111: Shadows in deep space

"Beep—"

That alarm, which only Chen Feng could hear, was like a red-hot steel needle, instantly piercing his calm facade.

He abruptly closed the alarm interface, the color draining from his face at a visible rate, leaving behind only a somber, iron-gray expression.

"Boss?" Reno was the first to notice something was wrong. He stopped his equipment check and looked over in confusion. "What's happened?"

Lao Mo also poked his head out from behind the console, his weathered face etched with concern. "Is there a problem with the ship?"

"No." Chen Feng's voice was very low, like cold iron sinking into the deep sea. "There's nothing wrong with the ship."

He paused and looked up. In those eyes that were always calm to the point of indifference, a storm was now churning—a mix of shock and icy killing intent that Reno and Lao Mo had never seen before.

"Our foundation... there's a problem with it."

Before his voice had even faded, Chen Feng had already activated the encrypted communication at top speed. In the holographic projection, Su Li's capable and delicate face appeared.

"Chen Feng?" Su Li seemed a bit surprised that he would contact her so soon. "What's the matter?"

"Did you also receive an alarm from the Exchange on your end?" Chen Feng got straight to the point, the urgency in his voice making Su Li's expression turn serious immediately.

"I did, just three minutes before you contacted me." Su Li spoke very quickly, clearly having already entered a wartime state. "I immediately pulled up all the relevant data. The situation is bad."

"Speak."

"The other party's ID is 'Netherworld'. It's an anonymous trade, untraceable. Judging by their sell-off behavior, they possess at least one undead crystal source with reserves no less than our Sector B vein."

Su Li paused and dropped an even more fatal piece of news: "The most critical thing is that Sequence Zero has also sent them a price inquiry. Just now, the next batch of supply orders we had just finalized was unilaterally suspended by Sequence Zero. The reason given was 'the need for a market re-evaluation.' This means that in the face of 'Netherworld's' price advantage, our long-term contract with Sequence Zero... is effectively void."

"Fuck!" Listening to their conversation, Reno finally couldn't help but punch the nearby metal wall, letting out a dull thud. "Someone must have leaked it! Our route, our source!"

"Unlikely." Lao Mo shook his head, forcing himself to stay calm and analyze. "Boss, a leak would only expose us. But the fact that the other party can provide higher quality goods means they have control over a much higher-value 'source' that we know absolutely nothing about."

"The rug has been pulled out from under us," Chen Feng said word by word, each one sounding as if it were squeezed out from between his teeth.

He stood up abruptly, pacing back and forth in the narrow bridge, his mind racing.

"Now is not the time to investigate the cause." Chen Feng's voice regained its coldness. "Everyone, to the meeting room, now!"

Five minutes later, in the 'wanderer's' modest meeting room, the atmosphere was so heavy it felt like it could drip water.

"Su Li, project all the real-time data from your end." Chen Feng stood before the holographic screen and pulled up the Interstellar Exchange's 'Market Trend Analysis' plugin.

Countless curves representing price fluctuations, trading volume, and buyer sentiment indices instantly filled the screen.

"Reno, don't look at these lines like that; they aren't your enemies," Chen Feng said without turning his head.

He pointed to a sharply declining blue curve and a wildly rising red curve on the screen: "'Netherworld's' behavior pattern is very strange. They aren't lowering prices in gradients to test the market's floor; they've slashed the price to a level that would cause severe losses in one go. This kind of dumping isn't for profit at all."

"Not for profit?" Looking at the screen full of lines that looked like gibberish to him, Reno's expression was pained. He tried to follow Chen Feng's logic but eventually gave up, blurting out, "Boss, just tell me what this bastard wants to do. We'll just go back and beat up whoever we need to!"

Lao Mo was amused by his bluntness, but his tightened lips quickly flattened again.

"He's not doing business; he's announcing his existence to us—or rather, to the entire market." A flash of realization crossed Chen Feng's eyes. "This is a demonstration, a test."

"I understand." Su Li's voice came through the communicator. "He wants to see our reaction to judge our strength and our cards."

"Exactly." Chen Feng drew two arrows on the screen. "So, we must fight on two fronts. Su Li, your tasks are twofold: First, stabilize Sequence Zero at all costs. Tell them we are about to launch a new generation of purified 'concept samples' to keep them in a wait-and-see mode. Second, try to contact 'Netherworld' as an ordinary buyer to uncover their background and see who they really are."

"Understood," Su Li replied curtly.

"As for us," Chen Feng's gaze swept over Reno and Lao Mo, "the plan remains unchanged: we head to Tartarus. Besides rescuing Eve, we have an additional mission: in that lawless no-man's-land, find out what kind of entity stands behind the ID 'Netherworld'."

After the meeting ended, the oppressive atmosphere did not dissipate.

Reno rushed into the training room without a word, venting all his frustration and powerlessness on the training dummy. The high-frequency vibration dagger in his hand hummed; every strike was more cunning and swift than before. His moves lost some of their broad, bold bravery but gained a few more points of lethal ruthlessness.

Lao Mo locked himself in the workshop, performing the final checks and modifications on the wanderer.

"Boss," he suddenly connected to Chen Feng's internal comms, "I've made a discovery."

"Speak."

"Among that pile of 'junk attachments' we scavenged from the scrapyard for camouflage, there are a few armor plates... they aren't ordinary alloys. I scanned them with a spectrometer; their material seems to be some kind of energy-storage material from a lost civilization. Although the energy has decayed significantly, if we overload them at a critical moment, we should be able to squeeze out one last bit of emergency power."

"Very good." A ripple of emotion finally appeared on Chen Feng's face. "Keep it as our final trump card."

A month later, as the wanderer's sub-light speed voyage neared its end, the outline of a massive city—a haphazard patchwork of countless shipwrecks, asteroids, and space station modules—appeared outside the porthole like a hideous scar in the depths of space.

Tartarus Free Port had been reached.

Just then, an emergency encrypted message marked with the highest priority arrived from Ashen Earth Star across the endless void.

It was Su Li.

"Chen Feng, I analyzed the energy residue data from all of 'Netherworld's' transaction slips and compared it with the law fluctuation models of all known 'concepts' in our database."

Su Li's voice carried a hint of unbelievable trembling.

"And the result?" Chen Feng's heart tightened suddenly.

"The source of his 'concept', the characteristic frequency of its law fluctuations, has a 97.3% similarity with an extra-dimensional civilization in our database called the [Echoes of the River Lethe Plane]."

Chen Feng's pupils constricted into dangerous pinpoints in an instant.

His competitor... was not a company, nor a financial group.

It was a complete, living, extra-dimensional civilization that he had never even heard of.