Early Evening — Car ride home
The Lexura RX300 pulled smoothly out of the school lot, slipping into the late-day traffic. Warm sunlight streaked across the windshield, softening the mood inside the car.
Guohua glanced at the rearview mirror, eyes lingering on his children with a quiet, searching warmth.
"So," he began lightly, "how was the first day back?
I imagine there must've been… attention. Maybe even pressure."
Xue let out a soft breath.
"It was… manageable," she said. "People whispered a lot, but nothing I couldn't handle. Classes were fine. And…"
Her eyes brightened a little.
"I made a new friend today. She's sharp, very witty — and a big fan of Feng," she said, chuckling. "But she's also scared of him at the same time."
Guohua blinked, surprised, then chuckled.
He looked at Feng through the mirror.
"Well, that combination makes sense."
Feng only gave a small, amused exhale.
The car settled into an easy rhythm, the kind that filled itself with quiet warmth.
Then Guohua's smile faded slightly.
"To be honest," he said, fingers tightening gently on the wheel, "I expected your day to be more... unpleasant."
He paused. "I was even considering whether we should transfer you to another school."
Xue looked up sharply.
"Eh? Why would we transfer?"
Guohua hesitated only a moment before answering.
"Because the Li Group made a move yesterday."
The air stilled.
Xue's posture stiffened, her shoulders lifting just a fraction.
Feng's expression remained perfectly calm—too calm.
Guohua saw Feng's calmness in the mirror and allowed a faint, almost invisible smile to touch his lips.
"A representative visited Blue Horizon yesterday," he continued. "Polite words, but the message was clear. Pressure is starting. I assumed… they would try something through the school next."
Xue sat a little straighter, her hands curling lightly around her skirt.
"…try what, exactly?"
Guohua didn't answer directly. He didn't need to.
The implication was enough.
Feng spoke first, his voice calm, steady.
"They won't dare trouble you, Xue. You don't have to worry."
She blinked in surprise at the certainty in his tone.
"Then… what about you, gege?"
Feng turned his gaze toward the passing cityscape outside the window.
"They'll try," he said simply.
A light pause.
"But it would be the last thing they do as teachers."
Guohua inhaled sharply—barely audible, but unmistakable.
Not fear.
Not disapproval.
A realization.
That Feng was no longer just a boy.
And the Li Group would soon learn the mistake of treating him like one.
The car continued down the road, sun dipping lower, the air quiet but charged—
three people, one family,
moving forward together.
---
Night — Second Branch Villa
The house slept.
Xue in her room. Guohua in his study. Quiet drifting through the halls like a soft blanket over the villa.
Only one room remained awake.
Feng's monitors cast a calm glow over the walls—three displays arranged in a perfect arc around him, each filled with layered code, model diagrams, and Silent Hands repositories.
Before continuing development, he set his sight on completing the one task he refused to ignore tonight.
A private security query—a background check.
Not out of paranoia.
Out of care.
He typed the name: Liu Yue
The system performed a discreet pull—clean data, normal school activity, stable household, no concerning links.
No observable ulterior motives.
Feng closed the file without a ripple of emotion.
Good.
Xue was safe.
He shifted his attention back to the four Silent Hands builds—Core, Duo, Pro, Mini—refining execution graphs and training heuristics with quiet precision.
Until Arachne chimed.
A soft, crisp alert—nothing flashy, nothing dramatic.
Just a system doing exactly what it was designed to do.
Feng clicked it open.
[Arachne Notification]
Category: High-Significance External Movement
Flag: Meeting Logged
Location: Li Family Main Estate
Subject: Representative of the Zhou Family (Capital City)
Feng's eyes narrowed slightly.
A Zhou representative?
At the Li Estate?
He tapped the notification.
A more detailed report unfolded—clean, structured, professional.
Arachne had already parsed the clandestine meeting from multiple audio captures and metadata streams.
The transcript summary appeared:
[Meeting Summary — Arachne Analysis]
Participants:
• Zhou Family Envoy (Name redacted by Arachne due to falsified ID)
• Patriarch and the three branch heads
• One internal aide
Purpose of Visit (Inferred + Confirmed):
Verification of the Li Family's stance regarding Miss Li Xue.
Specifically:
— Whether the engagement contract with Zhou Tianhao would be renegotiated, suspended, or annulled following the Second Branch's removal.
Findings:
Li Family stated explicitly:
— No intention of severing ties.
— Engagement remains intact.
Zhou Envoy Response:
Satisfaction, followed by a final directive:
"The Second Branch is your matter. Do with them as you please.
But physical harm must not reach Miss Li Xue. Your Li family cannot withstand the consequences of messing with the young master's fun."
Additional Notes (High Priority):
• Zhou envoy has been stationed in Longhai for almost 2 months (7 weeks)—Since the week of the Longhai Youth Science and Technology Expo.
• Has been keeping tabs of miss Xue ever since.
Feng leaned back slowly.
Two months.
A Zhou operative had been working inside Longhai for two months… without his knowledge.
That was unacceptable.
A faint crease formed between his brows.
"So… Tianhao has stretched his arms into Longhai."
No surprise as to why.
Xue's rising attention—her patent, her growing academic presence, her beauty—would inevitably stir interest.
Tianhao was protecting his future asset. In his own cold, calculated way.
Feng's fingers drummed once on the desk.
"If outside forces can establish footholds in Longhai without me noticing…"
His gaze shifted to the quiet, breathing web of code around him.
"…then I'm still not fast enough."
Phase 2 of Li Web was powerful.
Arachne was powerful.
But not powerful enough.
Not city-wide.
Not omnidirectional.
Not absolute.
And not intelligent enough.
He turned toward the machine learning skill window—its indicator resting at (98%), so very close to breakthrough.
"I need to push ML & AI to Level 2," he said softly.
"And begin Phase 3 of Li web."
The true evolution of Arachne.
Arachne 2.0.
Silent Hands continued compiling quietly in the background as Feng opened a fresh workspace.
Tonight… there would be rest for him.
---
Hours Later
The sky outside was still dark—barely a shade past midnight drifting toward dawn.
Inside Feng's room, the only illumination came from the soft, synchronized glow of his monitors.
Silent Hands—Core, Duo, Pro, Mini—compiled and recompiled in silent cycles around him.
He didn't move from his chair.
Didn't blink often.
Hours passed quietly.
Lines of model restructuring, behavior graphs, heuristic refinements—each adjustment precise, elegant, instinctive. The work no longer felt like "thinking." It felt like remembering.
A small pulse flickered at the edge of his vision.
Then—
A chime.
Soft. Neutral. Absolute.
[DING! Skill Breakthrough Detected]
[Machine Learning & AI — Lv. 1 (99%) → Lv. 2 (0%)]
[Passive Ability Acquired: Neural Predictive Field (NPF)]
The words hung before him—but they were only the surface.
The real change arrived as sensation.
A faint pressure behind his eyes—
then a widening.
Not painful. Not overwhelming.
Just… an expansion.
As if his mind had been living inside a room, and suddenly, the walls dissolved.
Information didn't become louder—
it became clear.
Ordered.
Alive.
And something new began humming beneath it:
A field.
Subtle.
Invisible.
Constant.
Flowing from him, then returning as structured intuition.
Like the world now had patterns he could feel—even without looking.
[Neural Predictive Field (NPF) — Description]
A tier-2 augmentation granting:
• a subconscious predictive layer operating beneath conscious thought
• automatic reading of system trajectories (digital, behavioral, computational, physical patterns)
• short-horizon foresight — the ability to sense what a system is about to do before it does it
• structural anomaly intuition — deviations "felt" rather than calculated
• cognitive overclocking without strain
NPF did not give visions or mysticism.
It gave near-instant structural prediction.
For a human mind, it was impossible.
For the current Li Feng, it was natural.
Feng exhaled slowly. Analyzing his elevated state.
"So this is… Level 2 ML & AI."
His fingers relaxed against the keyboard.
Level 2 wasn't "higher skill."
It was fundamentally different existence. And this isn't just about the passive he gained.
He could now:
• See the "shape" of intelligence systems —Not visually, but perceptually.
Models—neural nets, heuristics, logic graphs—had a form he could sense.
How they learned. Where they failed. Where they could grow.
• Generate entirely new ML architectures.
Not just improvements. Not just optimizations. Entirely new classes of models—Systems that didn't yet exist in modern computation.
• Create meta-learning frameworks
Learning systems that learn how to learn.
Self-evolving architectures… with near-zero drift. Almost perfect stability.
Feng leaned back in his chair, the glow of the screens reflecting in his eyes.
"It's too much," he murmured—
not in fear,
not in doubt…
…but in awe.
He had reached Level 2 before, with other skills.
He knew the feeling of crossing the boundary.
But this—
This felt deeper.
More intrusive.
More transformational.
The Neural Predictive Field wasn't just a mental upgrade.
It was a new sense.
He lifted his hand slightly.
As his fingers moved, he felt micro-shifts in airflow, the slight creak of the chair frame, the timing of the monitor refresh cycles—
as predictions, not perceptions.
It was subtle.
But unmistakable.
He checked the clock.
03:45 AM.
Few hours before he needs to start preparing for school.
He opened a new workspace.
Lines of architecture flowed into place with terrifying ease.
"it's time to get started with the phase 3 of the Li Web."
Arachne 2.0 — Phase 3 of the Li web.
He knew exactly what to do.
Instantly.
The architecture unfolded in his mind like a blueprint he had always known but never accessed:
— multi-tier intelligence routing
— self-correcting learning cycles
— fully autonomous anomaly hunting
— environment-wide predictive modeling
— meta-learning cores capable of recursive self-optimization
And beyond that— city-level intelligence threading
a task that would have been insane for any human mind…
But now?
His mind handled it effortlessly.
His fingers moved.
No hesitation.
No drafting.
Just pure translation from cognition to code.
Keystrokes erupted like controlled lightning—rapid, precise, relentless.
Lines of code appeared faster than most eyes could track, a storm of structured logic written without pause.
Arachne 2.0 would hold every data signal in Longhai securely:
compressed, modeled, cross-referenced, visualized—
ready for him to use at any moment.
Its cyber tools—rebuilt now with Level 2 skills—would operate at a tier no hacker on earth could stand against.
It would surpass every intelligence system ever created.
And it would obey only him.
---
The world outside stayed dark and silent—
while inside the room, Arachne 2.0 began to take shape
under the hands of someone who had stepped past limits that humans haven't even explored yet.
---
Hello, Author here,
Thanks for reading — Leave a comment to tell me what you think about this chapter, and drop a Power Stone if you're enjoying Li Feng's story so far! Let's grow this story together.