Chapter 23: Want to dismantle plagiarism? Sorry, a self-destructing anti-tamper lock has been added.

2:00 AM, Huaqiangbei Electronics Street.

The bustling street during the day had long since quieted down, and a rolling shutter door with a "Second-hand Recycling" sign was violently pulled open from the outside.

The tall man and his accomplice crouched and ducked inside, then pulled the iron door shut tightly behind them.

Behind the door was an underground studio hidden from the light, the air thick with the pungent smell of low-quality tobacco and rosin.

Brother Biao was shirtless, the gold chain around his neck gleaming faintly, pacing back and forth in the room irritably.

Liu Jin, the boss of Jinshi Mobile, sat on a broken sofa, cigarette butts scattered all over the floor at his feet.

"Did you bring the stuff back?" Brother Biao strode over, his eyes wide as copper bells.

The tall man wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, took two square boxes out of his jacket pocket, and slammed them onto the table.

"Brother Biao, Boss Liu, I have fulfilled the mission."

The tall man panted, "There were too many people in line, so we paid double to intercept these two unopened ones from the scalpers."

Liu Jin crushed the half-finished cigarette in his hand and sprang up from the sofa.

He grabbed one of the boxes, his gaze as vicious as a venomous snake that had gone hungry for three days.

"Lu Jingming... you've ruined me!"

Liu Jin gritted his teeth, the veins on the back of his hand bulging, "Today, I'm going to strip you down to your underwear!"

He turned his head and looked at a thin old man sitting behind the workbench.

The old man was wearing a yellowed white undershirt, wearing reading glasses, and was picking his teeth with a pair of needle-nose tweezers.

This man was called Uncle Jiu, a famous repair master in Huaqiangbei, claiming there was no piece of foreign junk he couldn't dismantle.

"Uncle Jiu, it's up to you." Liu Jin pushed the box over, "As long as you can dismantle the motherboard structure and the die-casting parameters of that big battery, there will be plenty of money for you."

Uncle Jiu slowly spat out the toothpick and pushed up the reading glasses on the bridge of his nose.

"Don't worry, Boss Liu. I've been in this street for thirty years. I've even taken apart Apple's engineering prototypes."

The old man's tone was full of arrogance, "How much capability can a black lump made by a bankrupt factory have?"

Uncle Jiu took out a utility knife and neatly sliced open the plastic film.

The black xinghai generation 1 lay quietly on the sponge pad, exuding a rigid and rough industrial texture.

The old man weighed it in his hand, and his brows immediately furrowed into a frown.

"It's heavy. They really spent money on the materials for this shell."

He tapped the back cover with his knuckles, "Fully sealed double-layer polycarbonate, seamless, they didn't even leave a gap for a pry bar."

Brother Biao grew anxious and leaned in to ask: "Can you dismantle it? It doesn't matter if the shell is broken; we need the motherboard wiring inside!"

As long as they figured out the internal structure, they could immediately set up an assembly line.

Relying on the deep-tier channels they had accumulated over the years, they could still win back the lost market by changing the shell.

"What's the rush?" Uncle Jiu glanced at Brother Biao and unhurriedly pulled over a high-power heat gun.

"No matter how tightly the shell is welded, it's still plastic, and it will soften when heated."

Uncle Jiu turned on the heat gun and cranked the temperature to the highest setting.

The red heating tube lit up instantly, and hot waves of heat blew onto the thick back panel of the phone.

A pungent smell of burnt plastic soon filled the basement.

After a few minutes, the edges of the originally hard polycarbonate shell finally showed signs of softening.

Uncle Jiu sneered and picked up a special precision steel pry bar.

He followed the almost invisible gap along the edge and forced the pry bar in.

With a muffled "click."

The back cover was violently torn open, revealing the dark internal structure inside.

Liu Jin and Brother Biao hurried over, greed flashing in their eyes.

But after seeing what was inside, both of them were dumbfounded.

"What the hell is this?" Liu Jin pointed inside the phone, his voice cracking.

There were no neat ribbon cables, nor clear capacitors or resistors.

The entire motherboard was tightly wrapped in a thick layer of amber epoxy resin, not even a single solder joint was exposed.

The full-potting process that Lu Jingming mentioned at the press conference was actually real!

"Damn it, is this Lu guy a lunatic?"

Brother Biao was so angry he kicked the table leg, "Using so much resin for potting, does he not plan on repairing it himself later?"

In the minds of this group in Huaqiangbei, potting the motherboard is a huge taboo, because once a problem occurs, the repair cost is more expensive than building a new machine.

Uncle Jiu also put away his look of contempt, his expression becoming serious.

He poked the resin layer with a pry bar; it was rock hard and didn't budge at all.

"No wonder this thing can smash red bricks. This resin hardness is comparable to stone; it completely seals the motherboard."

Liu Jin grabbed Uncle Jiu's white undershirt, his eyes red with anxiety.

"I don't care if it's hard! Uncle Jiu, I'll pay you three times the price! You must peel this glue off for me today!"

As long as he could see the wiring logic, Liu Jin was confident he could build an identical imitation within a month.

Uncle Jiu shook off Liu Jin's hand and hummed with a cold face.

"What's the rush! There is no glue in this world that I can't peel."

He turned and rummaged through his toolbox, pulling out a small medical syringe filled with a light yellow strong acid solvent.

"First drip some acid to soften the surface, then heat it with a heat gun, and just pick at it little by little with a pry bar."

Uncle Jiu operated skillfully, but what he didn't know was that this was not just a normal layer of epoxy resin.

Far away at the Xinghai Technology headquarters, Lu Jingming had long anticipated that these rats hiding in the gutters would come to steal his home.

Under the guidance of the system's blueprints, he had Xia Weiliang arrange a circle of micro self-destruct anti-dismantling short-circuit locks around the core CPU and power management chips on the motherboard before potting.

These circuits were usually hidden deep in the resin and remained in a dormant state.

Once subjected to abnormal continuous high-temperature roasting, or physical pressure exceeding a critical value.

The short-circuit lock would instantly connect to that 20,000 mAh battery, forming a terrifying current overload.

Want to leech off Xinghai's technology? Not a chance.

In the basement, Uncle Jiu was sweating profusely, struggling with that motherboard.

The pungent gas emitted by the strong acid solution made Liu Jin and Brother Biao cough.

"It's softening! The glue is loosening!"

Uncle Jiu shouted excitedly, and the precision steel pry bar in his hand stabbed fiercely into the gap corroded by the acid.

His wrist exerted force, trying to pry off the resin covering the core chip.

Just as the tip of the pry bar touched the internal circuitry.

"Beep —"

A sharp, subtle current alarm sounded from deep within the motherboard.

Uncle Jiu froze, forgetting to move the pry bar in his hand.

"What's that sound?" Brother Biao instinctively took a step back.

Before they could react.

"Pfft!"

Beneath that rock-solid epoxy resin, a dazzling blue-white electric arc suddenly exploded.

Immediately following, the 20,000 mAh battery made a teeth-grinding roar due to the instantaneous overload.

A thick cloud of black smoke mixed with sparks shot directly into Uncle Jiu's face like a volcanic eruption.

"Oh, damn it!"

Uncle Jiu screamed, the precision steel pry bar in his hand was sent flying, smashing into the ceiling.

Sparks flew everywhere, and the sound of crackling current short-circuits echoed in the basement.

The newspaper on the workbench ignited instantly, flames leaping half a meter high.

"Put it out! Damn it, get some water!"

Brother Biao was scared out of his wits, grabbing a bottle of mineral water nearby, not even bothering to unscrew the cap, biting it open with his teeth and splashing it on.

After a flurry of chaotic stomping, the flames were finally put out.

The basement was filled with the pungent smell of burnt plastic, and the visibility was horrifyingly low.

Liu Jin coughed violently, waving his hand to fan away the thick smoke in front of him.

In front of the workbench, Uncle Jiu collapsed onto the floor.

The old man's originally white undershirt had already been burned with several large holes.

His entire face was smoked black like a miner who had just crawled out of a coal mine, with only the whites of his eyes rolling in fear.

Even his expensive reading glasses had one lens shattered.

"Is this a phone or a landmine..."

Uncle Jiu's lips trembled, his hands shaking as if he had been electrocuted, crawling towards the door.

"I'm not taking this job! I won't take it no matter how much you pay!"

Liu Jin didn't have time to deal with the old man.

He rushed to the charred workbench with red eyes.

The xinghai generation 1 that had been pinned with such high hopes was now completely reduced to a piece of charcoal.

A large hole had been burned through the core area of the motherboard, and all the circuits had melted into a pile of scrap metal.

Let alone copying the wiring, even its own mother wouldn't recognize this as a phone motherboard anymore.

"How is this possible!"

Liu Jin grabbed the hot wreckage and roared like a madman.

"That little bastard Lu Jingming actually installed a self-destruct device in the motherboard? How dare he!"

Installing a short-circuit lock in a phone to prevent dismantling? This kind of insane design completely refreshed the bottom line of the Huaqiangbei copycat circle!

Brother Biao looked at the mess on the floor and wiped away cold sweat with lingering fear.

He turned his head and stared intently at the remaining unopened box on the workbench.

"Boss Liu, this approach won't work. Forcibly dismantling this thing might get someone killed."

Brother Biao swallowed his dry saliva, his voice filled with a vicious madness.

"Since we can't copy the motherboard, why don't we pull a bait-and-switch and just copy the superficial appearance?"

Liu Jin turned around, glaring with bloodshot eyes.

"Copy the appearance? We don't even have the blueprints, what are we going to copy with!"

Brother Biao gritted his teeth and slammed his fist on the table.

"Go collect a batch of low-quality thick plastic for the shell, and then force a big battery inside."

"Isn't Lu Jingming selling them for 998? Then we'll copy the cat and paint the tiger and sell them for 499! We'll rob him blind!"