardboard box, he found a Hospital Internal Network Address Allocation Application Form. It was an Excel printout, with an attached sheet bearing the signatures of hospital leadership and the official seal. In the approval comments section, it read: “Approved for internal network segment allocation per the plan. Routing isolation must be maintained during the migration period.”

Lin Chen placed both documents side by side on the scanner glass. He adjusted the settings to 300 dpi in color mode. He pressed the scan button, and the machine glided forward at a steady pace. A green light blinked as the progress bar slowly climbed. He watched the preview on the screen, checking for complete edges, clear seals, and any text ghosting. Satisfied, he exported the file as a PDF and renamed it 2016_Network_Topology_and_IP_Approval_Supplementary_Materials. He compressed it to stay under 5 MB, complying with the government platform’s upload limits.

The clock read 12:40. He packed up the blueprint and the form, returned them to the cardboard box exactly as he’d found them, and signed the borrowing log. Stepping out of the archives, the smell of cafeteria food already drifted down the hallway. He went back downstairs to his car. His left foot had gone completely numb; he had to rely entirely on his right leg to hoist himself into the driver’s seat.

His phone screen lit up. A message from Su Man: Has the Health Commission system status updated?

Lin Chen replied: Uploading now. Expected to submit in ten minutes.

He opened his laptop and connected to the car’s hotspot. Logging into the government extranet declaration platform, he located ticket CMA-20241108-047 and clicked “Supplementary Materials.” He uploaded the PDF and filled in the remarks: Original network topology and IP allocation approval form retrieved from archives. Historical network segment overlap constitutes standard configuration during the internal business migration transition period. Routing isolation records are attached for reference.

He clicked submit. The page spun. Three seconds later, a green notification box popped up: Materials received. Entered cross-comparison queue.

Lin Chen leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes. His breathing gradually steadied. Seventy-two hours total, twenty-eight remaining. The chain was closed; the progress bar had reached eighty percent.

He started the engine and drove out of the hospital compound. Sunlight filtered through the windshield, casting dappled shadows across the dashboard. He opened his tracking notebook, crossed out IP Segment Overlap, and wrote on a fresh page: Node completed before 17:00. Next step: await preliminary inspection report. Contingency: if manual review is triggered, prepare raw export files of routing logs.

The pen tip paused. He remembered back in 2016, when server room relocations were pulled off overnight. Powering down servers, packing data, physically hauling equipment, re-racking everything. Back then, there were no compliance workflows—just four words: Don’t lose data. Now, every single byte required a provenance trail, and every network hop needed a logged record. The times had changed, and so had the rules. But the underlying logic remained the same: the assets had to be accounted for, and the books had to balance.

4:50 PM. The car was parked outside a convenience store near the Quality Inspection Institute. Lin Chen bought a bottle of mineral water, twisted off the cap, and took a sip. His phone vibrated. It wasn’t a system notification; it was a call from Su Man.

“The preliminary inspection report came out early.” Her voice was kept low, with the sound of keyboard typing in the background. “The Quality Institute just synced it over. Three tapes, two passed verification. The third one, LTO-5-03, has a hash mismatch.”

Lin Chen tightened his grip on the water bottle. “What’s the deviation?”

“Zero point three per thousand. It’s on the edge of the tolerance threshold, but the system flagged it red. The inspector’s note says: suspected partial oxidation of the physical medium, recommends a secondary read for verification.”

He was silent for two seconds. Zero point three per thousand. In medical data archiving, that meant the entire batch could be rejected and sent back for reprocessing. Seventy-two hours, slashed in half.

“What’s the verification procedure?” he asked.

“They need the original media submitted for inspection, with a dedicated physical-layer read channel opened. The Quality Institute said the tape must be delivered by ten o’clock tomorrow morning to rerun the low-level verification. Anything past the deadline will be marked as non-compliant.”

Lin Chen looked at himself in the rearview mirror. His eyes were bloodshot, but his gaze remained steady. He opened his notebook to a blank page and wrote: LTO-5-03 hash deviation. Possible causes: tape edge oxidation / read head calibration drift / checksum not refreshed during original write. Action plan: arrive at Quality Institute before 08:00 tomorrow, request an independent read station. Backup: retrieve 2016 original write logs, cross-reference checksum generation timestamps.

“Understood,” he said into the phone. “I’ll export the original write logs for tape 03 tonight. I’ll bring them with me tomorrow morning.”

“Your foot…” Su Man hesitated. “Can you hold out until tomorrow?”

“I can.” Lin Chen ended the call.

He started the car. The engine hummed as he merged into the evening traffic. Streetlights flickered on in sequence, bathing the streets in a dim yellow glow. He gripped the steering wheel, his eyes fixed on the asphalt stretching out ahead. Dust motes settled in the beams of light. The countdown continued. He kept driving.

Ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Physical verification. The link still had one final hurdle to clear.