Saturday dawned quietly over the Li estate, pale light slipping between tiled roofs and settling across the courtyard.
Li Feng had already finished his morning routine — Yi Jin Jing, Zhan Zhuang, breathing sequences. At this point, his body carried the motions without conscious thought. It was simply how he greeted the day.
Showered and dressed in a simple black t-shirt and shorts, he sat before his custom terminal.
Beside it lay an open notebook, a single line written in calm, confident handwriting:
Operation: The Li Web — Phase One: Silent Mapping
He powered on the terminal.
The machine hummed to life — quiet, efficient, perfectly tuned to him.
The Skill Breakthrough System overlay flickered gently behind his eyes.
[Cyber Security — Lv. 1 (98%)]
Even he had to acknowledge it — his current ability bordered on the absurd.
At Level 1 (50%), he could dismantle complex corporate systems in hours.
At Level 1 (80%), nation-level defenses were simply puzzles with extra steps.
But at Level 1 (98%)… the digital world didn't merely open for him.
It unfolded.
Patterns that would take experts weeks to decipher now aligned themselves the moment he looked. Encryption protocols felt less like walls and more like curtains — translucent, thin, easy to part with the slightest touch.
He rested his fingers on the keys.
"Infiltrating the Li Group…" he murmured, "…is practically trivial."
He began his work, but it didn't look like hacking.
It looked like reading.
A faint sequence of harmless-looking signals drifted through the Li Group's perimeters — indistinguishable from background network noise. Nothing triggered, nothing alerted. Through that noise, he observed the rhythm of their routers, the heartbeat of their servers, the cadence of their firewall refresh cycles.
Every pattern painted a picture.
In minutes, he understood the architecture more deeply than the people who built it.
Once the internal structure revealed itself, he wove in the first thread — a microscopic script hidden inside what appeared to be corrupted packet residue. It had no log signature, no timestamp, no persistence. It existed only in the moment it needed to, then vanished into the system's natural chatter.
More threads followed.
Not hooks.
Not breaches.
Footprints made of mist — present for a breath, then gone.
Those threads connected themselves across the Li Group's intranet, quietly carrying back metadata — node references, directory structures, subnet pathways — building a living map inside his own terminal.
The entire network mirrored itself piece by piece, like frost blooming across glass.
Forty minutes later, Li Feng leaned back, watching the complete architecture resolve on-screen — every server, every hidden partition, every departmental node.
"Mm."
His voice was soft, almost amused.
"Too easy."
It wasn't arrogance.
It was a clinical assessment.
The Li Group's cybersecurity — the pride of one of Longhai's wealthiest families — simply wasn't built to withstand someone operating at Level 1 (98%).
To him, their digital fortress wasn't a fortress at all.
It was an open blueprint waiting to be read.
---
By late morning, the sun had warmed the courtyard stones, drifting gently into Li Feng's room through the half-drawn curtains. He was still at his desk, eyes moving steadily across the digital replica of the Li Group network.
He hadn't noticed the time.
He hadn't noticed that he never went down for breakfast.
A soft knock sounded at the door.
"Gege?"
Li Xue's voice was quiet but bright — the kind that always slipped past his defenses.
"Come in," he said.
She poked her head in, ribbons in her hair swaying. When she saw him sitting there, posture relaxed but eyes faintly distant with focus, she stepped fully inside.
"You didn't come for breakfast," she accused gently.
Li Feng blinked, glanced at the clock, then rubbed his eyebrows with a small sigh. "Did I? I guess I lost track of time."
"You do that a lot these days," she muttered, crossing the room and placing a lunchbox on his desk. "You're overworking yourself again, so I brought this."
He smiled faintly. "I'm not overworking. Just… occupied."
Li Xue narrowed her eyes. "With what?"
He minimized a few windows on his terminal and turned the screen slightly away.
"Just some personal research," he said lightly. "Nothing particularly important."
She didn't look convinced, but she let it go with a soft huff and sat on the edge of his bed.
For a while, she watched him eat quietly.
Then her eyes lit up a little.
"Oh! Gege, the Expo is in three days. Remember?"
He paused mid-bite. "Yea, I remember."
"We're actually ahead of schedule. Silent Hands passed all the live tests last week, so we're basically done. If you hadn't helped…"
Her voice softened, warm with sincere gratitude.
"…I don't think I could've finished even half of it by now."
Li Feng set the chopsticks down and looked at her properly.
"You did the most important part," he said. "The idea came from you. I only made it work according to your plan."
She puffed her cheeks slightly. "You made it work perfectly."
"Mm."
His lips curved, just a touch.
"That's because you trusted me with it."
Li Xue lowered her gaze, fingers playing with the hem of her sleeve — a mix of shy and proud.
For a few minutes, they simply talked — easy, natural conversation drifting between classes, the Expo, and whether they should add a small decorative casing for the gloves to make the presentation cleaner.
At one point, she reached over and stole one of his dumplings without shame.
Li Feng raised a brow. "Again?"
"That's your punishment for not coming for breakfast," she said matter-of-factly.
He flicked her forehead lightly. "Criminal."
She laughed — soft, musical — the kind of sound that made the room feel warmer.
After a while, she stood and dusted off her skirt.
"Don't skip meals anymore," she said, pointing a finger at him like a tiny general. "And if you're working on something big… just be careful."
Li Feng nodded. "I will."
She hesitated at the door, studying him with those clear, gentle eyes.
"Gege… I'm really glad we're doing this project together."
He paused — then let out a soft breath.
"Me too."
With that, she smiled and slipped out of the room.
The door closed with a quiet click, leaving Li Feng alone again — but the room felt a little lighter than before.
---
Night settled softly over the Li estate, turning the courtyard beyond Li Feng's window into a quiet pool of silver. His room, however, pulsed with subdued life — the low hum of his terminal, the narrow cone of warm light cast by his desk lamp.
Li Feng sat cross-legged in his chair, gaze steady as streams of neatly filtered data scrolled across the screen.
Operation: The Li Web was already showing results.
Terabytes of logs, financial sheets, communications, test reports, encrypted backups — all silently mirrored through the invisible pathways he'd laid into the Li Group's infrastructure that morning.
But tonight, his focus was narrower.
He tapped in a command.
***
[Query: Pharmaceutical Division — last 90 days
Filters: anomalies / flagged irregularities / sealed reports]
***
The system parsed petabytes worth of information in under two seconds.
Color-coded entries stacked neatly across the screen. Li Feng leaned forward, eyes sharpening.
Unusual shipment variances.
Delays in mandatory test filings.
Two sealed internal compliance investigations.
A mismatched ledger entry hidden inside procurement paperwork.
Alone, any of these could be dismissed.
Together?
Li Feng narrowed his eyes.
He opened the sealed files — shallow encryption, disguised under generic document names, the sort of trick that fooled auditors but not someone at his level.
Against him, they were practically glowing.
Unauthorized formula modifications.
A low-grade raw material batch sourced off-record.
A contamination scare buried by a mid-level manager with Third Branch ties.
Nothing catastrophic.
But ugly — the kind of "small problem" that could erupt into a scandal if pushed.
'So that's what rattled Li Han.'
Li Feng exhaled a quiet chuckle.
He leaned back, stretching until a soft pop ran through his shoulder joint.
Even for him, digging through a conglomerate this massive required finesse and patience — indirect routes, false footprints, deliberate silence.
Skill made it possible.
But time made it tedious.
He tapped his fingers thoughtfully against the desk.
"…Li Web needs more than manual sorting," he murmured.
His eyes narrowed.
It needed intelligence.
Not a chatbot.
Not a simple model.
A custom-built analytical AI — something that could crawl through massive networks, detect irregularities, map correlations, and surface threats while remaining undetectable.
A watcher.
A shadow that thought with him.
He picked up his notebook and wrote a single clean line:
— Develop Li Web AI (pattern filtering, anomaly hierarchy, silent triggers)
He flipped through earlier pages, reviewing structural diagrams and long-term objectives he'd drafted over the past month.
"As long as I can see them," he said lightly, "the Li family can never blindside me."
He returned to the terminal, sweeping briefly across other departments — finance, media, internal auditing — just sampling for tension, mapping information flow.
Everything looked normal.
But beneath the surface… cracks.
Hints.
Pressure points forming quietly.
He didn't need to dig deeper tonight.
He'd seen enough.
With a few final keystrokes, he closed the windows.
The room fell still again — lit only by the faint glow of the moon and the soft pulse of his terminal.
Phase One of the Li Web had begun.
And no one in the Li Group had the faintest idea.
---
Hello, Author here,
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