Chapter 417: Deep Digging

The lights in the Investigation Bureau's Data Analysis Center are cold white, running twenty‑four hours nonstop, like the lighting in a morgue.

Su Ming swiped his card at 1:47 a. m.; the night‑shift analyst glanced up at him, then looked back down. Anyone appearing here at that hour is either an overtime dog or hiding something from the higher‑ups.

Su Ming is a little bit of both.

He didn't return to his desk, but went straight into the innermost isolated terminal room. The room has no windows, only three wall‑mounted screens and a host that requires iris verification plus a dual‑key to boot.

Su Ming entered his Core Captain authorization code and waited three seconds.

The screen lit up.

He first pulled up the bankruptcy liquidation File of Zhao Clan Building Materials; the document's summary had been shared in the faculty group during the day, and he hadn't paid attention then. Now, reading it word for word, his brow furrowed tighter and tighter.

Short Selling isn't surprising.

Coordinated Short Selling isn't surprising either.

What's remarkable is the speed.

From the first sell order to Zhao Clan's market cap hitting zero took a total of fifty‑three minutes. Twelve conglomerates, spanning three time zones, involving seven currency settlement channels, yet the timestamp discrepancy for all actions was no more than four seconds.

Four seconds.

Su Ming has seen high‑frequency trading systems at financial institutions; even the top‑tier military‑grade cascade response can't achieve this precision. It would require those twelve institutions to share a single command system—not a negotiated tacit understanding, but someone pressing a button that tightens twelve chains simultaneously.

He began tracing the capital chain backward.

The main short sellers' funding source was a shell company registered in a free‑trade zone, backed by a three‑layer nested trust fund, whose ultimate beneficiary points to a second‑tier subsidiary of Huan Yu Heavy Industry.

Shen Wanshan.

As expected.

Su Ming didn't stop.

He kept digging. In the past year, the Huan Yu Heavy Industry subsidiary had an anomalous related transaction, the counterparty being a pharmaceutical group. The group's second‑largest shareholder is a logistics company. The logistics firm's legal advisory team shares the same law firm as Ding An Industry.

Ding An Industry.

Su Ming's finger hovered above the keyboard, paused for two seconds, then kept typing.

He had reviewed Ding An Industry's equity structure during the day; it was unnaturally clean. Registered capital of three hundred million, main business supplying building materials, the shareholder column listed only two natural persons, and background checks came up blank—so blank that even a speeding ticket couldn't be found.

But tonight, when he inserted Ding An Industry into the full capital network for cross‑reference, the display changed.

Associated nodes began popping up automatically on the screen.

One, two, five, eleven.

Su Ming's hand withdrew from the keyboard.

It's not that he didn't want to keep pressing; the number of nodes on the screen was auto‑spreading at three to four per second—the system's crawler latched onto the data's tail, like pulling a single thread, and what came out was an entire fishing net.

Thirty seconds later, the main screen was densely packed with the names and logos of sixty‑seven companies.

Pharmaceuticals, logistics, energy, military‑industrial components, food processing, communications base stations, port operations, even funeral services.

The industry span is absurdly broad.

On the surface these enterprises have no overlap; their registration locations span eleven different Federation administrative districts, their legal representatives share nothing, and their business scopes are worlds apart.

But the flow of capital doesn't lie.

Su Ming extracted all the time nodes of related transactions and made a diagram. Sixty‑seven lines stretched in from various directions, ultimately converging into a single black hole—the empty trust account of Ding An Industry.

He zoomed in on the diagram.

Each line's capital amount was modest, single transactions ranging from a few hundred thousand to a few million, inconspicuous amid normal business dealings. Yet together, the total capital that passed through this node over the past two years exceeded eleven hundred billion.

Eleven hundred billion.

Enough to purchase many well‑known listed companies, and still have surplus after doubling the Investigation Bureau's annual budget.

Su Ming's back was pressed against the chair back; his body didn't move, but his right index finger tapped the desk three times unconsciously. It's a small habit he's developed while thinking, and can't shake.

He forced himself to shift his focus away from the numbers toward another clue.

Qiu Ce Yuan's security log.

At the daytime Old District murder scene, the set of barefoot footprints and scorch marks convinced him the killer was a High-level Yujie wielding a rule‑type Weird device. A being of that rank moving in and out of Qiu Ce Yuan's vicinity could not escape the security system's records entirely.

He retrieved all sensor data from 6 p. m. to 9 p. m. on the day of the incident.

The Old District lies on the fringe of Qiu Ce Yuan's three‑kilometer security radiation zone; coverage is sparse, but there is a free‑floating Weird‑energy monitoring point every two hundred meters.

Su Ming stacked the data from the nine monitoring points together for viewing.

At 6:14 p. m., Monitoring Point 3 recorded a B Ji energy pulse lasting 0.3 seconds.

At 6:14:03 p. m., Monitoring Point 5 recorded a co‑origin pulse.

At 6:14:05 p. m., Monitoring Point 7 recorded a co‑origin pulse.

Three monitoring points, spaced four hundred meters apart, with signal transmission taking five seconds.

This isn't natural diffusion of energy radiation. It's the trail of a physical entity moving from Point 3 to Point 7. Four hundred meters in five seconds translates to a speed near three hundred kilometers per hour.

Within Su Ming's knowledge of Yujie, only a handful can achieve that speed, and those who can must possess the ability to expand their domain.

Moreover, the direction of movement was from Qiu Ce Yuan outward, straight toward the Old District.

In other words—the killer set off from near the school and ran in a straight line to the target location.

The Zhao family father and daughter have been pinpointed.

Who set the coordinates? Who gave the order? Who carried it out?

Su Ming displayed the security log and the Capital Topology Map side by side on two screens. The left showed the massive capital web of sixty‑seven enterprises; the right showed the energy trace left by a Yujie that can cover four hundred meters in five seconds.

The two diagrams differ by only a single intersection point.

He began the final step of the investigation.

Zhao Lingfei's campus life record. Every Qiu Ce Yuan student has an electronic behavior file, covering attendance, social interactions, spending, and class evaluations. Su Ming's mentor-level permission happens to grant access to these.

In Zhao Lingfei's class evaluations over the past week, three entries were highlighted in red, all from the same group‑work class. Reason for highlighting: hostile attitude toward teammates, with verbal attacks.

The attacked teammate's name appears only once.

Chen Yao.

Su Ming pulled up Chen Yao's file.

Special enrollment student, no guardian registration, tuition fully covered by an anonymous scholarship. The signature on the admission recommendation letter belongs to an administrative supervisor from the eastern campus of Qiu Ce Yuan, and the party that issued that supervisor's labor contract is—Ding An Industry.

The line connected.

Su Ming marked the intersection of the two maps in red.

Zhao Lingfei bullied Chen Yao. Shen Wanshan teamed up with sixty‑seven conglomerates to strangle the Zhao family. The Yujie set out from the direction of Qiu Ce Yuan, rushed to the Old District to eliminate the Zhao father and daughter. The final node of the funding network is Ding An Industry. Someone from Ding An Industry signed Chen Yao's admission recommendation.

All the lines converged into a sentence—

There is a colossal entity that spans the Federation's economic lifeline; for a teenage Special enrollment student, it first mobilized dozens of top conglomerates to launch a Nation-Destruction Level siege in the financial market, and then dispatched a High-level Yujie to carry out a physical elimination.

This is not revenge.

This is sterilization.

Someone is using a sterilizing operating table approach to eradicate any factor that could harm Chen Yao. Whether that factor is a mosquito or an elephant, the treatment is exactly the same.

Su Ming leaned against the back of his chair, staring at the ceiling for a long time.

The analyst on night duty yawned outside. The coffee machine buzzed for a moment, spitting out an Americano. At the far end of the Corridor, someone shuffled by.

All were ordinary sounds.

But in Su Ming's mind, something extremely unusual was churning.

Sixty‑seven enterprises. 110 billion in capital. Covering medicine, military industry, energy, and communications. A coordinated precision of 0.4 seconds. And a Yujie assassin capable of moving four hundred meters in five seconds.

This is no longer a structure that a criminal gang could build.

This is a Shadow nation.

It has no territory, no flag, no constitution, yet it possesses a larger economic mobilization capacity and more lethal violent output than most sovereign states. It parasitizes the Federation's economic cycle, like a tapeworm clinging to its host's intestinal wall, growing quietly, absorbing nutrients, never showing its head, never making a sound, until you cut open the belly and discover—inside are all its eggs.

Wei Gong had him keep an eye on Shen Wanshan. He kept watch. But what he saw was far larger than he and Wei Gong had expected. Much larger.

Su Ming sat up straight, encrypted all the data on the screen into an isolated partition of his personal terminal, and then cleared the query logs on the host one by one.

Finally he opened the Communicator, composed an encrypted three‑character message and sent it to Wei Gong.

"Fish is huge."

After sending it, he shut down the terminal and left the analysis center. The Corridor's cold white light stretched his shadow thin.

Su Ming did not return to the dormitory.

He turned into the restroom, twisted the faucet, and doused his face with cold water.

Water ran down his chin into his collar. He leaned on the edge of the sink, looking at the wet face in the mirror.

Chen Yao.

Tomorrow at ten a. m., the Elementary Division has a psychology counseling class. According to the schedule, the specially appointed instructor for that class happens to be him.

He has a completely compliant reason that will not raise anyone's suspicion for approaching the girl.

Su Ming dried the water from his face.

There are four hours left until dawn.

He needs to think carefully about how to choose each word when speaking to a girl cradled in the palm of the Shadow Empire.

Because he knows—if the Shadow Empire can crush a hundred‑billion‑level corporation in fifty‑three minutes, and can send people to pulverize a target into fragments by the same dusk, then its surveillance of Chen Yao's surroundings could be so precise as to include every adult's phone message logs around her.

Every step Su Ming takes forward is watched by some eyes.

The faucet is still running.

Su Ming tightened the tap with his hand, turned and pushed the door open.

The Corridor is so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat.

But he knows this quiet is not a peaceful quiet.

It is the kind of silence a prey holds its breath in before a storm arrives.