I started by watching videos, and I chose 10,000 combat power.

At 11:58 a.m., in a room of a budget hotel in Longhai City, a middle-aged couple sat side by side on the bed, each with a mobile phone in front of them, their fingers hovering over the screen.

The curtains were drawn, the lights were off, and only the blue light from their phone screens illuminated their faces. Their hats and masks were gone, revealing two utterly ordinary faces—the man had a square face, the kind you'd lose in a crowd in three seconds. The woman had a round face, high cheekbones, a few fine lines around her eyes, and her lips were pursed, giving her a serious look.

At 11:59, the man's phone screen switched to the ticketing page for the Xianglong Museum, and the woman followed suit.

The page is very simple, with only ticket purchase instructions and visiting hours: tickets for the next day are released at 8:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. every day, and tickets are released at 12:00 p.m. every day, while supplies last.

It's exactly twelve o'clock.

The man and woman pressed the "buy ticket" button at the same time.

A circle pops up on the page and keeps spinning.

The man frowned slightly, and the woman pressed her lips together even tighter.

Then the page refreshed, and a gray message popped up: "Tickets sold out for today."

The room fell silent, the hum of the air conditioner particularly jarring.

The man threw his phone on the bed, stood up, walked to the window, and opened the curtains a crack.

Outside the window is the ordinary street scene of Longhai City. Across the street, there is a queue in front of a snack shop, and the vendor selling jianbing guozi is spreading sauce on the jianbing.

He closed the curtains, turned around, and his expression changed from calm to gloomy. The thing he had planned for so long had actually been blocked at the first hurdle.

The woman spoke up: "Thirty thousand spots were gone in an instant. It wasn't a matter of speed; there were just too many people vying for them. There are more than thirty million people in the entire Dragon Kingdom who want to see the Imperial Seal."

She paused, and then her phone screen went dark.

"If it's like this on the first day, it will only get harder to get one in the following days."

The man stood motionless by the window, his hands in his pockets, his back to the woman.

His voice was low, as if he were talking to himself: "If you can't get in, you can't steal. Our collection room will never be perfect."

He turned around, his face still gloomy, but now with a resolute air of "I have to go in."

They are not ordinary thieves; they are master thieves with a thousand faces.

This name was given by all the countries they had visited, because the traces left at each crime scene were different—fingerprints, footprints, DNA, and even faces captured by surveillance cameras; none of them were the same.

In the case of the stolen scepter in the United States, surveillance footage showed an elderly woman with white hair calmly walking out of a museum, leaving only a small silver mask at the scene. The investigation later confirmed that she had a priceless scepter in her backpack.

The old lady has not been found to this day because that person simply does not exist.

The crown from France disappeared the night before the exhibition opened, with no alarms reported by the security system. A silver mask was also left at the scene.

A huge ruby ​​in Japan, the vault's alloy door was opened, the ruby ​​disappeared, and a mask was left behind at the scene.

To this day, no one knows how the door was opened.

They made a total of thirteen attempts, succeeding every time, leaving a mark every time, and embarrassing the security experts on site every time.

Finally, the countries whose property was stolen formed a joint task force to investigate the true identity of the master thief, but after more than ten years, they found nothing.

No one knew that the Thousand-Faced Thief was actually two people, a perfectly coordinated married couple.

Men are responsible for the technology—hacking security systems, opening safes, and handling surveillance footage.

Women are in charge of intelligence—gathering information on targets, analyzing security vulnerabilities, and planning escape routes.

They never use their real faces when committing crimes; instead, they alter their appearance each time through meticulous makeup and prosthetics, and then quickly revert to their original appearance afterward.

Their collection room is located on an uninhabited island in the ocean, a well-decorated, secluded cave, filled with top-tier treasures they "borrowed" from various countries on Earth.

They don't sell, they only collect them. Not for money, but for the satisfaction they feel when they see them.

This time, they set their sights on the Imperial Seal of the State.

It's not because of its monetary value, but because it is the symbol of the Dragon Kingdom and the number one national treasure in the hearts of the Dragon Kingdom people.

If they could put it in their collection room, they would be the top collectors on the entire planet Earth, bar none.

The man walked back to the bedside, sat down, picked up his phone, and the screen lit up.

He read through the ticketing page line by line, from the purchase instructions to the refund policy, and from the refund policy to the admission instructions. His finger stopped at a line of small print in the middle of the screen: "This venue implements a real-name reservation system. Entry requires scanning your ID card and facial recognition. Those whose tickets and IDs do not match will not be allowed entry."

The woman also saw the words. Both of them fell silent for a moment.

"Real-name registration and facial recognition."

The man's voice was devoid of any emotion.

"Our old faces are no longer needed. Each face corresponds to a real ID card, and each ID card corresponds to a real person. Even if we could create fake ID cards, they wouldn't pass facial recognition. That's not manual verification."

The man paused, then remained silent.

They did their homework before coming and knew that the Xianglong Museum had no staff or security guards, and that the monitoring system, security system, and ticketing system were all managed by an artificial intelligence.

Xiao Wan. This man appeared in a spaceship-like artificial intelligence during a live stream. Ordinary hackers couldn't even access its firewall, let alone fool its facial recognition algorithm.

The woman leaned against the headboard, looking up at the ceiling, her mind racing.

"Since we can't get tickets, we'll have to find another way to get in. Not as tourists."

The man turned to look at her.

-

The experts' assessment results were released gradually throughout the evening.

The Longguo Cultural Relics Bureau organized a team of experts to appraise the cultural relics in the Xianglong Museum's collection, including the Imperial Seal of the State.

The experts used careful wording, but their conclusions were clear.

"Based on on-site inspection and instrument testing, all the cultural relics in the Xianglong Museum's collection are genuine, and no fakes have been found."

"Among them, the Imperial Seal of the State, after material analysis, craftsmanship comparison, and weathering test, was confirmed to be made of the He Shi Bi of the Qin Dynasty. The inscription 'Received the Mandate of Heaven, May it last forever' is consistent with historical records and can be identified as genuine."

The news caused a sensation on Chinese social media, escalating from an "explosion" to a "nuclear explosion."

The top ten trending topics were all about the Xianglong Museum. Claims included: the Imperial Seal of the State is genuine, no fakes at the Xianglong Museum, tickets go on sale tomorrow, travel guide for Longhai City, and hotels near the Xianglong Museum are fully booked… each post was followed by the word "hot." The comments section was refreshed so quickly that it was impossible to read them all.

"Officially confirmed! The Imperial Seal of the State is genuine! Oh my god!"

"After more than a thousand years, I can finally see it with my own eyes!"

"I don't care, I'm going to see it, even if it means taking time off and having my pay docked!"

"Tickets are up for grabs! Don't try to take them from me!"

"I've already set my alarms for 11:50 tomorrow, eleven alarms, one minute each."

"I've already managed to snag the tickets, but hotel prices in Longhai have tripled. I'm still booking them, though it hurts."

"You only paid three times the price. The one I booked went up five times, and I gritted my teeth and paid it anyway."

Someone started a topic on social media called "Ticket-grabbing guide for the Xianglong Museum," which garnered over 100 million views in just half an hour.

The strategies vary widely – some say to use 6G network instead of Wi-Fi, some say to put the phone in the refrigerator to cool it down and prevent it from throttling, some say to use two phones at the same time, and some say to start clicking like crazy at 59 minutes and 50 seconds.

One netizen's comment was pushed to the top: "Strategy guide my ass, it's all about luck."

The lights were all on in the conference room of the Longhai Municipal Government.

Zhou Jianhua sat in the middle of the long table, with several cigarette butts piled up in the ashtray in front of him, some of which were only half-smoked before being extinguished.

All the heads of the city's departments were present, each with a notebook open in front of them, some of which were filled with writing.

Zhou Jianhua stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray and spoke seriously.

"With the opening of the Xianglong Museum and the exhibition of the Imperial Seal of the State, the whole country's attention is focused on our Longhai City."

In the near future, the number of tourists visiting every day will not be in the hundreds or thousands, but in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

What they want to see, eat, stay, and do when they arrive is all things we need to worry about.

The market supervision bureau will investigate the hotel price increase issue first thing tomorrow morning.

Whoever raises prices will be punished. The maximum penalty will be imposed.

Regarding food hygiene issues, the Health Commission organizes spot checks, and if problems are found, the establishment is immediately shut down for rectification.

Regarding transportation issues, the bus company increased the number of buses to the museum, and taxi drivers were prohibited from refusing passengers, taking detours, or not using the meter.

The Public Security Bureau has deployed additional police officers to patrol the area around the museum to prevent pickpocketing, fraud, and forced buying and selling.

The Culture and Tourism Bureau is responsible for producing a tourist map of Longhai City, marking information on restaurants, accommodations, and transportation around the museum, and distributing it free of charge to tourists.

The heads of each department quickly jotted it down in their notebooks.

The director of the Culture and Tourism Bureau raised his hand and asked a question.

"Mayor Zhou, do we need to coordinate with the museum? Do we need to send people to maintain order?"

Zhou Jianhua glanced at him and shook his head.

"We don't need to worry about the museum; it's General Luo's territory, there won't be any trouble there. We just need to do our own thing."

At the exit of Longhai Railway Station and the airport, the number of people was several times greater than usual.

Some people were dragging suitcases, some were carrying backpacks, and some were holding up their phones with screenshots of successful reservations for the Xianglong Museum.

They came from all over the country, some to see the Imperial Seal of the State, and others just to catch a glimpse of the dragon-shaped building.

A young man from Kyoto stood at the exit and took a deep breath.

He took out his phone, snapped a photo of the airport, and posted it on social media with the caption: "Longhai, I'm here. See you tomorrow, Imperial Seal of the State."

The curtains were still drawn in the standard room of the budget hotel.

The man sat on the edge of the bed, his fingers slowly swiping across his phone screen, looking at the news about the Xianglong Museum—expert appraisals, ticket-buying strategies, tourists sharing their tickets, and the rectification measures taken by Longhai City.

The woman's phone screen displayed a completely different interface: black background with green text and scrolling code.

She was trying to hack into the Xianglong Museum's ticketing system, not to forge tickets, but to find opportunities to snag refunded tickets from the backend data.

The server's firewall was the strongest she had ever seen, bar none. She couldn't even get a glimpse of Xiao Wan's core algorithm; every attempt was rejected, decisively and cleanly, without even an error message.

She put her phone on the bed and rubbed her temples.

"I can't get in. That firewall is not something a human can break."

The man put his phone down as well.

"Since we can't get in through official channels and we can't bypass the technical barriers, we can only resort to the most rudimentary method."

He lowered the curtains, turned around, and his expression was no longer as gloomy as it had been at noon.

"Wait. Once the museum opens, with 30,000 people coming and going every day, there will always be someone whose identity can be borrowed. People who have lost their ID cards, people who look a lot like us, people who are willing to resell tickets at a high price. There are plenty of ways to get in."

The woman nodded.

The man walked back to the bedside, sat down, picked up his phone, and opened the photo album.

Inside is a screenshot of the Imperial Seal of the State, taken from a promotional video of the Xianglong Museum. In the video, five dragons are coiled together, and the light shines upwards from the base, casting their shadows onto the glass case.

He looked at the screenshot, and the corners of his mouth slowly curled up.

"The Imperial Seal of the State, wait for me." His voice was very low, so low that only the woman beside him could hear it.