The electronic screen of the New York Stock Exchange suddenly turned blue, and the Dow Jones Index froze at 30,000 points. The next second, the ancient Nordic runes of death poems burst out. Leo's silver hair was dyed into a strange cobalt blue by the dim light of the screen. What the claws touched was not the trading terminal, but the rotten oak bulkhead of the Viking longship. Canadian warrior Maya coughed up blood with blockchain fragments behind her. Her mechanical legs had degenerated into soft tissue in the shape of the Nasdaq index.
"The code... is eating me..." Maya used the barrel of the shotgun to support herself, "The sons of bitches stuffed it into the quantum system..."
The entire trading hall suddenly trembled with quantum vibrations. Runes from 885 AD covered the electronic screens, and each letter oozed black blood, dripping onto the ground and gathering into the wolf-head emblem of the Silver Brotherhood. Leo's bracelet exploded with cracks, and Viking memories erupted like a virus -
Frankish Kingdom, 879 AD
His Viking incarnation was using a battle axe to split the monastery's silver vault. The runes engraved on the axe blade **ᚦᚢᚱᛁᛋᚨᛉ (thunder)** were stained with the monk's blood, and the silver coins in the entire castle melted into liquid. The dying monk cursed in Latin: "You will be devoured by the weapons you forged..."
The alarm of reality overlapped with the monk's curse. The bronze bull statue of the New York Stock Exchange suddenly came to life, and the bull's eye projected the encrypted file of Satoshi Nakamoto's laboratory - the log record of Black Monday in 1987:
Experiment Log X-13γ
The Rune virus was successfully sealed into the Bitcoin Genesis Block, at the cost of the first test subject's brain death. Note: This virus destroyed the Frankish economic system in the 9th century.
When Leo ripped a fiber-optic cable, it suddenly wrapped around his wrist. The barbed runes burrowed into his blood vessels like living snakes, projecting the virus source code onto his retina—each code block was an afterimage of a Viking longship. Maya suddenly turned the gun around, and her degenerated pupils turned into Bitcoin symbols: "King... My genes were rewritten on the blockchain... into..."
Her throat burst out with black blood that smelled of copper, and her body collapsed into a pile of MBS bond corpses. Leo's vibranium bone spurs pierced the ground, and the sparks scraped out ignited the blockchain dust in the air, and the flames spelled out a warning in the air: The global financial system infection rate is 89%.
"Surprised?" The quantum projection of the Silver Brotherhood emerged from the mouth of the bronze bull. "Your father Satoshi Nakamoto built a more poisonous cage..."
In the blink of an eye, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange cracked, revealing the boiling mining pool below - the bodies of thousands of Bitcoin miners floating in liquid silver, their spines connected to the bronze rams of Viking longships.
Leo jumped onto the back of the bronze bull, and his wolf claws tore open the throat of the quantum projection. The broken electronic screen suddenly brightened, and the Death Poem of 885 AD materialized into an electrified chain:
ᚺᚢᚾᛞᚢᛋ ᛒᛁᛏᚨ ᛗᛁᚾ
(A hundred deaths are worse than one betrayal)
The moment the chains wrapped around him, Viking memories came flooding back like a tsunami. In the ruins of Frank's silver vault, his past life witnessed his people degenerating into beasts due to the Rune virus, and the caravan of the Silver Brotherhood bought ten mutant werewolves with a bag of salt.
"Same move," Leo bit the chain and pierced the bronze bull's spine with his bloody fangs, "You want to use it twice?"
The copper bull suddenly exploded, and the flying metal fragments reassembled into a Bitcoin mining machine array in the air. Satoshi Nakamoto's encrypted log was forced to pop up: The remaining energy of the prisoner protocol is 12% - it is recommended to enable the final instruction.
Leo crashed into the server farm under the New York Stock Exchange, where the quantum chain was transforming the miners' bodies into living virus carriers. He found laser marks on the mechanical arm of a corpse - the handwriting of his mother X-13γ: Go to Antarctica to start the agreement.
"Do you think Bitcoin is the savior?" The frozen corpse of the Silver Brotherhood elder rose from the mining pool, "It's just a bigger pledge contract!"
Leo's vibranium bone spike pierced into the pool, and liquid silver gushed out into the outline of a Viking longship. When his hand touched the bow statue, Satoshi Nakamoto's diary hologram unfolded:
October 19, 1987
The cost of using X-13γ's cerebrospinal fluid to encrypt the Rune virus is 75% permanent damage to its nerves. Bitcoin is not a currency, it is a chain that binds the dragon.
Maya's body suddenly twitched, and the mechanical eye projected the final picture: on the altar of the Antarctic Ice Cathedral, three hundred mother clones were using Leo's umbilical cord blood to unlock the bronze horn.
"It's time to settle the account." Leo tore off the Rune Cable wrapped around the server and inserted it into his own carotid artery, "Use your favorite - lever blasting."
When the computing power of the entire Bitcoin network plummeted to 1%, the Rune virus suddenly fell into hibernation. The death poem of the New York Stock Exchange faded into the original code of the Genesis Block, and the remains of the bronze bull spelled out Satoshi Nakamoto's last words: the protocol loophole has been fixed - at a cost of ████.
A new prompt popped up on Leo's retina: The infection rate of the global financial system was zero, but the blockchain browser showed that the mysterious address "Fenrir_895" was shorting Bitcoin at a rate of millions of times per second. He crushed the head of the ice corpse and found a micro transmitter embedded in the skull - the frequency was pointing directly to the Pole.
The Viking longship suddenly set sail automatically, and its ram pierced the crust of the New York Stock Exchange. The Lehman logo on the sail collapsed, revealing the bloody runes underneath: pledge liquidation turned to the Antarctic coordinates - countdown 23:59:59.
There was a roar of ice cracking from the East River, and Leo knew it was not a natural sound - the Silver Brotherhood had activated the Ragnarok Protocol ahead of time. His silver hair began to fade into the radiation-proof gray of Satoshi's laboratory, and the last layer of the genetic firewall was disintegrating.
When the Bitcoin mining pool was completely dry, quantum resonance waves came from Antarctica. Leo's vibranium bone spur suddenly displayed the birth weight data - 3.25kg was flashing in sync with the countdown of the Ice Church.