Chapter Two: A Borrowed Childhood

On the second day of the outage, the city became abruptly honest. Unable to hide inside message boxes, people had to call, knock on doors, or remain silent. The news named the event the Midnight Silence. Island claimed no data had leaked. But at six in the morning, Zhou Yu appeared at Shen Yan's door, his suit crumpled like discarded paper. “The screenshot is genuine,” he said. “That signature belongs to a disaster-recovery node retired seven years ago. The hardware was physically destroyed.” Seven years. Shen looked up. Zhou avoided his eyes and set an isolated laptop on the table. Internal monitoring showed that an unknown protocol had hijacked global direct messages.