In the evening, before the floor-to-ceiling window, a tall woman held her phone, her brows and eyes revealing a faint, cold expression. The call had already been going on for half an hour.
Tap, tap.
The office door was knocked on. The woman walked toward the door while answering the phone.
Pulling open the door, she met her subordinate’s anxious gaze head-on: “Director Su.”
“What happened?” Su Zhi asked with her eyes.
“The server crashed,” the subordinate said softly. “We’ve been troubleshooting for half an hour, but we can’t find the problem.”
Su Zhi frowned, her hand holding the phone tightening a bit before she terminated the call: “Let’s leave it at that for now. We’ll talk later.”
She tucked her phone into her pocket without excessive blame, taking the lead as she stepped out of the office. Her high heels struck crisp sounds against the floor.
The hallway lights elongated her figure. Su Zhi walked in front while her subordinate followed closely by her side, reporting at an extremely fast pace: “It suddenly locked up entirely. Traffic monitoring showed no abnormal peaks before the crash. Initial reboots were ineffective, and none of the routine logs pointed to anything specific.”
Listening as she walked, Su Zhi’s brain began to spin at high speed, filtering out key information. Her profile contours appeared even more three-dimensional under the light and shadow. When deep in thought, the aura she exuded was cold, stern, and oppressive.
The machine room door opened, hitting them with a mixed rush of machine cooling fans and tense air. Several screens flickered with pitch-black error codes, and a few engineers surrounded the core server with solemn expressions.
“Director Su.”
Seeing Su Zhi enter, everyone successively cleared a path. Su Zhi nodded in acknowledgment and walked straight to the main control desk, her gaze sweeping across the glowing red monitoring panel.
“Give me the logs, starting from fifteen minutes before the crash: all service interaction logs, system logs, and network traffic logs, in full.” Her voice was clear. As she spoke, she leaned down, her slender fingertips tapping a few keys to bring up the underlying monitoring interface. “Where is the DBA? Immediately check if there were any abnormal lock-waiting chains or transaction buildups at the exact moment of the crash.”
“Ops, check whether other non-critical services on the same rack are affected. Confirm if it’s a single-point failure or a spreading issue.”
Command after command was issued. The previously restless and chaotic machine room staff quickly went into action, each performing their duties. The sounds of typing, communication, and equipment operation merged back into an orderly, rushing stream.
Su Zhi stared intently at the screen, her dark pupils reflecting the rapidly scrolling data stream. Her fingertips occasionally paused to mark a certain abnormal log segment in red or quickly switch to another monitoring view for comparison.
Half an hour later, the server returned to normal.
Outside the window, the city’s neon lights had fully illuminated, reflecting on the giant floor-to-ceiling window and intertwining with the cold light of the server screens. Su Zhi let out a breath, her stern face looking slightly pale.
She raised a hand to massage her temple. After a long period of high concentration, a dull, throbbing pain emanated from her temples. When she spoke, her voice also carried a hoarse quality born of intense thought: “The root cause was a deadlock in the distributed locks of the cache cluster. The chain reaction dragged down the transaction thread pool. Operations log this: tomorrow morning at ten o’clock, fault retrosect meeting.”
“Thank you for the hard work tonight. Everyone, go back and rest early.”
With that, she took the lead in standing up and walking out of the machine room. The sound of her high heels echoed once again in the empty corridor, slower than when she arrived, yet still resounding with a firm impact, cutting off the sparse discussions behind her.
“Tomorrow’s retrosect meeting, the Operations Department is done for.”
“You said it! Did you see the look on Director Su’s face when she walked out?”
“I heard the layoff list has already been finalized. With such a massive server failure tonight, who knows if it will add to it.”
The throbbing pain in her temples intensified. Inside the empty elevator, Su Zhi stood straight. Cold sweat seeped through her white shirt, outlining her slender spine.
Ding, Basement Level 1.
The elevator doors opened, and the garage lights flickered. Su Zhi rounded a corner and was just about to move forward when a harsh screech ripped through the dimness of the garage behind her. A blinding beam of light instantly pierced the gloom, and a speeding car body, like a silent steel beast, rushed out from her side and rear without warning, plowing straight toward her.
The next second, Su Zhi lay on the cold ground, the mesh-like fragments on the car window and the fierce gaze of the man completely severing her consciousness.
“The vegetable plant had an accident. Did you guys see it?”
“Saw it, saw it! Server paralyzed, technical director advocated for layoffs, got hit, and ended up in the ICU!”
At 11:00 PM, when Ming Can finished her part-time job and headed back, several roommates were huddled together looking at their phones.
“So lively tonight?” Ming Can was somewhat surprised. While surprised, she also leaned over. “What are you looking at?”
Seeing her approach, her roommates consciously shifted to make space, and one of them dragged the content of a trending search post right to the front: “Here, see for yourself!”
Ming Can glanced at the screen featuring the cold, elegant woman in a white shirt with long wavy hair. Her first reaction: quite sexy.
To join the conversation, she swiped the screen and quickly scanned the post’s content.
Qianyu Technology’s Technical Director, Su Zhi, advocated for economic downsizing and fired a veteran programmer. Unable to withstand the pressure of car and house loans, the programmer drove his car straight and rammed her into the ICU.
The comments section had mixed public opinions. Some discussed the economic situation, others sympathized with the middle-aged uncle, and some even exposed Su Zhi’s usual behavior at the company, nine out of ten saying she was cold-blooded, ruthless, devoid of human understanding, and deserved to be hit.
Seeing Ming Can finish scrolling, a roommate couldn’t help expressing her view: “You tell me, these capitalists nowadays, with the bad economic situation, they just squeeze employees and practically force people into desperate corners. Why bother?”
Ming Can smiled faintly: “You already called them capitalists. Isn’t being cold-blooded pretty normal?”
“Hmph!” Her roommate said angrily. “She advocated for layoffs, so she deserved to be retaliated against! With all these job interviews these days, I get annoyed just seeing these capitalists!”
Ming Can petted her roommate’s head soothingly: “How did the interview go?”
“How else could it go? There are only so many slots to begin with, and the ones laid off from those big tech companies aren’t even enough to fill them, let alone us fresh graduates.”
They were both computer science students in their fourth year, facing the pressure of graduating and finding jobs. Currently, the IT job market environment was terrible, and resumes sent out sank like stones in the sea.
Her roommate looked at Ming Can as she spoke: “Can, are you still doing that caregiving part-time job? You should start preparing your resume. The further along it gets, the harder it is to find something, though your technical skills are good, unlike us.”
Ming Can smiled. She wanted to prepare her resume too, but her circumstances didn’t permit it. Just as her roommate wanted to urge her further, Ming Can’s phone buzzed in her pocket. She pulled it out and glanced at the caller ID.
Gong Que, a doctor at Jiahe Hospital, an older sister with a cold exterior but a warm heart. Many of Ming Can’s previous hospital part-time jobs had been introduced by her.
Ming Can answered the call, her voice carrying a bit of familiarity and a soft, tingling warmth: “Hello, Lao Gong, why are you calling me in the middle of the night?”
The other end autonomously ignored her joke and went straight to the point: “I have a patient here who recently ran into some trouble and is in a pretty bad emotional state. Do you have any other part-time jobs on your hands right now? Can you help take care of her for a few days?”
Ming Can hesitated between preparing her resume and making money for a few seconds, just a few seconds, before asking: “What do you mean by ‘pretty bad emotional state’, Lao Gong?”
“The patient’s name is Su Zhi, formerly a tech company director. An accidental car accident caused her to become paralyzed from the chest down, occasionally accompanied by incontinence issues. The psychological gap is too huge, and she needs professional care.”
“Wait a minute!” Ming Can interrupted her. “Is that Su Zhi who’s been trending heavily lately?”
The other side replied with flat indifference: “Yes.”
Hearing the response, Ming Can froze for a moment. After recovering from the buffer, she gave a dry cough: “Ah, sorry, Lao Gong. I just realized I seem to have other things to busy myself with recently.”
“Triple salary, paid in advance!”
“Deal!” The little white rabbit who was hesitant in the previous second instantly lit up with a wolfish gleam in her eyes the moment she heard about triple the salary.
“Tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, Inpatient Department, 17th Floor, VIP Room 3. I’ve organized the patient’s detailed information and nursing key points and sent them to your email.”
Ming Can: “Remember to advance the salary too.”
Gong Que sighed softly.
With the matter settled, early the next morning, Ming Can arrived at the hospital half an hour early. She had to admit that the technical director was really hot right now; news about her could be seen everywhere in the hospital.
Walking ahead of Ming Can, two nurses walked side by side, discussing in low voices.
“That patient in Room 3 is truly cold-blooded. Yesterday afternoon, the perpetrator’s family led a child over to apologize. Both mother and daughter were kneeling by the hospital bed, and that woman directly hurled a cup, which almost hit the child on the head.”
“Geez, that vicious? The adults are the ones who made the mistake, why take it out on such a little kid?”
“Exactly.”
Listening to the two nurses’ sighs, Ming Can walked forward thoughtfully and soon reached Room 3. Just as she prepared to knock, click.
The crisp sound of a ceramic cup shattering came from inside the room, followed by a woman’s voice screaming in a cracked pitch: “Get out! I told you to get out, can’t you hear me?!”
Ming Can’s outstretched hand paused. A few seconds later, the ward door opened, and an elderly caregiver backed out from inside.
“Auntie,” Ming Can greeted politely, introducing herself. “I’m Ming Can, the new caregiver.”
The elderly caregiver glanced at her, a tired look of sympathy emerging on her face: “The one inside, you better be careful with her. She’s very difficult to serve.”
Ming Can nodded. Seeing her react rather dully, the elderly caregiver subconsciously leaned closer and lowered her voice to warn: “She soiled her pants, but won’t let anyone clean it up. In this middle-of-summer weather, it stinks to high heaven.”
Ming Can stood there in silence.
The elderly caregiver gave her shoulder a hesitant pat before leaving. Ming Can processed the information, took a deep breath, built up her psychological defenses for a few seconds, and then pushed the door open to go in.
True to the caregiver’s words, there was indeed some odor inside the room, though not quite as exaggerated as described. In comparison, the shards of the glass cup shattered beside the bed appeared much more glaring. And then there was the woman on the hospital bed.
Her frail body was submerged under the bedsheets, her long neck exposed with pale skin where faint bluish veins could be seen extending all the way to her slightly sunken collarbones.
Ming Can’s gaze traveled upward, and the moment she took in the contours of the woman’s facial features, her heart experienced a slight shock.
She wasn’t as sharp as in the photos; instead, she possessed a sort of fragile aesthetic. Her long wavy hair was scattered messily across the pillow, making her cheeks appear even more sunken. Her thin lips were pressed tightly together, and above her high nasal bridge, that pair of eyes, even though closed, still retained a chilly aura that kept people a thousand miles away.
“Hello,” Ming Can called out under the pressure.
Two seconds later, the woman on the bed slowly opened her eyes. A gaze cold as glacial ice tracked the voice and landed on Ming Can’s face. She didn’t say a word, just stared straight ahead.
Ming Can’s spine tingled. Even though she had prepared herself psychologically just moments before, her mind was still completely blank at this moment, and the lines she had prepared vanished cleanly.
“Um…” She tried her best to organize her words, but the other person didn’t give her a second chance to speak, dropping three words from a cold and hoarse throat.
“Get lost!”
Author’s Note:
Starting a new novel, babies! Didn’t expect that, did you?