The pressure from the anonymous text and the sudden "customs flag" on the Azure Corp shipment was a two-pronged attack. The feeling was of walls closing in, the invisible hand of the Huo empire tightening its grip on his family's throat.
His father's frantic calls had become a constant, desperate drumbeat in his ear.
Finally, he couldn't put it off any longer. He drove to the Feng family estate, a grand but faded mansion that felt more like a museum of past glories than a home. He found his father in the study, a decanter of amber liquid on the desk, his face pale and drawn.
"The port authorities are immovable," his father said, his voice raspy. He wouldn't meet Liam's eyes. "They're citing national security protocols. It's a lie, a fabrication. They're going to bankrupt us, Liam. For good this time."
"This isn't random, Dad," Liam said, his voice low and steady. "This is a warning. It's because I'm digging into them. Into Huo. Into what happened five years ago."
The Feng Patriarch flinched as if struck.
"Stop," he whispered, the word brittle. "You don't know what you're dealing with. You think this is a business rivalry? This is not a game you can win."
"Then tell me what it is," Liam pressed, his frustration boiling over. "Tell me about the deal you made. It wasn't just a bailout, was it? What did they buy from you?"
His father finally looked up, his eyes swimming with a shame so profound it felt like a physical blow.
"They didn't just buy our company, Liam," he confessed, his voice cracking. "They bought our silence. My silence."
He took a long, shaky breath. "I was on the periphery of their… project. The one run by the Matriarch. I saw things. Financial irregularities, shell corporations funding 'research' that had nothing to do with technology. I saw the list of 'candidates' they were vetting. Talented, promising people. Liana Meng was one of them. I knew something was wrong. But I was weak. Our company was failing, and they offered me a lifeline."
He stared into his glass. "The price for that lifeline was my signature on a non-disclosure agreement so ironclad it might as well have been my own death warrant. And a promise to forget everything I saw. To never speak of 'Project Phoenix' again."
The confession landed with the force of a punch to the gut.
My father. Not a victim, an accomplice, trading his conscience for financial security.
"They saved us so they could own us," Liam said, the words coming out cold and sick.
"They own us," his father corrected, his voice a ghost. "Don't make them remind us again, son. Please."
Liam left the study, his father's plea echoing in his ears. But it was too late. He couldn't un-know what he knew. He couldn't abandon Elara. The shame he felt for his father's weakness was eclipsed by a burning resolve to not make the same mistake.
That night, back in the relative safety of his cluttered office, he prepared for his digital assault. The napkin from Marco Tanaka felt like a talisman in his hand. This was a suicide mission, but it was the only path forward.
He powered on his custom rig, initiating a series of security protocols that would mask his location, bouncing his signal through a dozen servers across the globe. He typed in the string of code Marco had given him. It wasn't a password, but a complex query, a digital question posed to the void.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then, his screen flickered, and a simple, text-based interface appeared. No graphics, no logos. Just a single, blinking cursor.
The first gate. He was in. Or at least, in the digital antechamber.
He began to probe, using his knowledge of corporate network architecture to search for the server Marco had described—the "ghost," the legacy system. He found traces of it, a partitioned-off section of the Huo network, walled off by layers of what looked like obsolete but incredibly dense encryption. It was like finding a medieval fortress hidden inside a modern skyscraper.
He initiated a breach protocol, a piece of software he'd designed to find and exploit weaknesses in older systems. The program hammered against the firewall. Code scrolled rapidly down his screen.
I'm making progress.
A progress bar appeared:
ACCESSING ARCHIVE... 10%... 20%...
His heart pounded in his chest. He was close.
Then, at 37%, everything stopped.
The screen went red. A new line of text appeared, stark and chilling.
ANOMALY DETECTED. DEFENSE PROTOCOL PHOENIX-AEGIS INITIATED.
Before he could react, his own system began to fight him. A flood of malicious code poured through the connection, a digital counter-attack. Alarms blared from his speakers. His firewalls were being systematically dismantled. It wasn't just locking him out; it was trying to destroy him, to wipe his drives clean and brick his machine.
He slammed his hand on the kill switch, physically severing the hardline connection to his router.
The room was plunged into silence, the only light coming from the dying glow of his monitor. He had failed. And worse, he had announced his presence in the most spectacular way possible.
He rebooted his machine from a clean backup, his hands shaking slightly. He had saved his hardware, but the attack had been a brutal demonstration of their power. As his system came back online, he checked the fragmented logs from the attack. Most of it was corrupted gibberish, but one line, the very last error message generated by their system before his kill switch activated, was captured in a log file.
ERROR: ACCESS DENIED. PROTOCOL "MATRIARCH" OVERRIDE REQUIRED.
He stared at the word.
Matriarch.
It wasn't just a name from the past. It was a key. A command. A level of access that superseded even their most advanced defenses. He hadn't gotten the data he wanted, but he had found something arguably more valuable: a name for the ghost in the machine. A path forward.
He now knew that to defeat the Phoenix, he had to find a way to invoke the power of its original, dead creator.