The echo of cautious footsteps trailed behind Lin Feng as he descended the old stairwell beneath the East Financial Archives—one of the city's forgotten relics from the 1980s. Dust clung to the air like smoke, disturbed only by the flickering of motion-activated lights overhead. Every step he took was muffled, but the deeper he went, the heavier the silence became.
This wasn't part of any official records. It was a network of sealed infrastructure—underground vaults and cold-storage datacores buried by a now-defunct state ministry that had once hoarded financial secrets from eras no one dared speak of aloud. Only through cross-referencing Cassandra's cultural influence maps and Keller's digital movements had Lin Feng found this—an unguarded root node of the city's ancient economic grid.
Behind him, Yu Xian followed silently, face taut. She had insisted on coming after seeing the irregular patterns in the leaked city fund transactions.
