137: Chapter 137 The Light of Dawn: A Night Raid

"One More Thing"

Mobile Phone Product Manager walked to the center of the stage. The lights dimmed, leaving only a single spotlight shining on him.

"Some say that Chinese enterprises only know how to imitate and cannot create innovative interactions," his voice rang out clearly in the silence. "Today, I want to respond to that claim."

He pulled a pen from his pocket.

It had a slender silver body with a transparent plastic tip at one end and an almost invisible button at the other.

"S Pen? Apple Pencil?" Mobile Phone Product Manager shook his head. "No, we call it the 'lingxi pen'."

He pressed the button on the pen's body, and the phone screen automatically lit up, entering a blank note page.

"Bluetooth 5.0 connection, latency: 9 milliseconds." He waved the pen in the air, and a trail appeared on the phone screen in real-time—not just simple lines, but handwriting with pressure sensitivity. Thick when pressed hard, thin when lightly touched.

"4096 levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt sensing—just like a real pen." He demonstrated: tilting the tip widened the lines, simulating a brush effect.

The audience was dead silent.

"But this isn't just a stylus," Mobile Phone Product Manager emphasized. "This is your third hand."

He demonstrated the first function: standing three meters away, he pointed the pen at the phone and pressed the button—the camera launched and took a photo.

The second function: while playing a PPT, he swiped the pen to the left in the air—page forward. Swiped right—back.

The third function: pointing at an English word and long-pressing the button—the phone translated and read it out in real-time.

The fourth function: during a meeting, he used the pen to record quickly, and the handwritten text was converted into print in real-time, automatically organized into meeting minutes.

"The pen tip didn't even touch the screen." Mobile Phone Product Manager walked to the edge of the stage to let the front-row audience see clearly. "It achieves air operations through ultrasonic positioning and an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit). Built-in battery lasts for 30 days; charge for 5 minutes, use for 2 hours."

He put down the pen and looked at the crowd. "This pen will not be bundled with the phone—it needs to be purchased separately for 399 yuan."

The price flashed on the large screen.

The audience remained silent. It wasn't disappointment, but shock.

"Because we believe that truly useful tools should be owned by those who need them, rather than becoming a burden for everyone," Mobile Phone Product Manager explained. "If you don't need it, you don't have to pay for it; if you do, it will change the way you work."

Price Explosion

"Finally, the price."

Three versions appeared on the big screen:

HX1 Standard Edition (4+64GB): 4,199 yuan

HX1 Pro Edition (6+128GB): 5,599 yuan

HX1 MAX Edition (8+256GB): 6,999 yuan

The moment the numbers appeared, the entire venue fell silent for two seconds.

Then, applause erupted like a tsunami.

It wasn't because the price was cheap—in fact, the MAX version was close to the top-tier price of the iPhone X. It was because, at this price point, Huaxing had provided specs and an experience that surpassed Apple and Samsung.

This was a declaration: Chinese flagships would no longer need to hide behind 'cost-effectiveness'. We can go head-to-head, and we can win.

The applause lasted for one minute and seven seconds. Mobile Phone Product Manager stood on stage, not smiling, just bowing slightly.

"This isn't about cost-effectiveness," he said once the applause subsided. "This is technological equality—allowing everyone, no matter where they are, to use the best technology."

He walked to the very edge of the stage, and the lights brightened again.

"Next month, Huaxing will enter three new markets: Kuala Lumpur, Riyadh, and Moscow." His voice grew powerful. "We are going to those places forgotten by high-end brands, to those markets deemed 'not in need of the best products'. Because we believe everyone has the right to enjoy the progress of technology, regardless of what language they speak, what religion they believe in, or what latitude they live at."

He finally held up the phone. "This is the HX1. This is not the end; it is the beginning. Thank you."

The lights blazed, and music swelled. Mobile Phone Product Manager turned and left the stage, leaving behind a boiling stadium and global media already frantically drafting their reports.

Backstage, Lin Wei handed him a bottle of water. "Manager Lu, it was perfect. We're trending number one on Twitter."

Mobile Phone Product Manager took the water but didn't drink. He walked to the monitoring screen, watching the crowds testing the actual devices below—a fifty-meter queue had formed, with excitement and disbelief on every face.

"Notify the factory to increase production capacity by another 30%," he said. "The launch event is just the beginning; the real test is delivery."

"It's already been arranged. Also, President Su just sent a message." Lin Wei handed over a tablet.

There were only two words on the screen:

"Beautiful."

Mobile Phone Product Manager smiled. This was the highest praise he had ever received from Su Chen.

The launch event concluded for now. The scene shifted to the Network Security Command Center of the Xingchen Academy of Sciences, 18:30 that same evening.

Li Rui stared at the six screens in front of him, his left hand unconsciously twirling a pen while his right hand flew across the keyboard.

At 28, he looked like a college student—thin, wearing black-rimmed glasses, messy hair, and a T-shirt printed with a variant of "Hello World." But in Xingchen Network's internal rankings, he was one of only three "S-class" security engineers.

In the center of the screen was the traffic monitoring chart for the Spark Materials server. Normally, this curve should be as steady as a heartbeat. But now, Li Rui saw an anomaly.

"Heartbeat packet frequency increased by 30%," he muttered to himself, tapping to pull up detailed info. "Source... Google Cloud IP ranges, three data centers in Oregon, Iowa, and South Carolina, USA."

This wasn't inherently suspicious. Spark Materials' overseas customers would access data through cloud services, and Google Cloud was a common channel.

But Li Rui's intuition was screaming.

He pulled up the data comparison for the past 72 hours. The number of heartbeat packets hadn't changed significantly, but the "arrival intervals" showed a subtle pattern: a group every 30 seconds, three packets per group, with intervals of 0.8s, 1.2s, and 0.8s.

Too regular. Too regular to be human operation.

"They are using legitimate requests as cover," Li Rui whispered, eyes glued to the screen. "But what's under the cover?"

He wrote a script and began parsing the contents of these heartbeat packets. On the surface, they were normal identity authentications and status queries. But Li Rui noticed that the "Time to Live" (TTL) fields of certain packets were off—they were 3 less than the normal value.

This meant that before reaching the Xinghuo server, these packets had passed through at least three extra "hops." They could be proxy servers, or...

"Encrypted tunnels," Li Rui's voice turned solemn.

He grabbed the internal phone. "Director Chen, I need level-two monitoring permissions. I suspect a covert attack targeting Spark Materials."

Silent Chen's calm voice came from the other end. "Reason?"

"There's an undercurrent in the heartbeat packets. I suspect someone is exploiting legitimate channels to try and establish a persistent connection."

"Authorization granted. How long to confirm?"

"Ten minutes."

"You only have five," Silent Chen said. "Because at this very moment, the communication system of Xingchen Military Industry just reported 'abnormal latency'."

The call ended. Li Rui's fingers became a blur on the keyboard.

18:45, the attack begins.

While Li Rui was still analyzing the data, the alarm went off.

It wasn't the Spark Materials server he expected, but the internal communication system of Xingchen Military Industry—it was the first to be paralyzed.

On the command center's large screen, the ten node icons representing the military sector turned red simultaneously. Real-time monitoring showed: production line consoles went black, quality inspection systems crashed, and even the internal instant messaging software showed "connection failed."

"It's no accident." Silent Chen walked into the command center. At 45, wearing a white shirt with sleeves rolled to his elbows, his eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses were as cold as ice. "The attackers are testing our reaction time."

He was the supreme head of network security for the entire Xingchen ecosystem. A former director of a key national laboratory, he had resigned three years ago because he "could not tolerate the bureaucracy's suffocation of technological innovation" and was personally recruited by Su Chen.

"Director Chen, the Spark Materials servers are also starting to come under attack," another engineer reported. "But the method is different—it's not paralysis, it's a data theft attempt. They've bypassed the first layer of the firewall."

Silent Chen walked to the central console and pulled up the global map. On the screen, red alerts spread like a plague: Xingchen Military Industry, Spark Materials, the Red Flag Automobile order system, the Xingchen Heavy Industry remote maintenance channel...

"The target is clear," Silent Chen said. "All data nodes related to 'new materials', 'chips', and 'screens'. The attackers know exactly where our core lies."

He picked up an encrypted phone. "Activate Phase One of the 'Great Wall Protocol': physically isolate the core servers. Notify all departments: critical production lines are to switch to manual operation."

As the orders were issued, the atmosphere in the command center suddenly tightened. Over twenty engineers began executing the contingency plan—cutting off external network connections, starting backup power, and transferring core data to offline storage devices.

19:00, the second wave of attacks.

"Director Chen, they are planting backdoors!" Li Rui shouted. "Found the signature of 'Bone Corroder' in the data stream!"

"Bone Corroder"—one of the most famous persistent backdoor programs of the NSA (National Security Agency). Once successfully implanted, it can bypass all conventional detection, lie dormant for long periods, and steal everything. More terrifyingly, it has a self-destruct mechanism: if it detects a removal attempt, it triggers a command to physically burn out the storage chips.

"Are you sure?" Silent Chen walked up behind Li Rui.

"Positive. Look at this code structure—" Li Rui pulled up a section of hexadecimal code. "The pattern of this jump instruction is identical to the NSA toolkit leaked by the 'Shadow Brokers' in 2017. And this string..."

He decoded a segment of binary data, and the result was in English:

"Veni, Vidi, Vici."

(I came, I saw, I conquered.)

But the attack came faster than expected.