"Okay, login's done. What now?" Shi Jiuyou asked, her voice a nervous whisper in the dark. Outside this concrete box, her sudden disappearance from the live stream had already caused a tectonic uproar in her chat. The last image, an officer's hand grabbing her shoulder, had frozen into a digital rallying cry.
Jing Shu took the phone, her fingers a blur of practiced motion. She isolated the most damning moments: the child's testimony, the director's hypocrisy, the officer's two-fingered signal, her own shout about the hero's heart. She carved the stream into surgical clips, each under a minute, and began overlaying text with the precision of a propagandist.
Clip 1: The little girl's voice, clear: "That Uncle Zhang is bad... he said the owner is a nobody."
On-screen text in bold red: SHOCKING! HERO'S HOME STOLEN WHILE ON SECRET MISSION!
Bullet comment: Is this how we treat our protectors?
Clip 2: The senior officer waving off the property issue.
Title: UNBELIEVABLE! THE 'SHARK SUBMARINE' SAVIOR ARRESTED FOR 'OCCUPYING' A HERO'S HOUSE!
Caption: She saved a thousand. They saved a unit for bribes.
Clip 3: The officer snapping, "Ten days labor reform!"
Title: 'I AM THE LAW!' WU CITY OFFICER DECLARES. TRENDING NOW!
Flashing text: Abuse of power or new normal?
Clip 4: Shi Jiuyou being dragged away, her final shout cut off.
Title: TRUTH-SEKKER SILENCED! IS THERE NO LAW LEFT IN THE APOCALYPSE?
Hashtags: #JusticeForSubmarineLady #BananaCommunityCorruption
An eye-catching title determined the click. Rage-inducing content determined the share. The first, clear narrative decided the war. Jing Shu left nothing to chance.
She switched through several alternate accounts on the phone, their usernames generic and untraceable. She tagged every relevant official department, Wu City Civil Affairs, Provincial Disaster Management, Central Discipline Inspection. She posted template comments others could copy-paste: "Demanding a transparent investigation!" "Is this our post-crisis justice?" For the silent majority, she provided the ready-made anger, the perfect retort. Setting the rhythm was everything, and she was the conductor.
Shi Jiuyou stared, her shock morphing into awe. The familiar platform, the viral tactics, but executed with a cold, veteran's proficiency. Her gaze toward Jing Shu changed. This wasn't just a brave survivor or a skilled fighter. This was a strategist. "Could she be… the real boss?"
The earlier live stream had been raw footage. This was a guided missile. The edited clips, sharp as scalpels, tapped directly into a well of public anxiety and moral outrage. The figure of the heroic savior, wronged by petty, corrupt bureaucrats, was a story that wrote itself. It inflamed those she had saved and their families. Comments flooded in, not just from Wu City but from across the fractured national network, demanding answers, demanding blood. Even those who could do nothing else could hit 'like' with furious conviction.
As the saying went, when a billion netizens spit at once, an ocean could be made.
The clips spread like synaptic fire. Likes and comments skyrocketed by the tens of thousands per minute. They breached local feeds, hitting provincial trending lists, then the national hot-searches, climbing with terrifying velocity. By the time any overworked censor in a bunker somewhere thought to flag it, the numbers were already in the hundreds of thousands. Suppression was now impossible; it would only fuel the inferno.
Wu City's official social media accounts were bombarded, tagged over a hundred thousand times in an hour. The weight of that attention was a tangible force, a bureaucratic tsunami. They had to respond. To ignore it was to be cursed by the entire, watching nation.
Shi Jiuyou let out a slow breath, giving a shaky thumbs-up. "And then?"
"Then we wait," Jing Shu replied, her voice calm as still water.
Reputation was a currency. Once minted, it had to be spent. Strike while the iron is hot. A few years later, who would remember a viral story?
Jing Shu had many ways to solve this problem. Direct violence. Leveraging other, darker contacts. But after learning of Li Yuetian's suspension, she had chosen public opinion. It was the method with the lowest immediate cost and the highest potential benefit. And in its own way, it was throwing him a lifeline.
Li Yuetian, Deputy Leader of the Second Squad, now a Senior Colonel. At his age, that trajectory was stellar. He had a future.
From his competent handling of the Hongshan Park evacuation to the merit he had earned from her submarine stunt, he was an asset worth binding. A strong ally with upward mobility in the post-crisis bureaucracy would let her walk sideways through the Banana Community. In this system, apart from those with celestial connections, most needed decades of service to reach his rank. The earlier the investment, the greater the yield.
"Let's hope this also helps him get through his own crisis."
Jing Shu flexed her wrists against the cuffs, a faint, metallic click echoing. But her narrowed eyes were already sweeping the warehouse shelves, inventorying the shadows. She whispered, almost inaudibly, "Second form."
A visualization only she could see unfolded, her Cube Space, a vast, orderly mental grid. It superimposed itself over the chaotic storage room. As she scanned, she began mentally reorganizing the crammed warehouse, categorizing piles while searching for items worth… relocating.
Once the phone's glow faded, plunging them back into near-total darkness, Shi Jiuyou's emotions finally overflowed. In the anonymity of the dark, facing her savior, she found her voice. "Back at Ai Jia… thank you. You saved my life."
In the blackness, Shi Jiuyou kept tossing out whispered questions, about the submarine, about the villa, about what came next. Jing Shu answered lazily, with monosyllables or brief hums, her focus elsewhere.
Meanwhile, her consciousness was busy. She visualized a thin strand of energy, like a spider's silk, extending from her mind's eye. She "tied" it to a small, imaginary point, a "bee," and guided it through the dark air. It brushed against a stack of helmets on a high shelf. Click. A dozen aramid helmets vanished from the physical world and appeared neatly stacked in a corner of her Cube Space.
Chinese-made aramid. Lighter and tougher than old American Kevlar. Excellent ballistic protection, high stability. In combat, a helmet. On the march, a pot, a bowl. In a desert, a water collector. Versatile.
But what Jing Shu valued more was disaster-proofing. Future hailstorms wouldn't drop pebbles; they would drop cannonballs of ice. A free-falling mass from the upper atmosphere carried apocalyptic force. Plastic basins would be confetti. And then came the landslides, the house-sized boulders shaken loose by earthquakes and biblical storms. For the Banana Community, nestled at the mountain's foot, hail was the least of it. The real danger was the mountain itself, hammered apart by lightning strikes with the force of small bombs.
Was it the wrath of thunder gods? Or the wind goddess smashing the peaks? Official science mumbled about orbital shifts and crustal stress. The reason didn't matter. The result did.
A good helmet wasn't just gear; it was a chance.
She didn't take many. Just enough for her family. She would modify them later in her space, repaint them.
Her mental "bee" drifted to a pallet. Three sets of bulky, rarely-seen bulletproof vests disappeared. The military seldom issued them widely, but in total war, factories could pump out millions. These three were a start.
The "bee" hovered over a sealed crate. Jing Shu's focus sharpened. She pried the lid open a crack in reality, just enough to identify the contents. A slow, genuine smile touched her lips in the dark.
"Professional full-face gas masks. Perfect."
Not the flimsy paint-fume masks from online stores. These were military-grade, with twin filter canisters and a sealed visor. She didn't know the exact specification, but they would handle the toxic miasma of the collapsing world, the plumes of chemical decay, the clouds of particulate from endless fires, the strange, shifting stenches that would rise as the very earth sickened.
Trust her, you did not want to breathe that air unfiltered. And it wasn't one smell; it was a catalog of rot, changing with the weather, as if the planet had a stomach flu.
Fifty masks vanished into her space. If she didn't take them, they'd molder here or be doled out to cronies. Preserved in the stasis of her Cube, they'd last for years. Later, they could be rented or sold.
For a price.