Iron Fist and Loyal Heart

Chapter 24 The 3-Second Time Window

Ye Xinghe invited Su Xinpei for drinks at a barbecue stall without a sign in the lower district. Such places are common in the lower district—the storefronts facing the street keep their shutters closed during the day, but at night they set up a few folding tables, and once the charcoal fire is lit, thick smoke is drawn out by old exhaust fans, and oil splatters accumulate on the utility poles, forming a layer of black residue. When Su Xinpei arrived, Ye Xinghe had already finished two bottles of beer, and had just opened the third, the foam dripping down the bottle neck onto the folding table, which he didn't bother to wipe.

"Sit down." Ye Xinghe kicked a plastic stool in front of him. Su Xinpei sat down, and the owner brought over a plate of grilled skewers; the smell of cumin was so strong it made his eyes sting. Ye Xinghe pushed an unopened bottle of beer in front of him. Su Xinpei took it, tapped the cap off with the corner of the table, but didn't drink it. He just held the bottle, glancing at Ye Xinghe out of the corner of his eye—Ye Xinghe was someone who never invited anyone for drinks. He had blocked Su Xinpei twice at the street office entrance and held three meetings in the Special Affairs Bureau's conference room, each time always businesslike, speaking like reading a report, even sparing with punctuation. The fact that he invited someone for drinks today meant he had something on his mind.

The two ate in silence for a while. Ye Xinghe already had three empty bottles piled up beside him; he held the fourth one, twirling it in his hand, the bottom scratching fine lines on the plastic tabletop. A streetlamp beside the barbecue stall flickered, and a moth flew against the lampshade, making a soft crackling sound. Then he suddenly spoke, his voice very soft, as if talking to himself or squeezing out something that had been suppressed for too long from between his teeth.

"This afternoon, the Intelligence Analysis Section intercepted a set of encrypted communications from the Northern Alliance. The deciphered message was just one sentence—'Year-end window, Black Sand Strait, synchronous test.' We also heard the term 'synchronous test' in the Northern Alliance signal before the expansion of the crack at the agricultural machinery factory. The Intelligence Section worked overnight to compare and confirmed that this time the signal source was the same transmission base, but the power was increased sixfold. Sixfold." Ye Xinghe placed a beer bottle on the table, tapping the bottom against the plastic surface. "Do you know what sixfold means—enough to activate at least three cracks simultaneously."

Su Xinpei placed his chopsticks on the edge of the plate without interrupting him.

Ye Xinghe continued, "The Northern Alliance has been working on two things recently. One is moving the technology for synchronizing subspace cracks from the laboratory to a real combat platform. The crack you saw at the abandoned factory in Beihe last time was still a single point of natural expansion. Now they can use synchronization signals to control multiple cracks simultaneously, causing them all to enter step expansion in an instant—not one by one, but all at once from all four sides. The other is the military exercise at the end of the year. The military exercise is a pretext; the synchronization test is the real thing. The signals we are now monitoring are becoming more and more frequent, and the frequency is getting higher and higher, like someone is repeatedly ringing the doorbell, waiting to see when we will open the door."

He paused, downed the last gulp of his fourth bottle of beer, and placed the empty bottle at his feet. "What the military fears most right now isn't warp entities. Warp entities can be attacked, contained, and contained. What they fear is the Northern Alliance launching a large-scale attack when the Southern Alliance is at its most vulnerable. The end of the year is that time. The residents of the lower city will be celebrating, factories will be shut down, and the municipal system will only have 30% of its usual manpower on duty. When the entire city's vigilance is at its lowest point, the cracks will open all at once, and warp entities will surge forth. What will we use to block them?"

Su Xinpei nodded. He didn't reply, but instead mentally pieced together the timeline Ye Xinghe had mentioned into his information network. The activity in the cracks of the old Beihe district had subsided in recent weeks. He and Zhou Cheng had reviewed the monitoring data and confirmed that the trough of the fluctuations would likely last another six to eight weeks. If the synchronous test was scheduled for the end of the year, it meant that Beilian was precisely aiming to strike at the very end of the off-peak period—not to capitalize on the momentum, but to wait until the defenders had become accustomed to the low-risk level before suddenly increasing pressure.

Ye Xinghe shook a cigarette out of the pack, put it in his mouth, and tried to light it twice but failed. He then slammed the lighter on the table. "For the past two months, I've been monitoring Beilian's infiltration routes. From the old industrial area of ​​the Lower District to the Central District, there are at least four underground pipe networks that can bypass the military checkpoints. One of them is right under your Beihe Subdistrict Office's jurisdiction—that abandoned municipal drainage main on the east side of the old district. It collapsed once last rainy season, and the sanitation bureau reported it for repair, but no one approved the budget, so no one has sealed it off." Su Xinpei knew about that main pipe; he and Lao Qi had put up warning tape when it collapsed last year, and the tape should still be there.

"I've reported the situation," Ye Xinghe continued, holding an unlit cigarette between his fingers, his voice tinged with weariness. "Director Yan approved the suggestion to strengthen the defenses, but the military region won't approve additional troops—their reason is that the year-end military exercises have already used up all our mobile forces. I only have four field teams, guarding five abnormal areas. The team members on rotation have been working overtime for eight consecutive weeks; their last leave was in September. Four field teams, fifteen people, guarding five lines—the bottom line can be breached in an instant."

He took the cigarette out of his mouth and looked at Su Xinpei. The charcoal fire at the barbecue stall cast flickering shadows on his face. "Political matters are none of our business, little pawns."

Su Xinpei nodded. No reply was needed—Ye Xinghe wasn't discussing politics; he was simply laying bare something he couldn't process alone, seeking someone who could understand to share the silence.

He picked up the bottle of beer he hadn't touched, weighed it in his hand, and put it back on the table. The two sat for a while longer; the charcoal fire gradually dimmed, and the owner came over to remove the empty skewers. Ye Xinghe put his cigarette back in its pack, stood up, patted Su Xinpei on the shoulder, said nothing, and turned to walk towards the other end of the alley. His back looked very thin under the dim streetlights—not physically thin, but the kind of illusion that came from carrying too much weight.

Su Xinpei didn't leave immediately. He sat on the plastic stool, picked up Ye Xinghe's empty beer bottle, and looked at the number on the bottom—it belonged to a production line he didn't recognize. He put the bottle back, then stood up, paid the bill, and walked back along the alley on the east side of the old district. The alley was dark, and occasionally a light rail train would pass overhead on the elevated tracks of the central urban area. The roar of the wheels rubbing against the tracks bounced back and forth between the narrow alley walls, making the old iron pipes piled up at the base of the walls hum.

He stopped at the edge of the old factory area on the east side of the old district. In the distance, the searchlights of the military checkpoint slowly swept across the wall, revealing the dark outline of the workshop behind it. He stood there for a moment, recalling Ye Xinghe's words about "little chess piece" at the barbecue stall, and then he thought of the "unresolved" complaints from three years ago that he had seen in the archives during the day—the complainants in the files and Ye Xinghe were actually on the same side: one repeatedly pressing a doorbell that would never be answered in the darkness.

He turned and walked towards the apartment.

It was late at night when he returned to his apartment. He changed into slippers, hung his coat on the back of a chair, then walked to the center of the living room, took off his shirt, and assumed a stance in the dim light of the table lamp. His feet were shoulder-width apart, knees slightly bent, hips back, and spine straight. A warm sensation rose in his Guanyuan acupoint after about ten minutes, ascending along the Ren meridian and returning to his Dantian along both sides of the spine. After completing a full cycle, he focused his consciousness into his Dantian, then stood still and practiced tendon-strengthening exercises for half an hour—not the explosive style of the Three Hundred Punches, but a slow, controlled twisting and releasing of the tendons using a secret hand-through-the-sleeve technique. Each muscle twisted along the force line from the ankle to the fist, pausing briefly at the end before slowly releasing. A few experience points appeared on the panel, but he didn't count them.

The tension from the muscle-strengthening exercise dissipated the feeling that had been building up in his chest while sitting at the barbecue stall. It wasn't anxiety—it was that feeling of knowing something is going to happen but not being able to stop it, not being able to walk away, only being able to wait. Ye Xinghe said that politics wasn't something small pawns could control, but Su Xinpei knew that the cracks didn't care who the big pawns or the small pawns were. The cracks would only tear open from the thinnest point. The Lower City was the thinnest point—old buildings, elderly and infirm residents, understaffed street offices, and field teams unable to work overtime. If the Northern Alliance launched a synchronized attack at the end of the year, the first to suffer wouldn't be the military defenses, but the residents of the old Beihe district, the vendors at the market, the elderly person with the dog in the tenement building, and the child in the bungalow area. The list of "retired" people that Aunt He had compiled before her retirement was still in a folder at the bottom of his workstation.

He didn't want to add any more names to the list.

The next day at work, he sat down at his desk, turned on his computer, and first processed a few routine documents according to his usual procedure. Then he pulled up the map of the Beihe Subdistrict Office's jurisdiction and used drawing software to mark each item on a new layer: addresses of abnormal complaints were marked with blue dots, and active crack areas were coordinates in the Special Meteorological Bureau's monitoring data where fluctuations exceeded environmental thresholds, marked with red patches. He spent more than an hour checking the addresses of the low-income households and elderly people living alone one by one, and used gray lines to outline potential evacuation households that needed priority attention around the densely populated red dot areas. After marking, he examined the overlapping parts of the layers—several blue dots on the east side of the old district were right at the edge of the red patches, and the distance between the gray boxes and them was so close that the danger could be seen without a ruler. He set this layer to private, the file name was a string of meaningless codes, and the password and key were stored separately. He did not intend to submit this map to anyone for the time being—not to hide it, but because before it could independently convince a formal dispatch order, an unencrypted heat map on any desk might cause unnecessary panic before action could be taken, or be intercepted by financial observers.

After returning from the abandoned factory in Beihe, he kept pondering a problem: the Beilian agents' infiltration speed was too fast, and the Special Affairs Bureau's response time couldn't keep up. The reason for the long response time was that the standard procedure required collecting abnormal signals to the command center, going through hierarchical review, and then issuing a dispatch order—in the middle of the night, completing these steps could take six hours. But if someone in the neighborhood office could identify abnormal signals on the spot, the response time would be compressed from hierarchical approval to the radius of a few streets for the field team. He didn't need to observe every point; he only needed to narrow his observation range from the "entire city" to the few streets he would walk through every day. Monitoring all the cracks was unrealistic, but as long as he focused on keeping a close eye on one window, the residents near that window could escape sooner.

He was most familiar with the first window: the east side of the old Beihe district, stretching from the alleyway he passed every day on his way to and from work all the way to the shantytown behind the wall of Beihe No. 2 Primary School. He wrote the latitude and longitude of the window on a notepad, circled it with a red pen, and then connected it with a black line to the unsealed abandoned drainage main that Ye Xinghe had mentioned.

After writing the last word, he placed the pencil on the sticky notepad. Sunlight streamed through the smog, illuminating his workstation and casting the shadow of the clivia on his desk next to the keyboard. He stood up, went to the tea room, and got a cup of hot water. He microwaved it for a minute; the water wasn't boiling, just lukewarm. He placed the cup next to the shadow. He didn't know if Ye Xinghe could get reinforcements, whether the military would approve it, or how many testing sites the Northern Alliance had set up at the end of the year. But he knew how wide the alley on the east side of the old Beihe district was, which elderly person was most likely to be awakened at night, and which fire escape route was available for emergency evacuation in case of an emergency.

Before heading to Tiegutang in the afternoon, he took a detour to the east side of the old district. Standing at the corner of a brick wall in a side alley, he used the angle to avoid the light from the guard post and ran his palm along the wall. There was a loose red brick at the base of the wall. He squatted down, pulled the brick out, and looked at it—there was a hollow space behind the brick, and he could see the concrete ceiling of the dry pipe. He put the brick back, memorized its location, and dusted off his hands.

As he emerged from the side alley, Ye Xinghe's image of a "little chess piece" echoed in his mind again. He internalized the phrase—Ye Xinghe wasn't complaining, but describing a fact. They were indeed little chess pieces, but little chess pieces had their own moves. The windows with lights on were only chest-high above the alley, all within earshot, and even the latest-moving households would be asleep before midnight. All he had to do was stand at the closest point to this crack in the night, watching the fire as it slowly cooled, until the very last second his boots touched the ground.