The underground caverns of the Silver Manor were filled with cigar ash and the stench of a century of stale copper. Leo's silver hair brushed against the rusted brass chandelier, and sparks splashed on the 1929 edition of the Wall Street Journal. The dark headlines on the front page suddenly twisted - "On the first day of the Great Depression, 23 traders committed suicide." The quantum generator above his head hummed, ionizing the air into a pale green color, and every breath carried a burnt smell of financial despair.
"Buy it...Buy it all..."
A hoarse howl exploded from the depths of darkness. Leo's wolf claws pierced the wet marble floor, and the claws touched the cold rails - the old New York Stock Exchange securities track that had been abandoned for a long time, and the gaps in the track were filled with silver dollars with teeth marks.
Thirty-seven quantized ghosts emerged from the void. They wore wrinkled striped suits, their eyes were electronic screens of the Dow Jones Index, and in their hands were not trading orders, but barbed stock code nooses.
"Another idiot!" The leading ghost spewed out black smoke with a smell of sulfur, "A bunch of bastards who don't have enough deposit..."
As his noose swung, Leo smelled the preservative of his mother's clone.
Noose Carnival
The first noose brushed past the tip of his ear, branding the date 10/24/1929 on the stone wall. Leo rolled to avoid it, and the vibranium bone spikes scraped across the ground, bringing up a string of Viking silver coins. The ghosts suddenly shuddered collectively, and their electronic eyeballs flashed the wolf head emblem of the Silver Brotherhood.
"Breakup... Breakup..." They whispered in the Chicago accent of 1929, and the noose was intertwined in the air to form a K-line cage.
Leo's wolf tail swept down an old telegraph machine, and a bloody paper tape spurted out of the machine - the original transaction record of shorting the wolf gene. When the paper tape wrapped around his ankle, the leading ghost suddenly materialized, and rotten fingers poked at his chest: "Your collateral... is not even as good as a pair of broken shoes in 1929..."
The bracelet suddenly became hot, and Viking memories pierced into my temple like steel needles:
1029 AD, Norwegian tundra
His Viking incarnation was burning the Silver Brotherhood's granary, and the merchants fleeing in the flames were shouting the stock code of 1929.
When seven nooses came at the same time, Leo deliberately slowed his heartbeat. The Eye of the Wolf King analyzed the quantum frequency of the noose - exactly the same as the brainwaves of his mother's clone. He tore off the paper tape wrapped around his left arm, and his bloody fingers quickly carved anti-rune on the noose.
"What caused your margin call wasn't stocks," Leo's fangs crushed the attacking electronic eyeballs, "it was the blood of the wolf tribe!"
The tampered noose suddenly shrank in the opposite direction, dragging the ghosts into the void. The leading ghost screamed before dissipating: "The Silver Brotherhood... they exploded first... the wolf gene mortgage pool..."
The floor of the entire exchange suddenly collapsed, revealing a boiling amalgam pool below, in which floated hundreds of skeletons in 1929 suits, each with a cooling pipe from a modern high-frequency trading server plugged into its chest.
When Leo jumped over the mercury pool, the bracelet suddenly projected a holographic account book. The entry for October 28, 1929 flashed bloody: The Silver Brotherhood's first genetic explosion - forced liquidation of 2,315 Wolf Heart futures.
"No wonder they hid it underground..." His wolf claws pierced the pool wall and dug out a copper plate with an inscription. On it was engraved the secret terms of the day of the liquidation in runes: If the wolf gene pledge rate exceeded 75%, the Silver Brotherhood would have the right to charge a thousand years of interest.
The mercury pool suddenly churned, and Satoshi Nakamoto's face emerged on the surface of the alloy liquid: "Have you discovered the truth? But do you know how they make up for the position after the liquidation..."
The screen switched to a video of the mother tied to the operating table, with an optical fiber connected to the Federal Reserve's underground vault from her temple. Leo's vibranium bone spur was inserted into the bottom of the pool, and the amalgam spurted like pus and blood, revealing an even more terrifying scene below - the quantized traders in 1929 were transforming werewolf captives into living candlestick charts.
The Canadian Ice Warrior's cry for help exploded from the communicator: "Leo! Don't believe those ghosts... Our gene pledge rate..."
The signal was cut off by a sharp margin call alarm.
When Leo destroyed the last high-frequency trading server, the entire mercury pool suddenly froze. He saw his reflection on the frozen alloy surface - his silver hair was fading into the gray stripes of a trader's suit in 1929. The bracelet popped up a red warning: the global wolf gene pledge rate is 99.7%.
The ruins of the Ghost Exchange suddenly played Ode to Joy, and the tone was distorted into the hymn of the Silver Brotherhood. The old-fashioned telephone in the corner rang, and Leo picked up the receiver. The electronic voice of Victor's clone came out:
"It's time to deliver...your heart's valuation..."
The receiver suddenly grew a barbed noose and wrapped around Leo's neck. In the moment before he suffocated, he glimpsed the inside of the phone - the brain tissue of his mother's clone was twitching with the current, and the rune engraved on the gyrus was ᛘᛁᚴ (debt).
The ice surface of the mercury pool burst at this moment, and Irene's clone X-13θ rose from the amalgam, and her nanoworm swarm spelled out the Antarctic coordinates in the air. When Leo's wolf claws tore the noose, the dome of the exchange suddenly collapsed, revealing the real starry sky above - the position of the Big Dipper coincided with the spire of the Antarctic Church.
The ghosts' echoes drifted among the ruins: "The liquidation is just the beginning... Interest... There is still a thousand years of interest..."
Leo clutched the fragment of his mother's brain tissue that he had pulled out of the phone. The latest neural pulses on it showed that all X-series clones were beating in sync under the Antarctic ice.