Xiaotian’s final move—a act of mutual destruction—was like an iron nail thrown into a精密 (precision) clockwork. The electronic pulse of the entire Old Residence instantly went berserk.
The white light on the Go board ceased to be neat grid lines. Instead, it twisted into countless arcing electricity, scrambling wildly across the blue brick floor. Wan Changqing’s holographic image shook violently. Pixels began to peel away, revealing the chaotic, raw streams of primitive code beneath.
“Dashan… Ruyi… Xiaotian…”
Changqing’s voice became excruciatingly slow, like a tape jammed in a capstan. “You… have destroyed the ‘Balance’. System judgment… Family assets are uncontrollable… Initiating… ‘Scorched City Protocol’.”
“Big Brother! What is the Scorched City Protocol?” Xiaotian’s face turned pale with terror, instinctively hiding behind Dashan.
“It’s a Format,” Ruyi said, staring at the old paper talismans on the wall that had suddenly begun to smolder. Her eyes were ice cold. “If he can’t have it, no one can. He is going to erase every digital asset of Wan Corp, every trust agreement, even our identity records from the internet. In one hour, the three of us will become refugees on a ‘Digital Island’, stripped of everything.”
Outside the Old Residence, Zhao Tianqi noticed the anomaly immediately. His monitoring screens erupted in massive garbled code. The “Electromagnetic Fence” originally used to besiege the Wans overloaded and exploded with a chilling bang.
“Wan Dashan! Are you insane!” Zhao screamed hysterically through the thick wooden doors. “If you destroy it, Wan Corp goes bankrupt! The whole world is waiting for that authorization key! If you burn it, what will you use to pay your debts?”
Dashan ignored the barking from outside. He walked to the stone lion, reached into its mouth, and pulled out the “decoy circuit board” he had planted earlier. The board was half-melted by heat, but from its back, he pried out a tiny, razor-thin mercury sensor.
“Madame Shen. Uncle Wang. Open the umbrellas.”
At Dashan’s command, Uncle Wang and Madame Shen—who had been guarding the entrance with their ink line—suddenly pulled out identical umbrellas from their robes. They were pitch black, with heavy,粗重 (thick) ribs.
These umbrellas were not for rain. Their surfaces were coated with a thick layer of graphite and metal powder.
“Dashan, what is this…” Ruyi stared in confusion.
“This is the only true sentence Father ever left in Dream of the Red Chamber,” Dashan said, opening a third umbrella and sheltering his siblings beneath its dark canopy. “He wrote: ‘When the great mansion collapses, the birds seeking cover shall be crushed.’ But he also knew: ‘To save the bird, one must build a roof that the storm cannot see.’”
He looked at his brother and sister, his voice steady.
“The Feng Shui of this house is actually a natural shielding field. If we sever all external connections within this hour, the self-destruct command of the ‘Scorched City Protocol’ will find no recipient. It will bounce back and consume itself.”
In the hologram, Wan Changqing let out a final roar. His figure, trapped under the convergence of the three black umbrellas, looked small and ridiculous.
“Father,” Dashan said, holding the umbrella high, his stance as solid as a pine tree. “In your algorithm, you calculated our greed. You calculated our fear. But you never calculated… that we would dare to have ‘Nothing’.”
“For these three days of silence,” Dashan declared, “we didn’t want money. We wanted this one hour of ‘Disconnection’.”
As Dashan’s words hung in the air, a muffled thunderclap echoed through the sky above the Old Residence. It was the electromagnetic reverberation of Wan Corp’s overseas server centers going offline en masse.
In the sudden darkness, the mercury sensor in Dashan’s hand suddenly glowed with a faint, steady blue light.
It was “Evergreen 3.0”.
The never-publicized, fully decentralized physical backup. Sensing the fluctuations of the “Scorched City Protocol”, it had finally completed its first true awakening deep within the ancient well of the Old Residence.
[SYSTEM ALERT: SCORCHED CITY PROTOCOL FAILED.]
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
[RECIPIENT NOT FOUND.]
[STATUS: SELF-DESTRUCT ABORTED.]
[NEW CORE DETECTED: EVERGREEN 3.0 (PHYSICAL/ANALOG HYBRID).]
[MESSAGE: “THE MANSION HAS FALLEN. BUT THE BIRDS ARE SAFE.”]
Outside, Zhao Tianqi’s screens went completely black. Not because of an error, but because the target they were trying to destroy had simply… stepped out of the grid.
Inside the umbrella’s shadow, the three siblings stood together. They were dark, silent, and for the first time in thirty years, truly free.
[COUNTDOWN TO REBOOT: 00:00:10]
Dashan just used Oil-Paper Umbrellas coated in graphite to block a global digital self-destruct sequence! ????? Talk about Low-Tech vs. High-Tech!
"You calculated our greed and fear, but not that we'd dare to have NOTHING." — This line hits hard! ????
And wait... Evergreen 3.0 has awakened in the old well! ???? Is this the real Father? Or something new entirely?
NEXT CHAPTER: THE FINALE! ??
The system is rebooting. Zhao is powerless outside. The siblings stand in the dark. What happens when the lights come back on? Will they restore the company? Or start something new?
Question: If you had to choose between saving your digital identity or keeping your family safe offline, what would you pick? ????vs??
