Chapter 476: The All-Powerful Science-and-Engineering Dog

"That education foundation has been in contact with you this whole time?" Yu Dazhang asked aloud.

He felt Liu Hai's words were drifting off track—by the end it was all complaints about society.

He was a fine young man himself; he couldn't let himself be led astray.

Besides, Chen Yang was still present, so it was better not to say anything vengeful against society.

So he quickly pulled the conversation back on track.

"Yes."

Liu Hai nodded:

"And they made it clear that as long as I kept pursuing my studies, they would keep funding me."

As he spoke, his eyes were gentle—clearly he had no resistance whatsoever to this kind of sponsorship.

But there's no such thing as a free lunch.

Yu Dazhang had once seen a line online that fit this situation perfectly.

The gifts fate bestows have long been priced in secret.

What's more, this kind of sponsorship was itself a conspiracy.

"I guess later on they didn't just simply pay your tuition, did they…"

Yu Dazhang looked at him with a half-smile:

"As your education level kept rising, their financial support for you would surely increase accordingly."

"Once your standard of living was maintained above a certain level, you'd find yourself slowly getting used to this relatively comfortable life."

"Those once-straitened days would grow ever more distant to you, even somewhat unfamiliar."

At this point, a faint note of emotion crept into his voice:

"You'd even be afraid—afraid they'd stop sponsoring you."

Corroding a person with money is an easy thing.

There are even plenty of people who, to maintain their quality of life, choose to take desperate risks and do things that break the law and violate discipline.

Yu Dazhang had seen far too many cases like this.

A young person like Liu Hai, who came from the countryside to study in the city, simply couldn't resist the temptations of society.

Once he'd grown used to a life of neon and revelry, sending him back to the countryside would be harder on him than killing him.

"Yes."

Liu Hai admitted openly:

"Especially after I sat for the graduate entrance exams, their support was no longer just academic."

"They rented an apartment for me, and even hired a life manager specifically to look after my daily living."

"That beautiful manager could even fulfill every need of mine."

A faint smile appeared on his face—a satisfaction and happiness from the heart:

"That was the first time I felt life could be so wonderful, that a person could actually live like this, live so comfortably."

I want that kind of life too… Even Yu Dazhang was getting tempted by what he was saying.

He turned his head to glance at Chen Yang and found him wearing the same look of longing.

"After that came the doctoral entrance exams."

Liu Hai recalled as he spoke:

"On the day I passed the doctoral exams and made it ashore, they privately arranged a celebration for me and gave me a bonus of 500,000 yuan."

His voice grew slightly excited:

"The money was given to me in cash—it was the first time I'd ever seen so much money."

"It was also that time they told me that if I ever joined a certain research project in the future, I had to let them know first."

He didn't need to say what came after—Yu Dazhang already knew.

Half a year ago, Liu Hai passed through layers of review and arrived at the Fifty-Third Institute; before that, he had told the people at the education foundation about it.

"How did you know the location here?" Yu Dazhang asked.

He didn't think Liu Hai had the ability to learn this place's exact location.

Even if Liu Hai had somehow gotten wind of it, he couldn't have sent the information out.

"I don't know the location here."

Liu Hai answered crisply:

"Even now, I don't know where I am."

His answer gave Yu Dazhang a start, as if he hadn't expected the other to give such an answer.

A moment later, Yu Dazhang frowned and asked: "Then how did those people outside find this place? Don't tell me it has nothing to do with you."

"With this." Liu Hai pulled a black plastic box the size of a matchbox from his pocket; at one end of the small box was a short stub of an antenna.

He handed the small black box to Yu Dazhang:

"Satellite-signal locator, hand-assembled version."

Seeing that Yu Dazhang hadn't understood, he continued his introduction:

"Before coming, I split this locator into multiple components—that way it could effectively evade inspection. I even took the power source off it separately."

"After arriving here, I made a new one."

"But to avoid arousing suspicion, this new power source took me over two full months to make."

This is practically hand-crafting a missile… Yu Dazhang could imagine the difficulty involved.

It's not like out there here, where you just buy whatever materials you want.

Every material in the experimental zone has strict standards; one item more or less and it'd be spotted right away.

He couldn't even imagine what material Liu Hai had finally used to make the locator's power source.

Science-and-engineering guys really are omnipotent.

No matter the conditions, they can always create miracles.

"Can this little gadget really transmit a signal out?"

Yu Dazhang picked up the small black box and examined it closely. There was a small switch on the side, and next to it a tiny indicator light the size of a grain of rice.

"Pretty much the same as a satellite phone."

Liu Hai explained:

"Except this locator has a single function — it can only send out a signal."

"I just need to turn the locator on while someone else is using a satellite phone, and the people outside can lock onto my position."

So that's how the location information was leaked... This was very different from what Yu Dazhang had guessed before.

Still, this method was indeed the simplest and most effective.

This way, there was no need to dig up the location information at all — just turn the locator on.

"How did you contact each other after that?" Yu Dazhang asked again:

"Since they snuck in, you must have transmitted some substantive information."

To coordinate from inside and out, a means of contact had to be established; otherwise Liu Hai, as a planted agent, couldn't play his role.

In his view, the rendezvous point was that patch of woods, but the initial method of conveying information wasn't the squirrel.

"A tree hollow."

Liu Hai answered:

"Earlier I helped the squirrel dig several tree hollows, but I only made a special mark beside one of them."

"The mark is very well hidden — only I and the people at the foundation can recognize it."

"Even if an outsider happened to find that tree hollow, they'd absolutely never be able to pick out that special mark on the bark."

That fit... Yu Dazhang immediately strung all the information together in his mind and quickly sorted out the thread.

The other party's first entry into the grove wasn't to infiltrate — it was to make contact.

The reason that person had lingered in the woods so long was that they were searching for the tree hollow with the special mark.

After finding the cipher Liu Hai had left in the hollow, that person was just about to withdraw when the state security team blocked them.

This sudden turn of events led to the first exchange of fire between the two sides in the woods.

Everything before had seemed like coincidence, but in fact every link was tightly connected.

And the reason Liu Hai had chosen to transmit messages in cipher form was clearly the result of careful deliberation.

If someone happened to find the note in the tree hollow and only saw the cipher on it, there was no way at all to tell that important information was being passed.

Something's off... Yu Dazhang suddenly thought of that murdered researcher.

"How did you get Researcher Zhang's vacation information out?" he asked, staring at Liu Hai.

Judging by the timing, not long after Liu Hai had finished making the locator's power source, Researcher Zhang disappeared.

The window was too tight — the two sides simply had no chance to pass information.

And the later firefight in the grove also happened after the researcher's death.

"Researcher Zhang wasn't betrayed by me."

Liu Hai's face went blank:

"I've been curious too — how did he end up exposed?"

(End of this chapter)