248: Chapter 248 Who says only those standing in the light are heroes? A tribute to the nameless undercover agents.

Zhou Yan did not make a single unnecessary movement.

He was very clear that time was running out, and the orders were explicit. Tonight, he could not touch anything that was truly a technical core; he could only look for things related to the "source."

Therefore, he was not flipping through blueprints, parameters, or experimental reports.

Instead, he was looking at visitor records, project budgets, meeting minutes, temporary authorization logs, and those internal memos that had been repeatedly forwarded between different departments but were intentionally written with vague content.

One.

Two.

Three.

Fine beads of sweat slowly seeped from his forehead, but his breathing remained steady.

It wasn't until he opened the fourth document that his fingers suddenly stopped.

It was a completely ordinary internal routing slip with no sensitive technical content, only a string of approval remarks and a few redacted project codenames.

One of the numbers appeared at the very end.

51.

Zhou Yan's eyes narrowed slightly.

He continued flipping through.

It was also in another cross-departmental meeting summary.

It was still there in a third project budget supplementary explanation.

51.

No full name.

No explanation.

It was like a certain place, a certain level of authorization, and also like an answer that everyone knew tacitly, but no one was willing to say out loud.

Zhou Yan stared at that number for two seconds, and his heart suddenly sank in his chest.

He instinctively realized that this thing was by no means ordinary.

The next second, he packed the information he had gathered in the pre-arranged way and transmitted it extremely quickly.

Sending only fragments, leaving no complete trail.

This was the most basic rule.

Almost at the same time the information was sent, a soft "beep" sound suddenly came from the end of the corridor.

Someone had swiped open the outer access control.

Zhou Yan looked up sharply.

Something was wrong.

At this time, the patrol shouldn't be back here.

He made a decisive choice, quickly turned off the desk light, closed the document, and turned to leave.

But before he could even turn the corner, the side door was pushed open from the outside.

An employee who should have long since clocked out hurried in holding a laptop, apparently having forgotten something.

The two collided face-to-face; the other person was stunned for a moment, then their gaze suddenly fell on the tool bag in his hand and the access card he hadn't yet fully hidden.

In that instant, Zhou Yan knew he had been exposed.

The other person opened their mouth to shout.

Zhou Yan stepped forward, cleanly and efficiently pinning the person against the wall, seizing the access card in the process, and turned to sprint toward the emergency exit.

A piercing alarm sounded the next second, echoing through the entire floor.

Red lights flashed wildly, and cold electronic prompts echoed repeatedly in the corridor.

Zhou Yan moved with lightning speed, navigating the corners almost entirely by muscle memory.

He was too familiar with the floor layout, so familiar that even with his eyes closed, he knew which camera had a blind spot and which flight of stairs was easiest to block.

But tonight was clearly different.

The lockdown had come too quickly.

He had just rushed into the next corridor when two security guards lunged at him.

Zhou Yan did not hesitate for a second, raising his hand to deliver an elbow strike, slamming it hard against the side of one person's throat, while his other hand seized a baton and swept it back toward the second person's knee.

Both of them fell with muffled groans almost simultaneously, and he used the momentum to slam open the emergency door and continue charging downward.

But a human is not a machine after all.

The sound of footsteps behind him grew closer, and more security guards surrounded him from different directions.

Zhou Yan had just rushed to the stair landing when a heavy blow slammed into his back.

He stumbled, swinging his hand back to push off the person behind him, but in the next second, he was pinned against the wall by several hands at once.

When his knees hit the ground hard, his vision went black for a moment.

His ears were filled with chaotic roars and footsteps.

Someone was pinning his shoulders, someone was twisting his wrists, and someone was shouting at him to stop resisting.

But at that moment, what flashed through Zhou Yan's mind was not the failure of the mission, nor the consequences of his identity being exposed.

It was that last look from his wife at the airport.

It was the timid "Daddy" from the little girl on the other side of the screen.

He suddenly stopped struggling.

His teeth clenched bit by bit, tightening his jaw into a terrifying arc.

It was as if he were making one final choice for himself, and for the country behind him that could never be spoken of.

A few seconds later, his body convulsed violently.

White foam spilled from the corners of his mouth, and his whole body seemed to have been instantly drained of strength, collapsing heavily.

The people around him were in a momentary panic, and the shouting became even more chaotic.

But Zhou Yan could no longer hear it.

His right hand was still moving very, very slowly toward his chest.

A family photo was kept there.

His fingertips were just a little bit away from his pocket.

Just a little bit more.

But in the end, he couldn't touch it.

That hand hung in mid-air, and after a long time, it finally fell powerlessly.

At the same time, in different cities, different institutions, and under different cover identities, another six dark lines collided with the storm on the same night.

Someone obtained a redacted description on the periphery of a military-industrial contracting chain. "non-human sample".

Someone intercepted a vague location reference in a historical handover record on the periphery of a national security system. "Area 51".

Others only had time to transmit back a codename, half of a blurry application form, and a string of anomaly source markers that had been largely deleted.

Out of seven people, two managed to withdraw.

Five did not return.

What they brought back were not complete answers.

Some were just a number.

Some were just a location.

Some were left with only half a sentence.

But when these fragments were spread out simultaneously back in the country and placed on the same table, the entire room slowly fell silent.

The white light made those few pages of documents look even more glaring.

The young officer responsible for compiling the intelligence stared at the tabletop, his Adam's apple bobbing several times before he finally spoke the final deduction.

"Preliminary conclusion..." His voice was tight.

"The other party's current partial technological breakthroughs are suspected to be related to the alien samples stored in Area 51."

When his voice fell, the room was dead silent.

Elder Wu sat in the main seat, not moving at all.

He had seen too many major events in his life, had experienced every kind of situation, and had even thought through the worst possible answers many times in advance.

He had thought of some secret consortium.

He had thought of a military-industrial black box that had been sealed off for years.

He had also thought of some top-tier experimental system beyond the imagination of the outside world.

But he had never imagined that what would finally land before his eyes would be these three words, so absurd they bordered on the bizarre.

Alien samples.

Elder Wu's gaze slowly fell back to the tabletop, and he remained silent for a long time.

Beside his hand, another list was pressed down.

On it were the names of five people.

Zhou Yan.

Chen Mo.

Lin Chuan.

Zhao Heng.

Sun Yi.

All very ordinary.

Ordinary like anyone you might brush shoulders with in the city, ordinary like a neighbor's husband, father, or son, like someone driving home in silence during the evening rush hour, like the most unremarkable face in a crowd.

Yet it was precisely these people, in the deepest darkness, who exchanged their lives for these few pages of fragmented intelligence.

Elder Wu was silent for a long time before finally raising his head.

His first sentence was not to ask about the technology, nor to ask about subsequent analysis.

"Have the names on the list been verified?"

"Verified." The person beside him replied in a low voice, their eyes already red, "Identities confirmed, no errors."

Elder Wu nodded, his voice a bit hoarse.

"Arrange for their families, follow the highest standards."

"Yes."

No one spoke in the room again.

Only then did Elder Wu look back at the pages of materials on the table, his gaze so deep it seemed to hold an entire night's darkness.

The country had yet to truly come into contact with so-called "alien life."

Yet the other party might have already pried technology from it.

Everyone present knew what this meant.

This was no longer an ordinary technological race.

Nor was it a simple game of national power.

The world's true hidden cards might be even deeper and more complex than they had originally imagined.

After a while, Elder Wu slowly closed the materials.

His movements were very light, so light it was as if he were afraid of disturbing something.

"Record this down."

He paused, his voice deeper.

"Their names cannot be buried behind this sheet of paper."

The room remained quiet.

But at this moment, everyone understood that some things had changed completely.

Lu Li was in the light, using technology to pave the way forward for the Dragon Kingdom.

And those who couldn't even have their names made public were in the darkness, using their lives to block the storm first.

One in the light, one in the dark.

One line paving the way to the future.

One line buried deep in the night.

Together, they supported the same direction.

For the Dragon Kingdom to reach the pinnacle of the world, it never relied solely on one genius, one technology, or one victory.

It also relied on countless people standing in unseen places, walking their share of the road first.