The old radio in his grandfather's shed had always been a mystery. Six years old, Li Feng would spend hours with it, oblivious to the summer heat outside. Adults would call him in, tell him to "go play," but the intricate maze of wires, capacitors, and dusty valves was more compelling than any ball game. His grandfather, a patient man, had just sighed and left him to it. Li Feng hadn't known what he was looking for, not then. He just knew there was a system there, a logical progression from electricity to sound, and it was broken. He didn't fuss or cry. He simply picked up a discarded screwdriver, tracing lines of connection, mentally mapping inputs and outputs, trying to find the missing link. He hadn't fixed it that day, but he had understood, fundamentally, how it should work.
That memory, a faint hum of old wood and sparking curiosity, surfaced as Li Feng walked away from Chloe's house. The streetlights flickered on, painting long shadows. His device, tucked securely in his backpack, held a snapshot of Julian's strange network patterns. This wasn't a broken radio, but the core principle remained the same: identify the system, find the anomaly, trace the breakdown. Or, in this case, the unusual function.
He returned to his apartment, the familiar quiet a welcome companion. He plugged the device into his own network, isolating its data stream. The raw logs scrolled across his screen – timestamps, packet sizes, destination addresses. Julian's data was heavily encrypted, a jumble of characters that offered no immediate clues. It was like looking at a locked box.
Li Feng didn't try brute-forcing the encryption. That was inefficient. Instead, he looked for patterns around the encryption. The sheer volume of data being pushed was staggering, far beyond anything a single home network should handle. He cross-referenced the bursts with global internet traffic reports. No corresponding large-scale anomalies were publicly reported. This meant Julian's activity was either incredibly localized, or somehow cloaked.
He began to build a digital fingerprint of Julian's activity. He set up a script to quietly monitor network port usage in his university's public computing labs – just in case Julian was using those resources too. He also started analyzing public data streams for any unusual shifts in computational power demands in the wider Eastbridge area. It was like looking for a ghost by tracking disturbances in the air around it.
Days turned into a focused blur. Li Feng maintained his routines – the physical training, the Forex bot refinements, the occasional, more natural interactions with Maya that still introduced new, unquantifiable variables into his logical world. But Julian's project had become a compelling new layer of his reality. He found himself thinking about it while waiting for coffee, during lectures, even sometimes when he should have been sleeping.
He discovered minor, almost imperceptible spikes in power consumption across a few old, unused university servers he managed to tap into – resources Li Feng knew Julian had access to from a previous, legitimate project. Julian was pushing his project further than just his basement. He was siphoning off dormant computational power, building something distributed, something that needed massive processing power.
The implications began to form. Julian wasn't just working on a typical software project. He was likely building a distributed computing network, a kind of personal supercomputer, using illicitly acquired resources. But for what? To "unveil the new truth"? The phrase still hung in the air, vague and unsettling. Li Feng found no direct evidence of malicious intent, no obvious signs of hacking or data theft from the university itself. It was simply... resource acquisition on a grand, secretive scale.
He compiled his findings into a concise report, a series of data points and preliminary hypotheses, ready for his next meeting with Chloe. The puzzle was far from solved, but Li Feng had found more pieces. And the more he found, the more intrigued he became.