The Last 299 Days of Humanity

Faced with the sudden surge of public opinion, Dadian Jinghua, this massive iceberg, did not show any panic. On the contrary, it demonstrated a cold yet efficient crisis response capability commensurate with its size.

A strong public relations statement set the tone: Within 24 hours of the public outcry, Dadian Elite held a highly anticipated global online press conference. The spokesperson, dressed in a well-tailored dark uniform, remained calm, speaking in a composed yet authoritative tone.

Instead of dwelling on the details of the extreme remarks that were exposed, he first strongly condemned the "irresponsible spread of rumors and malicious commercial defamation," and announced that he had assembled a top-notch legal team to file huge lawsuits against several of the most widely spread "sources of rumors" media and individuals.

He characterized the whole incident as "a despicable smear campaign by certain competitors who were unable to surpass Dianjinghua in technological innovation and business ethics."

Following this, Dianjinghua made a high-profile announcement of the launch of a global public welfare program called "Dawn of Tomorrow," pledging to invest heavily in medical, educational, and environmental protection projects in underdeveloped areas, and publicly released data on some of its previously low-key charitable activities.

They are trying to use real money and glamorous image projects to divert public attention from sensitive topics such as "population optimization" and reshape their image as "responsible social citizens".

On the technical level, Dadian Jinghua adopted a more cunning strategy. They did not completely stop their previous quantum frequency hopping communication, but instead disguised it in a more covert way.

At the same time, they deliberately released a large number of carefully crafted "false lead" data packets pointing to other competitors or neutral institutions.

These data packets also appear to contain fragmented information related to the "Pure World Brotherhood," but their encryption methods and content cannot withstand close scrutiny. Their purpose is to waste Shengtian's analytical resources, disrupt the direction of the investigation, and muddy the waters.

Leveraging its immense commercial influence, Dadian Jinghua mobilized media outlets, think tanks, and "authoritative experts" within its camp to launch a massive campaign promoting topics such as "the need for rational discussion of technological ethics" and "being wary of the politicization of business competition."

They cleverly packaged themselves as victims of "over-censorship" and "populist sentiment," which in turn won the sympathy of some people who were already wary of Big Tech companies.

Although Da Dian Jing Hua's combination of tactics had some effect on the general public, it did not deceive Yu Qing. He saw through the other party's true intention to shift the focus and buy time.

Yu Qing chose a crucial moment and, through a seemingly neutral third-party data investigation agency, released a specially processed audio clip.

The audio content, after noise reduction and voiceprint enhancement, clearly shows a retired but still influential former core director of Dadian Elite discussing the necessity of "optimizing the types and structure of the global population" in a detached tone at an internal senior management meeting.

He even mentioned that "the natural decay rate of non-optimal populations should be included in long-term model considerations." This audio clip was more impactful than the previous text leaks, instantly shattering Dadian Jinghua's public relations defenses and rendering their "out-of-context" defenses weak and ineffective.

As the audio leak caused Dadian Jinghua's stock price to fluctuate, Changsheng used some of the profits from his previous bottom-fishing in biotech stocks to join forces with several companies in eastern China to acquire financial assets in the east through equity swaps. Then, international hedge funds, which had long been dissatisfied with Dadian Jinghua's monopoly, carried out precise short-selling operations on the stocks of several key listed subsidiaries of Dadian Jinghua.

At the same time, they disseminated analytical reports suggesting that their core projects faced technological bottlenecks or regulatory risks. This move not only put enormous financial pressure on the other party but also shook investor confidence, fundamentally challenging Dadian Jinghua's business empire.

Yu Qing then instructed Ya Shi's team to expand their monitoring of Da Dian Jing Hua's global supply chain. Sheng Tian's reconnaissance forces began to focus on upstream and downstream companies that provided Da Dian Jing Hua with precision components, special chemical materials, or energy support, attempting to find irrefutable evidence of direct links between them and the "Pure World Brotherhood's" extremist activities from anomalies in logistics, capital flow, and information flow.

The successive blows, especially the audio leak and the financial attack, thoroughly enraged the top management of Dadian Jinghua. They realized that mild public relations tactics and misleading maneuvers were no longer enough to stop Shengtian's counterattack.

Now that their disguise had been exposed, they decided to use more direct and dangerous forces. To this end, they began physical attacks on Shengtian's core facilities.

A week later, an energy supply station of Shengtian Company located in the western mountains—a facility that relies on geothermal energy and advanced nuclear batteries to provide backup power for several important data centers—was attacked by unidentified armed forces.

The attackers were well-equipped and tactically adept, clearly having received rigorous military training. They had a clear objective, sabotaging the power plant's core energy supply system before swiftly withdrawing, the entire operation clean and efficient, leaving no evidence directly pointing to the power plant.

However, the weapons and electronic warfare technology used in the attack were identical to those used in the previous attack on Shengtian's headquarters. This attack caused a temporary decrease in some of Shengtian's computing power, serving as a blatant warning and a demonstration of strength.

Furthermore, Dadian Jinghua launched an unprecedented wave of cyberattacks. These were no longer simple espionage attacks, but rather attacks with clear destructive intent. They attempted to infiltrate Shengtian's industrial control system, tamper with parameters, and cause production accidents.

They also attacked modules in the city's infrastructure that were technically supported by Shengtian (such as traffic signals and power grid dispatching), creating chaos; they even tried to inject logic bombs into the "Tianzhi" system, attempting to fundamentally paralyze Shengtian's "brain".

The battle in cyberspace has reached a fever pitch, and Shengtian is facing the most severe test since its founding.

There are indications that Dadian Jinghua may be activating its most dangerous contingency plan. Shengtian's monitoring network has detected abnormal energy fluctuations and material movements at several large mobile industrial platforms (nominally used for marine resource extraction) of Dadian Jinghua located in international waters, with patterns similar to those observed before the Qiongshan volcano erupted.

Meanwhile, vague inquiries about "new and highly effective sources of infection" began appearing on the dark web in several major cities around the world, sending chills down one's spine and evoking images of the "donkey-headed wolf" virus.

Yu Qing stood in the command center, his face grave as he watched the alarms and loss reports flashing across the screen. Da Dian Jing Hua's counterattack was fierce and deadly; they no longer concealed their militarized forces and reserves of disruptive technology.

This commercial espionage and media battle is rapidly escalating into a real unrestricted war that could have global repercussions.

"They've gone to their wits' end," Chang Sheng said in a low voice, a hint of worry in his tone.

“No,” Yu Qing shook his head, his eyes growing sharper, “They’ve just finally torn off their last fig leaf. That’s fine, it’s time for the whole world to see clearly what kind of enemy we’re facing.”

He knew that the most dangerous phase had arrived. He had to find the irrefutable, final evidence to convict them, or a way to completely dismantle their threat, before Dianjinghua's more frenzied attacks took effect.

Then another question occurred to him. Why were they in such a hurry to launch "Operation Lutai"? Did they no longer intend to survive on this earth? Or would the operation only destroy the western region while leaving the eastern region unscathed?
This forced Yu Qing to investigate the specific details of Operation Lutai. However, this was highly classified; even Chang Sheng and his team only knew its outline and did not understand its contents or the targets of the attack.

He immediately called his assistant in the ultimate office, demanding that she transmit all the information regarding Operation Lutai to him. But the assistant replied, "Master, I don't have the authority; I can't do that. You must come to the office in person to view this information, and..."

"And what is it?" Yu Qing asked.

"Moreover, once you view these materials, it will assume that you are already in a state of emergency, and Operation Lutai will be automatically launched in two hours."

"Then I'd better not watch it."

However, Yu Qing's mind raced, and he laughed instead. Since no one knew the specific details of Operation Lutai, wasn't it all up to me to say what I wanted? I had to fabricate a story to terrify the people at Dadian Jinghua, so they would never dare to use it to destroy others again, and would feel they could remain uninvolved. Yu Qing immediately gathered Chang Sheng and a few core team members with top-notch technology and strategic insight, and began "creating" in an absolutely secure virtual room.

“The ‘Lutai Plan’ that we need to fabricate must meet several key points,” Yu Qing said bluntly. “First, it must sound like an ‘ultimate insurance policy,’ a way for me to escape when Shengtian faces extinction.”

Second, its destructive mechanism must go beyond conventional physical or cyber attacks; it must possess a near-rule-level destructiveness that would make Dadian Jinghua realize that even if they hid in the east or even underground bunkers, they would not be spared.

Third, it must include some seemingly reasonable 'signs of activation' that could mislead their defensive direction.

Chang Sheng pondered: "So, this plan needs to be a... 'suicidal' global strike? Because only indiscriminate attacks can convince them that it's intended for mutual destruction."

“That’s right,” Yu Qing nodded. “This was originally one of the old man’s crazy, indiscriminate destruction plans. The core elites of Dadian Jinghua must have thought that the destruction would mainly occur in our western region, and that they in the east had a chance of surviving.”

We need to make them realize that no one has such a lucky break, thus deterring them from taking the risk and prompting them to seek other ways to suppress us, rather than directly attempting to trigger this 'doomsday switch.'

The team members began brainstorming. They combined cutting-edge physics conjectures, environmental science, biotechnology, and even the dangerous applications of social engineering to meticulously weave a chilling framework for the "Lutai Project," which had to be based on concepts that had emerged two hundred years ago.

This is easy to understand, because the plan was formulated by the old man two hundred years ago. If it involved technological hypotheses that only exist now, then it would be exposed.

"Lutai" is not a direct attack weapon, but a "trigger for global systemic collapse." Two hundred years ago, Shengtian began to infiltrate and deeply monitor the world's critical infrastructure networks (power grids, financial transaction systems, logistics networks, communication backbones, etc.), and secretly planted countless logical backdoors and vulnerable nodes.

It includes quantum financial collapse, which involves using a deep understanding of the high-frequency algorithms of major global financial trading systems and the underlying protocols of blockchain to inject a specific "collapse sequence" at a critical moment, triggering a chain reaction.

This could cause the global digital currency system to collapse in an extremely short time, the traditional stock and bond markets to evaporate, and the economic order to instantly revert to the era of physical transactions. Dadian Jinghua's wealth and financial influence would vanish into thin air.

In addition, there is the targeted release of toxins along the ecological chain. Back then, Shengtian secretly synthesized several gene-guided toxins with latency periods that could spread globally through the water cycle and atmospheric circulation.

These toxins are not immediately fatal, but they silently embed themselves in the global ecosystem, causing cumulative and irreversible physiological damage to specific "optimized populations" that have undergone gene editing or rely on specific high technologies (such as targeted destruction of their dependent telomerase elongation mechanisms or neural enhancement interfaces), while having a relatively small impact on the general population that has not been "modified".

This explains why Dadian Jinghua could not remain unaffected—their "superiority" became their fatal weakness.

There is also the possibility of geomagnetic grid resonance collapse. By precisely calculating and manipulating the grid load and geomagnetic activity in specific regions of the world to create dangerous resonance, a large-scale, cascading grid collapse could be induced, which could further affect crustal stability and trigger unpredictable secondary geological disasters.

Energy is the cornerstone of all of Dadian Jinghua's businesses; this move directly targets its Achilles' heel.

Furthermore, there is the information entropy saturation attack. This involves releasing massive amounts of designed, unfilterable "information entropy" garbage data onto the global network, containing contradictory logic, paradoxes, and cognitive interference signals.

Its aim is to completely paralyze all AI-based decision-making systems, plunging modern society, which heavily relies on data and intelligent operation, into utter chaos. Dadian Jinghua's technological advantages will then become a burden.

Next, Shengtian began a technical feint and released "signs of activation".

To make the lie believable, Yu Qing decided to have Sheng Tian begin semi-public actions in areas that "aligned" with the logic of the Lutai Plan, seemingly preparing for the "worst-case scenario":
First, they made a high-profile announcement of accelerating the construction of deeper geothermal power plants and small modular nuclear fusion experimental reactors, demonstrating their stance of seeking energy self-sufficiency in extreme circumstances.

Then, in several remote bases controlled by Shengtian, they began to establish closed, internally circulating ecological agriculture laboratories and water purification systems, as if preparing to deal with pollution of the global food chain.

Furthermore, strengthening the physical isolation of Shengtian's internal network and developing new non-microchip-based computers appear to be measures to prevent a global information collapse.

Of course, there are also material reserves. Quietly increasing reserves of strategic resources (such as rare metals, medical supplies, and storable food) can be interpreted as preparation for any prolonged chaos.

These "preparatory" activities, through carefully designed "accidental" information leaks, gradually infiltrated Dianjinghua's intelligence network.

They appear cautious, but in reality, they deliberately reveal flaws to guide the analysts at Dadian Jinghua to "discover" and "piece together" the outline of the "Lutai Project".

When Dadian Jinghua's intelligence department painstakingly connected Shengtian's seemingly scattered preparations for survival with the fragmented information about the "Lutai Plan" that they had "intercepted" through special channels, a chill swept through Dadian Jinghua's decision-making level.

This plan is insidious and sophisticated. Unlike nuclear weapons of over a century ago, which have a clear detonation boundary, its impact is global, systemic, and difficult to defend against.

In particular, the "targeted ecotoxin" and "information entropy attack" directly target their self-proclaimed biological advantages and core technologies.

They realized that once the "Lutai" was activated, there would be no winners, the world would regress to the Dark Ages, and everything they had painstakingly built would crumble, perhaps even more completely because of their deep dependence on technology.

In their view, Sheng Tian's "preparations" were necessary steps before the "Deer Terrace" was launched—Sheng Tian was trying to secure a slim chance of survival in the apocalypse. This, in turn, reinforced the authenticity of the "Deer Terrace" plan.

As a result, Dadian Jinghua's strategy began to subtly shift. They continued to put pressure on Shengtian, but the focus of their attacks shifted to trying to locate and destroy Shengtian's core facilities that they believed might be related to the "Lutai" trigger.

This was exactly what Yu Qing wanted, as it dispersed their attacking force.

They also invested huge resources in researching possible ways to combat "targeted ecotoxins" and "information entropy attacks," and began secretly building deeper and more isolated shelters, which consumed a lot of their technological resources and financial resources.

In high-level decision-making, the voices of radicals were suppressed, and the moderates who advocated "gradual encroachment" rather than "direct detonation" prevailed, because they were afraid that pushing too hard would prompt Yu Qingzhen to launch "Lutai".

Yu Qing's deception succeeded. He used a fictitious "Sword of Damocles" to temporarily halt Da Dian Jing Hua's most frenzied destructive impulses, buying Sheng Tian precious breathing room and time to retaliate.

However, he also knew that lies risked being exposed. He had to accelerate the search for a truly permanent solution in this dangerous game of balancing. (End of Chapter)