Director Cooper's stiff hand seemed frozen, and only after a long moment did he slowly lower the tablet under the anxious gaze of the technical investigators.

No one noticed that small patch of frozen silence in the corner of the corridor.

People hugged each other, cheered and spun upward, soaring past the cold glass outside the operating room, over the sea of city lights formed by thousands of households, vanishing with the night wind at the edge of the horizon, like a requiem known to none.

·

One year later.

Myanmar, Shan State.

Dawn shrouded the border town, and the market gradually grew lively. There were sellers of tiger bones, fake jade, heroin cut with more than half a bag of lime, meth mixed with rock sugar—every little shop was raising its shutters one after another. Prostitutes finishing their shifts, wrapped in cheap perfume, makeup, and the sweaty stench of alcohol, passed through the market in twos and threes, laughter and teasing drifting everywhere.

“Boss Qin!” A sharp-eyed woman twisted her waist and laughed, “How’s business? Coming to have some fun with us tonight?”

Mr. Sullivan wore a T-shirt, shorts, and slippers, looking refined with a pair of silver-rimmed glasses. His slender fingers held a cigarette as he lounged in a chair at the shop entrance, reading a book. The sign beside him listed the shop’s offerings—Buddha amulets, little ghosts, voodoo fetuses, all kinds of talismanic handicrafts; sandwiched between a neighbor wholesaling ephedrine and another weighing opium by the sack, he was a rare stream of literary elegance.

“Just barely making a living, how could I dare wrong you ladies?” Mr. Sullivan raised a handsome brow and replied lazily with a smile, “Maybe another time.”

The women giggled and jostled each other: “Mr. Sullivan doesn’t have to pay to play!” “Not only free, we’ll even pay you!” “Come on, come on!”

The market vendors wouldn’t have it, and the street erupted in laughter and jeers, filling half the street with a joyful atmosphere.

Just then, the roar of engines sounded from afar, quickly drowning out the voices. Everyone turned to look, only to see vehicles suddenly appear in the mist-shrouded town. Seventeen or eighteen jeeps charged down the mountain roads from all directions, bursting into the market amid screams and shouts!

“What the hell?!” “Cops?!” “F***ing looking for death!”

The drug dealers in the market weren’t amateurs; in an instant, every household rushed out with homemade guns. But before they could fire, the car windows rolled down and dozens of submachine guns unleashed a terrifying hail of bullets!

The leading vendors were instantly riddled with bullets, and in a flash, half the street was engulfed in a hell of gunfire, shrapnel, and flying flesh. Screams and wails exploded, and countless people scattered in panic, vanishing in the blink of an eye. The jeeps screeched to a halt, tires shrieking against the ground, and dozens of bodyguards of various skin tones jumped out with submachine guns, surrounding the handicraft shop.

Next, the bodyguards parted to make way. A tall, slightly curly-haired white man stepped out of a bulletproof car, smiling as he removed his sunglasses:

“Enjoying life, aren’t you, Jason Sullivan?”

The air, thick with the stench of gunpowder and blood, seemed ready to explode. Mr. Sullivan sat up, sighed as dozens of gun barrels pressed against his head, and casually tossed aside the gun he’d just pulled from under the lounge chair. “I thought you’d gone under with the ‘Mariana Trench’ website, ‘Shark’… Is this really how you greet people? Can’t you change it up next time?”

The white man called Shark shrugged. “But Evan Parker is dead, global drug prices are in turmoil, and no one’s happy about losing hundreds of millions for no reason. Don’t you agree?”

“I’m truly sorry, but it really has nothing to do with me.” Jason Sullivan immediately explained, “Mr. Parker was a regrettable performance artist, just a bit unlucky. I’m willing to pray to God for a lucky next life for him, at the cost of retiring from the world and becoming a lifelong vegetarian…”

“Evan Parker was an atheist.”

“…All the more unfortunate,” Jason Sullivan said helplessly.

“Instead of hiding on the border for the rest of your life, maybe cleaning up the mess he left behind would be a better way to honor him.” Shark smiled and gestured. A bodyguard immediately opened a tablet and handed it over. On the screen was an ordinary, short, stout Chinese man in his fifties or sixties, hair graying at the temples: “—Samuel Grant, you know him, right?”

Jason Sullivan’s mouth twitched slightly.

“Evan Parker was always my most valuable partner. He was a genius chemist—brilliant, honest, and not greedy. All the ‘Blue Gold’ was shipped under the Mariana Trench website’s escrow system, keeping the prices of all kinds of drugs on the black market balanced.” Shark’s tone was full of polite sorrow. “But the successor to the ‘Blue Gold’ formula—your friend, Mr. Wan—hasn’t inherited a single one of his virtues.”

Jason Sullivan had just opened his mouth when Shark cut him off: “153%.”

“In less than two years, the global circulation of Blue Gold has skyrocketed by 153%, prices have dropped 300%, and other synthetic drug prices have plummeted. What’s even more baffling is that Mr. Wan seems especially committed to the old-school ways of drug dealers, with no intention of cooperating with the dark web.”