Chapter Forty: The Dagger Revealed

"...This... is a devil's arsenal, one that could drag the entire world into war."

As Lin Feng's voice, heavy with despair, echoed through the "Singularity Security" studio, the whole command center was plunged into a silence more dreadful than death itself.

It was as if all hope had been utterly drained.

Old K, the technical team leader, stared at the dozens of menacing Ouroboros emblems on the screen, his face as pale as paper. With trembling hands, he removed his glasses and spoke in a voice that sounded almost like sleep-talking:

"It's over... We've lost... This thing is completely indefensible... We've lost."

His words were like a needle, bursting the final bubble of hope in every heart.

Wang Zhe collapsed into his chair, his body limp as if all his bones had been removed. He stared at the deep blue crystal chip, his eyes filled with a terror that seemed to seep from his very marrow.

"Inside the NSO Group, it... it doesn't go by 'that thing'." His voice was hoarse, as if scraped raw by sandpaper.

"Its official codename is... 'The Scepter of God.'"

"It means only God is worthy to wield it."

"And we..." He let out a hopeless laugh, "...are merely mortals."

"God?"

Just as everyone was about to surrender to this plague of despair, ready to abandon all resistance, a voice full of arrogance and scorn exploded like thunder in the deathly silence of the office!

It was Lin Feng!

He slammed his palm down hard on the sturdy bulletproof glass "sandbox!"

Bang!

The deafening sound made everyone jolt!

He glared fiercely at the deep blue crystal chip inside the sandbox, the chip that seemed to be mocking them all. In his bloodshot eyes, inflamed by sleeplessness and fury, a fire burned—one fierce enough to consume the gods themselves.

"God?!"

"Screw your so-called god!"

Like a beast driven to madness, he roared at that tiny chip, his words the utmost blasphemy and defiance.

"Today, I want to see for myself!"

"Let's see just how tough your so-called 'Scepter of God' really is!"

This furious outburst was like a shot of adrenaline, piercing the heart of every person on the verge of collapse!

Despair hadn't vanished.

But their fighting spirit was reignited!

Xiao Ran watched the man in the holographic projection—shouting like a madman at a chip—and the heart that had frozen over with fear began to burn hot once more.

She knew this man would never give up.

"Wang Zhe!" She pointed at the once-elite coder on the screen, her voice cold and resolute. "Get up!"

Wang Zhe was so startled by her command that he shuddered.

"I don't care if it's called the 'Scepter of God' or the 'Devil's Toy'!" Xiao Ran's glare was sharp as knives, pinning him in place. "You have only two choices right now! Either sit there like a stray dog and wait for Anderson to 'clean you up,' or stand up like a man and join us to find a way... to smash it!"

Wang Zhe looked into Xiao Ran's unyielding eyes, then at Lin Feng, who had already returned to the console and was furiously typing away.

In his muddied gaze, that spark of courage—long since extinguished—was reignited.

Slowly, he rose from his chair.

And so, in this small, cyberpunk-scented studio, began a battle to slay the gods—perhaps unprecedented in human history.

Lin Feng and Wang Zhe.

Once bitter enemies, now for the first time, sat side by side at the world's most advanced control console.

They began the deepest, most thorough reverse engineering dissection of that infernal "Scepter of God."

"Its core is the 'Chaos Algorithm'!" Wang Zhe, leveraging his familiarity with the NSO Group's development habits, quickly pointed Lin Feng in the right direction. "You can't analyze it with conventional linear logic! You have to imagine yourself as a... madman with no logic!"

"That's my specialty," Lin Feng sneered, his ten fingers dancing across the virtual keyboard in a blur.

He no longer tried to brute-force a solution.

Instead, he built one imaginative, trap-laden, data-mined virtual test environment after another for the "Scepter of God."

They were like two master swordsmen, each recognizing the other as an equal.

One exposed the origins and flaws of each move.

The other answered with the most dazzling, deadly swordplay to counter it.

"No! There's an inducement routine in their 'infection protocol'! If you attack point A, point B will lock instantly!"

"Then let's fool point B too! Mouse! Generate a virtual target disguised as 'point B'!"

Their debates in the universe of technology were fierce and full of mutual disdain, yet at crucial moments, their minds would align perfectly, and sometimes they'd unconsciously high-five in triumph after solving a problem together.

Xiao Ran and everyone in the command center felt like they were watching an alien language unfold.

But they could clearly sense it—a formidable power called hope was slowly coalescing at the fingertips of these two geniuses.

Time ticked by.

Twenty-four hours...

Thirty-six hours...

When exhaustion overwhelmed everyone, when no one could recall how many cans of coffee they'd downed, Lin Feng and Wang Zhe finally, in a seemingly insignificant, heartbeat-maintaining base module, uncovered something bizarre and utterly illogical—a piece of redundant code.

"This... this can't be..." Wang Zhe's face went white as he stared at the code. "This 'heartbeat' calibration protocol... it... it doesn't originate from the chip itself!"

"Exactly!" Lin Feng's eyes flashed like twin supernovae. "It's calling an external signal source! One... coming from the sky!"

He ripped that faint signal from the torrent of data.

Then, he began the final decoding.

A few seconds later.

A simple, almost laughable answer appeared on the screen—

GPS

Global Positioning System

The entire studio and command center fell silent for ten long seconds.

Then, a deafening cheer of ecstasy erupted!

"I understand!" Lin Feng leapt from his chair, pounding the table with a fist like an excited child.

"I get it—all of it!"

He pointed at the screen, screaming wildly into the comms at Xiao Ran.

"The 'Scepter of God' isn't invincible! It's like a deep-sea leviathan, hurled down to earth by the gods, now floundering out of water!"

"It needs a 'coordinate'! It constantly relies on the most stable, omnipresent GPS signal to calibrate its timestamp, to confirm its very existence in this world!"

"If... if it loses the GPS signal..."

He paused, a devilish smile of victory spreading across his face.

"...it will lose all sense of self, unable to confirm who it is or where it is, and descend into the deepest chaos of logic!"

"It will become nothing but... a heap of useless, beautiful... blue trash!"

At last, hope pierced the endless darkness!

They had found it!

Found the weapon to slay the gods!

But just as everyone was reveling in overwhelming joy, Xiao Ran, after her initial excitement, quickly regained her composure.

She looked at Lin Feng and asked the most fatal—and realistic—question.

"How... in a supercity like Shanghai, with tens of millions of people... how can we make the GPS signal... disappear?"

Every smile froze.

Of course.

Lin Feng could disrupt a region's network.

But to erase the GPS signal from an international metropolis? That would require the power to start a real war.

It was an impossible task.

The hope they'd just glimpsed now seemed cruelly snuffed out by reality.

At that moment.

Lin Feng and Xiao Ran locked eyes through their respective holographic projections.

Both saw a glimmer of the same madness in the other's gaze.

"Conventional methods won't work," Lin Feng said quietly.

"Agreed," Xiao Ran replied, just as decisively.

"So," Lin Feng's lips curled into a strange arc, "we can only use... unconventional means."

...

Half a world away, on Wall Street in New York.

Anderson sat in his office, answering a call.

On the other end was his most trusted Chief Technology Officer, David.

"Sir..." David's voice trembled with barely suppressed terror. "'Zhuhong'... he's probing our backup servers, frantically testing our 'GPS calibration' protocol..."

"He... he might have figured it out..."

Anderson slowly rose from his executive chair.

He strode to the massive floor-to-ceiling window, gazing down at the glittering tapestry of city lights at his feet.

For the first time, a true murderous intent flickered in his blue eyes.

"The endgame is near—the dagger must be drawn."

He spoke into the phone, his voice calm but bone-chilling.

"Initiate... the final liquidation protocol."

"Awaken the 'seed' we buried in the Skynet..."

"...Wake it up ahead of schedule."