Chapter Four: A Thirty-Million Order—Paid First to My Enemy

YaoCore could embargo new products, but it still had to package this batch—or release its packaging parameters and interface masks to Spark. Wanqing had already requested a court preservation order and contacted three domestic packaging houses. If YaoCore delivered, Sinkstar got its first material. If it refused, Sinkstar got the more valuable process interface. Han chose a third path. On the seventeenth night, 3,200 finished chips arrived with perfect certificates. The moment Chenzhou approached their climate-controlled cases, he heard faint gasps. “Clock drift approaching.” “Failure at hour nine hundred ninety-seven.” YaoCore had buried mobile metal ions inside the packages.