The wind at the alley mouth of the Old Residence suddenly tightened, whistling like a mournful flute.

  Zhao Tianqi had been sitting motionless in his SUV for six hours. On his screens, apart from the “self-destruct death notice” from the chip in the pickle jar, there was absolutely no signal fluctuation. A man accustomed to surfing on tidal waves of trillions of data points, Zhao now felt like a blind man stripped of his sight in this absolute Silence. He began to anxiously gnaw at his fingernails, the metallic taste of fear rising in his throat.

  “Mr. Zhao, someone is entering,” the bodyguard whispered, compiling the report.

  At the alley entrance, where Uncle Wang had snapped his ink line, a figure appeared.

  It was a man even older than Wang. He wore a faded blue long gown, clutching a long, cloth-wrapped object tightly against his chest. He walked without sound, like a withered leaf skimming the ground. Only the faint rustle of his old thousand-layer sole shoes against the blue bricks betrayed his presence.

  “Halt,” Zhao Tianqi said, pushing his car door open and blocking the path. He tried to summon the last remnants of his authority. “The Wan Old Residence is a restricted zone. Old man, what are you carrying?”

  The elder stopped. He slowly raised his head. His eye sockets were deep, his cloudy pupils hiding a pool of dead water. He didn’t speak. He simply lifted a corner of the black cloth to reveal an extremely dilapidated Huqin (a two-stringed Chinese fiddle). The snakeskin on the sound box was cracked and dry; one of its two strings was broken, the other hanging loosely, exuding the scent of rotting wood.

  “A fiddle,” the elder rasped, his voice sounding like it had been dragged across sandpaper.

  “The algorithm says Wan Dashan is waiting for a ‘Keeper of Ritual’ inside,” Zhao sneered, staring at the instrument. “What? Is the new Head of the Wan family planning to resist a capital liquidation by listening to ‘Moon Reflected in Second Spring’?”

  The elder ignored him. He stepped sideways, bypassing Zhao. Strangely, despite Zhao’s training in Sanda (Chinese kickboxing), he found himself unable to block this stumbling old man. It was as if he were trying to intercept a gust of wind, or a fleeting shadow.

  Inside the Old Residence, Dashan had already arranged three chairs in the center of the main hall.

  The middle one was empty. On either side sat Madame Shen and Ruyi. Ruyi gripped the electrified silver needle, her eyes sharp and ready.

  “Master Uncle, you’ve arrived,” Dashan said, standing up and bowing deeply—a gesture of profound respect.

  The elder nodded and sat opposite the empty chair. Without any pleasantries, he placed the Huqin on his knee. His hand, thin as dried firewood, grasped the bow that was missing half its hair.

  “Dashan, your father was always most afraid of hearing me play,” the elder said, plucking the broken string. It emitted a harsh, screeching sound, like metal grinding on glass. “He said there were ‘ghosts’ in my fiddle. In truth, he wasn’t afraid of ghosts. He was afraid of that ‘Unfinished Computation’ he left behind in the Rose Garden.”

  Ruyi frowned. “Master Uncle, my father’s AI persona has iterated itself trillions of times. What melody could it possibly not have heard?”

  “It has heard music theory,” the elder said softly. “But it has never heard ‘Imperfection’.”

  Slowly, he drew the bow across the strings.

  A sharp, extremely dissonant low note exploded within the hall.

  Ruyi’s eyes widened. As the sound waves vibrated through the room, the listening device hidden inside the Nanmu pillar in the West Wing began to emit unstable electrical crackles again.

  “Big Brother, look!” Ruyi pointed at the pillar.

  This wasn’t simple resonance. The elder’s music was simulating a specific physical frequency. This frequency directly induced “Illogical Errors” in the sensor’s internal circuitry. To the algorithm, this sound should not exist; yet, on a physical level, it was brutally assaulting the circuits.

  “This is the final rule your mother left for Wan Changqing on that opera stage,” Madame Shen said, closing her eyes and swaying slightly to the music. “Wan Changqing thought that by killing the people and burning the theater, this frequency would vanish. He treated it as noise. He never realized it was the 1% System Loophole that the ‘Changqing System’ could never encircle.”

  Outside at the alley mouth, Zhao Tianqi suddenly screamed.

  The tablet in his hands began to spew green smoke. Every single infrared monitoring point was instantly paralyzed, jammed by the ultrasonic interference generated by the fiddle’s dissonant notes.

  [SYSTEM ALERT: CRITICAL AUDIO ANOMALY DETECTED.]

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  [FREQUENCY: UNIDENTIFIED/ILLOGICAL.]

  [ERROR: SENSOR OVERLOAD. LOGIC GATE FAILURE.]

  [MESSAGE: “PERFECTION CANNOT COMPUTE PAIN.”]

  Zhao stared at his melting screen, realizing with horror that he wasn’t fighting a man. He was fighting a ghost song that had been waiting thirty years to scream.

  [COUNTDOWN TO FUNERAL: 41:05:22]

  The old master just played a note so imperfect, so full of human pain, that it crashed Zhao’s entire surveillance network! ????

  Why? Because AI can calculate perfect harmony, but it cannot compute suffering. That dissonant sound was the '1% Loophole' Wan Changqing feared all along. ????

  Next Chapter: With the sensors blind, the real funeral can finally begin. But what is the 'Unfinished Computation'? And will Zhao try a desperate, physical assault now that his tech is useless?

  Question: Do you think art/music can ever be 'hacked' by AI? Or is the human soul in art truly unique? ????