A real killer playing a villain; the guy surnamed Zhen in Detective, run!

The clerk reached for the alarm under the table.

Lu Yuan's hand moved even faster. He grabbed the clerk's wrist with his five fingers and pulled him back, slamming the clerk onto the table. The back of his head hit the metal surface with a dull thud.

The clerk was temporarily unable to resist.

Lu Yuan released one hand and used his right hand to peel off a piece of silicone implant from the side of his face, revealing his true appearance underneath.

Then he took a charred match out of his pocket and placed it in front of the clerk.

The third match, from the KOLT tavern.

The clerk's pupils contracted sharply; he recognized the face.

He now realized that all those "micro-expressions" were fake. The twitching of the muscle fibers below his cheekbones, the changes in his breathing rate, the three seconds of hesitation—it was all an act.

Every emotional signal he read at the poker table was deliberately fed to him by his opponent.

"Joker!"

Lu Yuan pulled the steel wire from a hidden compartment in his duffel bag. It was the only relic Old Gun had brought from the burning tavern—his interrogation tool of thirty years.

"Old Gun's account," Lu Yuan said.

The steel wire is wrapped around, crossed, and twisted tightly.

The soundproofing of the room is excellent; you can't hear anything outside the door.

Twenty minutes later, Lu Yuan emerged from the secret room, dressed in a neat suit and carrying a counterweight box.

In the unattended cargo area on the stern deck, containers were submerged in water without making a sound.

He returned to the monitoring room and spent four minutes rewriting all the footage from the three hours in the underground secret room. In the footage, the clerk left the secret room alone with a briefcase, took a small boat down the gangway in area C, and disappeared.

Embezzling funds and absconding. The most taboo crime within the syndicate.

At four in the morning, Lu Yuan left the cruise ship among the departing guests.

......

Berlin, Kreuzberg district, forty-six hours later.

Lu Yuan stood in front of the roller shutter door of a dilapidated auto repair shop. Most of the paint on the door had peeled off, and the sheet metal was pitted and corroded.

He simply lifted the half-rolled iron curtain, and in the repair pit, a man covered in engine oil was sliding out from under the chassis of an old Mercedes.

He was in his early forties, with a thick beard stained with black grease, and an old tattoo on his arm—a string of crossed-out binary code.

Upon seeing the unfamiliar face, the man immediately reached for the wrench behind his waist with his right hand.

Lu Yuan pulled over an oil-stained iron stool and sat down, taking out a coin from his pocket—a 1987 East German mark.

He used his index finger to stand the coin upright on the greasy iron table, spun it halfway around, and stopped it two degrees to the left of the eleven o'clock position.

The mechanic's hand remained on the wrench, but he didn't grip it.

Lu Yuan picked up a piece of discarded steel pipe from the table and tapped it rhythmically on the iron countertop next to him. "Tap tap, tap, tap tap tap."

There was a half-beat gap in the middle, it was intentional.

The steel pipe lay on the table. The mechanic's face emerged a grayish-white from beneath the grease.

"You're fucking dead."

"I've died before." Lu Yuan put the steel pipe down.

Ghost, the number one ranked cyber ghost within the Syndicate during the Joker era.

Six years after the Joker's "death," the Syndicate underwent a massive purge, and everyone who had worked closely with the Joker became lambs to the slaughter. The Ghost fled overnight, disappearing from the dark web and spending six years repairing cars in a Berlin slum.

"How did you find this place?" The ghost's hand was still on the wrench.

"You've changed nine cities and twelve identities, but you've never changed your car." Lu Yuan pointed to the rusty 1991 W124 in the pit.

"The engine number of this car appeared when you first ran offshore data for me fifteen years ago."

The ghost finally removed his hand from the wrench. "What are you doing here?"

"syndicate."

The ghost tossed the rag over his shoulder: "I'm backing out."

"Old Gun is dead."

The ghost stopped moving. Lu Yuan didn't say anything. He placed the charred third match on the iron table.

The ghost recognized it; it was from KOLT Tavern, Old Gun's place.

After a long period of silence, coolant from the Mercedes engine dripped onto the ground from the repair pit, making a "drip, drip, drip" sound.

"My equipment has been sealed for six years." Ghost's voice was hoarse. "After the Joker died, the top five on the Syndicate's kill list were all your old informants. The reason I'm still alive today is because I sealed everything off, not touching a single bit."

"There's no need to hide anymore," Lu Yuan said. "The clerk is dead, all the gods are wiped out, the Asian region has been uprooted, and K-17 has been burned to a crater. The Syndicate now only has one central hub still operating: the financial clearing center in Zurich."

The ghost stared at him.

"I'm going to break through it," Lu Yuan said. "I can't do it alone; I need your stuff."

Ghost was silent for more than ten seconds, then he bent down and crawled into the innermost corner of the repair pit, moved three stacked waste tires aside, and tore off the dust cover that had been covered with dust for six years.

A server array. Self-assembled, non-standard components, fully offline state saved, not even connected to power.

He pulled out the power cord, his hands trembling slightly; he hadn't touched this thing in six years.

"Who's still alive on Old Gun's side?" Ghost asked.

"That's all."

The ghost plugged the plug into the industrial socket on the wall, the screen lit up, and blue light shone on the faces of the two people.

Lu Yuan opened the encrypted map copied from the clerk's terminal. The coordinates unfolded: Zurich, Bahnhofstrasse, 14th basement level, Syndicate financial center.

Sixty percent of the world's underground funds are cleared through there.

"Damn it." The ghost dragged the keyboard over.

......

The server array's cooling fans had rusted after six years of operation and emitted a groaning sound like an old ox pulling a millstone when it started up.

The ghost's fingers hovered over the keyboard for two seconds, like a pianist who had been away from the stage for too long and needed to regain muscle memory. In the third second, his fingertips fell, and the code began to flow.

The topological map of the 14 underground floors of Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich was peeled away layer by layer, the 3D model rotated, and dense red markings were displayed.

"Physical sandbox." Ghost pointed to the core area. "All liquidation data runs in a completely isolated local cluster, separated from the Internet by seven layers of firewalls and two physical air gaps."

"Even if I piled up all the botnets in the world and broke through seven layers of walls, the eighth layer would be a physical disconnect, with no network cable connected at all."

Lu Yuan stared at the air gap marking.

"But it's not completely isolated." The ghost zoomed in on a section of the circuit topology.

"The syndicate's dark pool needs to synchronize quotes with more than 400 nodes around the world in real time. It is connected to a dedicated dark optical cable that runs through the redundant channel of the Swiss National Grid, with a primary and backup dual link."

"When the main cable is cut off, it will automatically switch to the backup cable, with zero switching in between," Lu Yuan said.

"Yes, but what if the main cable and the backup cable break at the same time?" Ghost held up one finger.

"The system forces the use of the third emergency link, which goes through the public network. There will be a one-second handshake authentication window between the physical sandbox and the public network gateway."

"One second, I can cram the algorithm in in this one second." The ghost pulled out a piece of code.