Chapter Two: An Eighteen-Hour Chain of Evidence

Nineteen minutes later, he sent a set of hashes. The bucket had received a replacement package under the same name on September 3. Its signing certificate belonged to an HR risk-control subsidiary under Zhou Xiao. Buried inside the extension was obfuscated logic: if it detected username `chen.mo`, it wrote the `Tide-Mirror` archive to a specified drive, then changed the file date to August 19. The second link: path and actor. Motive remained an inference. At noon, Zhou called again. Su signaled for silence and activated a recording notice. “Two hours left,” Zhou said. “Executive Gu's patience is limited.” “I'll sign,” Chen said, carefully sounding exhausted. “But once I hand over Zero, the leak investigation disappears?”