Xiao Mei stepped into her apartment carrying a weight of exhaustion heavier than her laptop bag. Her steps were slow, her mind racing with memories of the masked man's chilling warning. She dropped her bag onto the small table beside her red sofa and collapsed onto the sofa cushions, sinking as if the weight of the world pressed on her chest.
Finally, she forced herself to sit upright. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, recalling the cryptic voice: "If you keep digging, they'll come for you." She replayed the meeting in her mind—the silence, the shadows, and the envelope filled with explosive evidence. What exactly had she gotten herself into?
An overwhelming sense of confusion and doubt washed over her. She opened her eyes and stood. Determined not to be paralyzed by fear, she climbed the stairs to her small study upstairs. The room was dimly lit, the overhead lamp flickering slightly. She approached the large desk, cluttered with papers, notebooks, and digital printouts from her blossoming investigation.
She opened one of the top drawers and pulled out a thick folder containing documents she'd compiled over the past days—the leaked contracts, fragmented emails, financial charts. She spread the papers across the desk, scanning each one carefully. Many of the names were familiar: executives from major corporations, politicians she'd read about in the news, even prominent journalists who had since gone quiet. They were all connected by the tendrils of Project Aegis.
Then, under a stack of printed memos, she found what she was looking for—a single sheet of paper heavily redacted in black ink. A secret message had clearly been blacked out, but the outlines of the text remained. This was the literal smoking gun—a message meant only for those who knew how to read between the lines.
Her pulse quickened. She listened to her phone buzz on the desk. A message from Yuan Qi:
"Ready. Meet me online soon."
Xiao Mei's fingers flew across the keyboard as she sent the scanned redacted page to her former colleague. Hours passed, each minute echoing with tension. Finally, Yuan Qi responded with a breakthrough: he'd successfully extracted the hidden text. The decrypted message pointed to a classified location—an underground site beneath an old government building, long abandoned.
A chill ran through her. She sat back, reading the decrypted address, her mind racing with possibilities. But almost as quickly, a knock came at her study door. She startled, jumped up, and met the eyes of Zhang Rui, his expression grim.
"I warned you," he said quietly, placing a folder on the desk. "You're playing with fire."
She grabbed the folder and opened it, revealing screenshots from her phone conversations with the masked man, security camera footage clearly showing her entering the old building, and—most disturbing—a recording allegedly from Lu Zeyan himself, discussing his "concern" for her safety. It painted a confusing picture: was Lu Zeyan really on her side, or was he manipulating her every step?
Fear, anger, confusion—all swirled inside Xiao Mei. Her instinct screamed to destroy the evidence, to walk away while she still could. But another voice—her conscience—urged her forward. She looked at Zhang Rui. "Help me decide what to do next."
He sighed heavily. "The underground site—go there. Tonight. But be careful. I'll cover your tracks."
They devised a plan. Armed with a USB drive and blistering curiosity, Xiao Mei steeled herself, agreeing to slip away under the cover of darkness.
That night, she crept out of her apartment and into the cab that carried her to the abandoned site. Fear prickled her skin as the city lights dimmed and the cab rolled into the shadowed perimeter of the old government building. At the entrance to a rusted service door, she stepped out, clutching her bag of equipment. A deep breath—and she was inside.
Her flashlight pierced the darkness as she navigated through graffiti-streaked halls and abandoned offices. Finally, she found the metal door marked with peeling signs: "Authorized Personnel Only." It slid open with a hiss, revealing a stairwell leading downward.
Below, the air was colder, damp, and thick with silence. At the bottom of the stairs, rows of old computer servers hissed, their lights blinking in an eerie rhythm. Data Tower 12: this was the heart of the hidden archive. She found a workstation still powered up—a miracle, seeing as the power had been shut off for years.
She placed her palm on the scanner pad, breathing steadily. The system recognized her credentials—thanks to Yuan Qi's digital backdoor—and she gained access. Files poured onto her encrypted thumb drive: financial ledgers, internal memos, video logs, personnel dossiers, a trove that would expose Project Aegis in full.
Time blurred. As the last megabyte transferred, she heard footsteps overhead. A soft click—the stairwell door opened.
Her breath caught. She looked up, alone in the gloom.
A familiar silhouette emerged.
"Xiao Mei?" The voice echoed down the corridor. It was deeper than before—controlled, calm. She froze.
A figure descended slowly. Under the hood, she could see… the shape of a coat she recognized. A voice she knew.
There he was.
Lu Zeyan.
Heart pounding, Xiao Mei gripped the USB drive. Was he there to help… or to stop her?
The air crackled with tension.