I was just telling a story, why is the whole internet urging me to turn myself in?

Chapter 95: The Most Popular Chapter Online – A Profile of the Grandmaster's Dimensional Reduction

At 8:00 PM, on the 68th floor of the Shanghai World Financial Center.

The faint smell of ozone and blood in the corridor had been completely removed by the powerful ventilation system.

Shen Feng sat in the large boss's chair, his face outwardly calm and unfathomable, but inwardly he kept encouraging himself: "I have to get my money back tonight—otherwise, if a few more clueless assassins show up next time, I'll have to take them down with my bare hands!"

Xiaoyu pressed the last Enter key at the workstation next to him, excitedly turned around his gaming chair, and gave an OK sign: "Grandmaster, all the streaming nodes are ready!"

Shen Feng nodded slightly, took a sip of warm water infused with top-grade goji berries, cleared his throat, and pressed the start button.

The black screen of the live stream room lit up instantly.

The number of online users in the upper right corner didn't need any warm-up at all; it skyrocketed at a terrifying exponential rate!

One million – five million – ten million!

In less than ten minutes, the number broke through the 14 million mark and is still rising at a rate of tens of thousands per second!

The screen was filled with comments like a raging blizzard, so much so that Shen Feng's face was almost invisible.

"Warning: High-energy content ahead! The Grandmaster is checking in on time!"

"Holy crap! I heard there was a major power outage in Jiangzhou CBD last night, and they even put up warning tape. How come the streamer is sitting here unharmed and broadcasting today?!"

"Get ready, everyone! Let's wait for the master to finish the story! What will become of Ryoji and Yukiho?"

"Blind student, I've figured it out! Ryoji is one of those scapegoats, isn't he? Every time the Defense Agency uncovers a crucial clue, someone steps in to take the blame!"

"This is terrifying to think about, brothers! Several people have died in Jiangzhou in real life. Liu Jianhua jumped off a building, and last night another important person died on the Chengxi Elevated Road. All of them were either accidents or suicides—this is exactly the same method of silencing witnesses in 'White Night'!"

"The anchor definitely has inside information! This isn't just telling a story; it's practically a public execution of the Jiangzhou Defense Command!"

Shen Feng was overjoyed as he watched the barrage of comments scrolling wildly across the screen.

Yes, that's the rhythm! Let the guessing run wild, and make things as big as possible!

"Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the final night of 'Journey Under the Midnight Sun'."

In front of the camera, Shen Feng interlaced his fingers, rested his elbows on the table, and spoke in a deep and magnetic voice, "In the first two episodes, we talked about the symbiotic relationship between Kirihara Ryoji and Karasawa Yukiho, and how they used one lie and one murder after another to cover up their initial crimes. Today, let's talk about their ending."

"But before revealing the ending, let's take a look back at how this symbiote, which walks in the dark, repeatedly led the police astray."

Shen Feng leaned forward slightly, his deep gaze seemingly piercing through the screen. "In the story, whenever a case has a breakthrough, someone always seems to 'accidentally' happen. Some jump from high-rise rooftops out of guilt, some are involved in 'hit-and-run accidents' on remote highways, and some are even staged as robbery-murder scenes, and even burned to a crisp after death—"

"They used one scapegoat after another to build an impenetrable physical firewall. As long as the middlemen who handled the dirty work were eliminated, the fire would never reach 'Xuehui' standing in the sunlight."

Upon hearing this, the live stream chat paused briefly before erupting into an even more frenzied barrage of comments.

"Jumping off a rooftop?! Isn't that Liu Chien-hua from the Information Section of the National Defense Agency?!"

"A dump truck hit and ran, then the body was burned beyond recognition! Holy crap, the car accident that was on the news last night on the West City Elevated Road—the deceased was definitely not a simpleton!"

"Our ancestor is practically going all out right up to us! He's practically calling us out by name and giving out our ID numbers!"

At the same time, in the underground command center of the Jiangzhou Defense Headquarters.

On the huge LED screen covering the entire wall, Shen Feng's live broadcast was playing in sync.

Su Qing crossed her arms and stared intently at the man on the screen who was speaking eloquently.

Qin Zheng sat on the command seat next to him, with a thick stack of documents in front of him.

The top document is a copy of the original case file of Tao Jianbang's death in 2004, which was just retrieved from the Chengnan Branch.

Behind him, more than a dozen SWAT team members were fully armed and on standby, while several technicians were frantically typing on keyboards, transcribing every word Shen Feng spoke into text in real time and extracting keywords.

"Team Leader Su, Director Qin." Old Han from the technical department walked over quickly, holding a newly printed copy of the trending search data.

"Public opinion has completely exploded. The hashtag for the finale of 'White Night' surged to the top of all major online charts within twenty minutes!"

Old Han pointed to the scrolling comments on the tablet, "What's more troublesome is that netizens' sensitivity has exceeded our expectations."

They started piecing together the story's plot with recent cases in Jiangzhou.

"Look, some people are talking about Liu Jianhua jumping off a building, some are mentioning the dump truck accident on the Chengxi Elevated Road last night. And—someone even directly asked in the live chat if there's a Tang Ze Xuehui hiding in the Jiangzhou Defense Headquarters!"

Su Qing gritted her teeth and said, "That bastard—he did it on purpose!"

"He took all the clues, broke them down, packaged them into a novel plot, stuffed them into the story, and then used the opinions of tens of millions of netizens to force us to investigate the case!"

Qin Zheng pushed up his gold-rimmed glasses, opened the file in his hand, and gave a wry smile: "His open scheme was indeed brilliant. So brilliant that even though we knew we were being used as pawns, we still had to obediently investigate."

"Tao Zhiyuan's uncle died from a sharp instrument puncture, and the scene was cleaned up meticulously. This perfectly matches the opening scene of 'White Night Walking,' where the pawnshop owner is murdered. And the 'accidents' he just mentioned correspond exactly to the ways Liu Jianhua and Tao Zhiyuan died!"

"He wasn't just telling a story; he was giving us a live profile! In front of tens of millions of people, he was issuing a death sentence to that crocodile!"

■n8n■n

Shanghai World Financial Center.

Xiaoyu was staring at the traffic monitoring graph on the secondary screen when his fingers suddenly stopped on the keyboard.

"Heh, interesting." Xiaoyu muttered to himself in a low voice, his eyes instantly lighting up with excitement. His hands flew across the keyboard, pushing the highlighted information to the hidden teleprompter's secondary screen:

[My lord, over three thousand high-defense virtual VPNs are flooding in! The attackers are using massive amounts of junk data packets for traffic scrubbing and are even attempting to bypass the firewall for reverse attribution! The underlying signatures are high-end stuff from the provincial information security department!]

At this moment, Shen Feng was preparing to push the story to its climax.

He caught a glimpse of the red text popping up on the secondary screen out of the corner of his eye, and his heart skipped a beat.

"Holy crap! The provincial cyber police actually pulled the plug on my internet?! These guys have no sportsmanship! Are they going to cut off all the popularity points I've worked so hard to gain?!"

Shen Feng was inwardly cursing, but outwardly, he took advantage of the pause in the story to pick up his thermos and tactically take a sip of warm water infused with goji berries.

As he put down the cup, Shen Feng's gaze inadvertently swept towards Xiao Yu's direction outside the camera lens, and he lightly tapped the table twice with his right index finger.

Tap, tap.

Upon seeing this gesture, Xiaoyu, who was sitting behind the monitoring station, was instantly energized, his scalp tingling with excitement.

"The patriarch's expression—it's incredible! He knew all along that these bastards would resort to desperate measures! So he deliberately had me leave a honeypot to lure them in!"

Xiao Yu's brain frantically and automatically filled in Shen Feng's "strategic intentions," and the two taps on the table were, in his eyes, a counterattack!

"Trying to find out our background by following the internet connection? Dream on!" Xiaoyu roared in his mind, his hands slamming down on the keyboard in an instant, creating a brutal, clattering rhythm.

A series of bright red warning boxes popped up on the screen.

"The other side is quite persistent. They used a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to try and overwhelm our streaming server and forcibly cut off the live stream."

Xiao Yu sneered and immediately pulled up his own low-level countermeasure code. "Too bad, you've run into me. Since the Grandmaster has given the order, I'll give you the highest level of physical data reflection!"

"Want to investigate me? I'll burn through your internal router first!"

"Snap!" Xiaoyu slammed the Enter key down.

The red alert on the screen was instantly lifted, meaning that the progress bar for traffic cleaning had been forcibly cleared and pushed back by the domineering data flow!

"Done! The other side's main server's CU is probably emitting black smoke right now." Xiaoyu snapped his fingers triumphantly as he looked at the restored streaming data.

Shen Feng, meanwhile, continued his "death profile" without pausing, his fingers interlaced in front of the camera.

"But lies will eventually be exposed. When the police are closing in, when all the scapegoats are dead, and when the clues inevitably point to the shadow lurking in the dark, Ryoji makes his final choice."

"He used that pair of scissors—the same pair he used to kill his father twenty years ago and to cut paper for the past twenty years—to stab himself in the chest."

"He fell from the building, ending his sinful life in front of Xuehui. With his death, he completely severed the last thread of the police investigation."

"And Xuehui?" Shen Feng paused, then gave a mocking sneer. "She simply turned around and walked up the stairs, her back showing no sign of lingering. Not even once did she look back."

"Many people think that the story ends with Ryoji's death. But that's not the case. Ryoji was just the shadow who did the dirty work in the open. His death cut off all the clues and preserved the real protector who stood in the sunlight."

"Xuehui didn't look back because she was determined to keep up the pretense. The demise of the shadow marked the beginning of her complete disappearance into the darkness, allowing her to continue to reap profits."

"In this 20-year-long symbiotic relationship, there are no winners, only souls devoured by evil."

Before I knew it, the clock on the wall had quietly pointed to 11:30 p.m.

In this three-and-a-half-hour live stream, Shen Feng meticulously unraveled and revealed countless foreshadowings, murders, and lies spanning twenty years in "White Night Walking."

The number of viewers in the live stream reached 25 million!

"The story of 'Journey Under the Midnight Sun' has come to an end. Thank you all for your support, and we'll see you in the next story."

As the final sentence ended, Shen Feng pressed the close button.

The screen went black, and the live stream ended.

Shen Feng leaned back in the large boss's chair, let out a long breath, and rubbed his slightly sore temples.

In fact, from the very first minute of the broadcast, the system notification sounds in his mind had never stopped.

Over those three hours, with each death profile he presented that closely resembled a real-life case, each time causing the online comments to collectively break down, the audience's shock, fear, trembling, and chilling thoughts were translated into real-time popularity points.

[Ding! Extreme fear and shock detected in the audience. Popularity +150!]

[Ding! Audience's psychological defenses have been breached; popularity score +300!]

Even though the streaming has been completely cut off, and countless netizens are sitting in front of their black screens, the chilling aftereffects continue to build, and the numbers in the system's backend are still skyrocketing at an astonishing rate.

It wasn't until several minutes later that the fluctuating numbers gradually slowed down and finally stopped.

Shen Feng glanced at the system panel in his mind.

[Current popularity score: 12,548,600 points!]

"Phew, I finally recouped the money I lost last night, and even made a profit!"

Shen Feng maintained a calm demeanor on the surface, picked up the thermos on the table, and slowly unscrewed the lid.

Xu Zhengyang walked over with a cup of freshly brewed black coffee: "Sir, the live stream data is perfect. When Xiaoyu counterattacked just now, I checked the surrounding surveillance footage, and there was nothing unusual."

"I have redeployed the security around the perimeter. Grizzly bears and jackals are on guard in shifts around the clock."

Shen Feng picked up his coffee and took a sip. The bitter taste spread in his mouth. He frowned slightly and put it back on the table. He still thought the goji berry water in his thermos tasted better.

"Old Xu, do you think the Defense Agency understood the story I told today?" Shen Feng asked casually.

Xu Zhengyang's expression was solemn: "With Su Qing and Qin Zheng's keen senses, they definitely understood. With Tao Zhiyuan dead, all the clues have been cut off. They are now backed into a corner and can only follow the clues you gave them to dig deeper."

"That mole in the provincial department won't be able to hide for long."

Inside the command center of the National Defense Agency.

Although the live broadcast had ended, the atmosphere in the hall was extremely oppressive.

"Bang!"

Qin Zheng abruptly stood up and slammed the file in his hand onto the table. "Liang Si's death has cut off all leads. Tao Zhiyuan's death under the overpass has similarly cut off our direct evidence to track down the mole!"

Qin Zheng strode to the whiteboard, picked up a black marker, and quickly drew a diagram of the relationships between the characters.

"Look!" Qin Zheng pointed to the whiteboard, "Liu Jianhua is in charge of tampering with the surveillance footage in the IT department, and Tao Zhiyuan is in charge of providing physical support in the logistics department. These two, one skilled in administrative tasks and the other in physical ones, work together seamlessly!"

"But! None of them have the authority to move that wailing dump truck on the West City Elevated Road, much less the authority to access the provincial department's secure email system!"

"Above this symbiotic structure, there must be a commander-in-chief! This person is Xuehui, whom Shen Feng mentioned!"

"This person is familiar with all our case-handling procedures, understands the movements of every task force, and can even accurately predict when Su Qing will investigate old cases! Only in this way can he arrange a flawless assassination plan the moment Tao Zhiyuan is exposed!"

"Every word Shen Feng said in front of the camera was implying that Tao Zhiyuan was actually a shadowy figure who did dirty work."

"The real big fish, 'Xuehui,' who has access to the provincial department's confidential email address JSST-0079, is still within our ranks! She's still playing the role of the good guy!"

Su Qing took a deep breath and walked to Qin Zheng's side: "Director Qin, what's the next step in the investigation? Tao Zhiyuan is dead, Liu Jianhua is dead, and the whereabouts of those three top-secret reports are unknown. All we have now is the email address of Sun Minghui, the police officer who died five years ago."

Qin Zheng rested his hands on the table, deep in thought for a full half minute: "Investigate Sun Minghui's social connections from back then! Investigate all the original case files of the drug bust case in which he died in the line of duty!"

"The person who has been using his email account must have an extremely close connection with him, and may even be the one who climbed to power by stepping on his corpse!"

"Now that Shen Feng has provided us with a clue, let's dig deeper along this line! Whoever is involved, and how high-ranking they are, we must uproot this cancerous tumor hidden within the provincial department, even the mastermind!"

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