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

The gate of the Changsun family's villa was smashed open, and the servants looked at their usually elegant young master in horror.

The two heavy mahogany doors shook violently under the impact of gravity.

The brass ring struck the door nail.

It made a piercing, crisp sound.

The faces of the servants who were originally serving in the courtyard turned pale.

The brass washbasin he was holding fell onto the bluestone slab with a clatter.

Cool water splashed everywhere.

The threshold got wet.

Changsun Chong and others suffered from dopamine depletion, writhing on the ground in agony and banging their heads against the wall.

"My wings! Give me back my Nine Heavens Wings!"

Changsun collapsed in the dirty mud and water.

His once expensive Shu brocade robe had long been torn to shreds by himself.

Her clothes were torn into strips and hung on her body.

His shriveled ribs were exposed.

He rolled wildly on the rough brick floor.

Each time it turned over, it scratched at the dirt with its hands.

The ten fingernails cracked due to intense physical friction.

Ten blood-red finger marks were left on the ground.

The pain of dopamine deprivation left his cerebral cortex blank.

He let out a dry, beast-like howl.

He suddenly sat up from the ground.

With that head full of messy hair.

Facing the blue brick exterior wall carved with Qilin patterns.

It rammed into it viciously.

"Thump!"

The dull thuds of flesh colliding echoed through the deathly silent courtyard.

The white plaster on the wall was shaken and fell off in a flurry.

A physical hole the size of a finger was instantly smashed into Changsun Chong's forehead.

Thick, black blood trickled down from the corner of his eye.

But he seemed to feel no pain.

He just stared with those bloodshot, dead fish eyes.

He laughed wildly.

He continued to smash his head against the hard brick wall.

Meanwhile, deep within the Lu family's headquarters, not far away.

The situation is even several times worse.

The young Duke of Lu foamed at the mouth, abandoning his dignity and kneeling before his servants to beg them to put a helmet on him, offering to trade his workshop for a minute of deep-sea diving.

He collapsed onto the expensive rosewood couch.

He clung tightly to the trouser leg of a lowly servant whom he would never even glance at normally.

Large clumps of white foam dripped down the corners of his mouth.

It soaked his chin, which was covered in age spots.

"Here you go... as long as you put that glowing iron hat on my head!"

The young duke's voice was so hoarse it was unrecognizable.

He pulled out a large stack of physical contracts with red handprints from his pocket.

They shoved it into the servants' hands with all their might.

"The three iron ore workshops in the west of the city!"

There are also fifteen silk shops in the northern part of the city!

You can have the entire land title!

This young master only needs one minute!

"Just let me go back to my cubicle and take one last look at the radiant courtesan!"

The servant was so frightened that he fell to his knees with a thud.

He gripped his belt tightly with both hands.

They wouldn't dare accept such enormous wealth that could buy half a street.

"My lord, the Eastern Palace army is pulling the plug outside."

That glowing hat was long ago melted into a pool of molten iron by the Cyberspace Administration of China's cannons.

"Where am I supposed to find a place to connect for you?"

This is the terrifying frenzy caused by the sudden cutoff of cyber opium supply.

On this night.

It took the villas of all the top privileged classes in Guanzhong.

It was transformed into a series of bloody madhouses.

The young noblemen abandoned the centuries-old dignity of their aristocratic families.

He knelt in the mud and kowtowed to the servants.

Use your teeth to bite those broken, substandard cables.

I just want to buy even a tiny bit more of that illusory dopamine reward.

The terrifying exposure of cyber addiction sent reports from powerful figures across the country flying to the Taiji Palace in a frenzy.

Inside a side hall of the Daming Palace.

The stack of physical Xuan paper memorials on the rosewood desk was already three feet high.

Each sheet of paper was stamped with the urgent military department's official seal.

The ink was not yet dry.

It emitted a pungent smell of pine smoke.

"Report! An urgent report has arrived from the Wannian County government! The second young master of the Zheng family has pierced his own thigh with a porcelain object inside his house!"

"Report! Fire at the Lu family mansion! The three young masters strangled the steward to death while fighting over a burnt helmet!"

The old eunuch Wang De knelt beside the dragon table.

He held the latest military secrets document high in his hands.

His voice trembled as if he were crossing a river in the dead of winter.

The old man Li Shimin leaned against the back of the broken dragon throne.

His overweight old face was covered in a thick layer of cold sweat.

He looked at the list of privileged children who had gone mad due to withdrawal symptoms on the holographic display.

The old man's eyes were filled with an absolute fear of the shattering of his belief in technology.

These rebellious sons are wasting their lives on trivial pursuits.

He usually speaks of benevolence and morality in court.

As a result, we ended up in this world of zeros and ones in code.

It can't even break free from a network cable.

The future successors of powerful clans have all become mere digital pawns in Li Chengqian's hands.

As long as the Eastern Palace pulls down the gate.

The privileged class of the Tang Dynasty will exist in reality.

Within one second.

They've completely turned into a pile of drooling mud.

And in this chaotic situation of citywide lockdown.

The veteran general Cheng Yaojin was so frightened by his son's convulsions that he dropped his sword.

In the backyard of the Duke of Su's mansion.

Cheng Chumo was lying on the stone bench with his limbs bent backwards.

He made a dry, gagging sound.

Both eyeballs had rolled up above the eyelids.

Only a deathly white of the eye remained, trembling rapidly under the cold light.

Cheng Yaojin was originally carrying a gleaming, mountain-splitting broadsword.

I was thinking that if this kid dared to disobey and go online...

With a single blow, he physically shattered the unfilial son's shinbone.

But when he saw the strange facial muscle twitching that Cheng Chumena was experiencing due to the complete depletion of dopamine, he realized...

This is a veteran general who killed countless people on the battlefield.

His right hand suddenly trembled.

"Clang!"

The heavy, hundred-pound Xuanhua cleaver inevitably slipped from his hand and crashed onto the bluestone slab.

The physical recoil splashed mud and water all over his trouser leg.

But he didn't even have the strength to look down at it.

"Son! Don't scare your father!"

Cheng Yaojin sat down hard in the mud.

Those large, calloused hands hung vacantly in mid-air.

She wanted to hug her son.

He was also afraid that he might break those stiff, iron-like joints with a little force.

This man never shed a tear in Wagang Village.

In this minute.

Looking at the metal helmet with the melted chip.

Finally, tears of despair, typical of a veteran military leader, fell from his old eyes.

This is not some kind of treasure trove bestowed upon mortals by gods.

This is to preserve the noble bloodline of these military generals.

From reality.

A complete and formatted death sentence.

The highest-ranking state power holders in the Tang Dynasty.

On this night.

Finally, they were separated by the thick palace walls.

I experienced firsthand what it means to feel powerless and terrified when dominated by algorithms that reduce dimensionality.

"Sir, the withdrawal symptoms at all four hundred core nodes in the city have reached their peak."

Inside the central computer room of the Cyberspace Administration of China.

The operator watched the waves of high-frequency, deep purple brainwaves pulsating on the screen.

He reported in a low voice with a strange expression.

The sound of tiles being smashed on the long street was amplified by a physical loudspeaker.

It looked particularly desolate.

Wu Zetian stood quietly in front of the huge black titanium curtain wall.

Her gorgeous tactical silk dress fluttered slightly in the cool air from the cooling fan.

There was no trace of pity on her stunningly beautiful face.

All that remains is absolute calm in the face of the restructuring of wealth and data flows.

No matter how much those scions of noble families wrestle around in real life.

In her central bank's general ledger.

Those private properties that originally belonged to powerful clans.

At this moment, it is moving at a rate of tens of thousands of points per microsecond.

It was legally and compliantly transferred to the central reserve treasury of the Eastern Palace.

"Let them shout."

Wu Zetian's voice remained as cold and aloof as ice.

It carries not a trace of any bias or bias belonging to living people.

Her slender fingers slowly tightened their grip on the virtual control panel.

The sharpness in his eyes was like a particle saber just pulled from a furnace.

"This is just a physical withdrawal."

The true ancestral Trojan horse, hidden in the sewers, providing signals to these iron hats.

They haven't been caught yet.

She casually pulled up a dark depth filter hidden at the bottom of the system disk.

All exposed wiring in the Chang'an grounding network due to the power outage will be removed.

It's been turned up to the maximum.

In this grand narrative frame composed of numbers.

Several discolored light spots that are outside the official anti-counterfeiting protocol.

It's like the tentacles of a dying octopus.

Deep underground in the Qinling Mountains.

They frantically performed the final reverse high-frequency jumper.

Amid the chaos, Wu Zetian stared at the few faint reverse data streams exposed in the background, her eyes sharp as knives.