The early morning sky over Linhai was cloaked in thick grey, threatening rain but delivering only the kind of oppressive stillness that hinted something deeper was coming. Inside Apex Holdings' central security node—an underground facility coded as Black Shard—Lin Feng stood alone in a sealed analytics room, eyes scanning a wall of live feeds and layered simulations.
Data moved in glacial layers across transparent OLED walls—internal chatter, code pulses, satellite sweeps, behavioral drift patterns—reduced into cold, rhythmic lines. But one feed, buried beneath the others, pulsed differently.
It shouldn't be there.
A hidden uplink embedded in the power calibration logs of a decommissioned logistics node in northern Sichuan. Subtle. Silent. Almost elegant in its audacity. It routed outbound at irregular hours, disguised as telemetry.
Lin Feng didn't call for his cybersecurity lead.
He didn't call anyone.
