Langley, Virginia, America.
Inside Director Cliff's office at CIA headquarters, there was dead silence.
The lights were off.
The enormous electronic screen was the only source of light. Its eerie blue glow made Cliff's bloodless face look like a corpse floating in the deep sea.
On the screen, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals' stock chart was not a waterfall but a sheer cliff, plunging straight down and crashing through the horizon.
A pharmaceutical empire that had once dominated the health of billions worldwide had disintegrated within twenty-four hours. It did not even qualify as ruins.
"Director, this is... the final message."
A senior agent pushed the door open and entered, his steps unsteady and his voice trembling uncontrollably.
He handed over a paper file. The hand that had held a gun for years, steady as a rock, now shook like a fallen leaf in the autumn wind.
Cliff's gaze remained nailed to the photograph on the first page.
The man in the photograph faced the drone's camera and slowly raised his middle finger.
"Chen... Lin..."
Every syllable sounded as though it had been forced through rusty gears in Cliff's throat.
"He's the chairman behind the Autumn Forest Group, the company Pfizer targeted."
The agent swallowed with difficulty, keeping his voice extremely low.
"The equipment used by all 108 of our top cyber ghosts deployed worldwide spontaneously combusted and exploded when they attempted to hack into the Autumn Forest Group."
"There were... no survivors."
Cliff closed his eyes wearily.
The figure on the streets of Washington, carrying a Vulcan Cannon in one hand and emerging unscathed from a barrage of Hellfire Missiles, seared his mind once again.
That was invincibility in the physical world.
And now, the man had demonstrated terrifying computing power capable of instantly paralyzing global networks, pinpointing their operators, and physically