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

Chang'an, the headquarters building of the Cyberspace Administration of China.

In the top-floor data monitoring center, the alarms were blaring, causing considerable distress.

Wu Zetian stood in front of the huge circular main control panel.

She was holding a cup of strong tea that had gone cold.

His eyes were fixed on the blue bar chart in the center of the screen, representing the total value of the real economy of the Tang Dynasty.

Just now.

The blue pillar that had been steadily rising suddenly seemed to have been cut off in the middle.

It plummeted by a whopping three percentage points.

"Bang."

Wu Zetian slammed the teacup in her hand heavily onto the table.

Tea splashed onto the keyboard, making a soft hissing sound.

"Three dots? Are you kidding me?"

She turned and yelled at the group of data analysts behind her who were wearing holographic goggles.

"Was the industrial zone in the western part of the city leveled by artillery?"

"Ten million taels of silver's worth of physical production capacity evaporated in just three hours!"

A young analyst frantically pulled up several documents.

Cold sweat dripped down his chin from his forehead.

"General Wu...it wasn't the cannons that leveled it."

"The workshop... has stopped operating."

He swallowed hard and pointed at the red dot on the screen.

"In the West Market of Chang'an, there are seventy-two smelting workshops and forty-nine heavy mecha parts assembly plants."

"Their leaders are all nowhere to be found."

"Can't find it?"

Wu Zetian's brows furrowed into a tight knot.

"What do you mean 'can't find'? Can a living person just vanish into thin air?"

Analysts pulled up an electronic genealogy of major clans and chambers of commerce.

This list was originally meant to represent the core of the Tang Dynasty's commercial lifeline.

But looking at it now sends chills down my spine.

The remnants of the Changsun family, the Cui family, and the Wang family, and even a few distant princes of the royal family.

Those core elders, aged seventy or eighty, who control the lifeline of the family's physical businesses.

The status bar next to their names.

It is no longer "healthy" or "bedridden".

Instead, the text uniformly turned into a cold, gray font:

[Account closed/migrated to new network].

Wu Meiniang felt her blood run cold instantly.

She shoved the analyst aside and threw herself onto the control panel.

They frantically retrieved even lower-level surveillance records.

The data will not lie.

Those privileged classes who are nearing death have truly abandoned their physical bodies.

They brought real gold and silver jewelry, antiques and paintings, and even land deeds.

They were sold to underground banks at ridiculously low discounts.

It melts down the wealth accumulated by generations into nothingness computing power.

Just to buy an obscure "death cabinet" on the black market.

Upload your soul into that dark and sunless cell and become an ageless immortal.

This group of people took away the wealth, but left behind a series of unmanageable messes.

"They've gone mad...they've all gone mad."

Wu Meiniang looked at those gray names.

This is not a technological revolution.

This is a form of self-destruction stemming from the very core of humanity's desire for digital immortality.

The industrial zone in Chang'an West Market is now completely deserted.

There was no physical signature or retinal authorization from the person in charge.

Datang Bank's physical settlement channels were directly locked.

Tens of thousands of displaced people and skilled workers will not receive their wages this month.

They blocked the workshop's tightly closed gates.

Wearing tattered burlap clothes, they shivered in the cold wind.

"Open the door! We want to eat!"

"Where did the shopkeeper go?"

The workers pounded on the tin gate with stones, making a dull thud.

Inside the workshop.

Those heavy industrial blast furnaces that originally worked day and night to provide cooling coatings for the Tian Shu system.

As no one added coal, the fire in the furnace gradually went out.

The red-hot molten iron cooled and solidified in the mold, turning into a pile of waste.

The massive transmission gears emitted a final, dry, grinding sound.

Completely stopped.

The foundation of the Tang Dynasty's heavy industry was threatened by a virus called "immortality".

Irreversible, large-scale shaking began.

The real economy has been exploited to the point of being emaciated.

Cyberspace Administration of China Headquarters.

Wu Zetian felt a splitting headache.

She rubbed her temples, forcing herself to calm down.

Li Shimin was pretending to be asleep, while Changsun Wuji was leading the charge in causing trouble.

After the Crown Prince finished the battle in the Western Regions, he locked himself in a basement in Hawaii and refused to answer any communications.

Now, she's the only one left to handle this mess.

"check."

Wu Meiniang gritted her teeth, her voice as cold as ice shards.

"Investigate the flow of funds for that 'Chang Sheng Men' (a gambling website)."

"They received so much gold in kind from the privileged class; there's no way they could hide it."

Analysts immediately began intensive monitoring.

Half an hour later.

A top-secret data flow chart was presented to Wu Zetian.

This is a very well-hidden offshore fund pool.

It is codenamed "Longevity Fund".

Wu Zetian followed the trail of the funds pool and investigated further.

When she saw the final, totaled number.

The tablet in my hand almost slipped from my grasp and fell to the ground.

It wasn't just the family property that those aristocratic families sold off.

In this sum of money.

There are also records of the allocation of national treasury reserves.

"This is impossible..."

Wu Zetian's voice began to tremble.

She couldn't believe her eyes.

The Tang Dynasty's national treasury was Li Shimin's lifeblood.

But now, the data clearly shows it.

More than one-third of the country's physical gold reserves are held in the national treasury.

It has already been siphoned off by this secretive "Longevity Fund" through dozens of shell chambers of commerce.

and.

This batch of gold never entered the market.

They were in several hidden factories in the Western Regions.

It was melted by high temperature, poured, and molded.

They were all transformed into advanced quantum chips used to maintain the operation of the "resurrection cabinet".