9:00 a.m., 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.
"Look at page three first."
It was a standardized corporate software procurement compliance review checklist, an internal document from some company. The logo and letterhead had been 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 statements were provided.
"Where did these come from?"
"The legal departments of three corporate clients." Gu Siyue unscrewed her thermos. "The wording differs, but the requirements are all the same."
Han Luyi flipped through the other two documents. Sure enough.
"Does BugKiller have those three things?"
"No."
"Then you won't pass legal review." Gu Siyue took a sip of water. "Product evaluation comes after legal review. If that section is blank, the technical team won't even get a chance to try it."
Han Luyi set the documents on the desk.
He said nothing.
He opened Sight.
The data from the three procurement checklists surfaced. The fourth item lit up orange. Orange marked process risks.
[WARNING: Missing compliance qualifications → corporate procurement process bottleneck] [Scope of impact: corporate clients with annual revenue >50 million (approximately 85% of the target client pool)] [Remediation path,] [① Third-party data security audit report (2–3 weeks)] [② User code data security white paper (can proceed in parallel with ①)] [③ Privacy compliance statement (templated, within 1 week)]
He stared at the panel.
"You have a solution already."
"I asked you here to discuss exactly this." Gu Siyue picked up a business card from beside her, white with black lettering: Zhongdun Information Security Technology Co., Ltd.
"One of my clients does information security audits. They've served more than a dozen listed companies," she said. "Market rates start at two hundred thousand. The contact's surname is Zhou. Negotiate with him yourself."
Han Luyi turned the card over and glanced at it. Zhou Yan, Business Director.
"Alright."
Gu Siyue pushed over another printout, titled 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. The transmission is end-to-end encrypted. It's deleted immediately after inference and never retained. No one on the server side, including me, can access the original code."
Gu Siyue glanced at him.
"You don't need to see it?"
"No. 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 explanation, data flow diagram, third-party audit endorsement, compliance statement. For the 'data security measures' field on the procurement form, just 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 read their API documentation?"
"Reading documentation is part of my job." Gu Siyue slowed slightly. "You know the scale of Dingsheng. Cloud services, search engines, enterprise collaboration, GG systems—when user code goes through that infrastructure, how many intermediary systems does it pass through? How many people have access? Even they might not be able to say."
She tapped the printout.
"You're an independent SaaS. Your data pipeline is clean and simple to audit. That's your structural advantage. In the white paper, 'end-to-end encryption, deletion after processing, zero human access' should be highlighted in your marketing."
Han Luyi smiled.
"Lawyer Gu, it feels like you've been helping more and more lately."
"Don't flatter yourself. You're the client with my highest growth potential." Gu Siyue didn't look at him as she said it. She had risen to water the pothos. "Tech companies will only have more compliance needs. Helping you run through the whole process gives me a ready-made methodology for similar clients in the future. I'm investing my time."
Han Luyi said nothing and slipped the business card into his pocket.
"When do we start?"
"The first draft of the white paper will be ready before Friday. You and Su Niannian can review the technical details."
Han Luyi stood.
"Lawyer Gu, thank you."
"Just doing my job."
2:00 p.m., 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 read from beginning to end. There were three sections: action items, responsible parties, and deadlines.
The core assessment was on the first line:
"Don't fight Dingsheng in a resource war. Do what the big companies can't."
Open-source the SDK completely and let the community build plugins. Dingsheng's ecosystem was closed, so they could not take that path. Strengthen the impact-assessment moat. Double v1.3's scan speed. Coordinate compliance efforts with Gu Siyue's plan. The final item was branding: "To enterprise clients, BugKiller is just a GitHub link. To get onto cloud marketplaces and meet investors, it needs a presentable face."
Han Luyi looked up after finishing.
"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 is another day we lose hesitant customers. Two weeks versus ten days is four days. Four days could mean two paying users."
"...Alright."
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 wrote code at his usual table in the corner. Old Zhou wiped glasses behind the bar. There were not many 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, set it beside Han Luyi's laptop, and sat down across from him.
"Something's been off with you lately, Xiao Han."
"I'm fine."
"Fine?" Old Zhou draped his rag over his shoulder. "Half the developers who came in this week were talking about your BugKiller. Is Dingsheng competing against you lately?"
Han Luyi stopped typing. "You 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 did operations monitoring. Six people. Our tech was two generations ahead of Nagios, and every customer who used it said it was incredible."
Han Luyi watched him.
"Then Kunlun launched its own monitoring service, bundled for free. The tech was terrible. Our CTO said it was fine—our product was better, so they'd 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 looked 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 weather it just by burying your head in code."
Han Luyi watched Old Zhou return to the bar.
9:00 p.m., 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 targets, but Han Luyi did not bargain him all the way down. They settled on one hundred thousand, and the other side threw in a penetration test as well.
Han Luyi opened the BugKiller backend and checked the day's numbers. 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 tightened Q3 budgets, we have decided to pause our BugKiller Pro subscription. Once our 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 excellent, but our cash flow has been a little tight lately. We'll pause for now and renew as soon as we recover."
Two clients in one week.
Han Luyi closed the emails and opened the technical forum.
A post had been bumped to the top of the homepage. Its title was <BugKiller vs CodeSafe: Real Data Comparison from an Indie Developer>.
The original poster was an indie SaaS developer. The ID was unfamiliar; Han Luyi had never seen it before. He had run his project through both BugKiller and CodeSafe, posting screenshots that compared the detection results item by item. Detection rate, false-positive rate, and impact-assessment accuracy—the three sets of data were laid out plainly, and the conclusion was overwhelmingly one-sided.
The post ended with one sentence: "If you want to know whether a tool is good, run it yourself. My data is here. You're welcome to verify it."
There were more than three hundred comments, all firmly backing BugKiller.
Han Luyi had not arranged the post, and he did not know the original poster.
He watched it for a few seconds, closed the forum, and continued working on v1.3.
He was halfway through restructuring the cache layer for the impact-assessment module when the Sight panel flickered several times at the edge of his awareness, like an old television with poor reception.
He blinked.
At the bottom right of the panel, the experience number jumped—
200/200.
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