Chapter 3: The Dark Web Connection
The threat glowed on Alex's screen like a wound that wouldn't close.
"Stop digging. Or else."
No sender. No metadata. Just those four words burned into a terminal window that should have been air-gapped from any external network. Alex's fingers hovered over the keyboard, heartbeat thudding against the ribs like a bass drum.
Three hours ago, he'd been a broke Solidity dev debugging a friend's smart contract. Now some shadowy collective — Lazarus Group, for God's sake — was threatening him because he'd peeled back a layer of their money laundering operation.
Or else what?
He laughed. It came out sharper than he intended, a brittle sound in the cramped apartment. The fan whirred overhead, pushing stale air in lazy circles. His third empty coffee mug sat beside the keyboard like a tombstone.
Alex cracked his knuckles and opened a new terminal.
$ ./oracle --status
The familiar blue holographic interface materialized, casting his face in cold light. But this time, something was different. The system prompt pulsed with an intensity he hadn't seen before, and new text was forming at the bottom of the display — slow, deliberate, like something thinking before it spoke.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ ORACLE SYSTEM v2.1 │
│ │
│ Threat Analysis: CONFIRMED │
│ Source Attribution: Lazarus Group │
│ Threat Level: ELEVATED │
│ │
│ Responding to threat escalation... │
│ Unlocking countermeasures... │
│ │
│ ████████████████████ 100% │
│ │
│ [Skill Unlocked: Dark Web Intelligence] │
│ Level: 1 │
│ │
│ Description: Access to dark web forums, │
│ hidden marketplaces, and encrypted │
│ communication channels. Provides real-time │
│ intelligence from underground networks. │
│ │
│ Warning: User anonymity is NOT guaranteed. │
│ Proceed with operational security │
│ protocols at all times. │
│ │
│ XP Awarded: +300 XP │
│ Current Rank: C-Rank Investigator │
│ Total XP: 1,847 / 2,500 (D-Rank) │
│ │
│ [Main Quest Updated] │
│ "Trace the Phantom Thief" │
│ Reward: 500 XP + Skill Upgrade │
│ │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Alex leaned back. Dark Web Intelligence. The Oracle wasn't just a blockchain analysis tool anymore — it was evolving. Growing. Like it was preparing him for something.
"Alright," he muttered. "Let's see what you've got."
He typed the access command the system provided. The terminal window fractured into a dozen sub-windows, each displaying cascading onion-routed connections. IP addresses bounced through relays in Bucharest, then Singapore, then a server farm in Reykjavik. The Oracle was building him a clean tunnel — untraceable, or as close to it as the system could manage.
[Dark Web Intelligence - Active]
Routing through 7 proxy layers...
TOR circuit established.
I2P backup channel: standby.
Accessing hidden services...
The screen went black for three seconds. Then it came back.
Alex had seen the surface web's idea of the dark web — those sensationalist articles about "Silk Road 2.0" and "hacker bazaars." The reality was different. It was quieter. More organized. Like walking into a high-end auction house where everyone wore masks and nobody made eye contact.
The marketplace he'd landed on called itself The Abyss.
It was structured like a classic darknet market — AlphaBay's spiritual successor, if AlphaBay had been designed by people who actually understood operational security. Clean UI. Escrow system. Reputation scores. Vendor verification through multi-sig PGP keys. The difference was the scale. Where AlphaBay had tens of thousands of users, The Abyss claimed north of 200,000 active wallets.
And the primary commodity wasn't drugs or weapons.
It was data.
Stolen credentials. Zero-day exploits. Corporate secrets. Government databases. And — Alex's stomach dropped — crypto intelligence services. People offering to track wallets, de-anonymize addresses, and front-run trades. The Abyss was where blockchain analysis tools went to die, sold back to the very criminals they were designed to catch.
A listing near the top of the "Financial Services" section caught his eye:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ [FOR HIRE] Elite Blockchain Forensics │
│ Vendor: ph4ntom_0dysseus │
│ Rating: ★★★★★ (847 reviews) │
│ Services: │
│ - Wallet de-anonymization │
│ - Exchange withdrawal interception │
│ - Cross-chain fund tracing │
│ - Smart contract exploit development │
│ Starting price: 2 ETH │
│ Note: No law enforcement. No tourists. │
│ We vet our clients. │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Alex's blood ran cold. This wasn't just a criminal — this was someone offering the exact capabilities he was using to track Lazarus Group, but weaponized for the other side. He saved the vendor profile. ph4ntom_0dysseus. He'd come back to this.
But first, he needed information. The Oracle's Dark Web Intelligence skill gave him read access to the forum sections, but posting required verification — a PGP-signed message from a known identity. He didn't have one.
Yet.
He navigated to the "Open Discussions" section, a semi-public area where unverified users could browse but not post. Threads scrolled past — malware trading, ransomware negotiations, a heated debate about whether Monero's latest protocol upgrade actually improved privacy. Mundane criminal life.
Then he saw it.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ Thread: Looking for a real chain tracker │
│ User: gh0st_in_machine │
│ Posted: 2 hours ago │
│ │
│ "I need someone who can actually trace │
│ on-chain transactions. Not the script │
│ kiddies advertising here — someone who's │
│ done real work. I have a job. Pays well. │
│ DM for details. No fakes." │
│ │
│ Replies: 3 │
│ [All flagged as spam by community] │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Alex stared at the username. gh0st_in_machine. The Oracle's intelligence module flagged something — a pattern match in the wallet addresses this user had previously referenced in public forums. Three months ago, gh0st had posted on a Bitcoin talk board about a DeFi exploit that drained his liquidity pool position. He'd been burned. Badly.
This wasn't a criminal. This was a victim who'd learned to fight back.
Alex opened a direct message channel. The Abyss required a one-time key exchange — ECDH over TOR, with a self-destruct timer on all messages. Thirty seconds to read. Then gone.
He chose his words carefully.
"I can trace chains. What do you need?"
The response came in eleven seconds.
"You're the one asking about Lazarus Group.
I see your queries hitting the forum index.
Don't lie."
Alex froze. He had been querying Lazarus-related threads — the Oracle's Dark Web Intelligence was indexing forum posts that matched his investigation parameters. He hadn't realized his search patterns were visible.
"And if I am?"
"Then we can help each other. I have inside
information on Lazarus. Real intel — not the
surface-web garbage. But I need something
first."
"Name it."
"Someone drained my DeFi position three months
ago. Rug pulled the liquidity pool I was LPing
in. Fifty ETH. Gone. I've been tracking the
bastard across chains for weeks but I can't
crack his final destination. You help me find
him, I give you everything I know about
Lazarus Group's operational structure."
The Oracle's skill module pulsed.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ [Side Quest Detected] │
│ "The Stolen Fifty" │
│ │
│ Objective: Trace the attacker who stole │
│ 50 ETH from user gh0st_in_machine │
│ │
│ Clues Provided: │
│ - Attack tx: 0x7f3a...e91c │
│ - Attacker wallet: 0xDead...4F2A │
│ - Last known location: Arbitrum Bridge │
│ - Time of attack: 93 days ago │
│ │
│ Reward: Lazarus Group Intel Package │
│ + 200 XP │
│ │
│ [Accept?] [Y/N] │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Alex didn't hesitate. He pressed Y.
"Deal. Send me the transaction hash."
Ghost responded instantly, as if he'd been waiting with the data loaded:
"0x7f3a9b1c4d2e8f6a0c5b7d9e1f3a8c2d
4e6f0a1b3c5d7e9f2a4b6c8d0e1f3a9c
Target wallet: 0xDeadB33f...4F2A
That's all I have. He bridged to Arbitrum and
then... nothing. Vanished. Like he knew exactly
how to disappear."
Alex pulled up the Oracle's Fund Flow Analysis module — the same tool that had cracked Lazarus Group's Tornado Cash laundering in Chapter 2. He fed in the transaction hash.
The system chewed through it. Cross-referencing DEX trades. Parsing bridge logs. Mapping every hop across every chain.
[Fund Flow Analysis - Active]
Tracing 0x7f3a...e91c...
Hop 1: 0xDead...4F2A -> Uniswap V3 (ETH/USDC)
Hop 2: 0xDead...4F2A -> Arbitrum Bridge (deposit)
Hop 3: 0xBa77...9C3D -> Arbitrum: GMX swap (USDC->ETH)
Hop 4: 0xBa77...9C3D -> dYdX (deposit)
Hop 5: 0xBa77...9C3D -> dYdX (withdrawal, new address)
Hop 6: 0x1F9e...7A2B -> Bridge back to Ethereum
Hop 7: 0x1F9e...7A2B -> Tornado Cash (10 ETH deposit)
[PARTIAL MATCH DETECTED]
Address 0x1F9e...7A2B shares clustering
signature with known Lazarus Group wallets.
Confidence: 78.3%
Alex's mouth went dry.
He ran the analysis again. Then a third time. The clustering algorithm didn't lie — the same heuristic patterns that had flagged Lazarus Group's NovaDEX exploit were present here. The same transaction timing. The same bridge-hopping behavior. The same Tornado Cash deposit intervals.
This wasn't a coincidence.
He opened the Oracle's cross-reference module and overlaid the attacker's wallet — 0xDead...4F2A — against every known Lazarus Group address in the system's database.
The result popped up like a flare in the dark:
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ [CRITICAL FINDING] │
│ │
│ Wallet 0xDead...4F2A has been identified │
│ as a secondary operational address for │
│ Lazarus Group cell: INFRA-7 │
│ │
│ Cell INFRA-7 handles: │
│ - DeFi exploit execution │
│ - Smaller-scale rug pulls (under 100 ETH) │
│ - "Independent" operator front groups │
│ │
│ The attacker who stole Ghost's 50 ETH is │
│ not an independent criminal. │
│ │
│ He is LAZARUS GROUP. │
│ │
│ [Side Quest Updated: "The Stolen Fifty"] │
│ "The thief is connected to a larger │
│ operation. This was never personal. │
│ It was operational." │
│ │
│ +200 XP Awarded │
│ Current XP: 2,047 / 2,500 (D-Rank) │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
Alex sat back. The fan creaked. Somewhere outside, a car alarm went off and died.
Ghost had come to him for help with a personal grudge — a DeFi theft that had cost him fifty thousand dollars. But the trail led somewhere much darker. The person who'd robbed Ghost wasn't some independent scammer. He was a foot soldier in Lazarus Group's army. A node in a network that the Oracle was only beginning to map.
Which meant Ghost's "inside information" wasn't just valuable. It was critical. Ghost had been targeted by the very organization he was now offering to expose. He wasn't just a victim — he was a potential defector.
Alex opened a new message to gh0st_in_machine.
"I found your attacker. But you're not going
to like what I have to tell you."
"The person who stole your 50 ETH isn't just
some random DeFi criminal."
"He's Lazarus Group. Cell designation: INFRA-7.
You weren't robbed by a thief. You were
targeted by an army."
The read receipt appeared. Then disappeared. The message had self-destructed.
Alex waited.
Ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
Then a new message appeared. Not through the Abyss's messaging system — through a completely separate channel. A hidden relay that bypassed the marketplace entirely. The Oracle's Dark Web Intelligence flagged it as a priority override.
"I know."
"I've known for six weeks. That's why I'm
reaching out to you specifically, Alex."
"I know about the Oracle System. I know about
NovaDEX. I know about the threat you received
tonight."
"And I know that if we don't work together,
Lazarus Group will erase us both."
Alex's hands stopped moving.
The cursor blinked. The fan whirred. And somewhere in the digital darkness, a ghost was watching him back.
┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ [Main Quest Updated] │
│ "The Lazarus Protocol" │
│ │
│ Objective: Uncover the full scope of │
│ Lazarus Group's infrastructure and │
│ identify their leadership. │
│ │
│ New Allies: │
│ - Ghost (identity unknown) │
│ │
│ New Leads: │
│ - Cell INFRA-7 (confirmed) │
│ - Vendor ph4ntom_0dysseus (person of │
│ interest) │
│ - The Abyss marketplace (intelligence │
│ source) │
│ │
│ Warning: Enemy is aware of your │
│ capabilities. Countermeasures expected. │
│ │
│ Next objective: Establish secure │
│ communication channel with Ghost. │
│ │
│ Reward: 1,000 XP + [CLASSIFIED] │
│ │
│ Status: ACTIVE │
│ │
│ C-Rank Investigator │
│ XP: 2,047 / 2,500 │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘
To be continued...
Author's Note: The line between hunter and hunted blurs when the darkness looks back. In the next chapter, Alex must decide how much to trust a ghost who knows too much — while Lazarus Group tightens its net. The dark web holds secrets that were never meant to see the light.
If you enjoyed this chapter, follow me for daily updates and drop a comment with your theories. Who is Ghost really? And what is the Oracle System's true purpose?
Tags: #litrpg #web3 #cybersecurity #fiction
