Chapter 87 - 88 – Fault Lines Beneath Silk
The city didn’t know it yet, but the ground had already shifted beneath it.
Lin Feng sat in the center of his upper-floor operations suite, not in a suit, not posturing—just in dark slacks and a crisp mandarin-collar shirt, sleeves rolled to his forearms, reviewing the final outlines of the trap he’d built over the past four days.
Zixuan Xuanzhi hadn’t struck directly. But his fingerprints were starting to show.
And Lin Feng was going to make them impossible to ignore.
The Urban Renewal Initiative had been seeded with subtle markers—phrase choices, metadata signatures, embedded smart tags that monitored every edit, every comment, every attempt to game the system.
And someone had tried.
Three separate shell companies submitted proposals designed to fracture the funding model: one wanted to siphon permits to an illegal logistics firm, another inserted subtle clauses to enable rent arbitrage, and the third mimicked an NGO structure—but its owner traced back to a policy consultancy quietly affiliated with Nantai Holdings.
Lin didn’t go public right away.
He waited.
Because the moment of truth wasn’t when someone tripped the wire—it was when they thought no one noticed.
The system chirped softly.