CHAPTER 133: CHAPTER 134: ASHES IN THE DATA – LINES THAT SHOULDN’T BE CROSSED

The early morning sky over Linhai was cloaked in thick grey, threatening rain but delivering only the kind of oppressive stillness that hinted something deeper was coming. Inside Apex Holdings’ central security node—an underground facility coded as Black Shard—Lin Feng stood alone in a sealed analytics room, eyes scanning a wall of live feeds and layered simulations.

Data moved in glacial layers across transparent OLED walls—internal chatter, code pulses, satellite sweeps, behavioral drift patterns—reduced into cold, rhythmic lines. But one feed, buried beneath the others, pulsed differently.

It shouldn’t be there.

A hidden uplink embedded in the power calibration logs of a decommissioned logistics node in northern Sichuan. Subtle. Silent. Almost elegant in its audacity. It routed outbound at irregular hours, disguised as telemetry.

Lin Feng didn’t call for his cybersecurity lead.

He didn’t call anyone.

Instead, he ran a recursive trace through his own custom-built engine—something only he and one other person had access to.

The result chilled him.

Source: Internal.

Access level: Tier 1 clearance—originating from someone within the Apex Executive Ring.

And worse—when he traced the outbound destination, the path disappeared into a relay cluster tied to one of Cassandra’s phantom shell firms. It was buried three layers deep beneath agricultural trade metadata. Obfuscated, but not invisible.

Someone close to him—very close—was sending Apex infrastructure data to Cassandra.

He didn’t flinch. He simply turned off the room’s main interface and stepped out.

Back on the 47th floor of Apex HQ, the council conference was already underway.

Ren Yan was speaking, gesturing calmly toward a digital projection outlining expansion into tier-two city hubs. Most nodded in agreement, but Zhao Yinuo’s face remained unreadable.

Lin took his seat silently. Qingyang, seated beside him, leaned in.

"We may have a problem with Ning Hai," he whispered. "Reports say he’s been in contact with Zixuan’s think-tank operatives. Off the record."

Lin nodded slightly. "Monitor only. Don’t engage."

But even as he said it, his mind was elsewhere—running simulations, probabilities, behavioral matrices.

Who had Tier 1 clearance?

Fifteen people. Maybe sixteen if one of the silent backers from early Apex days had retained dormant access.

Too many variables. Too little time.

As the meeting adjourned, Lin stood and motioned for Qingyang and Ren Yan to remain behind.

"I found a leak," he said simply.

Qingyang tensed. "Where?"

"Internal. High-level. Routed through dormant logistics logs. Tier 1 credentials used. Cassandra’s endpoint confirmed."

Ren Yan narrowed her eyes. "You’re certain?"

"I traced it myself."

"What do you want us to do?" Qingyang asked.

Lin looked at them both. "Nothing. Not yet. I need both of you to continue operations as if nothing’s changed. But start feeding Tier 1-only briefings with subtly false data—harmless, but traceable."

"A bait-and-tag operation," Ren said. "Good."

"But we don’t confront until we have a full behavioral and motive profile," Lin added. "I don’t want this to be another ideological fracture. We’ve just begun containing the last one."

That evening, Lin Feng met with Jiang Mei.

She was seated alone in the audit office overlooking the river, flanked by two screens—one showing infrastructure redundancies, the other, founder activity metrics.

"I need your independent view on someone," Lin said without preamble.

Jiang turned, eyebrow raised. "You’re invoking audit privilege?"

"Yes. Privately. No logs."

That got her attention. She turned off the screens.

"Who?"

"I won’t tell you yet. I want to know who you’ve been watching. Who feels... off to you."

Jiang thought for a moment, then said, "Three names come to mind. Ning Hai. Zhao Lian. And—this might surprise you—Li Qingchen."

Lin didn’t react outwardly. But inwardly, a pin dropped.

"Li?" he asked. "Why?"

"He’s been doing shadow engagements with external partners not registered under Apex. Mostly think-tank level. Harmless-seeming. But too frequent."

Lin folded his arms. "He also told me last week I was moving too far ahead."

"Then he may be right."

"Or covering his tracks."

Jiang said nothing. The air between them was taut with complexity—an auditor and a founder now testing the limits of mutual trust.

"I want you to build a pattern model," Lin said. "No assumptions. Just raw behavioral drift. Cross-check it with the feed metadata from Black Shard, which I’ll give you offline. No backups."

Jiang nodded. "I’ll start tonight."

Meanwhile, far from the HQ, in a low-lit apartment inside the Linhai university sector, a figure sat at a terminal rerouting encrypted data fragments through a dynamic relay shell. The interface looked harmless—an academic data migration tool—but hidden behind its skin was a deeply modified port engine.

The figure was Zhao Lian.

Her face was expressionless, her hands steady.

On her screen, a simple message blinked in text-only interface:

Cassandra: Phase 2 confirmation pending. Transmit partial Apex transport protocol. Hold political threading.

She typed back:

Understood. Transmission will embed in pseudo-outage logs. Delay threshold: 48 hrs.

She paused for a long moment, staring at the cursor blinking beneath her last word. Then she minimized the window and leaned back.

Her phone buzzed. A message from Ren Yan.

[Council Oversight Meeting moved to Tuesday. You’re still on logistics protocol briefing. Let me know if you want to coordinate.]

She typed back a smile emoji. Nothing else.

Behind her calm, the fire burned.

Two nights later, Lin sat alone again—this time not in the rooftop garden or Black Shard, but at his old apartment. The one he hadn’t touched since Apex crossed into its second expansion wave.

He was reading a physical notebook—something written years ago in his own hand, during the earliest conceptual days of Apex. The margin notes were idealistic. Naive, even. But somewhere in that mess, he found a line he’d forgotten.

"If we succeed, it must be because we protect everyone’s future, not just ours."

He closed the notebook, breathing out slowly.

His comm unit vibrated. Jiang Mei.

"I have the model," she said.

"And?"

"There’s a 73% match between the behavioral signature of the leak and Zhao Lian."

Lin didn’t speak.

"There’s also a 16% bleedover into Li Qingchen’s drift data—but no direct patterns. Just ideological echo."

Lin nodded to himself. "Then Zhao Lian it is."

"What now?"

He looked out the window, the city below flickering with light and buried tension.

"We don’t confront. We let her run."

"Why?"

"Because the moment we make her feel watched, Cassandra will switch assets. And Zhao Lian will disappear into political cover."

"So you want a long play?"

"I want everything. The network. The endpoint. The rationale."

He disconnected.

As dawn approached, Lin stood once again at the rooftop garden. This time, he wasn’t alone.

Zhao Yinuo approached quietly, her eyes sharp even at this hour.

"I heard you’ve been quiet lately," she said.

"Listening," Lin replied.

"To what?"

"Footsteps."

She tilted her head. "Ghosts?"

"Not quite. Just people who forgot why they’re here."

Yinuo didn’t press further. But she stayed beside him.

"I’m still here, Lin," she said after a moment. "Even if I challenge you."

He nodded. "That’s why I trust you."

The wind picked up slightly, carrying with it the scent of rain—heavy, full of promise and warning.

The fractures were deepening again.

But this time, Lin wasn’t just reacting.

He was preparing the firelines himself.