Two days passed quickly, as Wang Hao had asked everyone, sent messages to coursemates he hadn't spoken to since second year. Called people he barely remembered. His father had stopped calling and started sending messages, which scared the hell out of him.Right now, he was sitting in his car outside a café, out of ideas, when the notification appeared.A post in the university alumni forum. Developer of ClearShield identified Lin Chen, a CS graduate, in this year's class.Wang Hao stared at the name. Lin Chen The name was vaguely familiar, like he had heard it somewhere, recently, but couldn't attach a face to it. But now that he had a name. That was enough he had no idea yet what that name was going to cost him.---Lin Chen was in the university library when his identity leaked publicly.He had come back to campus not as a student but because the library remained the best place he knew to read without interruption. He still needed more knowledge. The system rewarded mastery and

Wang Hao arrived seventeen minutes later.Lin Chen watched him come through the door and cross the room. He took his time watching because the contrast was worth taking in properly.A week ago Wang Hao had stood in a hotel suite with his arm around Su Xiaowan looking like a man who had never experienced a consequence in his life. He talked with confidence of someone who had always had enough money that the world arranged itself around him.The man crossing the restaurant floor now was wearing the same expensive suit but it looked different now, slightly rumpled at the shoulders, the jacket not quite straight. He was sweating despite the air conditioning. He was holding a document folder against his chest with both hands like it was something he could hide behind. His eyes were moving around the room before they found Lin Chen, and when they did something moved across his face that he didn't manage to suppress in time.He stopped at the table."Lin Chen." His voice came out uncertain

On the day of the graduation, the graduation hall was fully packed.Every seat taken, the high ceiling above them catching and amplifying the collective noise of hundreds of people in gowns. Family members were in the galleries all waiting. Two local media camera crews at the back of the room.The ceremony moved through its formal stages. With the songs and administrative announcements. A long address from Dean Xu about the institution's legacy that the front rows listened to attentively and the back rows tolerated politely.Then Dean Xu adjusted the microphone."Knowledge and character have always been the twin pillars of this institution. Today I want to invite someone to this stage who has demonstrated in the three weeks since he graduated what those two pillars can build when they are combined." He looked out across the hall. "Our outstanding graduate. The student who used his knowledge to create a cybersecurity tool that secured a thirty million yuan deal before the ink on his

Lin Chen finally stopped typing, his fingers hurt and he was tired already. He closed the laptop and moved to his bedroom, the exhaustion from the celebration hit him the moment he stepped through the door, as he switched his phone off without even reading the flood of messages waiting there, congratulations from people he knew, and from plenty he didn't. Tomorrow, the real work will begin. And the plan for his empire will start. He slept off as soon as he hit the bed dozing when he heard sounds that woke him up. Thud!! He woke up to the sound of knocking. Groggy, he stumbled to the door. "Who is it?" "It's me, Fatty Hao." He opened it to find Liang Hao standing there in a suit, a suit that had clearly declared war on his stomach. It looked too tight for his chubby stomach, only the middle button could close, and even that looked like it was losing as it was about to burst. Liang Hao sucked in his gut, held the pose, and announced with a straight face, "Comrade Liang Hao, report

Tap, tap, tap….The sounds of Lin Chen typing filled the room as code upon code kept popping up on the screen.He was building out the architecture of Athena OS, drawing on the artificial intelligence knowledge now sitting in his head, though still beginner-tier, and in preliminary stage, but even at this level he could feel the shape of something bigger taking form under his fingers: a compression algorithm that could genuinely change how software ran on old hardware.Most legacy devices couldn't run modern software not because the processors were too weak, but because of space. Storage and memory overhead choked them long before raw processing power ever became the real bottleneck. If he could compress data efficiently enough, old machines wouldn't need to be replaced to run new software. All they would need would be Athena OS. That was the idea taking shape, line by line, and the deeper he got into it, the more certain he became that it would work.Two hours had passed before he