Who to Turn to When Things Go Wrong

At nine in the morning, Boheng Law Firm.

Three documents lay spread across Gu Siyue's desk. Han Luyi had just sat down when she pushed the top one toward him.

"Start with page three."

It was a standardized compliance review checklist for enterprise software procurement, an internal document from some company with the logo and header redacted. The fourth item on page three had been circled in red:

Supplier data security qualification review: Whether third-party security audit reports, data processing white papers, and user privacy compliance declarations are provided.

"Where did these come from?"

"The legal departments of three enterprise clients." Gu Siyue unscrewed her thermos. "The wording differs, but the requirements are all the same."

Han Luyi flipped through the other two. Sure enough.

"Does BugKiller have all three?"

"No."

"Then you won't pass legal review." Gu Siyue took a sip of water. "Product evaluation comes after legal review. If this section is blank, the technical team won't even get a chance to try it."

Han Luyi set the documents down.

He said nothing.

He opened Sight.

Data from the three procurement checklists surfaced. The fourth item glowed orange. Orange marked a process risk.

[WARNING: Missing compliance qualifications → blockage point in enterprise procurement process]

[Impact scope: Enterprise clients with annual revenue >50 million (approximately 85% of target client pool)]

Han Luyi looked further down.

[Remediation path,]

[① Third-party data security audit report (2–3 weeks)]

[② User code data security white paper (can proceed concurrently with ①)]

[③ Privacy compliance declaration (templated, within 1 week)]

He stared at the panel.

"You have a plan."

"That's why I asked you here." Gu Siyue took a business card from beside her. White background, black text: Zhongdun Information Security Technology Co., Ltd.

"One of my clients does information security audits and has served more than a dozen listed companies," she said. "The market rate starts at two hundred thousand. The contact's surname is Zhou. Go negotiate with him yourself."

Han Luyi turned the card over and glanced at it. Zhou Yan, Business Director.

"All right."

Gu Siyue pushed over another printout, BugKiller Data Security White Paper: Framework.

"Does user code pass through your servers?"

"Yes. Cloud inference, standard SaaS architecture."

"Then who can see it?"

"No one. End-to-end encryption in transit, deleted immediately after inference, no retention. No one on the servers, including me, can touch the original code."

Gu Siyue gave him a look.

"You don't need to see it?"

"I don't. The data used to train the model was labeled by me and has nothing to do with user code."

Silence lingered for a second.

"Then make that clear." She tapped page three. "Technical architecture description, data flow diagram, third-party audit endorsement, compliance declaration. For the 'data security measures' field on the procurement form, you just need to put in the link."

Han Luyi finished all seven pages. The audit would take two to three weeks, while the white paper could move forward at the same time.

"One more thing."

Han Luyi looked at her.

"Your competitor is tied to Dingsheng Cloud. I checked their terms of service and API documentation."

"You even looked at their API documentation?"

"Reading documentation is part of my job." Gu Siyue slowed slightly. "You know how massive Dingsheng is. Cloud services, search engines, enterprise collaboration, GG systems... Once user code goes through that infrastructure, how many intermediate systems handle it? How many people have permissions? They might not even be able to say themselves."

She tapped the printout.

"You're an independent SaaS. Your data pipeline is clean and simple to audit. That's your structural advantage. You should promote the 'end-to-end encryption, delete after processing, zero human access' in your white paper."

Han Luyi smiled.

"Lawyer Gu, it feels like you've been helping more and more lately."

"Don't flatter yourself. You're my client with the highest growth potential." Gu Siyue didn't look at him as she got up to water the pothos. "Tech companies will only have more compliance needs going forward. Helping you run through the whole process gives me a ready-made methodology for similar clients later. I'm investing my time."

Han Luyi said nothing and slipped the business card into his pocket.

"When do we start?"

"Get the first draft of the white paper out before Friday. You and Su Niannian can review the technical details."

Han Luyi stood.

"Lawyer Gu, thank you."

"It's part of my job."

At two in the afternoon, Bug Café.

Su Niannian turned her laptop screen toward him. The title of the Lark document was bolded in red: BugKiller Response Plan v1.0.

"Read it before you say anything."

Han Luyi went through it from beginning to end. Three sections: action items, person in charge, and deadlines.

The core judgment was placed in the first line:

"Don't fight Dingsheng in a resource war. Do what a giant corporation can't."

Open-source the SDK entirely and let the community create plugins. Dingsheng's ecosystem was closed, so they couldn't take that path. Reinforce the moat around impact assessment, double v1.3's scanning speed, align compliance with Gu Siyue's plan, and the final item was branding: "To enterprise clients, BugKiller is just a GitHub link. We need to get onto cloud marketplaces, meet investors, and put on a respectable face."

Han Luyi looked up after reading it.

"When did you write this?"

"I didn't stay up too late. Don't worry about me." Su Niannian lifted her cup and took a sip, though the dark circles beneath her eyes were impossible to hide.

"Doubling scan speed for large projects will take two weeks, by my estimate."

"Ten days."

"The impact assessment module needs its cache layer rewritten—"

"Ten days." Su Niannian looked at him. "Every extra day Dingsheng offers free trials, we lose another day of wait-and-see customers. Two weeks versus ten days is four days. Four days could mean two paying users."

"...All right."

Su Niannian closed the laptop.

"Luyi, honestly, I don't know how long this plan can hold. If Dingsheng really throws money at making it free, our paid conversion rate will keep dropping." Her voice was low.

Su Niannian went home first.

Han Luyi coded in his usual corner seat while Old Zhou wiped glasses behind the bar. There were few customers in the shop, and the air conditioner made the corners of the napkins on the table curl upward.

Old Zhou brought over a glass of water and set it beside Han Luyi's laptop, then took the seat across from him.

"Something hasn't been right with you lately, Xiao Han."

"I'm fine."

"Fine?" Old Zhou draped the rag over his shoulder. "Half the developers who've come in this week have been talking about your BugKiller. Dingsheng's competing with you lately?"

Han Luyi stopped typing. "You've heard about it too?"

Old Zhou leaned back in his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and looked out the window.

"I used to work at a company that made operations monitoring software. Six people. Our tech was two generations ahead of Nagios, and every client who used it said it was amazing."

Han Luyi watched him.

"Then Kunlun launched its own monitoring service. Bundled for free, terrible technology. Our CTO said it was fine, that our product was better and they could never catch up." Old Zhou paused. "Six months later, seventy percent of our clients were gone. We worked ourselves to death iterating, but it was useless. One client said, 'If I use Kunlun's whole suite and something goes wrong, I go to Kunlun. If I use yours and something goes wrong, who do I turn to?'"

"What happened after that?"

"After that, the CTO took four people to work for Kunlun." Old Zhou stood and picked up Han Luyi's empty cup. "The product really was good. But being good isn't enough. You have to make people believe in you."

He took two steps, then turned back.

"I'm not trying to teach you anything. I don't know what to do either. I'm just saying, I've seen this before. You can't survive by keeping your head down and writing code alone."

Han Luyi watched Old Zhou return to the bar.

At nine that night, Room 502.

He had met Zhou Yan from Zhongdun that afternoon. Sight had shown him the other party's bottom line: eighty thousand. Zhou Yan needed to hit his sales target. Han Luyi hadn't pushed him all the way down, and they settled on one hundred thousand, with the other side throwing in a penetration test.

Han Luyi opened the BugKiller dashboard and checked that day's figures. There were 294 new registrations, fifty fewer than last week's daily average, and no new paid teams.

There were two new emails in his inbox.

The first was from the technical lead of a small company: "Hello, Mr. Han. Due to tighter Q3 budgets, we have decided to pause our BugKiller Pro subscription. Once the budget recovers, we will prioritize reactivating it. Thank you for your understanding."

The second was from an independent game studio in Shenzhen: "The product is great, but our cash flow has been a little tight recently. We'll pause for now and renew as soon as we recover."

Two clients, within a week.

Han Luyi closed the emails and opened the tech forum.

A post had been pushed to the top of the homepage, titled: BugKiller vs CodeSafe: Real Data Comparison from an Indie Developer.

The poster was an indie SaaS developer with an unfamiliar ID. Han Luyi had never seen them before. They had run their project through both BugKiller and CodeSafe, then compared screenshots of the detection results point by point. Detection rate, false-positive rate, and impact assessment accuracy—the three sets of figures were laid out plainly, and the conclusion was overwhelmingly one-sided.

The post ended with one sentence: "Whether a tool is good or not, run it yourself. My data is here for anyone to check."

There were more than three hundred comments, all firmly backing BugKiller.

Han Luyi hadn't arranged the post. He didn't know the poster.

He looked at it for several seconds, closed the forum, and continued working on v1.3.

Halfway through restructuring the impact assessment module's cache layer, the Sight panel flickered at the edge of his awareness like an old television with poor reception.

He blinked.

In the lower-right corner of the panel, the experience value ticked—

200/200.