Kannazuki's long fingers brushed over the code. The limits of physical distance would soon cease to exist. He raised his head and looked at the dazzling sunlight outside the window.
Three days.
Just seventy-two hours.
Kannazuki's brain was like a supercomputer that had broken through the limits of physics, ravenously devouring every character in those ten specialist books.
From basic computer principles to C, assembly language, complex low-level architecture analysis, and kernel-level programming.
The intelligence boost he gained from killing had carried him across technical hurdles that would take an ordinary programmer ten years or more to clear.
Those obscure logic trees and network protocols automatically compiled and reorganized themselves in his mind, forming a perfectly self-consistent body of knowledge.
Late at night, all was quiet.
Kannazuki opened the window, letting the night breeze carry the Old City District's sour, rotten smell into the rental apartment. Holding a battered pair of nail clippers and a length of extremely fine copper wire stripped of its insulation, he leaned halfway out.
Half a meter beyond the window, Happy Home's aging communal broadband main cable hung against the exterior wall.
Kannazuki's gaze was cold and focused.
Using the nail clippers, he precisely slit the protective casing around the fiber-optic transceiver and seamlessly connected the copper wire to a spare port, his hands steadier than those of the most experienced telecommunications technician.
The other end of the copper wire ran through the gap in the window into the room, connecting to the miniature terminal he had cobbled together from discarded motherboards.
A green indicator on the miniature terminal's motherboard flickered faintly.
He had tapped into the broadband signal.
He was online.
Kannazuki connected the old phone with the chipped screen corner to the terminal with a data cable, using it as a makeshift display.
The screen lit up. Against a pitch-black background, green code began cascading like a waterfall.
He was in no hurry to act. In the online world, going in unprotected was suicide.
Kannazuki's ten fingers blurred over the phone's virtual keyboard.
First, he activated the compromised machine hidden in the Interstellar Internet Cafe's billing computer, using it as his first stepping stone.
Then he spent two hours writing an extremely complex program that routed his connection through multiple proxies.
The IP address on the screen began changing furiously.
Iceland, Russia, South Africa, Brazil... He buried his real physical location under layer upon layer of protection, ultimately disguising himself in the ocean of the internet as a constantly roaming overseas dynamic node that automatically switched physical nodes every three seconds.
"Heh-heh, are you playing hide-and-seek?" Ryuk crouched at the head of the bed, munching on a Red Fuji apple as his red eyes watched the flickering characters.
"I'm building a shield," Kannazuki said evenly.
"But before I go into battle, I need to test how tough it is."
He needed a sufficiently tough opponent to put it through a live test.
Kannazuki pressed Enter.
Targets locked: the underlying core databases of Alipay and WeChat.
These were financial-grade defense systems with the highest security ratings and tightest firewalls in the country.
Five hours later.
Four in the morning.
Kannazuki looked at the interface granting the highest administrator privileges that had appeared on his phone screen, his gaze utterly unchanged.
He had succeeded.
Like an invisible ghost, he had penetrated the supposedly impregnable digital barrier.
He had not damaged a single line of data or touched so much as a cent in any balance.
He had merely taken a quiet look around, confirmed his skill level, then withdrawn along the same route, erasing every access log and trace of his intrusion on the way out.
It was so clean that he might never have been there.
At the same time, in the City Public Security Bureau's forensic evidence examination center.
Wearing white gloves, Chen Lei stared fixedly at the objects on the stainless-steel workbench before him, his eyes bloodshot.
It was all the trash Kannazuki had thrown away over the past three days, secretly retrieved from the garbage bin outside Building Four of Happy Home.
Greasy packets from braised beef instant noodles, red casings from individually sold ham sausages, and several broken disposable chopsticks.
With a high-powered flashlight and a multispectral lamp, Chen Lei examined the sour-smelling garbage inch by inch.
"Captain Chen, stop looking." Beside him, Xiao Li rubbed his aching eyes, despair in his voice.
"We've already sifted through it twice.
"There aren't any scraps of paper or impressions left by handwriting. Not even a supermarket receipt."
Chen Lei clenched his teeth, the muscles in his jaw twitching slightly.
He refused to believe it. A man had stayed home for three days without even jerking off.
He had assumed Kannazuki would write down some sort of plan at home. If he could find even a scrap of paper half the size of a fingernail, or recover writing impressions from the cardboard of an instant noodle container, he could find an opening.
But he had underestimated Kannazuki's obsessiveness.
In the rental apartment's bathroom.
Kannazuki pressed the toilet's flush button. The swirling water swept up a mass of cloudy gray-brown liquid and roared down the drain.
A full day before Chen Lei had come knocking, he had already torn up the draft sheets tucked inside The Eight Parts of the Heavenly Dragon, covered in code development and logical architecture, and tossed them into a plastic basin.
He had poured in an entire half bottle of cheap toilet cleaner containing strong acid.
The acid had completely broken down the paper's plant fibers, reducing it to a puddle of murky pulp that meant nothing.
Kannazuki was an obsessive who, once he committed to something, would grit his teeth and see it through to the end.
Having decided to erase his traces, he had to obliterate them on both the physical and chemical levels. He would accept no compromise.
Chen Lei's search for physical evidence was doomed to go nowhere. The investigation had reached a complete deadlock.
Ten in the morning.
Kannazuki sat cross-legged on the bed.
The successful live test had confirmed that his hacking skills had reached the very top tier in this world.
It was time to launch an all-out offensive.
The shipping label from six months ago, with its billable weight of 0.3 kg, was a sword of Damocles hanging over his head.
Kannazuki's fingers tapped the screen again. He began writing a highly targeted Trojan.
He named it "Borer."
Borer had no destructive capabilities.
Its sole instruction was to infiltrate the logistics company's underlying historical database and pinpoint the order ending in 7742,
change "0.3 kg" to "2.4 kg," and rewrite that day's system logs so the alterations blended perfectly into the underlying logic from six months ago.
The code took shape line by line.
At noon, Kannazuki pressed Enter one final time to execute it.
Borer traveled down the communal cable outside the window, leaped into the stepping stone at the Interstellar Internet Cafe, then vanished into the vast ocean of the internet, becoming an invisible current headed straight for the logistics company's core server.
Kannazuki set down the phone and leaned against the wall.
Ryuk swallowed his last mouthful of apple and leaned closer curiously. "Human magic is so slow.
"Is it over?"
"Almost." Kannazuki's gaze was icy.
The miniature terminal had taken complete control of the phone's chipped screen.
Against the black background, a green progress bar slowly advanced.
95%...
97%...
99%...
The room was deathly silent, save for Kannazuki's steady breathing.
Finally, the progress bar stopped at 100%.
Immediately afterward, a ghostly green dialog box appeared in the center of the screen, illuminating Kannazuki's expressionless face:
[Access Granted]
Before you continue