One in Twenty-Three Million

Boheng Law Firm was in an office building in Lujiazui.

Han Luyi stood before the floor directory in the lobby and checked his watch. It was two minutes to ten in the morning. He had deliberately changed into a clean shirt today and smoothed down his hair. A law firm in Lujiazui was not the sort of place to enter wearing sportswear.

The elevator stopped on the nineteenth floor.

The reception area was designed with fully transparent glass walls. A white calla lily sat on the black walnut reception desk, while a row of lawyers' photos and practicing qualifications hung on the wall. A gold nameplate bore the words "Boheng Law Firm."

"Hello, do you have an appointment?"

"Han Luyi. I have a ten o'clock consultation appointment with Attorney Gu Siyue."

The receptionist checked the computer, then nodded. "Attorney Gu is waiting for you in the meeting room. This way, please."

Outside the meeting room, the receptionist knocked on the half-open door.

"Attorney Gu, your ten o'clock client is here."

The meeting room was small, with a six-seat conference table. Half of the Lujiazui skyline was visible through the window, and someone sat at one end of the table.

She wore a black suit and white shirt. Her long, straight black hair was tied into a low ponytail, with barely a stray hair out of place. Beneath thin-rimmed glasses was a sharply defined, very fair face, her lips pressed into a straight line.

Her entire person resembled a meticulously formatted legal document.

Gu Siyue looked up from behind her laptop, glanced at him, and stood. Without a smile, she merely gave a slight nod and gestured toward the seat opposite her. The entire sequence took less than two seconds before she sat back down.

"Please, sit."

Han Luyi sat down. Zhang Haoran had said she was "a little cold." This was a little?

"Attorney Gu, I—"

"Han Luyi, formerly an algorithm engineer at Prosperity Group, P7. Laid off this February. Consultation focus: data compliance. Notes say technical whistleblowing." She turned a page in her notebook. "I checked your public background."

Han Luyi blinked. "...You're efficient. I don't even need to introduce myself."

"Consultations are billed by the hour." Gu Siyue closed her laptop and finally looked him directly in the eye. "Go on. What's the situation?"

Han Luyi opened Sight.

He looked a little longer, and the panel expanded with more details.

[Emotion: Businesslike (Hidden: Slightly curious)]

[Assessment: Another programmer?]

[Logical reasoning ability: Outlier]

Another programmer? Those five words, paired with a question mark, conveyed a great deal. It meant quite a few programmers had come to consult her, and her overall opinion of the group was not particularly high.

Sight categorized people with labels. Han Luyi had seen "Excellent" and "Fairly Strong," but never one directly marked "Outlier." The data had deviated too far from the normal distribution for Sight to assign it a rating.

He closed Sight.

"I found some data anomalies in an app I downloaded through public channels."

"Which app?"

"Flash."

Gu Siyue's expression did not change at all. She picked up the pen on the table.

Han Luyi had prepared his explanation in advance. He could not expose his cheat ability, so he had to package "Sight scanning" as "technical analysis." Fortunately, he did have the technical skills to support that claim.

"After downloading Flash's app, I made some technical observations out of professional habit. The app's network request behavior during operation was noticeably inconsistent with the scope of data collection declared in its user agreement."

"Specifically?"

"Two aspects." Han Luyi raised a finger. "First, privacy theft. The app actually accessed contacts, text message records, and GPS tracks, but the user agreement only disclosed basic device information. It was serious overcollection, and the private data was encrypted and sent to IP addresses in Southeast Asia."

"Southeast Asia?" Gu Siyue put down her pen and leaned closer over the table.

"Second, data fraud," Han Luyi said. "I decompiled the APK. The maximum auto-increment primary key for user IDs was around twenty-three million, but the company claims eighty million registered users. Then I used a crawler to collect active-user data from public pages. A huge number of accounts showed highly identical behavior patterns, characteristic of machine-generated activity. Even more absurdly—the company claims thirty-five million daily active users, more than its actual registered users. All the excess ones are fake."

"Scope of impact?"

"The privacy data of roughly twenty-three million registered users was stolen. The valuation basis for its one-billion Series B funding round was built entirely on fake data."

"What evidence do you have for what you're saying?"

"APK packet-capture records, crawler data, and behavioral analysis reports. Everything has been anonymized. It only involves the app's public behavior. I never touched any backend code or servers."

"Are you sure?"

"I'm sure. Everything I did was within legal bounds—downloading a public app, decompiling a publicly available installation package, and scraping data from public pages. It was all standard security research."

Gu Siyue looked at him for several seconds.

For those few seconds, Han Luyi felt as if he were being scanned by an X-ray.

"Even assuming your technical abilities are sufficient, technical ability and legal safety are two different matters. Do you know the scale of the company Flash is?" she asked.

"One billion in Series B funding, with a valuation of ten billion."

"That's right. Ten billion. They have a legal team of at least twenty people, plus outside counsel. If you report them under your real name, they have a hundred ways to make you regret it."

Gu Siyue placed both hands on her notebook, fingers interlaced, and looked at him.

"I need to ask you a few questions."

"Go ahead."

"Do you have an employment relationship with Flash?"

"No."

"An investment relationship? A competitive relationship? A commercial dispute?"

"None."

"You are not a Flash employee, not an investor, not a competitor, and not even a party whose interests Flash has directly harmed." Gu Siyue's pace did not change, but every word tightened around him. "You are a programmer who was just laid off by another company, and now you intend to report a company valued at ten billion."

She paused.

"Why?"

It was a very direct question.

To a lawyer, a client's motive determined whether a case was worth taking. Someone with no conflict of interest who wanted to poke a ten-billion company in the eye was either a fool, a saint, or had reasons he was not revealing. None of the three were good cases to take.

"You said I'm not a party whose interests were directly harmed. That's not correct," he said.

Gu Siyue raised an eyebrow slightly.

"I downloaded Flash," Han Luyi said. "My phone has my friends' phone numbers, my chat logs, and records of where I go every day. From the moment I installed that app, that data was stolen and sold into some unknown gray-market chain."

He paused.

"I'm one of those twenty-three million people."

Gu Siyue said nothing.

"One of my buddies works in self-media. Last month, he placed an ad on Flash. Because the data was inflated, the results were far below expectations. The brand refused to pay the remaining balance, and he had to cover more than ten thousand yuan in production costs himself. It all went down the drain, and he only makes eight thousand yuan a month." Han Luyi's tone remained calm. "He doesn't have the technical ability to prove Flash committed fraud. What could he do? Complain to customer service? They told him to 'optimize the quality of his content.'"

Gu Siyue lightly tapped her notebook with a finger.

"I was just laid off the day before yesterday," Han Luyi said. "I won't say much about why. I just went through the whole thing where a big company bullies a little person. Flash is doing the same thing. I'm the big company, I control the data, and the users are little people. I can use it however I want, because you can't see it."

He looked into Gu Siyue's eyes.

"But now I've seen it."

The meeting room fell silent for several seconds.

Gu Siyue watched him for a while, then picked up her pen and reopened her notebook.

"Out of twenty-three million people, only you came to find a lawyer."

"Out of twenty-three million people, one of me is enough."