Zhu Yun followed behind Li Xun.

There had actually been another question she wanted to ask, but when she entered the office and saw the bedroll spread out on the sofa, she decided there was no longer any need to ask it.

Only Li Xun’s computer was on. Zhu Yun went over to look at the screen, which was covered in multiple windows. She read through them — it was the at command.

After all her years studying computer science, Zhu Yun had always taken the straight and proper path. When it came to hacker techniques, she wasn’t completely ignorant, but her knowledge barely scratched the surface.

She knew that at was a program that accessed the network and related information at the kernel level — capable of providing TCP and UDP monitoring and generating reports on process memory management.

Zhu Yun turned around and asked Li Xun, who was over by the water dispenser.

“Are you trying to trace the attacker?”

Li Xun didn’t answer. He came back with a cup of water, and on his way past Zhang Fang’s desk, he reached into a drawer and pulled out a tin of cocoa powder. Zhang Fang had very similar tastes to Zhu Yun and absolutely loved sweet things, but he found it embarrassing for a man to have a sweet tooth, so he hid all his candy and snacks in the deepest corner of his drawer.

Li Xun tore open a packet of cocoa powder, stirred it into the hot water, and set it in front of Zhu Yun.

Zhu Yun said, “You didn’t even stir it.”

Li Xun looked at her with a blank expression. Zhu Yun accepted the cup graciously.

The warm cocoa went down, driving out the cold that had settled into her bones, and Zhu Yun was immediately washed over by a deep sense of contentment.

She held the cup and sat down beside Li Xun, watching the screen alongside him.

“Will that actually track him down?”

“No.” He pulled a cigarette from the pack on the desk, lit it, and said, “This only shows current connections. If the other party isn’t actively attacking, there’s no way to detect them.”

Zhu Yun searched her shallow knowledge of hacking and ventured a suggestion. “What about setting up a scheduled task — have the system automatically send out a command at intervals, on the chance that the other party happens to be active at the same time…”

Li Xun, cigarette dangling from his lips, leaned back in his chair and slowly shook his head.

“He isn’t that kind of amateur.”

“He?” Zhu Yun caught the word immediately. “Is it someone you know?”

“Yes.” Li Xun gave her a sideways glance, unhurried. “Someone you know too.”

“…”

Zhu Yun looked at his expression — and in an instant, a certain person came to mind.

“Is it that lean, slight man you were with before?”

“Right.”

Zhu Yun set down her cup. “I forgot to ask you at the time — who exactly is he? After I saw him that once, he never showed up again.”

Li Xun tilted his chin at the computer screen. “And now he’s shown up.”

Zhu Yun was at a loss for words. Li Xun took the cigarette from his lips, tapped off the ash, and said, “I met him inside. As for what he does—” He pointed at the screen. “—that’s what he does.”

“A hacker?”

“Yes.”

“Is that what he went in for?”

“More or less. He broke into a publicly listed internet company and siphoned off a considerable sum. He was sentenced to seven years.”

Zhu Yun said under her breath, “I knew there was something off about him.”

Li Xun’s expression went cold. “And do I look honest to you?”

Zhu Yun stared at him. Li Xun held her gaze at first, but eventually — perhaps because her look was too unwavering — he slowly looked away.

Zhu Yun: “Why do you always defend him?”

Li Xun said nothing. Zhu Yun went on, “I’m speaking to the facts — I’m not making a comparison to you. I can understand your feelings toward him, but the two of you are fundamentally different people.”

“We shared the same cell block — what makes us so different,” Li Xun said, giving Zhu Yun a sidelong look. “And besides, he’s genuinely skilled. Far above you.”

Zhu Yun thought to herself that she was nearly thirty now — she’d be ridiculous to still fall for such a simple attempt at provocation.

“Fine by me,” Zhu Yun said, completely unfazed. “Skill is a good thing. Why don’t you recruit him? Then with you, him, and Dong Siyang, we might as well rename the company The League of Reformers.“

Li Xun simply turned his head away and refused to look at her.

Zhu Yun asked, “How much damage did he do to the database?”

Silence.

Zhu Yun tried again: “If we can’t catch him, maybe set it aside for now and patch the backend vulnerabilities first.”

Still nothing — he didn’t even glance at her, cigarette in his mouth, every inch of him broadcasting that he was in a sulk.

Zhu Yun: “…”

Something felt off. Zhu Yun didn’t quite know what to say.

The truth was, she could guess at the reason for his attitude. That man, for all his wrongdoing, had perhaps been Li Xun’s only friend through those long years in prison. And with both of them being technically gifted people who had ended up behind bars, her clear resistance to him was bound to make Li Xun uncomfortable.

But Zhu Yun was just petty like that. She refused to accept that Li Xun was the same as the real criminals inside.

When it came to computer science — a field her mother had initially forced her into, only for her to genuinely fall in love with it — Li Xun had played a pivotal role. It was he who had first sparked her interest in programming, and it was he who had made her believe that technology should be used to benefit society. That was why she had such a particular contempt for those who wielded their skills for harm, and for those who committed their misdeeds and then strutted around feeling pleased with themselves.

“Hou Ning had his reasons for ending up inside,” Li Xun said to her while she was lost in thought. “He was socially withdrawn. He got badly bullied when he was young. Then someone saw he was good with computers and approached him as a friend. He ended up going along with whatever this person said, and was tricked into account theft. He did half a year in a detention center. When he got out, the same person came looking for him again — and he trusted him all over again.”

“And then he was caught again?” Zhu Yun could barely suppress her reaction. “Remarkable talent indeed.”

Li Xun heard the sarcasm and said, “He was caught twice in total. The first time, it was because his so-called friend got too greedy and left a trail of evidence. The second time, his friend was playing both sides — he had Hou Ning steal critical data from a company, sold it for a large sum, and then, when he heard the company’s owner was putting up a reward to catch the hacker, went and volunteered to catch the culprit himself. He sold Hou Ning out, pocketed another windfall, and fled abroad.”

Zhu Yun heard this and said quietly, “You can’t use that to excuse him. He’d already been inside once — and when he came out, he went right back to the same thing.”

Li Xun: “He has bad luck.”

Zhu Yun couldn’t help but argue back. “This isn’t bad luck. He knew what he was doing.”

Li Xun looked at her and said calmly, “When I say he has bad luck, I mean he never had a single person in his life who could pull him back from the edge.”

Zhu Yun was stunned. She felt there was a great deal that Li Xun was trying to express with that look — but before she could read it, he had already looked away.

Her cheeks grew warm. The two of them sat in silence for a moment, and she cast around for something to say. “So… why did he hack our data?”

Li Xun: “Before, he wanted me to go abroad with him. I turned him down.”

Zhu Yun felt a quiet wave of relief, then asked, “So he’s overseas now?”

Li Xun shook his head. “He should still be in the country.”

“How do you know? Didn’t you say you couldn’t track his IP?”

“He texted me.”

“…”

Li Xun said, “He’s been hired by Fang Zhijing.”

Zhu Yun’s expression darkened. “What?”

Li Xun said, “Though it’s probably not a direct line of contact. Jili’s game is going live right after the New Year and they’re in the middle of their final promotional push. Fang Zhijing has handed the project to someone on his team named Wang Ke. This was an idea from their marketing and publicity team — the thinking being, if they can completely destroy our game and drive all the users over to them…”

Zhu Yun bristled with indignation, then asked Li Xun, “How do you know all this in such detail?”

“Hou Ning told me himself.”

“Why would he tell you?”

Li Xun gave a short, humorless laugh, took out another cigarette, and put it between his lips. “He knows I have a grudge against that company and has had his eye on them this whole time. When he found out they were planning to cause trouble, he went and offered his services proactively. Wang Ke and the rest of them originally just wanted someone to write a cheat program, but Hou Ning said he could go straight into the database.”

Zhu Yun was so angry she could feel her teeth grinding.

“…That despicable man — he already picked my wallet clean before.” She slammed her hand on the desk. “We should report this to the police!”

Li Xun said lazily, “It’s not that simple. He’s been very careful this time. And filing a report could easily provoke him — Hou Ning is an extremely sensitive person. You risk him losing his temper and just scrambling all your user data entirely.”

Zhu Yun’s jaw tightened.

Li Xun saw how furious she’d gotten and said with a hint of a smile, “This is exactly why I told you to stay home and enjoy the New Year. You drove back here to fill yourself with nothing but aggravation.”

Zhu Yun couldn’t help but let her expression droop. “Why did he send you a message — to gloat?”

“Probably.”

“Could we pay him off?”

“It’s not about money. And besides — what does your little game even have to offer? You’re broke.”

Zhu Yun: “All right, I’ll give him that much — at least he has principles.”

Li Xun: “He just can’t stand that I’ve stopped caring about him.”

Zhu Yun: “He’s a grown man — is he a child?”

Li Xun: “His personality really is kind of like a child’s.”

Zhu Yun let out a harsh grunt. “Can you catch him?”

“Basically impossible.”

Zhu Yun gave him a look of undisguised contempt. Li Xun saw it and the curve at the corner of his mouth deepened. He turned toward her, teasing. “What — you think I should be able to catch him?”

“…Not exactly,” Zhu Yun said quietly.

But the honest answer was yes.

When Li Xun had first gotten out of prison, Zhu Yun had still been capable of weighing things against reality. But as time went on, her thinking had grown more and more untethered, and thoughts from when she was twenty had begun to resurface. She’d started to feel — increasingly, irrationally — that Li Xun was like a Transformer: invincible, capable of anything.

She held her now-empty cup and quietly reflected on herself.

Li Xun could read her thoughts just from her expression. He made no comment, just stretched his mouth into a slight grin, and unhurriedly smoked his cigarette.

Zhu Yun said, “So what do we do now?”

Li Xun: “I’ll try reaching out to him.”

Zhu Yun: “What if he won’t cooperate?”

Li Xun didn’t answer.

Zhu Yun pressed on. “Do you have a way to contact him?”

Li Xun: “No. He’s changed his number — the number he texted from earlier was a masked one.”

Zhu Yun: “How much data did he manage to get from the backend?”

Li Xun gave a soft, humorless laugh. “Our system is like a block of tofu in front of him. When he gets in, how much damage he does — it’s entirely up to his mood.”

Zhu Yun fell silent.

Li Xun glanced at her. “Upset?”

“No.”

“Different fields, different levels of expertise. He specializes in this sort of thing — naturally it comes easily to him.”

Zhu Yun: “You don’t need to comfort me. Just focus on figuring out how to handle this.”

Li Xun genuinely fell into thought. He reached for the cigarette pack again, and Zhu Yun suddenly said, “Don’t.”

Li Xun already had the cigarette between his lips, unlit. He looked at her. Zhu Yun said, “You’ve had one in your hand this whole time.”

Li Xun: “No I haven’t.”

Zhu Yun gestured at the overflowing ashtray. “Since I got here you haven’t stopped once. And you won’t think of a solution anyway, so stop wasting cigarettes.”

“Oh,” Li Xun said with a cold laugh, “so now even lighting a cigarette is a waste?”

Zhu Yun said nothing — just watched him. About five seconds later, Li Xun muttered a curse under his breath and threw the cigarette away.