IV：Silver Bullet and Rune Code

The sweet smell of burning nanoworms wafted through the ruins of lower Manhattan. Leo leaned against the collapsed Morgan Stanley billboard, the silver bullet embedded in his right shoulder tearing the wolf gene into binary fragments. He could hear the rhythm of Irene's high heels crushing glass shards - twelve-centimeter heels, Prada's new style of the season, exactly the same as the pair she wore at her mother's funeral.

"Amendment 13 of the Lunar Eclipse Protocol," Erin's voice sounded like a tampered Bitcoin transaction record, with a human tremor suppressed under the mechanical texture, "You have the right to die in wolf form."

Leo dug into the wound with his wolf claws and dug out the half-melted silver bullet. The runes **ᛁᚾᚴ (ink)** on the bullet head shone with the luster of Viking silver coins. This was not a bullet at all, it was clearly a mobile gene recorder.

"Your department has a pretty lavish budget," he said, toying with the hot bullet, "using ninth-century runes as ammunition."

Irene's nano-insect swarm condensed into a Barrett sniper rifle on her left shoulder. The pattern on the barrel was a map of the Federal Reserve's gold reserves: "Do you know why I chose ᛁᚾᚴ? This is an ancient contract..."

"The signing ceremony was in blood, wasn't it?" Leo interrupted suddenly in Old Norse. "Just like the purchase order number you carved into my mother's temple."

Irene's breathing rate was disrupted for 0.3 seconds.

The first silver bullet hit the Coke can at Leo's feet, and the can was melted by Runewen into a blockchain data stream. The muscle memory of complete wolf transformation was fading, but the bracelet suddenly became hot - the memory of 865 AD invaded like a virus:

By a campfire in the Scandinavian tundra, his Viking incarnation was writing a contract on elk skin with wolf blood. The Saxon cavalry suddenly attacked and shot an arrow engraved with ᛒᛅᚾ (prohibition), but he caught it with his bare hands and it bounced back. The runes on the arrow shaft reorganized in the air into **ᚠᚱᛁ (freedom)**.

The ballistic trajectory in reality was decomposed into editable code in the Wolf King's Eyes. Leo licked the blood on the silver bullet and led the nanoworm swarm to the bracelet - those ancient runes suddenly reorganized into a compiler interface on the skin.

"Thanks," he grinned at Irene, who was recharging her energy again, "I just needed an anti-virus software."

When the second silver bullet came, Leo's vibranium bone spikes drew a reverse rune in the air. The bullet's protocol was rewritten at the quantum level, and its trajectory suddenly turned 90 degrees, piercing the amalgam skull of the vampire sniper three blocks away.

The reverse-compiled silver bullets exploded like fireworks on the blood clan's front. Each shrapnel carried a rewritten Rune code, and the blood clan's quantum armor peeled off like the skin of a rotten apple. Irene's nano-insect swarm suddenly rebelled collectively, and in the air, they pieced together Leo's mother's dying electrocardiogram.

"Impossible..." Irene's mechanical prosthetic eye oozed biological lubricant, "The encryption of the Lunar Eclipse Protocol..."

"You used my father's cerebrospinal fluid as the key, right?" Leo pried open a vampire's corpse and pulled out a glowing bundle of nerves from the cervical vertebrae. "Coincidentally, his guilt runs in my veins."

There was a roar of building collapse from the direction of Baiyin Manor. Leo's retina popped up the Canadian Icefield Group's distress signal, but what concerned him more was the new prompt on the bracelet - in Irene's real-time vital signs data, a certain indicator was flashing wildly:

**Genetic match 99.7%

Abnormal maternal genetic chain: X-13γ sequence activation**

Irene suddenly hugged her head and knelt on the ground. Nanoworms emerged from her ear canal and spelled out a distress signal in the air. Leo smelled the unique preservative smell of the clone, mixed with the rotting smell of her original human cells.

When Leo grabbed Irene's neck, her skin suddenly became transparent, revealing the Bitcoin mining machine squirming in her chest. The mining machine was not plugged with a chip, but a frozen slice of her mother's brain tissue, and the synapses were connected to the main server array of DOA.

"They... showed me... the lab video..." A human sob broke out from Irene's mechanical vocal cords, "When your mother was injected with wolfsbane... she said something..."

Leo's wolf claws pierced into the mining machine's shell, and his vibranium nails scratched sparks on the brain tissue: "She repeats this in my dreams twenty times every day now."

"No..." Irene's eyes suddenly returned to her mother's unique amber color, "She said... to the church under the ice in Antarctica..."

The bracelet tightened suddenly, and the memory of 1023 AD was inserted: the Viking fleet encountered a blizzard in the Arctic Ocean, and the eyes of the figurehead were embedded with the runic code of the prototype of Bitcoin. Leo's Viking incarnation cut off his left hand and used the broken arm to carve the warning **ᛘᛁᛞᚴᚢ (middle)** on the ice wall.

The real Manhattan begins to tremble, and amalgam with futures contract codes seeps out of the cracks. Irene takes the opportunity to inject nanoworms into Leo's wrist, but the swarm is suddenly absorbed by the bracelet and converted into the navigation coordinates of the Viking longship.

Over the ruins of Silver Manor, DOA's quantum satellite launched an attack array. Leo dragged Irene into the underground vault of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but found that the secret room where the gold was supposed to be stored was filled with X-13 clones' cultivation chambers.

"The ultimate goal of the Lunar Eclipse Protocol..." Irene's voice gradually became more human, "It's not to kill you... It's to make you go there voluntarily..."

Her mechanical prosthetic eye projects a holographic church under the Antarctic ice. The spire is not hung with a cross, but a combination of the Bitcoin "B" symbol and a Viking battle axe. Leo's Bitcoin wallet suddenly automatically transfers 890 BTC to an unknown address. The blockchain browser shows that the recipient is "ᚠᛁᚾᚴᛅ (Fink) Bank-AD 1024".

As the satellite beam melted through the vault dome, Irene suddenly threw herself at Leo. The nano-insect swarm spelled out her mother's handwriting on her spine: "The original sin is not in the Silver Manor, but in the IPO under the ice cap."

Leo held the gradually cooling clone and found that the X-13γ number on her neck was transforming into **ᛘᛅᚦᛁᛦ (mother)** Rune. A wolf howl came from deep in the vault, not the frequency of modern werewolves, but the hunting call extracted from the Antarctic ice core recording thousands of years ago.

The bracelet popped up a final reminder: 07:59:59 left until the global wolf gene pledge liquidation. And Irene's body began to quantize and decompose, leaving two sets of overlapping coordinates in the air - the tenth floor underground of the Silver Manor, directly below the Antarctic Dome A.