Chapter-1
Black-Edges Sorcery Chapter-1
“Hey, there are plenty of repair shops around town, and there’s a PC repair shop just ahead. Where are you going?” a feminine voice said.
“Those shops won’t do. It’s not a hardware issue — it’s the software that needs fixing,” the middle-aged man beside the young girl said, carrying what looked like a computer in a box.
“But there’s nothing up ahead. Did you get the wrong place, Dad?” the girl said.
“He’s a friend of mine, Uncle Dong. You’ve met him before, Zhang Xinyi — though you were very young back then,” the father said.
They entered an alley and passed through a neighborhood of unit dormitories built during the Cold War era. The man went into a building, slipped behind the staircase, and turned right.
“It’s so dark in here. Is this really the place?” Xinyi said.
“Wait, let me check the name on the water meter,” Father said, turning back to look. “The name’s on the meter, alright.”
BANG! BANG! BANG! “DONG YANG, ARE YOU HOME?!” Father knocked on the door, shouting.
“Who’s there?” came a lazy voice, as if its owner had just woken up. “Ah, it’s Zhang… Zhang Ming?”
A lifeless man in nothing but shorts and a pair of slippers appeared at the door. His face was unnaturally pale — actually, it wasn’t just his face. His whole body was pale and skinny, and his hair was oily, as if it hadn’t been washed for a week.
“What brings you here? I haven’t had a visitor in a year,” Dong Yang said.
“I’m here to have my spare PC fixed. It doesn’t seem to read the SFP stick it’s using,” Zhang Ming said, holding out the PC with its DELL logo.
“Come in, then. Make yourself at home — it’s a junkyard anyway, couldn’t get any worse.” Dong Yang led them into the room.
Inside, cheap plastic shelves bent under the weight of anti-static bags lying around, their contents unknown. In the corner were black plastic bags of trash waiting to be taken out. There was also a table with soldering mats, but so many miscellaneous items were piled on top that the soldering station was barely visible. Beside it stood a computer table with a monitor, an empty VESA stand, and another VESA stand holding a laptop tray. The PC hung on the wall, its cables dangling loose below it.
Xinyi looked around like a cat taking in its surroundings, in this one-room, one-toilet, one-kitchen basement.
“Let me see. It’s a DELL — kinda uncommon around here. Big integrator, and those usually have a whitelist. Horrible stuff. Is there a software or system-level override? Or does it need a chip burning?” Dong Yang said, examining the machine Zhang Ming had handed over.
“Nothing I tried seems to work. I think it needs an edit to the ROM, but I don’t have the code,” Zhang Ming said.
“So a card and two modules — just switch out the card. At most you lose 600 yuan, and you save the hassle of hunting down the code, plus all the soldering and stuff. Consider it a lesson about buying e-waste. You’re not so poor that you have to sink all that time and hassle into it,” Dong Yang said. “By the way, who’s the young lady over there?”
“Thought you’d never ask — always focused on the tech side of things, heh. She’s my daughter. You’ve met before,” Zhang Ming said. “Aren’t you going to greet your Uncle Dong?”
“Uncle Dong,” Xinyi said.
“She must be about high school age by now, right?” Dong Yang said, connecting the Dell Precision to a monitor and turning the machine on.
“She just took her exams last week. Based on her past grades, probably a second-tier university. As a humanities student, she’s pretty much doomed,” Zhang Ming said, typing in the machine’s password.
“Can’t be much worse than us, can she? Remember back in the day — I studied fine arts. Not that I can say I’m doing well myself,” Dong Yang said self-mockingly, taking the keyboard from Zhang Ming, opening a terminal, and starting the sshd service.
“Oh, it can be much worse. At least you can stand up and join any big company whenever you want. She didn’t even know how to open WinRAR a week ago, before I drilled her hard for a week,” Zhang Ming said.
“Dong Dong, connect to the Dell PC over SSH on the network. User ZhangMing, password Dong123,” Dong Yang said, glancing at the condenser mic on its stand some distance away.
“Connected. Dell Precision. Do you need me to set up a node?” an AI voice replied from a speaker on the wall.
“No, not needed. There should be a network card in there from the same OEM. Can you find a way to bypass the whitelist?” Dong Yang replied to the machine.
“That’s OpenClaw — the lobster that’s pretty popular recently. It makes terminal tasks and computer management a lot easier. It should take roughly half an hour while she tests all the available options,” Dong Yang explained to Zhang Ming, who looked puzzled.
“I see, so you still haven’t lost your touch from back then, unlike me. Though back then I didn’t know what any of that was about either — all I did was connect cables to the car and download Anaconda,” Zhang Ming said. “It was total chaos. We built mini roads and cars, and even traffic lights.”
“Ah, that was when I was invited by Intel as a guest to your program, right? Too bad Intel cut all the additional funding to AI and other programs after that. Talk about hindsight!” Dong Yang complained. “They scrapped everything after that, in 2016, right before the AI boom.”
“I thought you never liked Intel back then. You were the one with the most complaints about the NUC boards and Atom sticks. I still remember you raging at the power delivery of the little car, saying, ‘With this little power, we’re the bottleneck of edge computing over the WiFi network outdoors. People have to run behind the car while holding a router.'” Zhang Ming said.
“Intel was doomed either way. The NUC and compute stick would never have made it to today’s market. Maybe they’d be a little useful today, for storing a few small GGUF files. We were using a GTX 1050 Ti back then for the compute. With little power outdoors, we still chose NVIDIA,” Dong Yang said. “Should have really bought NVIDIA stock. What I’m mad about is the massive AI layoffs right after AlphaGo won and AI boomed. Just a few more months and our progress would have been seen.”
“Enough about the past. It seems to me you haven’t lost your edge in AI. Ever thought about going back to the career ladder? You were among the first few groups of AI developers, all the way back to 2009. I’m pretty sure you’d do well at any of the big companies,” Zhang Ming said.
“HR at those companies wouldn’t even look at the resume of someone my age. My only place now would be IT consultant at a small company, or network admin of servers. The career ends there, with little growth — like a security guard. Either way, I’d just be lying there rusting,” Dong Yang complained.
“Shit, so your floor is already above most people’s ceiling. Take Xinyi — I’d cry with joy if she could just find a stable, proper job like IT consultant or network admin after university,” Zhang Ming said, looking at Xinyi. “You know the pay for an IT consultant’s assistant is 8,000 yuan a month. That’s better than 99% of jobs in Ezhou.”
“It can’t be that bad. Remember what I always say? Women are 20% more efficient than men in computing. Her ceiling is 20% higher than both of ours,” Dong Yang said. “She’s just unfamiliar with PCs, the way I still struggle with macOS after months of using it. Given enough time, her potential is greater than both of ours — even the first programmer, Ada Lovelace, was a woman. So by nature, she’s a better programmer than either of us.”
“I’ve had enough of teaching her computing since last week. She still has three months of holiday, so why not give her some tutoring? You have empty apartments upstairs, right? She can live there while learning AI from you. Ezhou is such a small city in China that it’s impossible to find a computing tutor with decent skills,” Zhang Ming said.
Author’s note — for readers who don’t understand the story
- Chip burning: means writing to the chip — like “burning” a CD. (The ROM in CD-ROM stands for read-only memory; “burning” really belongs to writable discs. The chips themselves get a proper name in Chapter 2.)
- Lesson for buying e-waste: the original phrase is 洋垃圾 — “foreign trash.” Many enterprise servers and components end up in China, and many come with whitelists and compatibility issues. They’re not your average second-hand goods; they’re closer to e-waste than to second-hand electronics.
- HR not even looking at the resumes of people over middle age: a phenomenon in every tech company in China. No matter how good Dong Yang’s skills are, they won’t look at his resume. IRL example: in July 2026, Bojie Li — a former Huawei “Genius Youth” recruit, USTC PhD, and now chief scientist at Pine AI — publicly complained about DeepSeek’s interview process: two weeks of silence, then an interviewer accused him of copying in the second round. Even brilliant CVs get handled badly.
- Zhang Ming the layperson: he cannot comprehend the logic behind a TensorFlow installation. Back in 2015–2016 there was no official support for TensorFlow on Windows; developers had to set up Cygwin and debug plenty of undocumented errors. To Zhang Ming, everything is chaos.