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

The instant the button was pressed, an invisible physical pulse storm swept across the globe, centered on Chang'an.

That's not ordinary electromagnetic interference.

That was a physical cut-off from the progenitor-level energy gateway.

In a fraction of a millisecond, the entire planet's azure halo seemed to tremble violently.

Vast, ruthless, and leaving no room for compromise.

The cyber world that the Tang Dynasty had built over the years ushered in its most domineering formatting at the end of this New Year's Eve.

At that moment, the entire world abruptly fell into absolute silence, in a suffocating manner.

Neural networks, not just for civilian or military use.

All wireless power transmission networks and all gravity-fed levitation trains in the world had their last microamps of current drained within the same microsecond.

The blast furnace production line, stretching for tens of thousands of miles, came to a sudden halt.

The sea of ​​neon lights that had been burning all night went out instantly.

In the instant the light faded, the hundred core cities of the Tang Dynasty province were instantly pulled back to the most primitive and desolate era of cold weapons.

The night was like an incredibly heavy black cloth.

It poured down without warning, suffocating all the prosperity, greed, and clamor within.

Those ordinary people who were originally celebrating and shouting slogans of a prosperous era on the long street still had wristbands with red alerts on them.

In that instant, it turned into cold, stubborn stone.

The excitement on their faces hadn't even faded yet.

That intense pleasure brought by the holographic virtual courtesan was forever frozen at the corner of his mouth.

In the darkness, everyone reached out their hands and groped around.

Someone accidentally stepped on and overturned the flatbread stall.

Someone fell into the ditch during the shoving, and their terrified screams sounded particularly pale and weak in the night sky without electronic narration.

Deep within those damp, cold, and foul-smelling underground sewers, the hackers' bewildered state was utterly comical.

Just a microsecond ago, Lu Zicheng was staring intently at that simple terminal.

The progress bar on it was moving wildly, and it was only one step away from infiltrating the core mainnet of North America.

His fingertips even trembled slightly from excessive excitement.

Beside him, Cui Hua grinned, ready to burst into laughter at the old aristocratic family's return to the top.

"puff--"

A dull, faint thud of a physical fuse breaking abruptly echoed through the darkness.

Those specially made screens that were frantically implanting Trojans and flashing a cold, eerie blue light just a second ago.

Without receiving any system error codes, tiny sparks suddenly burst forth in unison.

Then, it completely turned into pieces of black, cold, and unresponsive dead glass.

The control panel is broken, and the mainnet is deflated.

Those vicious virus codes were painstakingly crafted over several months by a mole within the Academy of Sciences.

Those complex blackmail programs that used 300,000 ordinary citizens' IDs as human shields.

Within that millisecond, having completely lost the physical conductors upon which they depended for survival, they instantly became data garbage that died in the womb.

There was no electricity, no light.

Even if you play with the original protocol in a million different ways, it's nothing more than a bunch of dead glowing characters in the face of a complete physical severance.

This unreasonable technical disconnection is the coldest and most aesthetically pleasing violent humiliation of the conspiracies and intrigues of the old era.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away in a North American province, inside a heavy, cold armory of special-type heavy mechs.

The gate was already 35 percent open, and the wind and snow were howling as they poured into the dark passageway.

Those ten thousand heavy-load combat mechs that had just thawed, their eye sockets gleaming with a scarlet death light.

Under the control of the virus, the nuclear transformer in the body has been pushed to the critical point of high-frequency overload.

Driven by hydraulic bearings, their metal plates were creaking and grinding with a terrifying metallic clanging sound.

However, just as the first killing machine was about to step out of the armory door with its three-meter-long high-frequency oscillating particle blade...

The power outage caused the iron curtain to crash down with a deafening roar.

The physical valves of a high-energy nuclear battery are forcibly opened within one ten-thousandth of a millisecond.

The power source was instantly cut off.

The giant microparticle blade that had been glowing with a dangerous white light and was humming at a high frequency.

Within that microsecond, the light vanished abruptly.

It turned into a lifeless, dark gray iron bar.

Those ten thousand steel behemoths, capable of turning the entire New World into scorched earth, froze in place the instant their power reached zero.

Due to inertia, the massive bodies of the first few giant mechs tilted slightly forward, their internal gears making an unpleasant, creaking sound.

Subsequently, they transformed into a gigantic, useless titanium alloy tombstone weighing hundreds of tons.

Amidst the swirling snow of North America, it exudes a cold and deathly metallic gleam.

Without the manipulation of algorithms, and without the drive of electricity.

These world-destroying weapons that nearly terrified Li Shimin and his court officials are now less than a stubborn rock by the roadside.

At this moment, in the darkest corner of Chang'an, Lu Zicheng's hysterical growl had taken on a distinct distorted tone.

"What's going on? Where's the power? Where's my server?!"

He collapsed onto the wooden table, which was soaked in dirty water, in a fit of extreme panic.

His hands flailed wildly in the darkness, slapping all the cracked brushes into the sewage ditch with a chaotic, splashing sound.

"Master, the power's out... The whole city, no, the whole world is dark!"

Cui Hua cried out in despair in the darkness.

He frantically scratched at the long-dead black watch face on the bracelet with his bloodied fingernails.

Aside from a couple of ear-piercing noises caused by physical friction, no holographic pop-up could give him even the slightest response.

That kind of utter despair—having finally grasped destiny only to have it stripped away in a second, leaving not a single hair behind.

This shattered the last pillar of support for these old aristocratic families into a complete mess on the spot.

"Impossible! Has Li Chengqian gone mad?!"

Lu Zicheng slammed his forehead hard against the edge of the cold, dark control panel, blood flowing down his cheek and into his mouth, carrying a bitter, desperate taste.

He could neither understand nor imagine such technical maneuvering that transcended the political logic of ordinary people.

In the minds of aristocratic families, how could anyone choose to paralyze all the workshops, shops, and armies in the world just to eliminate a few assassins?

This is clearly an attempt to drag the entire empire down with them.

"Answer me! You self-proclaimed sage of science, why don't you turn on the backup power?"

Cui Hua grabbed the collar of the vice president of the Academy of Sciences who was slumped on the ground next to him, shaking him frantically as if he were grasping at the last straw.

"It won't open...it won't open..."

The vice dean's calloused hands weakly scratched at the oil-splattered floor.

His glasses were long gone, and blood and tears mixed with dirt streamed from his eyes. His voice was filled with endless fear of higher-dimensional power.

"That unfilial son... he directly used the ancestral agreement to disintegrate and sever the superconducting magnetic energy generator units at all twenty-four nodes around the world."

The vice president chuckled somewhat neurotically, kicking his legs in the sewage, creating white foam of despair.

"Compared to the physical switching on and off, my code... my lifetime of computing power, what's that... haha... what's that!"

This scientist, who boasted that he was the smartest person in the Tang Dynasty and most eager to use his brain to challenge the myth of Tian Shu.

In that one minute, all pride was utterly shattered by Li Chengqian's decisive kick that pulled the internet cable, plunging him into an abyss of nothingness.

He's crazy.

He was driven mad by this kind of romanticism that completely disregarded martial ethics and physically paralyzed him without even showing his face.

The dripping sound of sewage in the underground sewers became clear and hollow again in the darkness.

Along the miles-long sewage pipeline, apart from the violent panting of dozens of old valve remnants, there was only deathly coldness.

Their painstakingly planned grand restoration drama of the "Old Tang Dynasty".

Faced with the absolute stillness of this nationwide blackout, it became the most absurd and pathetic clownish farce of this New Year's Eve.

In the darkness, the heads of the old Tang organization frantically pounded on unresponsive keyboards, desperately roaring, "What's going on? How dare they cut off the world's power? Don't they care about the economic collapse?!"