Alias

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

On the first day, someone posted a plea for help: their online service crashed every three to five days without fail. Restarting fixed it, but they could never find the pattern. There were over twenty replies beneath the post. Some suggested checking for memory leaks, some recommended setting up monitoring alerts, and someone simply pasted an analysis from ChatGPT—all of it missed the point.

Han Luyi opened Sight and scanned 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, still caught a clue.

He typed a reply in three short paragraphs, pointing out that two connection pools shared the same timeout configuration and providing a specific fix.

Half an hour later, the original poster updated: Changed it. Observing.

Three days later, another update: It's stable. Completely stable.

The post blew up.

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

Just as expected.

Helping people fix Bugs for free earned experience from the system.

Han Luyi had found the right way to use it.

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 any conclusion. Those posts drew the biggest crowds, which gave his answers the widest reach.

Someone's production environment was suffering from intermittent segmentation faults. They had investigated for a month and cycled through four different tools without catching anything. One scan with Sight told him that a third-party library was clashing with the memory alignment of a struct. One reply solved it.

Someone else's sorting algorithm produced scrambled results on a specific dataset. He found that floating-point precision caused the comparison function to violate transitivity. Add an epsilon, and it was stable.

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

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

Some guessed he was an architect at a major corporation. 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 thread: "Who exactly is NullPointer?" The options ranged from "Byte 3-2" to "Chinese Academy of Sciences researcher" to "early OpenAI employee." The top-voted choice was, "No idea, but I kneel."

After a week, "NullPointer" had accumulated more than two thousand likes across several major tech forums.

His experience slowly climbed from 15 to 25.

Not fast, but every little bit counted.

Of course, the forums did not only have 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 stepped in one after the other, while the police cybercrime unit officially opened a case into the illegal overseas transfer of data. CEO Ding Ren was barred from leaving the country, while CTO Zhou Mingzhe disappeared outright—some said he had fled, others said he had been taken away. No one knew the truth. The app was removed from all platforms, its Series B funding round fell through completely, and Starlight Capital released a statement distancing itself, essentially saying, "We were victims too."

Whenever Han Luyi came across this news, his finger would pause for a second or two before he kept scrolling.

Ding Ren did not stay quiet. 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 phrasing was like bait, trying to force the whistleblower to reveal themselves.

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

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

Every time he saw that thread, he would look at it twice more before closing it. Gu Siyue's order still sat at the very top of his notes—"Don't mention Flash."

On Friday evening, after reading the last post, he was about to shut down his computer.

The freelance developer platform pushed a new request.

He had not intended to look. He had already completed three jobs today. But the title caught his attention.

Dingsheng Digital Technology.

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

He opened the request details.

"Core recommendation system algorithms have recently experienced abnormal performance. Peak-period latency has surged by over 300%, while user retention metrics continue to decline. The internal team has spent two weeks investigating without identifying the root cause. We are now urgently outsourcing a senior technical consultant to assist with diagnosis..."

Han Luyi stared 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 redacted technical summary, three pages of PDF.

Han Luyi stopped after reading two lines.

Every key parameter was followed by a parenthetical note. After the peak latency increase of 300%+ was written "(baseline: version launched in 2025 Q3)," and after the QPS threshold was written "(theoretical maximum under current cluster configuration)."

He recognized it at a glance. Xiaoming 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 document formatting.

Xiaoming had posted the problem on an outsourcing platform.

That meant the internal team was completely out of options. Chen Bowen's team had spent nearly two weeks investigating without locating the root cause. In the end, Xiaoming—most likely having taken the job on himself—wrote this technical summary and sent it outside. Han Luyi could imagine how badly he had been working overtime these past two weeks.

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

It was like converting a manual-transmission sports car into an old automatic mobility vehicle, then asking, "Why can't it go fast anymore?"

It was 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 picked, 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.

Wind blew outside, making the T-shirt hanging on the balcony flap loudly.

He picked up his phone and opened Sight again to scan the request.

The panel appeared.

Extremely poor.

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

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

"What a fucking bastard!"