Chapter 2: Dawn at the Black Internet Cafe

Fine rain stitched the city’s neon signs into a smear of blurry light. Lin Qian stood at the alley entrance, the electrical hum in her ears crystal clear. Every step she took registered as a fixed point on the map in her head.

Rainwater dripped from the hem of her black trench coat, tapping out a fine, erratic rhythm on the slick pavement. This alley was one of the city’s wrinkles, and for the moment, her only shelter. The air was thick with the mix of stale tobacco and cheap machine oil, tangled with the specific damp rot that followed a downpour. Her world wasn’t pitch black; it was draped in a semi-transparent layer of data streams. In her eyes, the dead plane tree at the alley’s mouth wasn’t just a plant—it was a complex network of green nodes. The bluestone path beneath her feet was a stream of alternating binary code. With every step, a tiny light ignited on the 3D map in her mind, eventually linking up into the optimal path toward her destination. This perception wasn’t a superpower; it was a side effect of three years of neural interface iteration—or, more accurately, the cost.

Old Zhou leaned against the back of the bar counter, not even lifting his eyelids. He watched the silhouette of the former war god, his finger tracing circles in the ashtray.

Through the curling smoke, Old Zhou’s weathered face was a blur. His hands were rough, calloused, rubbing against the rim of a dusty glass ashtray with a sharp, teeth-churning *skritch*. This underground internet cafe, called "Breakpoint," was hidden on the ground floor of an old residential building. No sign out front—just a wooden plank reading "Strangers Need Not Apply." The air inside was thin and murky, a cocktail of instant noodle steam, sweat, and a nameless anxiety. The wall behind the counter was plastered with peeling posters where pixelated characters seemed to be decomposing in real time.

"Lin Qian? Haven’t seen you in three years. Here to crash, or here to die?"

Lin Qian didn’t answer. Her gaze swept over the flickering chandeliers above.

That old-style Edison bulb hung by a thread, the current passing through the filament creating a subtle hum that her ears amplified into a piercing metallic screech. Her pupils dilated slightly, her vision locking onto the exposed wires.

"The grounding wires here are degraded. The voltage difference between neutral and live is over the threshold."

Old Zhou scoffed, pulling a dusty tower PC from under the counter and kicking it to the corner of the table.

The heavy machine crashed against the table leg with a dull thud. The dust on the chassis casing scattered in the airflow, dancing in the yellowish beam of light like startled insects. The screen was pitch black, save for the weak, creaking *grind* of the internal fan, sounding like it would fall apart at any moment. The spacebar was missing from the keyboard, the mouse cord was a tangle of chaos, and everything reeked of mold.

"Want to win? This scrap heap is all you've got."

He lowered his voice, his eyes shining with greed.

Old Zhou leaned forward, his shadow engulfing Lin Qian. A dangerous glint flickered in his murky eyes. His voice dropped, raspy like sandpaper dragged across wood.

"That fresh Diamond-tier rookie at the next table is on a losing streak and wants to use you for practice. Win, and you split the pot. Lose, and you’re out."

At that moment, an urgent data stream warning blared in her earpiece—Su Nian’s encrypted message.

In Lin Qian’s subjective consciousness, the information wasn’t text; it was a red, violently pulsing waveform. It invaded her auditory cortex, sending a mild stinging pain, before resolving into a clear, cold command. The chaotic background voices instantly faded, leaving only this single signal source.

"Don't take private jobs. Your traffic anomaly is being monitored. The Gentry's got sharp eyes."

Su Nian’s voice, processed through a voice changer, sounded mechanical and distorted. Attached to the end of the message was a complex encrypted key package, trying to implant itself into Lin Qian’s neural interface like a parasitic tumor. Lin Qian felt a chill creep up her spine. The Gentry’s surveillance satellites hung over the city like a spider web; any unauthorized fluctuation in compute power would be caught instantly. Her current state was like turning on a high-beam flashlight in a dark forest.

Lin Qian’s fingertips tapped the table, steady as a drumbeat.

*Thud, thud, thud.*

The sound was short, firm, and jarringly out of place in the noisy environment, yet it had a strange soothing effect. She didn’t look at Old Zhou’s calculating face, nor did she respond to Su Nian’s warning. Instead, she focused entirely on her trembling fingertips. She was testing—testing her neural interface’s reaction threshold, testing her body’s tolerance for high-intensity compute consumption. Three years in hiding hadn’t made her forget how to fight; it had just made her body more sensitive, more fragile.

She put on the cheap earphones, and the world went silent.

The rough plastic of the earphone cups pressed against her temples, bringing that familiar, slightly suffocating sensation.

Electrical static was stripped away. The keyboard clatter from the table next door visualized itself in her mind as sharp, precise trails of light and shadow.

All surrounding sounds were filtered into background white noise. The new Diamond player’s keystrokes were no longer physical impacts; they materialized as silver-white streaks of light, flying, intersecting, and reassembling in the air. Those streaks represented his operation frequency, reaction latency, and psychological fluctuations. Lin Qian’s gaze locked onto that cluster of light. Her consciousness unfolded like an invisible blade in the void of data.

She looked at the dusty PC, the data interface in her eyes beginning to load. The fan speed translated into rotation curves in her mind; the keyboard wear translated into an input error model. Despite the hardware’s low performance, unable to handle large-scale data calculations, it was enough to run her core algorithm—the Hunt Protocol.

That was the moment the Hunter locked onto the prey.

Lin Qian took a deep breath. The smell of rain mixed with the dust inside the machine case flooded her lungs. She reached out, touching the cold PC. The metallic chill from her fingertips sharpened her senses. In this data-choked underbelly of the city, she wasn’t here to crash, and she wasn’t here to die. She was here to find the breach that would break the stalemate. The screen lit up, the pale blue light reflecting on her impassive face like a broken mirror, casting the image of a cold, resolute soul.

A crude login interface popped up on the screen. The ID field read: "Old_Zhou_Special_Gray_Market_Access." Lin Qian didn’t hesitate for a second, her fingers flying over the mechanical keyboard. The old-style mechanical keys had a long travel distance and sluggish rebound; every press came with a heavy *clack-clack*. To anyone else, this might have been noise, but in Lin Qian’s constructed acoustic model, these sounds were broken down into frequency, force, and timestamps, piecing together the opponent’s most fatal rhythmic weakness.

The player across from her, nicknamed "Storm," had clearly sensed the threat. His operations turned frantic. His mouse movement was a spinning top, trying to overwhelm the area where Lin Qian was with high-intensity AOE skills. Lin Qian didn’t retreat; instead, she closed her eyes.

A storm erupted in the world of sound.

She heard "Storm"’s rapid breathing—the frequency anomaly caused by anxiety. She heard the high-frequency vibration of his mouse microswitches being clicked in rapid succession—the precursor to him desperately unleashing a key skill. And she heard the piercing shriek of his chair legs scraping the floor—the shift in his center of gravity as he prepared to kite backward.

"Three centimeters left. Zero-point-two-second delay."

Lin Qian reported the data in her mind. In the next second, she opened her eyes. Her wrist moved with zero excess motion, the mouse tracing an incredible arc toward the lower left.

The image on the screen froze.

"Storm"’s fatal skill halted abruptly, just half an inch from Lin Qian’s character’s chest. Lin Qian’s character, like a nimble fish, slipped through that tiny gap, piercing the opponent’s skill range. The counterattack erupted instantly, a combo pouring out like a sudden downpour. No flashy effects—just the purest, most efficient damage numbers ticking up.

"Game Over."

The system notification rang out, crisp and clear in the cramped Black Internet Cafe. A few old-timers smoking nearby didn’t lift their heads; they just glanced at the screen and muttered, "Kid’s got some real heat."

Old Zhou poked his head out from behind the counter, half a cigarette dangling from his lips, his eyes twinkling with amusement and surprise. "Hey, headphone kid. What was that just? You cheating? Getting those reactions out of that junk rig?"

Lin Qian took off her earphones, hanging them around her neck. Her voice was as calm as the silence from before. "Not cheating. I listened."

"Listened?" Old Zhou blew out a ring of smoke. Through the haze, his gaze sharpened. "Your Voiceprint Analysis tech is forbidden-art level grime in this circle. Using it just to win a game? Waste of time. But since you want to walk the Gray Market path, that payout is your token of loyalty."

Lin Qian pulled out an old smartphone from her pocket. It showed a notification: five hundred yuan received. This was her first startup capital, earned on the black market trading platform by completing several high-risk "data cleaning" jobs. It wasn’t much, but it proved she had a clean slate, no outstanding debts, and thus qualified to enter the deeper gray zones.

Old Zhou extended a hand, pointing to the pitch-black street outside the window. "Remember, there’s no turning back on the Gray Market. Every bit of 'data' you take has a price tag, and it comes with blood. Tomorrow night, 8 PM. Drop those three unfinished low-level logic codes into my email. Don't be late."

Lin Qian nodded, grabbed her backpack, and turned toward the door. The rain was still falling in fine drizzle, wetting the fabric on her shoulders. She didn’t look back. Her steps were firm and cold.

At the same time, on the other side of the city, in Su Nian’s apartment.

Su Nian sat before a massive curved screen, holding a cup of black coffee that had gone cold. The screen was playing footage of Lin Qian from the Black Internet Cafe’s surveillance angle. The image was grainy, but clear enough to see those bizarre position movements and almost precognitive reactions.

Su Nian’s finger hovered over the keyboard for a moment before finally striking down.

"Extract anomalous signals."

A red warning tag popped up in the bottom right corner of the screen, automatically categorized into the highest priority monitoring list. Next to the tag, Su Nian typed a line of small, knife-sharp characters on a virtual paper interface:

[Anomalous Signal: Target Lin Qian. Suspected activation of 'Hunt Protocol' base architecture. Monitoring Level: Raised to S.]

Outside the window, a bolt of lightning split the night sky, illuminating the bottomless chill in Su Nian’s eyes.