The soft, rhythmic clicking of keyboards filled Yang Muchen's private command center, but the atmosphere inside the room was suffocatingly tense. On the massive, wall-sized primary monitor, lines of deep-level data tracing programs were rapidly turning from a calm green to a stark, flashing crimson.
"Access Denied. Hardware Sentinel Protocol Active."
Yang Muchen stood behind his chief technical officer, his silhouette casting a long shadow across the terminal. His brow was furrowed into a hard line as he stared at the encrypted brick wall on the screen.
For the past three hours, his global information assets—the most sophisticated corporate espionage network in the country—had hit nothing but a pitch-black abyss. Every single digital probe they sent out was immediately swallowed by a dark web relay, leaving their teams chasing ghosts across international proxy servers.
