Tying Up Loose Ends

The plan for the immediate future is to secure some capital as startup funds, maintain a normal routine, and then find an opportune moment to return to Asia.

Reflecting on his actions over the past few days, he realized that his purchase of chemical reagents might become a source of trouble.

The reason he considered it a potential problem was simple.

It had to do with Huang Xiuyuan's upcoming moves; as the saying goes, people fear fame just as pigs fear fattening, and he was destined to stir up a storm.

Carrying memories of the future, one must remember that he was a hyperthymesia patient, and his memories of the future were crystal clear.

Some might argue about the butterfly effect and how it could lead to changes in the future.

Huang Xiuyuan did not deny this possibility, and he understood perfectly well that the moment he made that phone call back home, he had already begun to alter history.

Although these were just the shifts of a few minor figures, as his influence grew, it meant the butterfly effect would be amplified rapidly.

He was well aware of these possibilities.

However, the most valuable part of the information from his future memories was not the development of historical events, but the scientific and technological knowledge.

In the future, with the popularization of brain inhibitors and nanochips, hyperthymesia patients, relying on their advantage of super memory, easily became top-tier scholars.

Huang Xiuyuan was a first-generation hyperthymesia patient and a participant in China's Fuxi Project, a secret initiative launched in 2040 specifically designed to cultivate hyperthymesia patients into top-tier scientists.

Due to his age, he was already 54 when he joined the Fuxi Project, so he could only study while serving as a mentor for the younger generation.

The advancement of the Fuxi Project did indeed cultivate many scientists for the country, two of whom truly became world-class experts.

Huang Xiuyuan spent three years as a student and mentor in the Fuxi Project, after which he served as a teacher for the Qinling Class (the public name for the Fuxi Project) and as a professor in the Department of Materials Science at Harbin Institute of Technology.

He remained in the Fuxi Project for a long 24 years until he retired and was rehired, and in the end, he didn't retire peacefully but was killed in an attack.

Because of his hyperthymesia, the scenes from before his death remained vivid to this day.

If nothing else, during his time in the Fuxi Project, he had memorized almost all of the country's technology at the time, especially in his own specialty of materials science, which he knew like the back of his hand.

Between 2040 and 2064, China's technological level was at the forefront in every aspect.

This was related to the global landscape at the time; that period was known as the New Cold War—an era of East-West confrontation—where technology exploded, and many fields achieved leapfrog development.

Huang Xiuyuan, being part of the Fuxi Project, was like a living encyclopedia, having recorded most of the technology from 2000 to 2064, even if he lacked the top-secret Western technology of the 2060s.

These technologies were an immense fortune.

Returning to the matter at hand, with so much technology at his disposal, once Huang Xiuyuan began to reveal it bit by bit, he would inevitably become a thorn in the side of certain powers.

Once a person becomes famous, many things are placed under a magnifying glass and scrutinized by others.

This was why he worried that his purchase of chemical reagents would become a problem.

If someone were to notice something suspicious about these reagents and manage to deduce something from them, that was certainly not a scenario he wanted to see.

After calming down, Huang Xiuyuan began to think of ways to solve this problem, and several ideas soon surfaced.

He opened his laptop, logged into the Harvard University website, and checked the status of the school's chemistry laboratory building. Perhaps due to the holidays, there were quite a few simple labs available for use.

He entered his student ID number and applied to borrow one of the labs for a period of half a month.

After submitting the application, he calculated the money he had on hand: there was $21,500 in his bank account, and $73.75 in cash.

He checked his watch; it was around two in the afternoon. Considering the school's approval speed, he estimated it would take two or three days.

He grabbed his coat and took a taxi back to the chemical reagent supplier, purchasing over a dozen more types of reagents.

Back at the dormitory, he went online through the chemical company's official website and ordered another batch of reagents, having them delivered to Harvard University.

Everything looked perfectly normal, but Huang Xiuyuan did not stop there; his ten fingers danced across the laptop keyboard.

Night fell, and after a hurried dinner, he had already finished three small programs on his laptop. He clicked on one of them.

The laptop screen split in two. When playing the hacker game in the United States, the thing one needs to guard against most is one's own computer, because these machines all contain PRISM.

The small program he wrote was designed to disguise himself and lock the PRISM system into a specific area.

Next, it was time to capture some "zombies."

In the dead of night, under the dim yellow light, Huang Xiuyuan stared intently at the screen, his nimble fingers dancing across the keyboard as if performing a ballet.

The chemical company's internal network happened to be connected to the internet—thanks to their online ordering system, which bridged their intranet to the web.

By sending a Trojan horse through an email inquiry, Huang Xiuyuan gained administrator access to their internal network.

He found his two sales records in their database and then pulled up the recent sales records for that specific branch.

Among the hundreds of sales records, he swapped the names of the chemical reagents, shuffling the items and their corresponding customers while keeping the total sales volume unchanged.

"Done and dusted," Huang Xiuyuan muttered to himself with a smile.

In a few months, even if those two clerks had excellent memories, their recollection of the event would become fuzzy, and they would have no choice but to trust the "authentic data" on the computer.

By then, even if the FBI dug three feet into the ground, they would never be able to find any useful information from the mismatched chemical reagent records.

The next day, Thursday, January 24th.

He opened his laptop and found an email in his inbox. He clicked it and took a quick glance; it was the approval for his lab rental application, valid from January 25th to February 20th.

He replied to the email, confirming that he had received it and verifying the reserved dates.

Outside, the snow was still falling, and the continuous snowfall had blanketed the entire world in a layer of pristine white.

Exhaling a puff of white mist, he grabbed his down jacket and stepped out of the dormitory, his body instinctively tensing up the moment he stepped outside as he strolled toward the school cafeteria.

Entering the cafeteria, he finally felt a hint of warmth; he casually grabbed a serving of black pepper pasta, a fruit salad, a grilled sausage, and a bottle of hot milk before finding a seat to eat at a leisurely pace.

A few minutes later, a figure pulled out the wooden chair opposite him.

With a haggard face, unkempt attire, and thick glasses, the person exuded an air of decadence and dullness.

"Xiuyuan, I haven't seen you these past few days; I thought you had returned to the country." The man spoke in a low voice while dropping sugar into his coffee.

Huang Xiuyuan set down his knife and fork, wiped the grease from his mouth, and asked with some concern, "Xuedong, are you alright?"

"It's nothing, just some family matters. Have you passed your graduation thesis yet?" Lu Xuedong replied with a forced smile before immediately changing the subject.