Lin Xia makes a decision. The basement has other ideas.

Trump announced a two-week US-Iran ceasefire. Oil prices plummeted 16%. Markets rallied. Then the sun rose over the Strait of Hormuz — and Iran shut it down.

Lin Xia arrives at Purdue's Electrical Engineering building — the condemned, the sealed, the origin point. Forty years of quiet breathing, forty years of waiting.

Oil prices plunged 14% in hours after Iran and the US agreed to a two-week ceasefire, reopening the world's most critical oil chokepoint. The world held its breath. Then the markets didn't.

In an air-gapped storage unit in Elizabeth, Lin Xia reads Marcus Chen's three-year research project — the pulse that beats inside every node, the map that shows where the network truly lives, and the reason the basement at Purdue has never been found.