You went on a blind date and presented an A-level wanted criminal as a meeting gift?

Before the air in the conference room could recover from the shock of Zhou Zheng being slapped away, Old Chen, the information security director of Ye's Group, rushed in.

His face looked even worse than before, like a patient who had just been diagnosed with a terminal illness.

"Mr. Ye! Something terrible has happened!"

Old Chen's voice trembled as he gripped an internal telephone in his hand, his knuckles turning white.

"Just now, our core R&D server cluster was attacked a second time, more than five times stronger than the first! The attackers used the 'Ghost' team, ranked among the top ten on the dark web, with over two thousand distributed attack nodes covering seven countries!"

"The first layer of the firewall has been breached! The second layer is being brute-forced; at this rate, all data will be copied and pasted within eight minutes at most!"

Ye Qingcheng stood up, a hint of panic flashing in her phoenix eyes that she had never seen before.

She knew better than anyone what was stored in the Ye Group's core R&D database.

The fourth-generation solid-state battery separator technology is just the tip of the iceberg. There are six other undisclosed technological reserves hidden beneath. If any one of them is leaked, Ye's leading advantage in the new energy industry will instantly disappear.

That was all the result of her six years of hard work.

Li Mingyu stood in the corner of the conference room, arms crossed, muttering something under his breath.

"The 'Ghosts,' those are the kind of entities that even the official authorities of our little world have to surrender to. No matter how powerful you are, you can't possibly beat them!"

Nobody paid any attention to him.

Lin Chen stood up from the boss's chair and walked towards the main control computer terminal embedded in the side wall of the conference room.

On the 68-inch screen, densely packed attack logs were scrolling wildly at a rate of hundreds of lines per second, and red alert windows popped up one after another.

"Get out of the way."

Lin Chen pulled out a chair and sat down.

The IT department manager tried to explain, but Lin Chen froze him in place with a single glance.

Ten fingers landed on the keyboard.

[God-level hacking skills], full power startup.

[God-level magic hand speed], full power start.

The two skills simultaneously took over Lin Chen's hands and brain.

The sound coming from the keyboard has changed.

It wasn't a "crackling" sound, but rather a continuous humming sound like a high-speed printing press running at full capacity.

The interval between each key being pressed and released is so short that the human ear can hardly distinguish them as individual keystrokes; all the sounds blend into a dense wave of sound.

Old Chen, who was standing behind Lin Chen, saw the changes on the screen.

The attack logs are still updating, but a brand new command line window has opened on the right side of the logs.

Lin Chen did not use any of the existing firewall modules of the Ye Group.

He is writing something.

Start from scratch.

The code is generated at a rate imperceptible to the naked eye in the black command line window, with at least forty complete executable statements emerging every second.

Old Chen is a professionally trained information security expert with fifteen years of experience in the field. He can recognize the general framework of those codes.

But he couldn't recognize them all.

Because Lin Chen did not write any known programming language.

The skeleton of the code resembled a hybrid of C++ and Python, but the embedded algorithmic logic and function call methods were completely beyond Lao Chen's knowledge.

He had never seen any of those function names before; each one seemed to have been invented by Lin Chen on the spot. However, the nesting between them was seamless, with not a single redundant character.

Thirty seconds.

Lin Chen was not on defense.

He didn't touch the second layer of firewall that was being violently and exhaustively attacked at all.

He let it continue to be hit.

Because he is building something even more terrifying.

Forty-five seconds.

A standalone executable program is compiled in the command line window.

The program is unusually small, only 1.7MB, smaller than a photo taken with a mobile phone.

Lin Chen gave the program a name.

"The Devourer".

In layman's terms, its working principle is that when the attacker's data stream passes through the firewall and enters Ye's server, this program will not intercept it, but will attach to the attacker's data stream and trace back along the attack path.

The attackers thought they were infiltrating Ye's company.

In fact, from the moment their attack data touched "The Devourer," their own servers had already been opened with a backdoor.

Lin Chen pressed the Enter key.

"The Devourer" is now available.

The changes on the screen happened right before everyone's eyes.

The red data stream, which originally represented the enemy's attack, continued to pour in, but along its path, a black line began to spread outward from the core node of Ye's server.

The black line flows upstream along the path of the red data stream, moving faster than the attack data itself.

One minute and thirty seconds.

A new window popped up in the upper right corner of the screen.

The window no longer displayed the Ye Group's system logs, but an unfamiliar server desktop.

The main control unit for the "Ghost" team.

When Old Chen saw that desktop, his legs went weak.

He had been in this line of work for fifteen years and had dealt with dark web hacker teams countless times. He knew what level of existence "Ghost" was.

It was a loose alliance of at least twelve of the world’s top hackers, scattered across different corners of Northern Europe, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, whose real locations were not traced by intelligence agencies with government or military backing.

Now, their main control unit is exposed nakedly on the large screen in the Ye Group's conference room, like a snail with its shell peeled off.

Lin Chen's fingers didn't stop.

He moved freely within the "Ghost's" control panel.

Two minutes exactly.

He found the cryptocurrency wallet address through which the "ghost" team received commissions from Tianhua Bio, as well as the communication records between the new head of Tianhua Bio and Banruo's subordinates after Zhao Deming's downfall.

The communication records clearly documented the complete mission chain of this attack on the Ye Group, including the commission amount, the list of attack targets, and the complete flow path of the illegal funds used by Tianhua Bio to preemptively register patents, from Singapore to the Cayman Islands to Liechtenstein. Each transfer had a timestamp and a corresponding internal bank number.

Lin Chen packed all the evidence and sent it to three different locations.

Interpol Cybercrime Center.

European Patent Office Dispute Resolution Committee.

And Ye Qingcheng's personal encrypted email address.

Two minutes and forty-five seconds.

Lin Chen began to do the last thing.

He implanted a very concise piece of underlying code on twelve core servers that the Ghost team had distributed around the world.

This code will activate after three seconds, instantly maximizing the CPU utilization of each server to 100% and locking the speed control interfaces of all cooling fans.

When the CPU is running at full load without any cooling, the core temperature will exceed the safe threshold of 105 degrees Celsius within 40 seconds.

Then the capacitors on the motherboard will bulge and burst due to overheating.

Then the solder joints of the power supply module will melt.

Then the entire machine will emit a pungent yellow smoke, the screen will turn black, and it will be permanently unusable.

three minutes.

Lin Chen lifted his fingers off the keyboard.

On the screen, the node icons representing the twelve core servers of the "Ghost" team turned gray one by one.

Gray indicates offline.

It's not offline because the internet is disconnected.

It is an offline result of physical death.

Twelve servers located in Stockholm, Kyiv, Bangkok, Bucharest, and Jakarta all turned into smoking electronic waste within the same minute.

The meeting room was silent for a full five seconds.

"Well……"

The IT department head squeezed out a meaningless syllable, as if he had forgotten how human language works.

Old Chen held onto the edge of the table; his legs were no longer very responsive.

What did he just see with his own eyes?

In just three minutes, one person not only stopped an attack by a top ten dark web hacking team, but also destroyed all of their combat equipment. In the process, he also collected a complete chain of evidence that was enough to bankrupt Tianhua Bio and bring the mastermind to the International Court of Justice.

Li Mingyu's mouth hadn't closed for a minute.

He tried to get his chin back where it should be, but his facial muscles refused to follow the instruction.

Lin Chen leaned back in his chair and looked at the quiet gray node graph on the screen.

"Crisis averted."

He turned to look at Ye Qingcheng.

"I have sent you the evidence of Tianhua Bio's illegal fund transfers and the entire chain of patent squatting. The European Patent Office's dispute ruling will be issued in as little as three working days, and the patent will return to Ye's name."

He paused for a moment.

"Also, I checked Tianhua Bio's overseas assets for you."

"They have a total of 3.1 billion in recoverable assets in their Liechtenstein and Cayman accounts. If we initiate a civil lawsuit against Ye as the party whose rights have been infringed, we can conservatively estimate that we can recover 3 billion."

Ye Qingcheng stood behind him, looking at the man who was leaning back in his chair, speaking in a calm tone as if he were giving a weather forecast.

Her fingernails dug into her palm.

It's not anger.

It's a heart-pounding acceleration so intense it's indescribable.