Chapter Twenty-Five: The Incomplete Puzzle

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Shanghai, in a nondescript safe house hidden atop an aging apartment building.

The curtains were drawn tightly, shutting out the city’s lights and the clamor of the world outside.

Inside, only a suffocating silence remained.

Xiao Ran tore off the tattered hem of her wine-red evening gown, exposing a long gash on her leg where shards of glass had cut deep.

Expressionless, she dabbed at the blood around her wound with an alcohol pad from the first-aid kit, cleaning it bit by bit. The sting of alcohol against raw flesh made her perpetually cold face twitch ever so slightly, yet she uttered not a single groan.

Meanwhile, Lin Feng tossed his miracle toolkit to the floor and fished out a palm-sized device encased in military-grade alloy—a portable signal jammer.

He switched it on and placed it by the room’s only door. In an instant, an invisible electromagnetic shield blanketed the safe house, cutting off all signals and turning the small space into a solitary island, severed from the world.

Only then, as if drained of all strength, he collapsed onto the sofa, gasping for breath. The harrowing escape just moments ago had nearly exhausted him.

Neither spoke.

Yet the air was thick with the tense, fragile euphoria of surviving disaster.

They had escaped the jaws of the beast.

And with them, they’d brought out—the Pandora’s Box capable of destroying everything.

“Let’s begin,” Xiao Ran finally broke the silence.

She had finished tending her wound; her gaze returned to that absolute composure unique to an ace agent.

Lin Feng nodded.

He didn’t play the recording directly. He knew its impact was too great—listening to it now might shatter the already frayed morale of the “Black Chamber” team.

Instead, he distilled the recording into a cold, objective report laced with dense technical jargon.

He encrypted the report, along with the denoised audio file, and sent them to the Black Chamber’s command center intranet.

Command Center, Technical Group.

Old K and his team crowded around a screen, reading lines of text that described “zero-day vulnerabilities,” “indiscriminate infection,” and “chain propagation”—words as cryptic as an alien script. One by one, the color drained from their faces.

“Is… is this real?” a young analyst’s voice trembled. “Does something like this… a ‘god code’… really exist in this world?”

Old K didn’t answer. Slowly, he removed his glasses and began polishing them with a cloth, over and over. For the first time, a flicker of fear shone in those usually timid eyes of his.

He was so shaken that he knocked over his long-steeped cup of strong tea.

Command Center, Financial Analysis Group.

Elsewhere, the financial experts read the conclusion: “Hijack hundreds of millions of mobile phones and launch a DDoS avalanche on the national financial clearing system.”

A distinguished, silver-haired veteran—said to have survived the Asian financial crisis of ’98—suddenly leapt from his chair.

His lips quivered, but not a word escaped.

He understood better than anyone what it meant.

This was no financial crisis.

This would be… financial apocalypse.

...

Safe house.

The focus returns to the safe house.

Xiao Ran, too, had quietly finished reading the report.

She said nothing. She walked slowly to the window, lifted a corner of the heavy curtain, and gazed at the peaceful city night—its tranquility woven by the lights of countless families.

Her figure, in that moment, seemed unbearably solitary.

And unbearably… burdened.

At last, she turned, picked up the crimson encrypted phone—the one that signified the highest authority.

But just as her finger brushed the dial—

A hand, like an iron clamp, seized her wrist.

It was Lin Feng.

“Are you out of your mind?!” Xiao Ran looked up, rage blazing in her eyes for the first time as she hissed at Lin Feng, “Hijacking hundreds of millions of phones! An avalanche triggered by the people themselves! Lin Feng, this is beyond us! This isn’t clandestine warfare—this is war! We have to report this! Now! To Director Wang! To the very top!”

“Report it?” Lin Feng’s eyes brimmed with scorn and pity. “And then what?”

He flung her hand aside and began pacing the room like an enraged lion.

“Then it’s meetings! Studies! Assessments! More meetings! More studies! By the time your bureaucratic machinery grinds through, it’ll be far too late! Anderson will have vanished with his ‘god code’ without a trace!”

“It’s procedure! It’s discipline!” Xiao Ran stood, her aura unyielding, facing him head-on. “We are national security! Not lawless terrorists! We must act within the framework of the rules!”

“Rules?!” Lin Feng barked a humorless laugh, whirling to face her, eyes bloodshot.

“Didn’t you hear Anderson’s words—‘Let your dream of rising be wiped to zero’? This is what he wants: for us to choke ourselves to death in this farce of procedures and rules!”

“Old Lu! My mentor! He died because of your damned procedures! Do you want it to happen again?!”

These words stabbed into Xiao Ran’s heart like a poisoned dagger.

She remembered.

She remembered how, years ago, she’d hesitated for a split second—clinging to the rule of “one shot, one kill”—and her partner had paid the price with his future.

She had no answer.

In that cramped, isolated safe house, the two of them stood locked in a mad standoff.

One, the staunch defender of the rules.

One, the relentless breaker of them.

The fundamental rift in their worldviews, long buried, finally erupted.

Just as it seemed they’d come to blows—

“Beep—Boss!”

From Lin Feng’s tactical watch, the AI assistant “Mouse” chirped, her voice clear and tinged with confusion.

“I performed a frame-by-frame structural data analysis on that recording.

And I found—

…it’s incomplete.”

The words doused their fury like a bucket of ice water.

Lin Feng and Xiao Ran froze.

Lin Feng rushed to his tablet, pulling up the audio’s digital waveform.

There it was.

At the very end, after Anderson uttered the word “zero,” a tiny, unnatural break—a splice, imperceptible to the human ear but unmistakable under Mouse’s forensic scrutiny.

“Damn…” Lin Feng’s gaze hardened as he stared at the waveform. “That old fox…”

“What do you mean?” Xiao Ran leaned over, not understanding the data, but sensing that Lin Feng’s anger was being replaced by something colder, deeper.

“Anderson… did it on purpose,” Lin Feng said hoarsely.

“He wanted us to hear these grand, devastating plans—to make us believe we’d uncovered the whole truth.”

“But at the crucial moment, he cut the recording.”

He looked up at Xiao Ran, and for the first time, the fire in his eyes was shadowed by gravity.

“He told us what he plans to do.

But he didn’t tell us… what he’ll use to do it.”

“That thing—the so-called ‘god code’ bought from Israel’s NSO Group—what is it, really? How does it work? What are its weaknesses? We have… no idea.”

“That is the most vital, missing piece in this Pandora’s Box—

…the incomplete puzzle.”