The grid went dark.

Hong Kong’s skyline shimmered with neon lights, casting a mesmerizing glow across the city. Skyscrapers loomed like titans, their glass façades reflecting the pulse of the metropolis below. Amidst this sea of towering giants, hidden in plain sight, was Zhang Wei’s digital fortress—a nearly invisible citadel embedded deep within the city's infrastructure, controlling its entire network.

Rudy crouched low on a rooftop several blocks away, his gaze locked onto the fortress. The structure seemed to shimmer and shift, a holographic veil disguising its true form. To the untrained eye, it blended seamlessly with the surrounding buildings, but Rudy’s augmented reality visor told a different story. Through the veil, he saw a lattice of intricate security nodes, each pulsating with data streams—a digital labyrinth of unprecedented complexity. The fortress was an impenetrable stronghold, a web of algorithms woven so tightly that even the most sophisticated hackers would be swallowed whole.