Deposed? I couldn't be happier! I wouldn't even be a dog to the crown prince.

The scene shifts back to Hawaii. On the holographic screen in front of Wu Zetian, the ghost code that Li Chengqian had suppressed suddenly begins to expand exponentially.

The once calm, mirror-like pale blue fluorescent screen wall suddenly looked as if it had been plunged into a pot of boiling oil.

Large swaths of garbled text spread downwards in a geometric progression, brutally severing the green indicator lines representing Datang's core assets in half.

The blinding, deep blue light suddenly intensified, its intensity even suppressing the gentle golden sunlight that had been streaming down the beach.

Amidst the shifting light and shadow, the previously orderly data stream experienced a severe, nuclear-explosive blockage.

Wu Zetian's gaze darkened within a microsecond.

Her soft, boneless hands left overlapping afterimages in the void.

The speed was so fast that the fingertips even made a slight hissing sound as they rubbed against the air.

"Your Highness, this thing is replicating itself at an alarming rate, and the core firewall is collapsing in large sections!"

Wu Zetian's cool voice spoke so quickly that it carried a rare sharpness.

Her ten fingers danced as if on invisible strings, forcibly peeling away layers of junk information and fake data.

Each crisp click of the holographic keyboard is accompanied by the physical shutdown of tens of thousands of useless nodes in the background.

This is a process of unraveling the complexities of the digital world, where every second consumed means the permanent evaporation of enormous computing power.

Li Chengqian threw away the skewers of barbecue in his hand and slowly straightened up from the beach chair.

He casually took off his aviator sunglasses, revealing his eyes, which usually had a slightly vacant look.

At this moment, it is like an ice spike in a deep pool, firmly locked onto that strange code chain that is constantly growing and vaguely showing a dragon-shaped trend.

"If it can render the core firewall of Tian Shu unable to resist, then it's definitely not clean."

Li Chengqian took a breath of the cool sea breeze and tapped his knees rhythmically with his fingertips.

After nearly thirty seconds of this silent tracking, Wu Meiniang's movements suddenly froze in mid-air.

Her beautiful eyelashes began to tremble violently.

The entire body's lines were tense and rigid at that moment due to some kind of impact.

"They found out? But how is this possible?"

Wu Meiniang's voice was filled with undisguised horror as she stared in disbelief at the data in the bottom register that had now revealed its true form.

That's not some new algorithm from beyond the Great Wall or the Western Regions.

That was the security protocol of the first generation of the Tang Dynasty's Tian Shu system, which had been sealed and scrapped three years ago.

Every logical dead end and every reserved backdoor interface in this protocol was painstakingly created by Li Chengqian on this beach.

"There are no coincidences without a reason in this world. The dead don't crawl out of their coffins on their own."

Li Chengqian snorted coldly, and the venomous look in his eyes, born from the interruption of his good mood, instantly condensed into a tangible, cold glint.

When the first-generation protocol was abandoned, I personally dismantled and destroyed it.

There are probably no more than three people in the world who can stitch up this rotten flesh buried at the bottom of the database so skillfully.

The leak of this core agreement means that a traitor has emerged from the very heart of the Tang Dynasty's central government.

Those who have the authority to view and withdraw the original protocol.

Without exception, they were all high-ranking officials in the central government of the Tang Dynasty, bearing the highest level of confidentiality seal and enjoying the highest level of subsidies in the empire.

These people were the backbone of the Tang Dynasty's technological development in front of Li Shimin, and were absolutely indisputable talents.

"Your Highness, should we have Xu Xiao take some men and invite all these people in Chang'an to the Great Snow Dragon Riders' base for tea?"

Wu Meiniang turned her head to the side, a ruthless glint flashing deep in her phoenix eyes.

As the second-in-command of the Tang Dynasty Digital Empire, she could not tolerate traitors who stabbed her in the back from within.

The finger hovered over the red physical arrest warrant, waiting for Li Chengqian to nod.

"It's no fun if we alert them. Since they went to so much trouble to dig up this mummified corpse, let's see what kind of show they're going to put on with it."

Li Chengqian slowly leaned back in his recliner, a lazy smile on his lips that sent chills down one's spine.

He looked at the ghost on the holographic screen that kept probing and wriggling in the bottom log.

His expression showed no sign of panic; rather, it was as if he were looking at a moth trapped in a spider's web.

"They thought that by getting hold of the worthless paper I left behind, they could turn this place upside down."

Little did they know that the reason I scrapped it back then was because it was a defective product.

Trying to use a defective product to play hacking and defense games with my current upgraded system—these scholars' brains are probably filled with the water from the underground tunnels of Chang'an.

Li Chengqian raised his right hand, drawing a graceful, icy arc in the air.

With his movement, a hidden firewall in the backend of the highest creator of the Tian Shu system was activated.

It deliberately collapsed inward by three micrometers, secretly placing the rampant spreading ghost code into the second layer of disguised sandbox.

This is called the art of catching a turtle in a jar.

Wu Meiniang took a deep breath and forcefully suppressed the rising anger in her chest.

She cooperated with Li Chengqian's operations, actively feeding several fabricated and seemingly chaotic central bank data streams to the cunning ghost who thought he had succeeded.

Then, she pinched the air with her fingertips, and a personnel register stamped with the Empire's top secret seal instantly sprang out in front of the two of them.

The white holographic document gleamed with a cold, unfeeling luster in the sea breeze.

Wu Zetian pulled up a personnel file, pointed to the name stamped with the seal of "Vice President of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of the Great Tang Dynasty," and said in an icy voice: "Your Highness, our family has a traitorous rat."