The commander, still blinded and disoriented by the acoustic spike, staggered toward Lei, his knife held low. His face, no longer a mask of professional apathy, was contorted with shock and fury. "You have committed an act of war, boy! The world will burn!"
Lei didn't engage. The Master Frequency had been broadcast; the mission was complete. His only objective now was survival and delivering Mei's remaining data.
He aimed the Sonic Pulse Dampener at the commander's thigh and fired a short, sharp burst. The soundless impact made the man cry out, his leg buckling beneath him. The knife clattered harmlessly against the console.
Lei grabbed the silver data chip from the console's port—the one containing Mei's final log and the government's full encryption files—and ran.
The Broadcast Relay Room was on the 103rd floor. The elevators were working now, but using them was a trap. He burst out of the room, ran past the slumped forms of the two agents he'd stunned on the skybridge, and plunged back into the dark maze of the Bank Tower's utility shaft.
Lei slid down the HVAC trunk lines, the rush of air in the enormous, segmented metal ducts covering the sound of his descent. He reached the bottom floor just as the first alarms began to wail: not the emergency sirens of the Quiet Hours, but the aggressive, urgent tones of the tower's internal security system.
He emerged from the maintenance shaft into the bustling lobby of the Guangzhou Bank Tower.
05:05. The Quiet Hours were over.
The lobby, which had been a dark tomb hours ago, was now a vibrant, deafening confluence of human activity. Employees were flooding in for the early shift, their footsteps loud on the marble floor, their casual chatter echoing off the glass ceilings. They paid Lei no mind—he was just a dirty, disheveled kid in tactical gear, easily mistaken for a rogue delivery worker or an overzealous security trainee.
Lei pressed himself against a cold pillar, struggling to adjust to the noise. After hours of absolute silence, the city noise—the distant roar of traffic, the nearby clatter of a cleaning cart, the ringing of a dozen phones—was overwhelming, a physical assault on his ears.
He saw the faces of the people: a woman complaining loudly into her headset about stock prices, a man arguing with a security guard about his ID badge, a group of teenagers laughing raucously.
None of them knew. None of them knew that less than an hour ago, silence was death. None of them knew that the monsters were now inert statues across the city, frozen mid-hunt.
The government's control was absolute. The Jìngwù were gone, but the fear—the routine, the belief in the terrifying status quo—was still deeply embedded.
Lei needed to disappear into this oblivious crowd. He shed the tactical harness and the padded boots, shoving the gear, the dampener, and the chip into his grimy canvas backpack. He ran his hand over his face, smearing the oil and dust, making himself look less like an agent and more like a civilian who had slept on the street.
He needed to contact Mr. Hu.
He found a secluded public access terminal, inserted a disposable SIM card he kept hidden, and sent a single, encrypted ping to Mr. Hu's last known private frequency:
LZ09 ECHO COMPLETE. SOURCE CHIP SECURE. NEED EXFIL.
The reply came back instantly, a short burst of binary code that translated into a cryptic location: The White Crane Pier, midday ferry.
The pier was miles away, across the river again, but it offered the best chance for escape. If he could get onto the densely packed ferry with hundreds of commuters, the Night Watchers would have a nearly impossible time tracking him without causing mass panic.
As Lei melted into the throng of people heading toward the subway, he saw the final, chilling confirmation of his new reality.
On a massive digital screen outside the Bank Tower, the government's emergency announcement system was running a familiar loop:
"Due to unforeseen atmospheric pressure anomalies, citizens are reminded that Quiet Hours protocols remain strictly in effect between 23:00 and 05:00. Compliance is mandatory for public safety. Report all abnormal noise immediately."
The government wasn't admitting defeat. They were enforcing the fear.
The Ghosts were neutralized, but the Night Watchers still controlled the narrative. And if they maintained the Quiet Hours protocol, they could easily explain away the inert Jìngwù—claiming they were temporarily relocated, or simply invisible. They would continue to hunt Lei, the one boy who held the secret that their entire system was a lie.
Lei pulled his hood low, the chaos of the morning rush hour suddenly feeling more threatening than the silence of the night. He was running toward a ferry, carrying the truth that could shatter the world's most stable, terrifying lie.