In the taxi, Han Luyi leaned against the back seat with his eyes closed, pretending to nap.
Up front, the driver grumbled and complained about the traffic while the navigation system's electronic female voice coolly announced, "Turn right in five hundred meters."
He was home.
He lived in an old six-story walk-up in Pudong, on the fifth floor. There was no elevator, so he treated the daily climb as exercise. His rent was 4,500 yuan a month, which was cheap by Haicheng standards.
He didn't even bother changing his shoes before turning on his computer.
Programmers encountering an unknown new feature had only one first reaction.
Test it.
He created a new document and named it RCV_test_log_v_0_1.md.
He activated Sight.
The world changed again.
A faint layer of data shimmered over the surface of every object in the room. The walls displayed building information, the desk showed its material, and even the bag of takeout trash he hadn't thrown away in the corner was labeled [Organic Waste | Stored for: 3 days | Recommendation: Dispose immediately].
Han Luyi glanced at the prompt, then silently carried the trash bag to the door.
Then he returned to his seat and started taking notes.
Energy: 67/100. It had recovered by six points since he'd left the office, at a rate of about 0.15 points per minute.
He typed the first line of data into the document, then spent around ten minutes testing Sight's two modes, passive and active. Leaving passive mode on cost one point per minute; focusing on a scan jumped the cost to three or four points.
Wait—
His heart began to race. He pulled out his phone and opened his investment app. A green glow appeared before his eyes.
[Anomaly: Security patch out of date (unpatched)]
The panel didn't mention a single thing about the candlestick chart on the screen, the price movements, or the trading volume.
He tried funds, futures, and cryptocurrency too. The panel remained as steady as a rock, recognizing only the phone itself and ignoring the financial data on its screen.
So he couldn't use it to trade stocks.
Disappointed, he turned Sight toward his computer screen.
An open-source recommendation system was still open on the screen, one he maintained in his spare time on GitHub. It had more than twenty thousand stars, and several small companies had deployed it. Sight scanned it for about ten seconds, and its entire code structure unfolded before his eyes.
Bugs were highlighted in red, redundant code in yellow, and room for optimization in blue.
Han Luyi frowned.
Finding bugs, marking the code in red, pointing out edge cases—wasn't that what code review tools did? It was 2026. Features like that were everywhere. Even if Sight was more accurate and faster, at its core it was just an upgraded static analysis tool. It wasn't a qualitative leap.
But beside each red mark, another layer hovered.
Han Luyi leaned closer to the screen and read it word by word.
[Trigger: Weight accumulation overflows when a user refreshes more than 50 times in a row] [Business loss: Lower recommendation accuracy, estimated aggregate loss ≈ 62,000 yuan per day]
Han Luyi sat bolt upright.
A daily loss of 62,000 yuan.
This wasn't information at the code level. The code only showed a data overflow, something any AI analysis tool could find. But where had the figures for "120,000 triggers per day," "affects 83,000 users," and "loses 62,000 yuan a day" come from?
It was an open-source project. Even he didn't know who had deployed the system.
This was real-world operational data.
And Sight could see it.
Just as he was about to turn off the scan, a line of golden text flashed across his phone—
Han Luyi froze.
Flash Tech—the company whose push notification he'd seen while taking the taxi, the one that had just raised a billion yuan in Series B funding and reached a valuation of over ten billion.
A company worth ten billion yuan had a major bug in its core data?
His energy was draining fast. He hurriedly turned off Sight and wrote in the document:
"Cannot be used for financial speculation."
"Code scanning: locates bugs and shows their impact in the real world."
He added another line: "Flash Tech, core operational data severely abnormal. Requires a deep scan. Large amount of experience."
He closed his computer and leaned back in his chair.
It was almost dark outside. Haicheng's sunsets came early in February; it was only a little past five, but the sky was already dim.
His stomach growled.
Only then did Han Luyi remember that he'd eaten just one meal today: breakfast.
He got up and went downstairs to buy something to eat.
As he reached the landing on the second floor, he heard movement below.
Someone was climbing the stairs, moving very slowly. Heavy footsteps were punctuated by a small child's whimper.
Han Luyi went down a few steps.
A woman was struggling up the stairs, carrying two large grocery bags in her left hand and holding a little girl in her right arm. The bags were so heavy that their plastic handles had left her fingers white. The little girl looked about four or five. Tear tracks still glistened on her face, and her head rested in the crook of the woman's shoulder.
As Han Luyi came down toward them, the woman looked up at him.
Sight was still active.
A panel appeared automatically.
That was all—a simple, basic nameplate hovering above her head.
But when his gaze lingered for a second, more information automatically unfolded beneath it—
[Emotion: Exhausted (Hidden: Anxious)] [WARNING: This person has 1 bug awaiting repair, family dispute (details unlock at Lv. 2)]
Han Luyi held out his hand. "Let me carry those."
Lin Wanqing paused.
"Thanks." She handed him the grocery bags.
Han Luyi took them. They were pretty heavy—about thirty pounds altogether. Rice, cooking oil, a pile of fruits and vegetables, and two cartons of milk for kids.
They climbed the rest of the way, one after the other.
"You're... in 502, right?" Lin Wanqing asked first.
Han Luyi nodded.
"I'm in 501." She smiled. "I've lived here for two years. I think this is the first time we've talked."
Han Luyi really didn't remember her. He used to leave for work at six every morning and get home at eleven or twelve at night. He often worked overtime on weekends, too. He barely knew his neighbors, let alone the name of the building manager.
"I used to be busy with work. I wasn't home much," he said.
"You're not busy now?"
"Now... not so busy."
Lin Wanqing didn't press him.
They reached the fifth floor. Their doors faced each other, and Han Luyi set the grocery bags down outside 501.
Just then, the little girl in Lin Wanqing's arms suddenly lifted her head and stared at Han Luyi with a pair of big, round eyes.
Her tears hadn't dried, and droplets still clung to her lashes, but she'd stopped crying. Now her expression held the special curiosity of a child.
"Big brother," she suddenly said.
"Hmm?"
The little girl tilted her head and studied Han Luyi intently for several seconds.
"Your eyes are so bright."
Han Luyi's heart gave a sudden lurch.
Sight was still active.
He quietly turned it off. The panels vanished, the streams of code faded, and the world returned to normal.
The little girl watched him for another two seconds, then lost interest and buried her head against her mother's shoulder again.
Lin Wanqing hadn't noticed. She freed a hand to find her keys and open the door.
"Thanks again," she said, turning back.
Han Luyi noticed her hesitate, probably wondering how to address him.
"My surname is Han. Han Luyi."
"I'm Lin Wanqing, and this is my daughter, Duoduo."
Muffled against her mother's shoulder, Lin Duoduo said, "Duoduo," which passed for an introduction.
Han Luyi smiled. "Nice to meet you, Duoduo."
Lin Wanqing thanked him once more and went inside.
As the door closed, Han Luyi stood in the hallway, replaying the yellow warning from the panel in his mind.
[WARNING: This person has 1 bug awaiting repair, family dispute (details unlock at Lv. 2)]
Lv. 2.
He remembered the line in his document: Flash Tech, core operational data severely abnormal; repairing it would grant a large amount of experience.
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