56: Chapter 56: Cleverly Obtaining the Five Million Bounty! Ah Gui is Dead on the Dark Web!

After A-Gui finished talking about twisting the neck of Somphat's son five years ago, the study fell silent for a few seconds.

Zhou Ye sat in front of the computer, took his hands off the keyboard, and gave A-Gui a thumbs up.

"Brother A-Gui, you really are a ruthless man." Zhou Ye praised him sincerely.

A-Gui didn't respond, still standing in a straddle stance behind and to the side of Lin Zhe.

Lin Zhe leaned on the sofa, tapping his fingers on the edge of the coffee table twice.

"A five million dollar bounty is hanging on the dark web. Although you are in the country now, it's ultimately a trouble." Lin Zhe looked at Zhou Ye, "Can you handle it?"

"A piece of cake." Zhou Ye immediately sat up straight and put his hands back on the keyboard. "The dark web is a place that recognizes money, not people. As long as we make them think the target is dead, the bounty will naturally be withdrawn."

"Are you going to forge A-Gui's death certificate?" Lin Zhe asked.

"Not just a certificate." Zhou Ye's fingers flew, and the black console on the screen scrolled with dense code again. "To deal with a suspicious warlord like Somphat, a piece of paper is useless; you have to show him something real."

Zhou Ye tapped on the keyboard a few times and pulled up several news photos of recent armed conflicts in northern Myanmar.

Muddy ground, bombed pickup trucks, and scattered corpses of militants.

"Brother A-Gui, let me borrow some of your facial data."

As Zhou Ye spoke, he started a small image processing script.

He extracted the skeletal outline of A-Gui's blurry profile and, combined with the 3D modeling algorithm in the system, began to deepfake the news photos.

In less than two minutes.

Three high-definition photos popped up on the screen.

The background of the photos was a firefight scene in a tropical rainforest.

Lying in the muddy water was a corpse wearing a black tactical suit, with half its face sliced off by shrapnel, a bloody mess.

But the remaining half of the face, whether it was the direction of the brow bone or the curve of the jawline, was exactly the same as A-Gui's.

Even the very faint scar on the side of A-Gui's neck was perfectly restored.

A-Gui took a step forward, staring at the photos on the screen.

"This death is a bit too miserable." A-Gui's voice was muffled, with no discernible emotion.

"You have to go the whole nine yards when putting on an act." Zhou Ye chuckled. "I've already rewritten all the underlying EXIF data for these photos. The shooting time is set to yesterday afternoon, and the coordinates are located in the Karen State conflict zone on the Thai-Myanmar border. Even a top-tier image forensics expert wouldn't be able to find any traces of manipulation."

Lin Zhe looked at the photos on the screen and gained a more intuitive understanding of Zhou Ye's capabilities.

The mutated entry bought with twenty million was indeed a dimensionality reduction strike.

In the online world, whoever Zhou Ye wanted to live lived, and whoever he wanted to die had to die.

"We have the photos, what's the next step?" Lin Zhe picked up his water cup and took a sip.

"Sending them directly to Somphat is too fake." Zhou Ye switched to a dark web login interface. "I'm planning to muddy the waters."

Zhou Ye pulled up several pre-prepared zombie proxy IPs and connected them to servers in Europe, South America, and Southeast Asia respectively.

"I just registered three different killer accounts on the dark web." Zhou Ye explained while operating. "The registration locations and activity tracks of these three accounts are completely different. Now, I will use these three accounts to send mission completion reports to Somphat's bounty email address separately."

The sound of keyboard typing echoed in the study.

The first email was sent successfully. The IP address showed Colombia. The content was simple: The target has been killed by us in a border conflict, attached with a long-range photo of the corpse, requesting five million USD to be transferred to the specified anonymous encrypted wallet.

Next was the second one. The IP address was in Ukraine. The email content was extremely arrogant: Night Crow's head belongs to me; the rest of the photos will be sent after receiving half the deposit.

The third email was sent from Bangkok. It included the clearest close-up photo of the face and claimed that the target died in a double-cross, demanding Somphat to pay the bounty immediately.

After the three emails were sent, Zhou Ye leaned back in his chair and let out a long sigh of relief.

"Done." Zhou Ye rubbed his hands. "Now the intelligence officer on Somphat's side must be completely bewildered. Three different groups of people, sending photos of the same corpse from different places, all claiming they did it, and all coming to ask for money."

Watching Zhou Ye's operation, A-Gui asked a rare question: "Won't they go to the scene to verify?"

"They can't verify it." Zhou Ye turned his head. "The background coordinates I chose were just covered by the Myanmar government army's artillery fire yesterday afternoon. Let alone a corpse, you wouldn't even find a complete tree stump. This is called leaving no trace of the evidence."

Lin Zhe put down the water cup.

"Can you get your hands on this five million dollars?" Lin Zhe asked.

Zhou Ye was stunned for a moment, then his eyes lit up.

"Boss, your way of thinking is brilliant." Zhou Ye immediately turned back to the screen. "I originally just wanted to ruin the bounty, but since you've spoken, it would be a waste not to earn this money."

Zhou Ye entered the dark web again and hacked directly into the third-party escrow platform where Somphat had posted the bounty.

"Somphat's five million dollars is pre-escrowed on the dark web platform. The platform has an automatic arbitration mechanism." Zhou Ye's fingers tapped rapidly. "I'm modifying the platform's underlying logic code directly, raising the judgment level of these three kill reports to the highest."

A green progress bar popped up on the screen.

"The system judgment has a logical conflict." Zhou Ye stared at the screen. "Now the platform believes the target is indeed dead, but it cannot determine which party accomplished it. According to the rules of the dark web, this money will enter a dispute freeze state."

"And then?" Lin Zhe asked.

"Then I will use administrative privileges to redirect the payment addresses of these three killer accounts to the same overseas money laundering transit station." Zhou Ye hit the Enter key.

The progress bar filled up instantly.

"The money is out." Zhou Ye snapped his fingers. "I made this money go through over three hundred rounds in offshore accounts across a dozen countries, and finally converted it all into Bitcoin."

Zhou Ye turned the computer screen toward Lin Zhe.

Lin Zhe nodded and said: "Well done. You keep this money as a bonus for your hard work."

Zhou Ye stared at the long string of Bitcoin wallet addresses on the screen, his hand hovering over the keyboard, hesitating to click.

He turned his head and looked at Lin Zhe, who was leaning on the sofa.

"Boss, this is five million USD." Zhou Ye swallowed, his voice a bit shaky. "That's over thirty million RMB. You're just giving it to me like this?"

Lin Zhe picked up the water cup on the coffee table and took a sip.

"Not enough?"

"No, no, no!" Zhou Ye shook his head like a rattle-drum. "I just... I just think this money was too easy to get."

Lin Zhe put down the water cup. "I already approved a billion-yuan server room for you, so do you think I'm short of this little bit of money? If I tell you to take it, take it."