Chapter 36: The God of Zeroes

The first thing Qin Mo noticed upon waking was the noise.

It wasn't the sound of birds or the distant hum of city traffic. It was a symphony of data, a cacophony of information that his newly reborn senses could now perceive as clearly as a shout. He could hear the electricity flowing through the apartment's cheap wiring, a low, constant hum. He could feel the building's Wi-Fi network, a shimmering, invisible river of data packets flowing around him. He could sense the digital heartbeat of every smart device in a hundred-meter radius.

For any normal human, it would have been an instant, overwhelming sensory overload leading to madness. For Qin Mo, whose soul was already accustomed to the simultaneous experience of 99,999 lives, it was simply... a new layer of reality to be processed. His ancient, vast consciousness accepted the flood of new data, sorted it, categorized it, and relegated it to the background in a fraction of a second.

The world had not changed. Only his perception of it had been fundamentally, irrevocably elevated.

He went about his morning routine. As he walked into the kitchen, his mother was making breakfast, her face a mask of practiced cheerfulness. He could see the faint, almost imperceptible lines of worry around her eyes, and his mind, without his conscious command, cross-referenced them with her recent search history on the family's terminal: "Job prospects for non-Awakened youths."

"Morning, Mo-mo," she said, her voice bright.

"Morning, Mom," he replied, his own voice as placid as ever. The new insight didn't make him sad. It was just another data point in the complex equation of his family's love.

His sister, Qin Yue, stomped into the room, scowling at her phone. "Ugh, the network is so slow this morning! I'm getting a 300-millisecond ping! How am I supposed to do my daily guild quests with this kind of lag?!"

Qin Mo glanced at the building's network status in his mind's eye. He saw the bottleneck: a dozen other families were streaming high-definition news reports, hogging the bandwidth. With a flicker of his will, a thought no more complex than breathing, he rerouted a sliver of the building's total bandwidth, creating a priority channel directly to his sister's device.

Qin Yue's eyes widened as the lag indicator on her game instantly turned from a angry red to a perfect, brilliant green. "Oh! Never mind, it fixed itself," she said, her mood brightening instantly as she became engrossed in her game.

Qin Mo said nothing. He just quietly ate his breakfast. This was his new reality. A world of small, invisible miracles.

On the maglev train to school, he closed his eyes. He wasn't resting. He was finally getting to work.

The data from the 'Leech' had been trickling into his secure server for days. His Analysis Core, led by the brilliant Su Liying, had been painstakingly decrypting and piecing it together. It was a slow, arduous process.

Now, it was no longer necessary.

His consciousness dove into the raw, chaotic data stream. The Prometheus Initiative's most advanced, military-grade encryption, which had taken Su Liying's team days to crack a single file, was now an open book to him. It was a primitive, flawed language, and his new mind was its native speaker.

He didn't just read the data; he absorbed it. In the space of a single train ride, he conducted a complete digital autopsy of the entire Prometheus Initiative branch in the Tianxia Concord.

He found their complete command structure, from the lowly lab technicians to the shadowy Sector Chief who answered to a global council. He found their financial network—a labyrinth of shell corporations, offshore accounts, and cryptocurrency wallets used to fund their atrocities. He found their communication protocols, their encryption keys, their secret dead-drop locations.

He saw it all.

Then, buried deep within the most heavily protected part of the server, he found a project file that was completely separate from the 'Project Chimera' research. This one was different. It was smaller, more precise, and infinitely more dangerous.

It was codenamed "Project Mistletoe."

His mind unspooled the contents. It was an assassination plot. The target was not a hunter or a military general. It was Dr. Aris Thorne, a renowned, elderly, and universally respected pre-Revival scientist from the Euro-American Federation. Dr. Thorne was the leading public voice advocating for stricter international regulations and ethical oversight on all Awakened and Abyssal research—a direct political threat to the Prometheus Initiative's very existence.

Dr. Thorne was scheduled to give the keynote address at the Global Science and Ethics Summit in New Shanghai in two weeks. "Project Mistletoe" was a detailed plan to assassinate him during the summit, using a genetically engineered Abyssal toxin that would mimic a natural heart attack. His death would be ruled a tragedy, and his movement for ethical regulation would die with him.

It was a brilliant, insidious, and utterly ruthless plan.

Qin Mo's mind processed the new threat. The assassination of a figure like Dr. Thorne would cause a global political crisis, sowing distrust between the super-states and creating the perfect chaotic environment for Prometheus to accelerate their other, darker projects.

This plot had to be dismantled. And Qin Mo would use it as the first, true demonstration of his new power. His first offensive strike as a god of the machine.

His weapon was not a sword or a spell. It was pure, weaponized information.

Sitting quietly on the humming maglev train, surrounded by oblivious commuters, he went to war.

His consciousness split, executing three tasks simultaneously.

First, he focused on the plot's funding. He found the secret offshore account of a key Prometheus executive who was financing the operation. He didn't steal the millions inside. He simply made a single, anonymous transfer of ten thousand credits from that account to the account of the executive's biggest corporate rival. Then, he packaged the executive's entire history of illegal financial transactions and sent it as an anonymous, encrypted tip to the Tianxia Concord's top financial crime investigation unit. The bait was set. The corporate sharks and the government watchdogs would do the rest.

Second, he targeted their political cover. He identified a corrupt official within the New Shanghai city government who was responsible for creating the security blind spots for the assassination team. Qin Mo dove into the man's digital life, a simple matter of reading an open book. He found everything: the bribes, the secret communications, the hidden assets. He packaged it all and leaked it to an aggressive, anti-government news agency known for its ruthless investigative journalism. The man's career, and Prometheus's political protection, would be over by sunset.

Third, he dealt with the assassins themselves. The elite "Specter" team, having recovered from their previous failure, had already been dispatched. Qin Mo found their falsified travel documents and their planned infiltration route through a neighboring sector. He sent another anonymous tip, this one to the neighboring sector's border security force. The tip didn't mention assassins or Prometheus. It simply warned of a "potential terrorist cell" matching their exact descriptions and carrying "biologically hazardous materials."

In the space of less than ten minutes, sitting quietly on a public train, Qin Mo had systematically and completely decapitated the entire "Project Mistletoe" operation. The funding was poisoned, the political cover was incinerated, and the assassins were about to walk into a high-level security trap they would never see coming.

It was a perfect, bloodless victory.

He arrived at the academy. The world looked exactly the same as it had yesterday. The sun was shining. Students were laughing. No one knew that a global political crisis had just been silently, invisibly averted.

He saw Su Liying talking with her friends. She was still completely unaware of the mortal danger she had been in just the day before. He now had the power to watch over her, to protect her in ways she could never imagine.

He had always been a strategist, a commander who moved the pieces on the board. The 'Oracle' persona was the ultimate expression of that. But now... now he was more. He was no longer just the player. He was the chessboard, the pieces, and the invisible hand that moved them all.

The era of pure delegation was over. The era of the true Shadow Commander had just begun.