Chapter 108 A Mysterious Organization Approaches Us, Seeking Cooperation to Control Talents

Su Qinghan stared at the screen for a long time at the words 'internal mole'.

The encrypted communication intercepted by Ghost originated from an IP address belonging to the largest commercial management company under the Su family—Shengheng Commercial Management.

This company manages all of the Su family's commercial real estate projects across the country, and its internal network security is at a financial grade. For an outsider to piggyback on its intranet to send messages, there is only one possibility: the person sending the message is a core member of Shengheng itself, or a core member is helping from behind the scenes.

"The intranet firewall at Shengheng was reinforced by me and my team three years ago; it is impossible for an external intrusion to bypass the behavior audit module."

Ghost zoomed in on the timeline of the communication record and cross-referenced it with the attendance clock-in data of Shengheng Commercial Management's employees.

The message was sent at 11:23 PM, at which time only a few employees working overtime remained in the entire Shengheng office building.

"The person who sent the message used the computer of the Deputy Director of the Finance Department. Only two people can log in to that computer."

After saying this, he projected two names onto the screen. One was Su Jianzhong, Su Qinghan's second uncle and Vice President of Shengheng Commercial Management. The other was Sun Li, Su Jianzhong's secretary.

Su Qinghan looked at the two names without speaking immediately. A moment later, she picked up her phone and walked out of the conference room, called her father, and put it on speakerphone on the table.

"Dad, someone on the Shengheng intranet is sending out encrypted emails using Second Uncle's office computer. The recipient is an overseas email address of the Black Crow Consortium, and the content involves all the business data and operational patterns of Lin Ye's studio."

There was silence on the other end of the line for a long while. When Su's father spoke, his voice was very heavy: "Your second uncle mentioned last month that he wanted to cooperate with an overseas capital party to develop holographic commercial real estate. I rejected it on the grounds that the risk was too high. If that capital party is the Black Crow Consortium, then he must have contacted them himself after I refused to approve it. Qinghan, handle family matters according to family rules. But regarding the Black Crow Consortium, tell Lin Ye that the Su family will fully cooperate with all his countermeasures."

Su Qinghan hung up the phone, took a deep breath, and relayed the content of the call word for word to everyone in the conference room.

Lin Ye did not discuss Su Jianzhong's matter immediately. He asked Ghost to seal and encrypt all the evidence, then turned to another more urgent question: "Besides receiving intelligence, does the Black Crow Consortium have any other moves?"

Ghost switched screens. He pulled up a distribution map of abnormal communication signals across the city over the last three days, with dozens of abnormal nodes marked in red, distributed across eleven cities in six provinces nationwide. These nodes had one common characteristic—they were all regularly sending short pulse signals to an overseas encrypted server. The signal content was encrypted, but the packet sizes were highly consistent, like some kind of standardized monitoring report.

"These nodes do not belong to the Black Crow Consortium. I have already modeled the communication characteristics of the Black Crow Consortium; their encryption protocol is commercial-grade."

Ghost placed the two sets of data on the same coordinate axis for comparison, and the spectrum curves were completely different. "The encryption protocol for this new set of signals is military-grade, utilizing multiple hops and physical layer encryption. I was intercepted by the opponent's security gateway six times while counter-tracking, and the final exit node I traced was attached to the IP range of a civilian scientific research project under a certain country's Ministry of Defense."

The conference room went quiet.

Ghost continued to add: "They are hiding very deeply, but their behavioral patterns have already been exposed. All these nodes are monitoring Lin Ye's Reality Synchronization energy fluctuations. From the Auntie Zhou speaker case to the Grandpa Zhang fraud case, and then to the passenger flow Decay at Dingsheng Group—every time Lin Ye released cross-dimensional energy, the time and coordinates were recorded and uploaded by these nodes. They have even established a preliminary energy Decay model. In the most recent uploaded data packet, they have already been able to roughly calculate the effective radius of Lin Ye's single Reality Synchronization."

"In other words, someone has been using a ruler to measure the range of my skills." Lin Ye leaned back in his chair, his tone very calm. "The Black Crow Consortium doesn't have this technology. To be able to bypass Ghost's tracking, attach to a Ministry of Defense IP, and model my energy characteristics—this organization is not simple."

Ghost added a more critical piece of information. When he tracked the physical locations of several of these nodes, he discovered they appeared simultaneously in the network equipment deployment records of large shopping malls, high-end office buildings, and private schools in multiple cities. The hardware models were identical, all being Internet of Things sensor gateway devices installed in the same batch, and the supplier was an overseas shell technology company registered in the Cayman Islands. And when Yinghua International School upgraded its campus network at the beginning of the year, it just so happened to purchase gateway devices from this very supplier.

"That Board Member Li, his school network also has the same monitoring nodes." Ghost pulled up and zoomed in on the equipment list of the Yinghua school server room. "This means this organization didn't just appear. They had already spread their monitoring network into the country at least more than half a year ago. We thought the Yinghua incident was Board Member Li's personal revenge, but now it seems it might not be that simple. Someone used Board Member Li's school as a cover and incidentally collected data on the behavioral constraint skills released by Lin Ye in the Xiaoming case."

Lin Ye picked up his teacup and looked at the map densely packed with red nodes on the screen. A moment later, he made a decision: "Ghost, organize all the deployment locations, device models, supplier information, and the equity structure of the associated shell companies for these nodes, and pack and encrypt them. If they are an official organization, then we will actively lure them out. If they are not an official organization, then we will let the authorities handle them."

Ghost nodded, his fingers tapping rapidly on the keyboard. Fifteen minutes later, a complete monitoring network investigation report was encrypted, packed, and sent simultaneously to the National Cybersecurity Emergency Response Center and the local public security bureau's cybersecurity detachment.

Less than forty minutes after the email was sent, Su Qinghan's phone rang first. The caller was the Su family patriarch, Su Zhenbang, Su Qinghan's grandfather, a retired old general who almost never initiated calls. Su Qinghan hadn't spoken more than a few sentences after answering when her expression changed.

She handed the phone to Lin Ye and said softly: "It's someone from the Guardian Alliance. They sent a message through my grandfather, hoping to have a face-to-face talk with you."

Lin Ye took the phone. On the other end was a calm female voice: "Mr. Lin Ye, my name is Sister Chen, and I am affiliated with the Guardian Alliance. You may not have heard of this organization before. We are responsible for handling all supernatural events nationwide, including special phenomena like Reality Synchronization of game energy. The report you just sent to the National Cybersecurity Emergency Response Center was first received by us. Because that monitoring network was set up by us."

Lin Ye slowly stood up and walked to the window: "You monitored my energy fluctuations and hacked into Ghost's system to track his counter-tracking path. What kind of official organization is that?"

Sister Chen's tone was frank but her attitude was firm: "The technical means were indeed not honorable, and I apologize. But we had no other choice. Before you awakened your Talent, the phenomenon of game energy permeating into reality had already appeared sporadically around the world. After we monitored the energy characteristics of your Decay Talent, we needed to confirm whether you fell within a controllable range. Facts have proven that you are controllable, and every time you have taken action in reality so far, it has been targeted at illegal and disciplinary evil acts."

She paused, and her tone carried an unprecedented weight: "Lin Ye, the Abyss Council is not just making trouble in the game. Intelligence we recently intercepted shows that at least seven abnormal events directly caused by Abyss energy have already occurred in reality—objects floating for no reason, local temperatures dropping sharply to near freezing, and large-scale failures of electronic equipment. These events are distributed across four provinces nationwide, and the frequency of occurrence is accelerating. Our conventional forces cannot effectively restrain Abyss energy; the only ones who can deal with Abyss energy are S-level Talent users like you who have traversed the barrier between the game and reality."

"So you want to cooperate." Lin Ye made it clear.

Sister Chen admitted it straightforwardly: "Yes. We hope to establish a formal cooperative relationship with you. The Guardian Alliance will provide you with identity protection that allows you to withdraw unscathed—all your studio's industrial, commercial, tax, and public security filings will be included in the highest-level compliance protection list, and there will no longer be incidents where a Board Member Li can call in a surprise inspection with a single phone call. At the same time, we will provide technical resources and intelligence sharing, including real-time monitoring data of Abyss energy anomaly points nationwide. In exchange, in situations where you deem it necessary to act, you will assist us in handling Abyss abnormal events that are beyond the scope of conventional forces."

Lin Ye did not agree immediately. He switched the phone to his other hand: "Cooperation is possible. But I have a few conditions. First, I only handle events that I judge necessary to handle. You provide the intelligence, I evaluate it; I do not accept forced task assignments. Second, all the monitoring nodes you previously deployed must be completely removed. In the future, if you want to monitor Abyss energy anomalies, the device deployment locations and frequency ranges must be coordinated with my side in advance; Ghost will be responsible for technical interfacing, and data synchronization will be transparent. Third, if my studio team encounters any pressure from other official departments in subsequent cooperation, you block it first; no need to wait for me to speak."

Sister Chen almost didn't hesitate: "I can agree to the first two points right now. For the third one, I need to go back and follow the procedure, but it shouldn't be a problem. The priority of the Guardian Alliance is higher than all local departments below the provincial level, and incidents like Board Member Li's will not happen again."

Lin Ye said "fine" and hung up the phone.

He returned the phone to Su Qinghan and turned to Ghost, saying: "Add a note to the copy of the monitoring network investigation report—the Guardian Alliance's device deployment records have been included in the internal filing; in the future, if abnormal signals of the same frequency appear again, automatically cross-reference them. If they don't match, treat them as hostile targets."

Ghost acknowledged and built a new monitoring model in the background.

Su Qinghan leaned against the conference table, watching Lin Ye finish handling all of this, the corners of her mouth curling up slightly. The matter with her second uncle hadn't been wrapped up yet, the Guardian Alliance had come knocking, the local business circle had just been shaken by the Dingsheng case and hadn't settled down, and the aristocratic school side had only been quiet for two days—this man seemed to always be handling several messes at the same time, yet he had never truly panicked.

She was just about to update this week's order schedule when a new monitoring window suddenly popped up on Ghost's screen. Inside the window was an encrypted communication record; the sending source was still the intranet port of Shengheng Commercial Management, but this time the recipient overseas was no longer the Black Crow Consortium. Ghost traced two layers of hops along the new recipient IP and discovered that the receiving server was tightly wrapped in a military-grade encryption shell. All the institutional information registered outside the shell was for shell companies, with no official identification whatsoever. He used a clever technique to peel away the outer camouflage, and the underlying physical server address coordinates that were finally exposed completely overlapped with the heat map of Abyss energy anomaly points they had just intercepted.

He took off his headphones and turned around, his voice rarely carrying a hint of uncertainty: "Brother Ye. That computer of Su Jianzhong just sent out another email. This time it's not to the Black Crow Consortium. The receiving end is at the physical location of the Abyss energy anomaly point. There is someone behind Su Jianzhong."

The order schedule Lin Ye was folding in half stopped in mid-air. Sister Chen had just left; he originally thought the biggest thing today would be negotiating terms with an official organization. Now it seems, that restless second uncle of the Su family had somehow already linked up with the Abyss Council. The Su family's affairs, the Abyss's affairs—someone had welded them together.