Six months earlier.
The heat in Moscow's Sheremetyevo Airport was a humid, suffocating blanket that smelled of jet fuel and old floor wax. It was July, a time when the Russian capital shed its icy persona and revealed a dusty, sweltering core.
Chen Feng stood in the endless line at the immigration counter, his expression a mask of patient boredom. He carried a single, battered suitcase held together by a frayed nylon strap and a backpack that looked far too heavy for a typical graduate student. Beside him, Lin Zhisu was staring at her phone with an expression of profound disgust. Her bangs were matted to her forehead with sweat, and her glasses kept sliding down her nose.
"Three hours," she muttered, loud enough only for him to hear. "We've been in this line for three hours, and that officer has processed exactly four people. A 1990s 56k modem has a higher throughput than the Russian Federal Security Service."
Chen Feng didn't look back at her. He was watching the slow, rhythmic movement of the ceiling fans above. "Efficiency is a luxury of the stable, Zhisu. We didn't come here for stability. We came here because the rust in the gears creates friction, and friction creates heat. That's where we hide."
When they finally reached the counter, the officer—a woman with a face like carved granite and eyes that had seen too many forged visas—stared at Chen Feng's documents for a full minute. She looked at his face, then back at the Chinese passport.
"Reason for visit?" she asked in a heavy, metallic English.
"Graduate studies. Applied Mathematics at Moscow State," Chen Feng replied. His Russian was accented but grammatically perfect, a detail that made the officer's eyes narrow slightly.
"You have a scholarship?"
"Yes. And a desire to learn from the best," he added, a subtle touch of flattery that felt like a calculated move on a chessboard.
The stamp hit the page with a final, violent thud. As they walked through the sliding glass doors into the main terminal, the chaos of Moscow hit them. Shouting taxi drivers, the smell of cheap tobacco, and the overwhelming sense of a city that was simultaneously collapsing and rebuilding itself.
"Welcome to the Cambrian Period," Chen Feng said, stepping onto the cracked pavement outside. "The world thinks the Silicon Valley is the future. They're wrong. The future is born in places like this—where the old rules have died, and the new ones haven't been written yet."
They took a rickety, soot-stained bus to the Sparrow Hills. When the massive, gothic silhouette of Moscow State University finally loomed out of the twilight, Lin Zhisu gasped. The building was a gargantuan stone mountain, a Stalinist cathedral of academia that looked more like a fortress than a school.
"Dormitory Zone B," Zhisu read from her intake form. "It says our room is in the basement levels. D-618."
The dormitory supervisor, a woman known only as Auntie Polina, was a mountain of a person wrapped in a floral shawl. She sat in a booth that smelled of pickled cabbage and bleach, clutching a ring of heavy iron keys. She looked at the two Chinese students as if they were a particularly annoying species of insect.
"D-618 is a storage room," she barked in Russian. "No windows. Too much noise from the main power lines. You want a different room? Wait until September. Maybe."
Chen Feng leaned against the booth's counter. He didn't argue. Instead, he reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of premium Mao-tai, the white porcelain bottle gleaming under the dim fluorescent lights. Beside it, he laid down a crisp, hundred-dollar bill.
"We like the noise, Auntie," Chen Feng said softly. "And we like the privacy. We are very... studious. We need the extra electricity for our research."
Polina's eyes darted to the bottle, then to the bill. Her massive hand moved with surprising speed, sweeping both items under the counter in a single motion. She reached for a key that was noticeably larger and older than the others.
"D-618," she grunted, tossing the key onto the counter. "Don't set the building on fire. If the fire department comes, I don't know you."
As they descended into the bowels of the building, the air grew cooler and the hum of the university's massive electrical grid grew louder. They passed through heavy steel doors and down corridors where the light bulbs flickered with a dying orange glow.
When Chen Feng turned the key in the lock of D-618, the door groaned on its hinges. The room was twelve square meters of bare concrete. Pipes ran across the ceiling like exposed veins, and a single, high-output industrial power socket sat on the far wall, a relic of the room's former life as a maintenance hub.
Lin Zhisu walked to the center of the room and dropped her bag. She looked at the peeling grey paint and the lack of windows.
"It's a tomb," she said, her voice echoing.
"No," Chen Feng said, walking to the power socket and running his fingers over the heavy-duty copper contacts. He could feel the vibration of the entire university's power consumption beneath his feet. "It's a laboratory. Here, the electricity is free, the walls are thick enough to block most SIGINT sweeps, and the world will never think to look for the end of the US dollar in a basement storage room."
He looked at her, his eyes reflecting the dim light.
"Zhisu, connect the first node. Let's see if this ghost has a heartbeat."
Lin Zhisu didn't waste another second. She knelt on the cold concrete floor and unzipped her overstuffed backpack. Inside, wrapped in anti-static foam and layers of thermal clothing, were the "organs" of their first machine: a high-end motherboard salvaged from a liquidated tech firm in Shenzhen, two top-tier GPUs with customized cooling fins, and a mess of tangled, hand-soldered wires.
She worked with the mechanical precision of a clockmaker. In the dim, flickering light of the basement, her silhouette looked like a priestess performing a forgotten ritual.
"The voltage here is unstable," she noted, her voice bouncing off the bare walls. She was probing the industrial socket with a handheld multimeter. "It's 230 volts, but the frequency is drifting. If we plug in directly, the capacitors will pop in ten minutes."
Chen Feng was already moving. He dragged a heavy, rusted metal table from the corner—a relic left behind by the maintenance crews—and positioned it near the socket. "I expected as much. The grid in this part of Moscow was built in the late seventies. Use the voltage stabilizer we bought at the Savyolovsky market. The one the seller swore was from a decommissioned MiG-29."
Zhisu pulled out a heavy, olive-drab box covered in Cyrillic lettering. It looked more like a bomb than a piece of electronics. She bypassed the safety fuses with a flick of her pliers and slaved the motherboard to the stabilizer.
"If this blows, the whole Zone B goes dark," she whispered.
"Then we'll have five minutes to run before Polina calls the security guards," Chen Feng replied, leaning over her shoulder. "But it won't blow. You're the best at this, Zhisu. You see the flaws in the hardware like I see the flaws in the market."
She took a deep breath and flipped the toggle switch on the stabilizer.
A deep, resonant hum filled the room, a sound so low it was felt in the marrow of their bones. The olive-drab box groaned, and for a terrifying second, a smell of ozone filled the air. Then, with a soft chime, the motherboard's onboard LEDs blinked to life, casting a ghostly blue glow onto the grey concrete walls.
Zhisu's fingers flew across her portable terminal, her eyes reflecting lines of kernel boot sequences.
"System up. OS is loading from the encrypted partition. Bandwidth..." She paused, her eyes narrowing. "Chen, the university's backbone is wide open. They haven't updated their router firmware since the early 2000s. We aren't just connected; we're part of the nervous system now."
Chen Feng pulled up a crate and sat down next to her. He tapped a command to open a global map of the cryptocurrency markets. At this hour, the exchanges in London and New York were roaring with activity.
"Now, we start the alchemy," Chen Feng said. "We don't have the capital to trade yet. So, we borrow it. Not from a bank, but from the inefficiencies of the system itself."
"Arbitrage?" Zhisu asked.
"Digital ghost-arbitrage," Chen corrected. "We're going to use the micro-second delay between the Moscow Exchange and the London Spot Market. Because of the sanctions, the price of the Ruble fluctuates slightly differently across various liquidity pools. It's a gap of only 0.001 percent, but with the university's unlimited power and your optimized hash-algorithms..."
"We can cycle the same ten dollars a million times an hour," Zhisu finished his thought, a rare, sharp smile touching her lips. "It's not trading. It's harvesting."
She hit the 'Execute' key.
The server fans began to spin up, the sound rising from a low hum to a persistent, aggressive drone. On the screen, a small counter in the bottom-right corner began to move.
$0.01... $0.05... $0.20... $1.15...
It was a slow, steady trickle of digital gold, mined from the friction of a world that didn't know they existed.
Chen Feng leaned back and watched the numbers climb. To anyone else, it was just pocket change. To him, it was the first proof of concept for the Morningstar Protocol.
"Moscow believes in hashrate, Zhisu," he said, the blue light of the monitor making his eyes look like cold diamonds. "And by the time they realize how much power we're pulling from the basement of D-618, we won't be students anymore. We'll be the bank."
Lin Zhisu didn't reply. She was already deep in the code, her mind merging with the machine. In that silent, concrete tomb, beneath the weight of a dying empire, the offshore empire was no longer a dream. It had a heartbeat.
The drone of the fans became a permanent layer of the room's atmosphere, a white noise that signaled the birth of a new reality. Outside the thick concrete walls, the students of Moscow State were drinking Baltika beer in the courtyards or sleeping through their summer hangovers. They had no idea that the foundation of the world they understood was being quietly eroded six feet beneath their boots.
"The accumulation rate is stabilizing," Zhisu said, her eyes fixed on a logarithmic chart. "At this pace, we'll have our first ten thousand dollars of operational capital by the end of the week. But Chen Feng, the power draw is starting to leave a signature. If the university's utility department does a phase-load check, D-618 will light up like a supernova on their grid."
Chen Feng didn't look worried. He was standing by the heavy steel door, listening to the distant, rhythmic clanking of the building's steam pipes. "The university won't check. Polina takes her cut, and the utility chief is likely selling the excess copper from the transformers to the local scrap yards. In a failing system, the biggest threat isn't the police—it's the greed of the gatekeepers. As long as we feed the gatekeepers, we are invisible."
He walked over to the rusted table and picked up a piece of chalk, drawing a single, jagged line across the grey concrete.
"This is the current border," he said, pointing to the line. "Everything on the left is the dollar-based world. Swift, the Fed, the sanctions, the oversight. Everything on the right is us. Every cent we 'harvest' moves across this line and becomes 'Ghost-Capital.' It has no origin. It has no nationality. It cannot be frozen because it doesn't officially exist in any ledger known to Washington."
Zhisu looked at the chalk line, then at the glowing monitors. "And when the pile on the right gets big enough?"
"Then we build the bridge," Chen Feng said. He turned to a second, darkened terminal and typed a name that made Zhisu's hands hesitate over her keyboard.
[PROJECT: STALINGRAD]
"Why that name?" she asked, her voice dropping. "It's... heavy. It carries too much ghost-smoke."
"Because Stalingrad was the place where the impossible became inevitable," Chen Feng replied, his voice devoid of emotion. "It was where a desperate defense turned into a crushing offense. The world thinks we're just hiding in this basement, Zhisu. They think we're the ones under siege."
He looked at the flickering blue LEDs, the cold light reflecting in his sharp, steady gaze.
"They don't realize that the siege is actually on them. We aren't just saving ourselves. We're building the furnace that will melt their golden handcuffs."
Chen Feng reached out and wiped a smudge of dust from the monitor. Underneath, the numbers continued to climb. $45.50... $48.90... $52.10... Each cent was a brick, each dollar a stone.
"Get some sleep, Zhisu," he said, his voice softening just a fraction. "Tomorrow, we start mapping the industrial nodes in the South. The tractor plants, the steel mills, the places where the rust is thickest. That's where the Morningstar will find its teeth."
Zhisu didn't argue. she curled up on a thin, moth-eaten mattress they had dragged in earlier, her eyes closing almost instantly. Chen Feng stayed awake, a solitary shadow in the blue-lit tomb. He watched the digital harvest continue, the silent hum of the servers sounding more and more like the first notes of a war march.
In the basement of D-618, the summer of 2023 was no longer a season of study. It was the beginning of the end of the old world.