Chapter 95 Lu Jingming's Counterattack: A Madman Who Doesn't Play by the Rules

John Smith's command had just been transmitted via the undersea fiber-optic cable.

Inside the Xinghai Technology building in Donghai City, a piercing buzzer shattered the calm.

"Buzz—buzz—"

Red network warning lights spun wildly on the corridor ceiling, casting the white walls as if they had been splashed with blood.

The solid wood double doors were kicked open.

The doorknob slammed heavily against the wainscoting, shaking loose a small piece of yellowed plaster.

Xia Weiliang hadn't even bothered to put on her slippers.

She stood barefoot on the Persian rug, the buttons of her lab coat fastened incorrectly.

She clutched a half-eaten cup of instant noodles in her hand; greasy broth spilled onto the back of her hand, but she didn't even glance at it.

"Lu Jingming! The foreign devils are flipping the table!"

She slammed the noodle cup onto the coffee table, splattering a few drops of broth.

She pointed to the tablet in her hand, which was flashing garbled code.

Chu Xuan was holding an iced coffee when his hand shook.

Brown liquid splashed all over his floral shirt, and he scrambled to grab tissues to wipe it off.

"Girl, can you stop being so jumpy? What kind of mess is it this time?"

Xia Weiliang's eyes were bloodshot as she stared fixedly at the tablet screen.

"The American Cybersecurity Bureau has directly exercised their backbone network authority! They cut the DNS resolution without even saying a word!"

She panted heavily, her chest heaving.

"They've physically severed all our cloud server IPs in North America!"

Chu Xuan stopped what he was doing.

He wiped his mouth haphazardly with a tissue, his voice cracking.

"Cutting the IPs? Doesn't that mean the millions of devices we sold to the foreigners will all become useless bricks that can't connect to the internet?"

Shen Qingqiu ran in wearing high heels, her face deathly pale.

"It's worse than becoming bricks."

She pushed up her gold-rimmed glasses, her voice trembling.

"Once the foreigners find their devices disconnected, they'll definitely think we've run off with their money. Once our reputation collapses, our foundation overseas will be completely ruined."

Lu Jingming sat in his executive chair.

He toyed with a plastic lighter, his thumb slowly flicking the flint wheel.

"Click, click" the sound was exceptionally crisp in the room.

He tossed the lighter onto the mahogany desk, making a sharp sound.

"Pulling my network cable? That old man John really thinks North America is his own backyard."

Lu Jingming stood up, tugged at the collar of his black T-shirt, and strode out.

"Boss Lu, where are you going? The servers can't hold on much longer!" Xia Weiliang chased after him.

"To the server room."

Lu Jingming didn't even look back, his leather shoes striking the floor tiles with a steady rhythm.

"Just taking hits without fighting back—that's not my style."

Second basement floor, Xinghai core server room.

The cooling fans blasted out cold air, giving anyone who entered goosebumps.

Hundreds of black server cabinets were arranged in a square formation.

The blue indicator lights, like ghost eyes, were now mixed with blinding red light, flashing frantically.

The cabinet fans were spinning at maximum speed, the roar deafening.

Lao Zhou and a few engineers were crouched in front of the master control console, typing away, drenched in sweat.

"Boss Lu! The American attack flow is too fierce! They are using a national-level firewall to block our path!"

Lao Zhou yelled back, his throat nearly raw.

Lu Jingming walked to the master control console and pulled out a folding chair.

The metal legs of the chair scraped harshly against the floor tiles.

"Dismantle all the perimeter defense walls."

He looked at the dense data on the screen and threw out the remark nonchalantly.

Chu Xuan, following behind, slipped and almost knelt on the anti-static floor.

"Dismantle defenses? Boss Lu, are you crazy!"

He grabbed his center-parted hair, his face full of terror.

"If we dismantle them, our headquarters server room will be completely exposed! They'll fill our hard drives with viruses!"

Xia Weiliang didn't waste words.

She shoved Lao Zhou aside and slammed her hands onto the mechanical keyboard.

The clattering of keys echoed through the server room.

"Perimeter defenses disabled."

Xia Weiliang stared at the screen, half of which had gone black, her knuckles turning white.

"They're in. Dirty data is flooding in."

Lao Zhou slumped to the floor, his face ashen.

"It's over. Now even our home base has been taken."

Lu Jingming leaned his hands on the edge of the table.

He stared at the monitor, a frenzied fire igniting in his eyes, completely ignoring the Trojan code running wild.

"Do they really think I wrote Xinghai OS just to provide them with a clean desktop?"

He sneered, revealing a glimpse of his white canine teeth.

"Weiliang, pull up that compressed archive from the underlying layer."

Xia Weiliang's hands, which were typing code, suddenly stopped.

She turned her head, her eyes wide behind her thick-rimmed glasses.

Her throat felt dry, and she swallowed twice.

"You… you want to open the 'Pandora's Box'?"

Her voice floated, as if she were speaking a forbidden name.

Chu Xuan leaned his head in, looking left and right, his face full of confusion.

"What box? We have this kind of little toy hidden in our system?"

"It's not a toy, it's a bomb."

Xia Weiliang gritted her back teeth, her fingers dragging a file marked with a red skull from the hidden directory.

She turned to look at Chu Xuan, her eyes filled with the fanatical yet fearful look of a tech geek.

"When writing the underlying architecture of Xinghai OS, he left a dormant P2P handshake protocol in the kernel."

She pointed to the string of code on the screen.

"Once this thing is activated, those millions of Xinghai devices overseas will instantly become zombie nodes, no longer under the control of local carriers."

Chu Xuan swallowed hard, his brain spinning for a long time.

"Zombie nodes? What does that mean, girl? Can you speak human language?"

Shen Qingqiu understood from the side.

She gasped, her scalp tingling as if it were exploding, staring fixedly at Lu Jingming.

"Doesn't that mean… the tablets and phones the foreigners paid for have all become guns in our hands to wage war?"

"If you buy my things, you have to follow my rules."

Lu Jingming straightened up, one hand in his jeans pocket.

He looked at the flashing red alerts on the screen, his gaze cold.

"If they can splash dirty water over here, I can pour some poison back down their pipes."

Lao Zhou sat on the floor, his lips trembling as he interjected.

"But, but the Americans cut the DNS! How are we going to send our commands?"

"Who said I was going through the front door?"

Lu Jingming chuckled and patted the back of Xia Weiliang's chair.

"Use those dirty data lines the foreign devils flooded in with to penetrate back. You're good at this job."

Xia Weiliang took a deep breath.

Her ten fingers flew across the keyboard again.

Several lines of complex anti-tracking code silently crept along the path of the American attack.

The master control screen flashed twice.

An execution interface with a black background and red text popped up.

An all-English warning prompt pulsed in the center of the screen.

[Warning: Pandora Protocol Ready to Execute.]

All it takes is pressing Enter.

Those millions of devices far away in North America will wake up simultaneously.

Like a swarm of dormant soldier ants, they will launch an unprecedented reverse flood attack on the American network backbone nodes.

The server room was as cold as an ice cellar.

The roar of the fans seemed to fade away, leaving only the heavy breathing of everyone present.

Xia Weiliang's finger hovered over the red Enter key on the keyboard, stopping.

Her fingertips couldn't help but tremble slightly.

She understood technology; she knew all too well how serious the consequences of pressing it would be.

This was no longer an ordinary commercial counterattack.

She looked up and glanced at the man standing behind her.

"Boss Lu, once this Enter key is pressed, millions of devices becoming zombie nodes is equivalent to declaring an international cyberwar against the Americans! Are you really going to go crazy?"

Lu Jingming lowered his eyelids.

He looked at the flashing red cursor, his eyes as cold as ice knives in the dead of winter.

He didn't budge, his tone filled with a ruthlessness capable of smashing through steel plates.

"Press it! If they dare to pull my network cable, I'll pull the main power switch on the Americans!"