486: Chapter 486 Lanfang Closes the Net

Shafiq did not understand the name, but he saw the corpse in the photograph—a boy wearing school shorts curled up beside the base of a basketball hoop, the basketball rolling into a ditch three meters away, blood splattered on its surface.

He remembered that boy. Not out of guilt, but because after his subordinate fired and came back to report that "the bullet missed," he had deducted a week's wages from that subordinate.

"Lin Desheng. Eighty-one years old. Locked in the house and burned to death. A family of six, the youngest grandson was one and a half years old."

The onlookers grew restless.

The old man holding a hunting rifle rested the barrel on the ground, the python tattoo on the back of his hand trembling in the firelight. The young man carrying a harpoon gripped the handle until it creaked. Lin Ziqiang bit his lower lip until it bled, the blood dripping down his chin onto the stock of his AK-203.

Lin Xiao-7 saw this scene through her night vision goggles. She ceased fire, moving her right thumb away from the trigger guard. She tapped her knuckles twice on the channel—this was the signal for "pause." Eleven team members stopped firing simultaneously, stepping aside to make space.

Shafiq saw this signal. In that moment, he suddenly understood—it was not regular army tactics, nor was it guerrilla tactics. It was a hunt. After a hunter surrounds the prey, they intentionally leave time for the prey to feel fear. He had used the same tactics in Afghanistan, and he had used the same tactics on locals in Syria. Now, he was the prey.

"Who are you—"

Lin Yaxing raised his long blade. Shafiq stared at the trajectory of the blade tip as it moved upward, from his chest to his neck, finally stopping right in front of his throat.

"Lanfang Republic."

As the blade fell, Shafiq remembered something. When he ordered the pacification campaign, the report he wrote contained the name of a village called Siniawan. He did not know what the name meant at the time.

He would never know.

The sky was slightly bright.

The rain over the peat swamp had stopped, and a ray of morning sun pierced through the gaps in the canopy of the camphor trees, falling upon the ruins of the stronghold. Lin Yaxing crouched beside the charred remains of the command tent, using a dry branch to push aside the ashes, and found a page of a document that had not been completely burned. The document header was in English: Operation Python Strike - Target List. Below it was a list—the target list was numbered up to 129, with each item marked with an execution status: Completed, Pending, Canceled.

The handwriting on the list had been blurred by rain and blood, with only a few scattered words visible—Lahad Datu, Siniawan, Singkawang, Pontianak. Each place name was followed by a number; the smallest number was "42", and the largest was "217".

There was a handwritten signature at the end of the list, the ink smeared, but Lin Yaxing recognized the signature—sloppy cursive, the same as the signature on the Lahad Datu document: [ Nathan Black, Cmdr, Task Force Shadow ]

He threw the dry branch on the ground and looked toward the morning mist in the forest. The sun had completely risen. At the intersection of the jungle shadows, he stood for a long time, holding that list.

Later, Lan Zhi asked him what he was thinking about while standing there, but he did not answer.

But Lin Ziqiang said his father stood there motionless, just softly calling his grandfather's name—and then touched the Lanfang blade at his waist.

The last stronghold in Sabah had been eliminated.

Lin Xiao-7 counted the battle results on the ruins of the stronghold: forty-seven mercenaries and extremists killed, six captured, and three javelin missiles, twelve M4A1 rifles, and five encrypted communication devices seized. More importantly, there was that partially burned target list—it detailed the names and coordinates of one hundred and twenty-nine Chinese communities in Sabah, forty-two of which were marked as "Completed," and another eighty-seven were marked as "Pending."

It was exactly eight o'clock in the morning when Zhang Cheng received this list.

He spread the curled, burnt document on his desk and used a magnifying glass to identify the blurred handwriting line by line. Li Lanzhi stood by his side, recording in real-time on a tablet, her brows furrowing as she typed.

"Eighty-seven communities." Zhang Cheng's voice was as calm as usual. "They intended to wipe out all the Chinese in North Borneo. Black got off too easily."

Li Lanzhi's fingers stopped typing. She wasn't afraid; she was thinking about something—from the Lahad Datu operation to this list, less than two weeks had passed. If the Lin Xiao Squad had intercepted the intelligence forty-eight hours later, the Chinese in those eighty-seven communities would not have waited for rescue.

Luck? No, it was because when the entire Sabah operation was launched, Zhang Cheng had bypassed standard reconnaissance procedures and directly deployed three special operations teams to cast a net simultaneously—completing the combat deployment of stronghold investigation, personnel identification, and "besieging the point to reinforce the reinforcements" within sixty-eight hours. From Black to Shafiq, from Sabah to Sarawak, not one had slipped through the net.

"There is one more thing," Li Lanzhi said. "Zhao Gang forwarded a piece of intelligence—internal US military communications intercepted by the Dragon Kingdom's Ministry of State Security show that Black sent a final encrypted message before he died. The message was already interrupted when we intercepted it, but the Dragon Kingdom's monitoring station in the direction of Guam intercepted a complete segment."

She handed over the tablet. On the screen was a line of decrypted English text: [ All routes cut. No extraction. They have the old books. Repeat, they have the old books. ]

"Old account books." Zhang Cheng took off his glasses and wiped them slowly with a lens cloth. "The land deed books of the Lanfang Republic."

At ten o'clock in the morning, Zhang Cheng convened a national security meeting at the Presidential Palace in Naypyidaw.

It wasn't just the top military brass in attendance—Old K, Zhao Yuxun, and Senior Colonel Lin Haisheng were all present, and Li Lanzhi sat at Zhang Cheng's side with the compiled battle report of the Sabah operation laid out in front of her.

But what was most surprising was that there was something else on the conference table: an original land deed book from the eleventh year of the Guangxu reign, the pages yellowed, the edges of the paper tattered, and the cover stamped with the cinnabar seal of the Kapitan. Beside the land deed book was a new wooden box made of Sabah camphor wood, with a line of characters carved on the lid: [ In commemoration of the return of the Lanfang Republic's descendants, December 31, 2024 AD ]

"The history of the Lanfang Republic was burned once by the Dutch in the tenth year of the Guangxu reign, and burned again in Singkawang in 1949." Zhang Cheng pushed the wooden box to Li Lanzhi. "From now on—whoever wants to burn the Lanfang Republic again, ask the Myanmar Army's thermobaric bombs first."

Li Lanzhi was somewhat surprised: "You want to posthumously recognize it?"

"Posthumously recognize? No." Zhang Cheng stood up, walked to the wall, and pointed to the map of Borneo. "The seal of the Lanfang Republic is with me. The land of the Lanfang Republic—Siniawan, Mandor, Singkawang, Pontianak, Sambas, will all be incorporated into the Sarawak Special Autonomous Region, implementing one country, one system, and complete autonomy. The chief of the autonomous region will be elected by the descendants of the Lanfang Republic."

Old K cut into the holographic situational map and quickly marked the coordinates of Siniawan, Mandor, and others on the administrative division of Sarawak. Above each settlement, a small flag rose—the baobab leaf emblem flag and the pattern of the Lanfang Republic Kapitan's great seal were placed side by side.