---
A day before the Longhai Youth Science and Technology Expo
The afternoon sun hung warm over the Li estate, filtering through the thin curtains of Li Feng's room in soft, muted gold.
He sat at his desk, fingers tapping lightly against the surface as his terminal hummed awake.
Lines of Li Web data pulsed quietly on his screen — mirrored logs, internal messages, maintenance schedules, meeting timestamps. The system he'd woven through the Li Group's infrastructure was working smoothly, retrieving information without ever disturbing the surface.
He skimmed through a batch of new entries, adjusting a few filters, adding silent triggers here and there. The work was routine — clean, precise, almost meditative.
Then—
A crisp notification tone pinged — one he only reserved for darknet alerts.
Li Feng paused, then clicked the blinking icon.
A darknet feed opened with a single new entry.
His brows lifted almost imperceptibly.
***
[Private Bounty — High Priority | Verified Escrow]
***
He clicked it.
The full listing expanded across the screen in sharp white text:
***
[Private Bounty — High Priority | Verified Escrow]
Client: Anonymous (Identity Verified)
Mission: Locate missing person — female, age 8
Suspected Cause: Kidnapping
Last Seen: Southeast Asian transit route
Requested Deliverable: Current location or confirmed status
Deadline: Flexible — urgent reports preferred
Reward: $3,000,000
Escrow: Fully funded and locked
Attachments: 7 encrypted files
— medical profile
— CCTV timestamp logs
— travel metadata
— ransom correspondence
— two abandoned contractor reports
— signal trace samples
— last known comms packet
***
Li Feng leaned back slightly.
"…It's the same bounty."
The one from a month ago — when the reward had been five digits, not seven.
Back then, he'd ignored it because he wasn't ready.
Now?
Now the reward had ballooned to three million.
Which meant one thing:
Nobody succeeded.
Either the kidnappers were exceptionally careful…
Or every hacker who tried ran into a wall.
He clicked open the attachment metadata.
Immediately, the gives showed themselves:
• multi-country VPN cascade
• layered TOR onion routes
• forged node signatures
• proprietary signal scrambler
• entropy-modified routing pulses
Crude enough to be breakable.
Advanced enough to defeat conventional hunters.
He drummed two fingers once on the desk.
"So that's why no one cracked it."
His old darknet identity — NullGhost — was clean, but still traceable by world-class intelligence teams if he ever crossed paths with them.
Now that he was stepping onto the real stage, he needed something far beyond "clean."
He needed untouchable.
Li Feng opened his custom toolkit.
A cascade of terminal windows opened like blooming flowers.
He built a new identity piece by piece:
• MAC address seeded via stochastic pattern mapping
• randomized typing cadence model
• kernel-level alias mask
• fractured routing handshake
• multi-hop anonymization with passive drift
• isolated sandbox shell
• freshly generated quantum-resistant private key
Every layer silent.
Every footprint dissolving as soon as it formed.
Ten minutes later:
***
[Darknet Registration Complete]
Handle: Hawkeye
***
Li Feng exhaled softly.
Clean. Sharp.
A name built to be remembered — and feared.
He returned to the bounty board, now under the Hawkeye identity, and pressed:
Accept Mission.
The window shifted.
Time to work.
—
He began the trace slowly.
Not rushing.
Not attacking.
Just… listening.
He caught the tiny gaps between VPN node transitions — the kind of timing differences only someone at his level could perceive.
He peeled away fake routing hops.
He found the real path hidden under the noise.
He mapped the scrambler's pseudo-random cycle, watching for entropy drops.
Then—
A pulse blinked.
Faint.
Buried.
But real.
Coordinates stabilized on his screen.
Li Feng's eyes narrowed.
"Europe."
He expanded the region, pulling thermal satellite overlays and matching timestamps from public logistics networks.
He compared truck plate numbers.
Localized shipping manifests.
Nearby CCTV caches where the kidnappers thought they left nothing.
He found her.
Alive. Weak, but unharmed. Bound in a chair next to a locked steel door in an abandoned warehouse outside Sofia, Bulgaria.
Li Feng assembled an encrypted packet:
• live coordinates
• satellite snapshots
• movement logs
• ingress/egress routes
• kidnapper rotation pattern
• risk assessment
Then sent it to the client.
***
[To Client]
Your daughter is alive.
Coordinates attached.
Move quickly.
— Hawkeye
***
A heartbeat later:
***
[Payment Released — $3,000,000 USD]
***
Li Feng blinked once.
"…Efficient."
He shut down the connection, locked out Hawkeye's routes, and dimmed the terminal.
Three million dollars.
And more importantly—
His first true step in the global world of cyber warfare.
A quiet beginning.
Li Feng leaned back in his chair, letting the warmth of the sun sink into his skin.
Sleep tugged lightly at him.
He closed his eyes.
Just a short nap.
The world could wait.
---
KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.
Li Feng drifted awake to a light, measured knock.
Not urgent.
Not pressing.
Just the kind of knock his father used when he didn't want to startle anyone.
He exhaled slowly as the last traces of sleep peeled away. Afternoon sunlight stretched in soft gold stripes across the room, warming the floorboards. His terminal sat on the desk—dark now, but still radiating a faint warmth from earlier heavy use.
"Feng'er," his father's voice came through the door, steady as ever. "Are you awake?"
Li Feng sat up, rubbing his temples.
"Yes. You can come in."
The door slid open.
Li Guohua stepped inside, composed as always—yet his eyes immediately flicked toward the desk.
The multi-layered setup.
The custom terminal chassis.
The diagrams arranged with surgical precision across the table.
His gaze lingered half a second longer than usual.
Not questioning.
Not accusing.
Just… observing.
And within that quiet look was a subtle recognition: his son was no longer the child he once knew.
"You were working again?" his father asked.
Li Feng nodded. "Wrapped up some things. Took a nap after."
A small hum of acknowledgment. No interrogation. No lecture.
Guohua returned to the reason he came.
"The Patriarch has called for dinner," he said. "In about an hour."
Li Feng's brows rose slightly.
A sudden summons.
All branches included.
That never meant anything good.
"Do you know what for?" he asked.
Guohua shook his head. "No. But it won't be casual."
He turned to leave… then paused.
His gaze drifted—deliberately this time—back across the workstation: the custom rig, the cooling vents, the handwritten notes dense with structure.
A faint, almost amused smile crossed his face.
"I trust everything you're doing here is… safe."
Li Feng followed his gaze and let out a small chuckle.
"Yes. Definitely."
Guohua nodded once. "Good."
Then added, "Xue'er is getting ready. She's nervous. Check on her before we leave."
"I will," Li Feng said.
When his father stepped out and closed the door softly behind him, the room settled into silence again—
but this silence carried weight.
A summons.
Unspoken tensions.
Quiet shifts beneath the surface.
Li Feng rose from the bed, stretching lightly.
Nap time was over.
Time to see what the old man wants.
---
The Li family dining hall buzzed with low conversation when Li Feng and Li Xue entered with their father.
Warm light from crystal chandeliers washed over the long table, where servants moved silently between dishes and teapots. The air carried the usual blend of polite updates wrapped around disguised power plays.
The First Branch spoke of new investment deals.
The Third reported pharmaceutical growth.
The Fourth boasted about media expansions.
Li Feng listened quietly, unreadable, while a few cousins exchanged amused glances — the Second Branch was rarely worth mentioning.
At the head, Patriarch Li Zhonghai sat like a stone sculpture, neither pleased nor displeased. Just watching.
Then the calm cracked.
Li Han leaned back in his seat, dyed hair catching the light, a lazy grin spreading across his face.
"So," he announced loudly, "I heard the school Expo is tomorrow."
Several heads turned.
"Big event. Innovation, engineering… real talent on display." His chopsticks tapped the bowl softly. "Though some people probably won't make much of an impression."
His gaze slid to Li Feng and Li Xue.
"No resources. No support. Must be rough."
A few cousins snickered.
Li Xue's shoulders tightened.
Li Feng remained still — not offended, not provoked, simply watching.
Li Han, encouraged by their silence, pressed on.
"Come on, cousin. What are you two bringing? Something simple? Recycled? Second-Branch style?"
More quiet laughter.
Li Feng finally set his chopsticks down. Straightened. Looked up.
Calm. Composed. Unmoved.
And said:
"Not everyone needs a conglomerate before they can make something of themselves."
The words were soft — but they hit the table like a dropped blade.
Silence.
Then:
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"You calling us incapable?"
"Tch, acting superior now—"
The younger generation flared instantly, stung where it hurt most — their dependence on the family name.
Some adults looked offended. Others thoughtful. A few quietly impressed.
Li Han's face darkened as he opened his mouth to retaliate—
"Enough."
The patriarch's voice cut through the room like a command bell.
Instant silence.
Li Zhonghai's cold eyes fixed on Li Feng.
"You," he said, tone sharpened with warning, "mind your tongue. Arrogance has no place at this table."
Smug looks spread among several cousins.
Li Feng didn't bow his head.
Didn't look away.
Didn't flinch.
He simply held the patriarch's gaze — steady, quiet, unyielding.
A pressure settled across the room, thin but unmistakable.
---
The Li family dinner ended exactly as Li Feng expected — with strained smiles, low murmurs, and the younger generation throwing concealed glances his way.
His single sentence had rattled egos and bruised pride; even as everyone left the hall, whispers followed in their wake.
The adults pretended neutrality, but the shift in their eyes was clear: a quiet reevaluation.
By the time Li Feng returned to his room, the Second Branch had become the quiet center of attention — resented by some, underestimated by many, but no longer invisible.
---
The house was quiet when Li Feng closed his door and settled at his desk.
Night had draped the estate in shadows, broken only by faint garden lanterns and the distant murmur of servants finishing their rounds.
A notification pulsed softly on his terminal — a verified broadcast.
NeuraTech Global CTF Announcement.
Li Feng opened it.
***
[GLOBAL CTF — NEURATECH SECURITY]
Prize Pool: $400,000
Objective: Breach the adaptive sandbox and extract the hidden authentication token.
Rules: No external tools.
Environment: Self-contained, dynamic, learning architecture.
Difficulty: Extreme
Time Limit: 72 hours
***
He accepted the challenge.
The simulation booted: a clean terminal prompt, nothing else. No hints. No starting files. No clues.
For most people, this was where confusion began.
For him, it was where clarity started.
Li Feng skimmed the visible surface — routine port lists, boilerplate processes, predictable traffic cycles — all intentionally unimpressive. Designed to lull mid-tier professionals into predictable patterns.
His fingers tapped lightly.
"It's a decoy layer."
He ran micro-probes — timing shifts, entropy signatures, response jitter — quiet enough to be indistinguishable from natural system noise. Within seconds, the hidden structure revealed itself:
A self-modifying policy lattice, rewriting rules on micro-intervals, burying its real architecture beneath fabricated simplicity.
Beautiful. Complex.
And ultimately transparent to someone operating at his level.
He didn't brute-force anything.
He didn't push or attack.
He listened.
Three handwritten scripts — compact, elegant, kernel-safe — drifted through the environment. They didn't exploit weaknesses; they mapped the deeper logic tree, reconstructed decision weights, and caught the adaptive core between state transitions.
An hour later, he had the full blueprint.
From there, extraction was trivial.
He located the buried token, packaged the proof, wrote a concise report, and submitted it. Efficient. Clean. Quiet.
As he closed the sandbox interface, something shifted.
Not the machine.
Him.
A sudden clarity — as if multiple layers of perception aligned at once.
His thoughts branching, threading, recombining in perfect synchrony.
And then—
the system responded.
[DING! Skill Breakthrough Detected]
[Cyber Security — Lv. 1 (99%) → Lv. 2 (0%)]
[Passive Ability Acquired: Accelerated Parallel Cognition]
---
Hello, Author here,
Thanks for reading — Leave a comment to tell me what you think about this chapter, and drop a Power Stone if you're enjoying Li Feng's story so far! Let's grow this story together.