Chapter One: The Night Mirror Went Live

“If you don't, the database locks in seventeen minutes. You take the blame. Zhao gets promoted. Tomorrow your mother asks whether you worked yourself sick again.” Lu's heart skipped. His mother did ask that. It was not proof of prophecy. “How do you know?” “Because I have watched it happen once.” The clock rolled to 11:59. The error count climbed from forty-seven to sixty-three. Lu changed the parameter and pressed Enter. The monitoring graph stopped falling. Lock waits vanished. Callbacks began to queue properly. Ten minutes later the red alerts blinked out, one by one. Then an internal audit record appeared: Zhao was not offline. He was watching from home, and had tagged the incident as “caused by Lu Chuan's release.”