Six in the morning.
The smell of oil from frying dough sticks drifted through the urban village's alleys.
Kannazuki leaned against the headboard, his phone screen lighting up his face. On it was the "Happy Home Building 3 Tenants Group."
[Landlady Wang: Attention, tenants on the second and third floors. Officers from the local station and plainclothes officers from the municipal bureau are checking broadband connections in the neighborhood today. They say it's an anti-fraud operation. Please make sure someone stays home to cooperate.]
[Tenant A: Why the hell are they checking network cables this early? Can't they let people sleep?]
[Tenant B: Probably another poor bastard clicked the wrong link and got scammed.]
Kannazuki stared at the phrases "plainclothes officers from the municipal bureau" and "broadband connections."
Anti-fraud?
Bullshit.
Anti-fraud checks were always conducted openly, with uniformed officers going door to door. Since when did plainclothes officers make surprise inspections of network cables?
"That was fast." Kannazuki threw back the covers and got out of bed.
He walked over to the computer desk and looked at the secondhand laptop he had used for three years.
Last night, he had used this computer to connect to the rental building's shared Wi-Fi and browse posts on the Cape Community.
Chen Lei.
The face of the stubble-covered detective captain surfaced in Kannazuki's mind.
The man had clearly traced the forum server's access logs back to the IP address here.
Without hesitation, Kannazuki unplugged the power cord, flipped the laptop over, and grabbed the Phillips screwdriver on the desk.
He removed the screws and pried off the bottom cover.
He located the 500 GB mechanical hard drive and ripped out its ribbon cable.
He turned and walked into the cramped bathroom. Kannazuki placed the hard drive on the tiled floor and grabbed the iron hammer in the corner used for plumbing repairs.
He raised it high and brought it down hard.
Bang!
The metal casing caved in.
Bang! Bang! Bang!
More than a dozen blows followed. The hard drive was completely mangled, its magnetic platters shattered into countless fragments.
Kannazuki swept the metal shavings and plastic fragments into a black garbage bag, then pulled the RAM sticks from the motherboard, snapped them, and tossed them into the bag too.
He carried the garbage bag outside and headed downstairs.
A garbage truck happened to be passing the mouth of the alley. An elderly sanitation worker was dumping food waste into it.
Kannazuki casually tossed the black plastic bag deep into the foul-smelling heap of trash.
Physical destruction. Not even a god could recover the browsing history now.
Once he had finished, Kannazuki bought two steamed buns from a roadside breakfast stall, scanned the payment code, then climbed onto his battered electric scooter and rode out of the urban village.
Eight in the morning.
Linhai City's largest secondhand electronics market.
Wearing a black baseball cap and a mask, Kannazuki threaded his way through the cluttered stalls. He stopped in an inconspicuous corner.
"Got any anonymous data SIMs with portable Wi-Fi?" Kannazuki asked in a low voice.
The vendor was a young man with dyed blond hair. He did not even look up. "Five hundred. Plenty of data. Toss it when you're done."
Kannazuki slapped five hundred-yuan notes onto the glass counter. He took the goods and left, without another word.
Nine thirty.
Ten kilometers away, on Linhai City's northern outskirts.
The chemical plant here had been abandoned for five years. Weeds grew as tall as a person, and the rusting reaction vessels resembled dead steel beasts.
Kannazuki parked his electric scooter out of sight and stepped over broken glass into an abandoned control room.
He took a newly purchased secondhand tablet from his backpack and plugged in the portable Wi-Fi device he had just bought.
He powered it on and connected.
He did not need elite hacking skills to conceal his IP address.
The most basic physical relocation was often the most effective way to counter online tracking.
At the same time.
Happy Home Building 3, in the urban village.
Two Santanas without police plates stopped at the mouth of the alley.
Chen Lei pushed open the car door and stepped into a puddle, splashing mud onto his leather shoe.
He did not notice. His eyes were fixed on a third-floor window.
"Captain Chen, the cyber unit's last location fix points to this building." Xiao Liu climbed out of the passenger seat, a terminal device in his hand.
"Move," Chen Lei said.
The three hurried upstairs and stopped outside the security door at the far end of the third floor.
Chen Lei gave Xiao Liu a look, and Xiao Liu stepped forward to knock.
"Who is it?" an impatient voice called from inside.
"Here to check the water meter."
The door had barely opened a crack when Chen Lei kicked it hard.
Bang!
The security door flew open. The shirtless man who had opened it was knocked onto his backside. He was about to start swearing when Chen Lei flashed his badge.
"Police! Nobody move!"
The sight inside made Chen Lei's brows knot instantly.
This was no ordinary rental apartment.
The 120-square-meter apartment had been divided with wooden boards into more than a dozen tiny cubicles. Each contained bunk beds, and the air reeked of feet, cigarette smoke, and instant noodles.
A large enterprise-grade network switch and router hung on the wall, with a dense web of cables extending into every cubicle.
"Fuck," Chen Lei muttered.
The technician followed them in. His face went pale when he saw the router. "Captain Chen... this is a private network node set up by someone subletting the place. He's splitting a hundred-megabit fiber connection among more than a hundred tenants in this building.
"The IP we traced is this network's public gateway."
The trail had gone cold.
More than a hundred transient residents, with people moving in and out every day. Any of them could have connected to this Wi-Fi to browse posts on the Cape Community.
Chen Lei walked over to the router and stared at its blinking indicator lights.
"Disconnect it." His voice was cold and hard.
The technician froze. "What?"
"I said disconnect it!" Chen Lei snapped his head around. "Take it back to the bureau!
"Extract the MAC address logs!
"Pull every device MAC address that connected to this router during those three days around the crimes, and compare them one by one!"
"Yes, sir!" The technician hurried over to dismantle it.
Chen Lei went to the window, pushed open the dust-covered frame, and looked down at the bustling alleys of the urban village.
His opponent was cunning.
Not only did he understand counter-surveillance, he also knew how to use this world at the bottom of society as natural cover.
"You won't get away." Chen Lei lit a cigarette and clenched it between his lips.
The abandoned chemical plant on the northern outskirts.
Kannazuki sat on the dust-covered control console, with the Tor Browser running on his tablet.
The dark web.
An underground world filled with illegal transactions, data trading, and all manner of illicit businesses.
Kannazuki entered a Russian-language forum. Using translation software, he browsed quickly and finally zeroed in on a post selling backdoor access to surveillance cameras in cities across China.
The seller's price: 0.05 Bitcoin.
Kannazuki brought up some cryptocurrency he had bought on a whim a few years ago, paid, and obtained the access key.
He opened a specific IP address and entered the key.
The screen flickered, then displayed a control panel packed with surveillance feeds.
Some peripheral nodes of the Linhai City Skynet Project were now visible to him, while he remained unseen.
Kannazuki entered the street coordinates of the urban village.
The feed switched.
The mouth of the alley below Happy Home Building 3.
Kannazuki enlarged one camera's feed. The timestamp showed it was live.
Several men were coming out of the stairwell.
The man at the rear carried a black router.
The man in front wore a black jacket. His face was covered in stubble, and a cigarette hung from his lips.
Chen Lei.
Kannazuki looked at the face on the screen.
On the day Zhao Gang died, he had been the one questioning the family outside the mourning tent.
On the day Zhang Wei died, he had also been the one leading the charge into the hospital lobby.
Now he was the one who had led a team to seize the network node at Kannazuki's rental building.
"You're really on my heels, Captain Chen," Kannazuki murmured.
He captured a close-up of Chen Lei's face from the surveillance footage.
On the tablet's desktop, he created a new folder.
He named it: Pursuer.
He dragged Chen Lei's photograph into it.
Kannazuki closed the tablet and slipped it into his backpack. He glanced at the digital watch on his wrist.
Eleven o'clock. The lunchtime rush was approaching.
He took off his gray tracksuit, revealing the yellow food-delivery uniform underneath. He put on his helmet and fastened the face shield.
Leaving the abandoned chemical plant, Kannazuki climbed onto his electric scooter and twisted the throttle.
The delivery app on his phone gave a crisp notification chime.
"You have a new food delivery order."
Kannazuki glanced at the delivery address. The map of Linhai City's Skynet cameras he had just seen on the dark web control panel immediately surfaced in his mind.
He planned an entirely new route.
It would add two kilometers, but completely avoid every high-definition traffic camera equipped with facial recognition.
The electric scooter entered the main road and merged into the stream of traffic.
The sky was gloomy. It looked as though rain was coming again.
Kannazuki looked straight ahead.
His expressionless face was reflected in the rearview mirror.
In the lane behind him, a patrol car with flashing red and blue lights came roaring past, its siren tearing through the city's clamor as it swept by his side.
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