Chapter 3

The air at the bottom of the abyss remained stuffy, but I no longer felt the radiation pressure that once threatened to crush my human resolve. My body no longer completely belonged to humanity; those nano-silver filaments woven by the Ark system pulsed with my heartbeat, extending my perception to the terminal of every electronic impulse.

I slowly emerged from the darkness of the "Sinking Abyss," slinking along the long-abandoned underground pipeline toward the "Old Industrial Node." This was once a core utility hub I had helped design; now, it was my armory and the most advantageous surgical entry point for my precise retaliation against Marcus.

Carbon-fiber hydraulic assist rods extended from my ankles; every step I took landed in absolute silence. Like a ghost, I infiltrated the massive Power Distribution Tower. It was filled with rotating turbines and flickering indicator lights, which, in my eyes, were no longer obscure mechanical structures but a series of codes waiting to be edited.

【Establishing physical interface... Neural link established.】

As my fingertips sank into the master control cabinet, surging with electrical turbulence, my world shifted. Physical walls blurred in my vision, replaced by a vast, infinitely complex blueprint of a digital network shimmering in gold and silver. This was the spinal cord of the Aether-Core Syndicate—the source of every cent that fueled their luxurious cloud cities and floating metropolises.

I closed my eyes, submerging my consciousness completely into that cold, biting torrent of bits.

At this moment, there were only ten minutes left until the Syndicate’s annual "Dawn Ball" held in the Cloud Layer. Marcus must be on some balcony draped in expensive tapestry, holding a champagne flute, talking to the cameras about the sense of achievement he felt from completely erasing a "pipe-dreaming engineer."

He was enjoying his glory, while I was sharpening my blade.

I bypassed countless firewalls. Those "impenetrable" dark web defenses that the world feared were, to me—having mastered the original algorithmic design—no more than a thin layer of transparent glass. I didn't choose to brute-force them; instead, I silently planted my "lockdown code"—a fundamental logic vulnerability that only I, Alex Wynn, could ever write.

At the ball.

The lights were brilliant, celebrities were thick as clouds. Marcus, wearing that custom-tailored dark grey tuxedo, stood at the center of attention, smiling and raising his glass, preparing to announce his new era to the world.

Suddenly, the gravitational balancing system of the entire ballroom emitted a shrill, piercing "screech."

The music stopped. The holographic screen, which had been showcasing the grandeur of the Syndicate, displayed a pitch-black, bottomless vortex icon—the symbol of the Abyss.

"What's going on? What is security doing?" Marcus’s expression shifted slightly; he loathed any interference that disrupted his perfect rhythm.

There were no data error messages on the screen, only a string of hopping balance-deduction counters, racing toward zero at a near-manic speed.

"Due to logical conflicts in asset allocation protocols, all digital credit points issued by the 'Aether-Core Syndicate' are currently in liquidation." The synthesized system voice echoed through the skyscraper—it was the cold, mechanical voice I had forged using the Ark system; it reverberated above the ballroom like the tolling of a death knell.

"What? What does that mean!" someone screamed. The celebrities were stunned to see that the smart payment terminals on their wrists and the credit identifiers on their chests were all flashing with a dim, grey light.

The smile on Marcus’s face froze. He whipped out that black gold card symbolizing the Syndicate’s supreme authorization; the radiant light on the card extinguished right before everyone's eyes, turning into a common, cheap piece of black metal waste.

"No... this is impossible! Hacking my account? Who could do this?" He pounded his fists against the table frantically, his voice turned shrill with fear. "I am the owner of this building! This is my..."

"This is merely a liquidation."

My voice suddenly appeared through every speaker in the building. It was me, Alex Wynn’s voice. It pierced the air, pierced the superficial glamour, and slammed directly into Marcus’s eardrums.

"Marcus, the game is over."

I stood in the energy tower’s control room, feeling the tremors caused by the sudden oxygen cutoff throughout the skyscraper.

The building’s air purification system let out a desperate groan, turned a few circles, and ceased operation entirely. The energy powering circulation in the brightly lit ballroom was forcibly snatched away by my command, diverted into the power cycle of the energy tower’s defensive fields.

The celebrities in the ballroom began to descend into chaos, the feeling of suffocation from the thinning oxygen triggering the first wave of panic.

In the midst of the chaos, Marcus stumbled backward. When he looked up at those screens flickering with red malfunction lights, he saw my silhouette from that dark, abyss-like vortex.

He realized that the "elimination" he had staged was, from the very beginning, my layout.

"I am watching you from the abyss." I whispered these words into the sensor, the sound echoing through the building like nooses tightening around his neck. "Marcus, your perfect technological empire has finally become my fuel."