A black Audi glided over the Manhattan Bridge.
Below the bridge, the East River's water greedily swallowed the city's reflected neon lights.
William pulled the car to a stop at a street corner in Dumbo.
This was Brooklyn's new upscale district.
The once-weathered red brick warehouses had been transformed into expensive apartments and cold, high-tech office buildings.
The "resonance" Matt spoke of was in a corner of this steel jungle.
William stepped out of the car, his figure merging into the deep Shadow cast by an industrial building.
He slowly closed his eyes.
Radar Sense activated!
Boom—!
The World was completely overturned in an instant.
His vision disappeared.
His hearing, however, was brutally magnified a hundred, a thousand times.
The faint squeal of car tires rolling over asphalt.
The dull, heart-attack-like drumbeat coming from the bar across the street.
A couple kissing oblivious to their surroundings on the street corner.
The wet intertwining of their lips and tongues was horrifyingly clear.
Deep in the sewer.
The frantic heartbeat of a rat.
The sound waves and vibrations of the entire New York indiscriminately rushed into his brain.
It was too noisy!
This was no longer noise, but mental torture.
The basic Radar Sense had limited range and precision, but the side effect was hellish noise pollution.
William felt as if steel needles were stirring in his brain.
He endured the tearing pain in his brain and began to filter.
He commanded his consciousness, like a supercomputer with trillions of calculations per second, to search for that single discordant note in this ruin of sound.
The roar of the subway passing underground, excluded.
The hum of thousands of air conditioning units running simultaneously, excluded.
The heartbeats, breathing, and sleep talk of all living people in the district, all excluded!
His perception sank to a deeper level.
To "listen" to the pulsation of the air itself.
To feel the strings of physical rules.
The distance was still too short.
This made William feel extremely strained.
To find this ghost, he had to steel himself and wander around.
Fortunately, the wait was worth it.
An extremely faint, intermittent hum, like a trace of static in the cosmic background radiation.
It did not belong to this World.
It was as if someone had used a fingernail to scratch an invisible, tiny crack in the fabric of reality.
Its frequency was extremely low, intermittent, yet it carried a chilling "sense of error."
William suddenly opened his eyes, a glint of light flashing in his pupils.
He locked onto the source of the vibration.
Across the street.
The modern building, composed entirely of glass curtain walls, stood like a cold, hard chip in the afternoon sun.
"Cyber Future Data Storage Center."
Massive amounts of data, tight security.
For a ghost that could phase through walls, this was an undefended golden vault with open doors.
William adjusted his suit and tie, preparing to cross the street.
Just as his left foot landed!
Danger Prediction activated fiercely!
A bone-chilling coldness, like the fangs of a venomous snake, bit hard into the back of his neck!
He was being watched.
William's footsteps did not falter in the slightest, his expression unchanged.
He merely raised his wrist very naturally and glanced at his watch.
As if suddenly remembering something, he turned and walked in another direction.
He did not look up.
But he knew that on a nearby rooftop, a figure in a dark red battle suit was overlooking his every move.
Matt Murdock.
Daredevil.
Things were getting tricky.
He not only had to catch a ghost that could phase through walls.
He also had a "Batman" trailing him, one who could hear his heartbeat.
The plan had to be adjusted.
William subtly detoured into the back alley of the data center building.
This was a scar beneath the city's glittering facade.
He found a blind spot in the surveillance.
On the wall, an inconspicuous external network maintenance port sat quietly.
William took out a metal tool, as thin as a cicada's wing, from his briefcase and pried open the port's protective cover.
He lightly pressed his index finger on the exposed data port.
Data Touch activated!
The security system diagram of the entire building unfolded in his mind like a star chart.
Firewalls, surveillance matrices, pressure sensors, infrared detectors… Cyber Future's security system was indeed advanced.
But any system, if man-made, inevitably has vulnerabilities.
William's consciousness traversed the ocean of data at high speed, searching for that forgotten "backdoor."
He found it.
A channel used by the IT department for remote maintenance.
The permissions weren't high, but enough for him to make some minor adjustments.
He did not attempt to invade the core; that would immediately trigger an alarm and alert everyone.
He precisely located the surveillance circuit in the west corridor on the third floor and set its surveillance footage to loop a recording from five minutes prior.
A time window of only three hundred seconds.
But for him, it was enough.
William withdrew his finger and gently flexed his somewhat stiff wrist.
He looked up at the gradually darkening sky.
The sense of Daredevil's gaze still lingered.
But he seemed to have moved to the other side of the building; clearly, William's "detour" had misled him.
Unfortunately, it was of little use.
William walked towards the tightly locked employee emergency exit in the back alley.
He had no key.
But he had considerable strength.
He gripped the cold metal doorknob, his wrist muscles instantly tensing, and a strength far beyond ordinary people suddenly erupted.
"Click!"
With a crisp sound, the intricate internal mechanism of the lock cylinder was twisted off by him.
William pulled open the door and slipped into the building.
As he went deeper, he finally arrived inside the data center.
It was dim and cold here.
Only the flickering indicator lights on countless server racks, like billions of electronic eyes opening in the darkness.
The continuous low-frequency noise of server fans converged into an irritating hum.
William closed his eyes again.
In the World of "Radar Sense," it was a million times noisier than the wildest rock concert.
That man was indeed a monster to be able to treat this hell as his daily life.
William forcibly suppressed the chaos in his mind.
Amidst the tumultuous waves of noise, he once again captured that unique, erroneous sub-audio vibration.
It was moving, but thankfully not fast.
William immediately hurried after it.
The core area was protected by a heavy titanium alloy isolation door; the lock was intact, and the fingerprint and iris scanners glowed green, indicating normal operation.
But William could clearly "hear" that the source of the vibration was behind the door.
The ghost had already entered.
William placed his palm on the access control system's control panel.
"Data Touch" activated again.
His consciousness bypassed all complex verification procedures, like a ghostly command, directly issuing an unlock order to the central processor of the titanium alloy door lock.
"Click."
The heavy isolation door silently slid open to one side.
The temperature in the core area was even lower.
The light was also brighter, like a sanctuary.
William spotted the intruder at a glance.
A woman in a pure White tight-fitting combat suit, her figure presenting an eerie blur, like a holographic projection with poor signal, about to dissipate.
She was standing in front of the main server array.
One arm had actually penetrated the thick metal casing of the server rack, seemingly directly stealing data from the lowest level of hardware.
The ghost.
William did not act immediately; he observed like a top-tier hunter.
He noticed that the edges of the ghost's body were constantly flickering and distorting.
Like a string of highly unstable code.
Her phase-shifting ability was not flawless.
Each penetration of matter caused some kind of wear and tear, or rather… disorder, to herself.
The "resonance" Matt heard was the World itself wailing as her ability forcibly distorted physical rules.
The ghost seemed to have completed her task, slowly withdrawing her arm from the server rack.
Just as she was about to turn and vanish as an illusion.
"Warning! Halon fire suppression system activated."
An electronic synthesized voice suddenly appeared.
The next second, dozens of sprinklers on the ceiling simultaneously extended, furiously spraying massive amounts of inert gas into the room!
To protect expensive and precise servers, data centers always use gas fire suppression, not Water.
These high-density inert gases instantly filled the entire room; the composition, density, and pressure of the air… all physical conditions changed dramatically in an instant!
William's expression changed; could it be because of him?
The ghost, who was about to phase through the wall and leave, already had half of her body submerged in the wall.
But this sudden drastic change in environment seemed to alter some physical constant, severely interfering with her phasing ability!
Her movement abruptly froze.
Her body, like a frozen bug, was actually stuck in the wall!
She let out a short, startled, and angry shriek.
The ghost struggled violently, her body stuck in the wall flickering even more wildly.
After a pained grunt, she forcibly phased herself through the wall.
Almost at the same moment.
Piercing alarms blared throughout the entire building, and red warning lights flashed madly.
The activation of the fire suppression system triggered the highest level of security alert.
The heavy footsteps of countless security personnel were rushing in from all directions.
William glanced at the wall where the ghost had disappeared, and quickly left the core area before security personnel could seal off the building… outside the building.
In the deep night of Brooklyn.
William's figure flashed out of the emergency exit in the back alley and quickly disappeared into the crisscrossing Shadows.
And on the rooftop opposite him, the dark red figure still stood.
Daredevil stood by a gargoyle, listening intently to the increasingly chaotic alarms and security shouts inside the building.
He heard everything.
William Rodriguez… what exactly was he chasing?
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