The flower shop looked romantic to outsiders, It had warm yellow light and pink and white roses that was arranged in neat rows.
And to add more romantic touch, it also has a soft background music that sounded like it came free with the speaker.
But to Chu Lian, it looked like hard labor.
Chu Lian bent over the counter and trimmed a rose, the scissors making a crisp sound. Some of the fallen petals lay all over the table like a horrible crime scene.
"Do you have anything cheaper?" she mimicked in a flat annoyed voice.
The air did not answer her, so she answered herself.
"Cheaper, my ass. You came to a flower shop, not the discount vegetable stall."
She stuffed the trimmed rose with anger into a bouquet and tied it with bright red ribbon. For a moment she forget her anger because the bouquet actually looked very pretty.
Chu Lian tilted her head and admired it for two seconds, then remembered the customer from earlier and rolled her eyes again.
That auntie had walked around the shop three times, picked up every bouquet, complained at every price tag, then finally bought a single carnation like she was donating money to Chu Lian out of pity.
"I am not begging on the street yet," Chu Lian muttered. "Just wait. When I become rich, I will only sell flowers to people who do not ask about cheaper things."
Humph, broke people
Outside the glass window, the sky slowly turned dark. The last rays of sunlight slid down the tall buildings and disappeared. People walked past in a hurry, no one cared about the girl inside the shop talking to herself.
The wall clock clicked loudly. The hour hand climbed over the number eight.
"Closing time," she announced to the roses. "Congratulations, you survived another day of human foolishness."
She locked the door and flipped the sign to "Closed," then she turned off the main lights. The shop became softer and quieter. Only the small lamp above the counter stayed on, cause a warm circle to form.
Chu Lian swept the floor, wiped the counter, checked that the refrigerator was shut properly. From the outside, she was a normal hard-working flower girl.
From the inside, her heart was already slowly opening a different door.
After she put the broom back, she went behind the counter and pulled out a thin black laptop from under a stack of old magazines. The laptop had a small sticker of a chubby rabbit on the back. It looked really cute!
Just like her.
She sat on the stool, plugged in a cable from the router the landlord did not know she had upgraded, and opened the screen.
The light from the laptop immediately lit up her face, cutting away the tiredness from her features and replacing it with sharp focus.
"Alright," she said. "Little Lian's night shift is starting."
On the desktop was a plain folder named "Homework." She clicked it. Inside was not homework in anyway.
Lines of custom tools, encrypted connections, and strange icons filled the screen. She flexed her fingers, then started typing.
A friend from an underground forum had posted a new bounty that afternoon. One hundred thousand yuan, just for pulling a specific set of transaction records out of a private server.
One hundred thousand yuan. She could buy a whole sea of roses with that. Or, more realistically, pay three months of rent and maybe finally replace the broken air conditioner.
Her fingers moved so fast. She connected to a hidden network and bounced her location a few times, then began the usual dance with firewalls.
The server was not as simple as she thought it would be, but then again that was expected. The security here was very strong.
"This smell," she whispered. "Rich dog."
The more expensive the system, the more satisfying it would be when she cracked it.
Time passed quietly. Outside she could hear cars honking and someone cursing on the street. Inside, the only sound was the soft click-clack of her typing.
Finally, a small window popped up.
[Main firewall bypassed. Entering secondary system.]
Chu Lian smiled. "Kneel."
She slipped into the server like a shadow. Folders appeared. Financial logs. Encrypted contracts. As expected she saw things with names that looked boring and expensive.
Her target was simple: transaction records from the last thirty days, marked by a specific tag. She searched by the code she had been given. The system thought for a few seconds, then highlighted a cluster deep inside.
At that moment, something else caught her eye.
A folder she had not looked for it was hidden behind a row of normal files, like it was pretending to be shy.
No name, just a black wolf symbol for icon.
She frowned. "What's this. You think you are mysterious?"
Her cursor hovered over it.
Something told her that she should not touch it. She was here to take the money job, not poke the sleeping boss of the server. But then again curiosity was a famous way to die.
But the black wolf symbol looked at her calmly. It was just a little too clean compared to everything around it, as if it had been placed there by someone who believed no one would ever get this far.
"How arrogant," she muttered. "You think I cannot open you."
She clicked, and squinted her eyes at the screen.
Then a message box appeared.
[Access restricted. Key required.]
A long line of symbols and numbers followed. The encryption made her scalp tingle. Someone had taken their time.
Chu Lian bit her lip and leaned closer. "So fierce."
This was not part of the job. Most hackers would back off here. She could take her money and leave. That was the smart choice.
Buttttttttt she was not always smart at night.
She opened one of her own tools, it was something she had been toying with for months.
"Just a peek," she told herself. "If it does not open, I go back to being a good child."
Her little hacking tool attached itself to the key and began chewing on it quietly, like a hamster nibbling melon seeds.
The progress bar moved slowly, slower than her neighbor Auntie Zhang counting change. Chu Lian stared at it and sighed. "Can you move any faster?"
She opened another window and pulled out the transactions that she needed. One eye was on the money and the other on that mysterious wolf symbol.
Minutes passed and she kept sighing everything second. She groaned frustrated as she slumped on her chair. Being a hacker really wasn't for the weak.
Then suddenly, the progress bar jumped from twenty-five to one hundred. "Wow, that was fast?" she whispered.
The black wolf folder opened. Inside there were rows of subfolders, neatly labeled with dates and names that definitely did not look normal.
It did not look like junk. It looked organized. "Hmm suspicious"
Before her brain could shout at her to close it, her screen flickered. Once. Twice. A small black window appeared.
At first, it was empty. Then a text appeared slowly, one letter at a time,[Who are you]
Chu Lian's breath froze. This was not a system warning. The typing style felt too human.
It paused between words, as if the person on the other side was thinking about her. "Oh no I'm in trouble," she muttered.
She stared at the blinking cursor in the reply box. It blinked, almost judging her. Blink. Blink. "Reply, coward," it seemed to say.
Her heart beated loudly in the quiet shop, "Who are you?" she whispered to herself.
Her fingers floated over the keyboard. They stopped, then returned. They floated again. "What did I just poke? Why is there a person inside my laptop? Is this thing haunted?"
She finally pressed one key. Then another. But her hands shook, as if she was typing to her future murderer.