Alias

Han Luyi registered an alias ID on the forum: "NullPointer."

On the first day, someone posted asking for help: their online service crashed every three to five days without fail. Restarting it fixed the issue, but they could never find the pattern. There were over twenty replies beneath the post. Some said to check for memory leaks, some said to set up monitoring alerts, and someone directly pasted a ChatGPT analysis—all of it missing the point.

Han Luyi activated Sight and glanced over the architecture diagram and log screenshots attached to the post. Though he was not looking directly at the code repository, his experience, combined with Bug Detection's assistance, still caught a clue.

He typed a reply, three short paragraphs that pointed out the issue with two connection pools sharing the same timeout configuration and provided a specific fix.

Half an hour later, the original poster updated: Fixed it. Watching it now.

Three days later, they updated again: It's stable. Completely stable.

The post blew up.

Out of more than two hundred replies, over half were not discussing the technical issue at all. They were asking, "Who is this guy?"

Just as he had thought.

Helping people fix Bugs for free earned system experience.

Han Luyi had found the right approach.

From that day on, he spent an hour or two on the forums every afternoon, specifically picking out difficult posts that had dozens of replies without reaching a conclusion. Those posts attracted plenty of onlookers, and their answers spread the widest.

Someone had an intermittent segmentation fault in their production environment. They had spent a month investigating it, cycling through four different tools without catching anything. Han Luyi scanned it with Sight and found that a third-party library was clashing with a struct's memory alignment. One reply solved it.

Someone else's sorting algorithm produced scrambled results on a certain dataset. He found that floating-point precision caused the comparison function to violate transitivity. Adding an epsilon stabilized it.

Every time, it was the same routine: a crowd debated for ages, then he came in with one reply and ended it.

A saying began circulating on the forums: "Wait for NullPointer."

Some guessed he was an architect at a major company. Some guessed he was a retired technical VP. Others said he was a core maintainer of some open-source project. Someone even started a poll titled, "Who exactly is NullPointer?" The options ranged from "ByteDance 3-2" to "Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher" to "early OpenAI employee." The top-voted option was, "Don't know, but I kneel."

Over the course of a week, "NullPointer" accumulated over two thousand likes across several mainstream tech forums.

His experience slowly climbed from 15 to 25.

Not fast, but even a mosquito's leg was still meat.

Of course, the forums did not contain only technical help posts.

The Flash Tech incident was still escalating. It had been ten days since 36 Degrees published its investigative report, and follow-up pieces kept coming one after another. The Cyberspace Administration and the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology intervened in succession, while the police cybercrime division formally opened a case into the illegal cross-border transfer of data. CEO Ding Ren was barred from leaving the country, and CTO Zhou Mingzhe had vanished outright—some said he had fled, others said he had been taken away. No one knew the truth. The app had been removed from the entire internet, its Series B funding was completely dead, and Starlight Capital released a statement distancing itself, essentially saying, "We were victims too."

Whenever Han Luyi came across those updates, his finger paused for a second or two before he kept scrolling.

Ding Ren had not quieted down. Being barred from leaving the country did not mean his mouth had been sealed. He hired a PR team to spread word across various platforms that they had "identified several suspects." The wording was like bait, trying to force the whistleblower to expose themself.

More troublesome was the profile thread on "Reverse Engineering Old Wang." It was posted on the same forum Han Luyi visited every day, and it was updated every few days. The latest conclusion had narrowed him down from "backend engineer at a major company" to "a senior expert with hands-on experience in recommendation systems."

They might be only one or two steps away from guessing Han Luyi.

Whenever he saw that thread, he gave it an extra glance before closing it. Gu Siyue's prohibition was still pinned at the top of his memo: "Don't mention Flash."

On Friday night, he finished reading the last post and prepared to shut down his computer.

The freelance developer platform pushed a new job request.

He had not planned to look. He had already completed three jobs that day. But the title caught his attention.

Dingsheng Digital Technology.

A wholly owned subsidiary of Prosperity Group, responsible for the group's digital product lines. During Han Luyi's last year at Dingsheng, more than half a year's worth of his code commits had gone into this subsidiary's repository.

He opened the request details.

"Performance anomalies have recently appeared in the recommendation system's core algorithm. Peak-period latency has surged by over 300%, while user retention metrics continue to decline. The internal team has spent two weeks investigating without locating the root cause. We are now urgently outsourcing a senior technical consultant to assist with diagnosis..."

Han Luyi looked at the description.

He had written this recommendation system for five years. He could describe its architecture with his eyes closed.

Chen Bowen probably had not even looked at the commit history.

Below the request description was a three-page PDF containing a sanitized technical summary.

Han Luyi stopped after reading two lines.

Every key parameter had a parenthetical note after it. After the peak latency increase of 300%+, it said "(baseline comparison: version launched in 2025 Q3)." After the QPS threshold, it said "(theoretical upper limit under the current cluster configuration)."

He recognized it at a glance. Xiao Ming had written it.

Zhao Qiming, the team member he had mentored for three years, from intern to P5. Han Luyi had personally taught him coding standards and documentation formats.

Xiao Ming had posted the problem on an outsourcing platform.

That meant the internal team had completely run out of options. Chen Bowen's team had spent nearly two weeks investigating without finding the root cause. In the end, it was Xiao Ming—most likely volunteering for the job—who wrote this technical summary and sent it out. Han Luyi could imagine how much overtime he had worked over the past two weeks.

Han Luyi had already seen the problem. Chen Bowen's team had altered his core scheduling module, changing the original dynamic weight allocation into a static rule engine.

It was like turning a manual-transmission sports car into an old automatic mobility scooter, then asking, "Why won't it go fast?"

A fifty-thousand-yuan job. He could fix it with his eyes closed.

But this was not about the money.

This was the fruit Chen Bowen had stolen, now rotting in his hands.

Han Luyi closed the request page.

Then opened it again.

Then closed it again.

He leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling.

Outside the window, the wind made the T-shirt drying on the balcony flap loudly.

He picked up his phone and activated Sight to scan the request once more.

The panel appeared.

Extremely poor.

The system he had written for five years had been changed into something extremely poor.

Han Luyi shut off Sight and placed his phone face-down on the desk.

"What a fucking bastard!"