85: Chapter 85 Arrest

He just lay there with his eyes closed in the darkness for over an hour.

He didn't turn over, didn't look at his communicator, and his breathing rhythm was exactly the same as when he fell asleep.

His Mental Power was continuously spreading outward, like an extremely thin web, extending from his apartment and covering every corner within a few dozen meters that could receive electronic signals.

The change occurred at the edge of his perception range.

Several connected smart streetlights on the nearby street flickered simultaneously. The interval of their dimming was extremely short; even if ordinary residents were still awake, they would only mistake it for unstable voltage.

Immediately after, the screen of a vending machine in a 24-hour convenience store downstairs flashed two lines of garbled code before quickly returning to normal.

Further out, the onboard systems of several flying cars parked along the street emitted a very brief buzzing sound, lasting only half a second before all going dark simultaneously.

All these tiny anomalies were concentrating in the same direction, as if something was slowly approaching this block along the veins of the virtual network.

Zhen Lu opened his eyes, but his body did not move.

He slowed his breathing further, his fingers clenching slightly under the quilt.

The people from the Church had arrived.

Those subtle electronic fluctuations were them conducting peripheral sweeping, checking inch by inch along every branch node of the virtual network, gradually narrowing the range down to this block.

He remained vigilant, ready to roll out of bed the instant he heard a command, while also guarding against the thing hidden inside the communicator, in case it realized the net was tightening and did something desperate.

The opponent was a High-level Machinist; although only a consciousness remained, the final bite of a trapped beast was often the most dangerous.

The attack came without warning.

Every connected device in the room emitted a very brief screech of electricity simultaneously—the projection TV, the smart thermostat, all the smart home appliances, even the smart toilet in the bathroom—all lit up with a blinding white light and then instantly went dark.

Their internal chips were simultaneously and violently burned out by some external force.

A faint burnt smell permeated the air—the acrid odor of plastic and silicon chips.

Only the communicator on the nightstand remained.

After flickering violently, the communicator's screen fell silent, as if an invisible hand had suppressed all its struggles.

Zhen Lu sat up, threw off the quilt, and stepped barefoot onto the floor.

He manually turned on the lighting system; voice control no longer worked. When he walked to the living room, a knock on the door suddenly sounded.

Knock, knock, knock.

The rhythm was steady, with the interval between each knock being perfectly uniform, like a scalpel landing on a tray.

He opened the door.

Two people stood in the hallway, both wearing the standard combat uniforms of the Guardians, but they were different from any Guardians members he had seen before.

The fabric was a deeper dark blue, with extremely thin armor plates embedded in the shoulders and chest, the edges of the armor shimmering with a dull, cold metallic light.

Neither of them had any expression on their faces, and one of them had an old scar running from his temple to his ear.

They stood in the hallway. The voice-activated lights didn't turn on, leaving the hallway dark, with only the faint green light from the distant emergency exit sign seeping through.

Scarface nodded at him, a very slight movement.

Then he raised his right hand, fingers slightly spread. The communicator that Zhen Lu had left on the nightstand floated up on its own, silently passing through the bedroom door and the hallway, landing steadily in his palm.

The communicator's screen was still lit, displaying the standby interface, indistinguishable from any ordinary late-night standby screen.

Scarface looked down at it, closed his fingers, and with the communicator gripped in his hand, the screen went dark.

The two turned and left without saying a word.

The sound of footsteps faded in the hallway, and the voice-activated lights turned on and off one by one at every node they passed.

Zhen Lu stood at the doorway, watching their backs disappear at the end of the hallway. The elevator doors slid open and closed; the entire process took no more than two minutes.

He closed the door, turned around, and sat down on the sofa.

This hurdle was over, and his tightly coiled nerves slowly began to relax.

He realized belatedly that his back was soaked, his pajamas sticking to his shoulder blades, feeling chilly.

He raised a hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then mobilized his Mental Power and spread it out into the surroundings.

This time, his Mental Power did not linger in his own room.

He scanned a circle outward with himself as the center.

For the residents around him, every chip in every connected device had been simultaneously burned out in the invisible attack just now.

He extended his Mental Power further into the distance, re-establishing contact with the normal data flow of the city's main network.

Those flowing data streams looked like luminous rivers in his perception, rushing endlessly along the main lines, while all the light points in this small area around him had been extinguished.

He withdrew his Mental Power, and a few minutes later, a knock on the door sounded again.

This time, a young member wearing the standard Guardians uniform stood outside the door, holding a brand-new communicator, the same model as his previous one.

The member wore a technical support badge on his chest. His expression was much friendlier than the previous two, but he spoke very quickly, as if reciting lines he had repeated many times before.

"Mr. Zhen Lu, this is a replacement communicator for you. The old device has been reclaimed, and all personal data and backups have been completely migrated to the new device. Your previous network identity and communication records have been preserved, and there will be no difference in usage. Regarding tonight's incident, please do not mention it to anyone. This is a direct order from the General Bureau."

Zhen Lu took the communicator; it felt slightly warm in his palm. The screen had already finished its initialization settings, and the background was the default wallpaper he was used to.

He looked down at it once, then pressed the screen off.

"Understood."

The member completed his task and turned to leave.

He closed the door.

After the lock clicked shut, he returned to the living room and sat down on the sofa. He pondered for a while, then opened his palm to look at the brand-new communicator.

The backup data was restored flawlessly; contacts, call history, browsing cache, and application arrangement were exactly the same as on his previous one.

He flipped through the home screen. Not in a rush to resume daily use, he first mobilized his Mental Power to probe inside.

Expert-level Programming and Virtual Intrusion and Defense operated simultaneously, his Mental Power tentacles silently infiltrating the communicator's data link.

He scanned the hardware layer first; the chip serial number matched the official registration data of the factory batch. There were no physical-level bad sectors in the storage module, and all post-factory rewrite logs for the baseband processor were within the official maintenance timestamps.

He traced down to the operating system's underlying layer, checking the digital signature of every background process one by one. All signatures matched the official ones; there were no tampered or replaced system components.

He checked the pre-installed applications and restored data again.

He verified the contact list one by one; no strange entries had been added, and no entries had been replaced during the restoration process.

The duration, timestamps, and base station jump paths of the call history were all continuous. The jump node for Sun Yi's encrypted communication still remained at the position he had been reverse-tracking halfway through; no one had touched it.

This indicated that after the Guardians reclaimed the old device and before the data was migrated to the new one, they had not performed any extra copying or review—at least not on the level he could check.

Both the hardware and the system were clean.

He withdrew his Mental Power from the communicator and rebuilt a layer of virtual firewall.

He added an extra isolation layer of Mental Power using virtual space technology outside the firewall, physically isolating the communicator from his own consciousness barrier, so that even if someone could breach the firewall, they wouldn't be able to touch his consciousness core.

After finishing this, he placed the communicator on the nightstand, went to the kitchen to pour a glass of water, and gulped it down.

Then he lay back down on the bed, pulled the quilt up to his shoulders, and closed his eyes.

Stroking the ring, he entered.