In an office building, a white-collar worker suddenly looked up and stared at his colleague with a strange expression. "Who's beating a drum? It's so loud!"
His colleague looked around, utterly baffled. "What drum?"
"Huh? You can't hear it? It's so loud!" The white-collar worker clutched his chest. "It's still pounding. It's making my heart tremble."
"Heh, you're crazy. Auditory hallucinations, maybe. Hey, you don't have heart disease, do you? Go get checked. Watch out for sudden death." His colleague did not take it seriously.
Ordinary people would not pay much attention to something like this. They would only assume someone had gone mad. Besides, the people hearing the drumbeats were not located in the same places within the Virtual World, so it was rare for the same group of people in the same location to hear them at once.
Yet the words spoken by those who heard the drums were not spoken with their tongues, and those who heard those words did not hear them with their ears. All language was merely the transcription of signals. Not a single one could escape the Virtual World's surveillance.
When thousands of people displayed the same symptoms at the same moment, ripples rose in the Information Ocean.
Old Six's breakthrough took five seconds. To him, those five seconds were calm and uneventful; the enemy seemed not to have noticed his existence at all. But in truth, by the third second, the Information Ocean had already detected the anomaly, reacted, and issued orders.
``` #Abnormal auditory signals detected in a large number of brain units simultaneously#
#Brain-unit link anomalies excluded#
#Locating brain-unit positions; all located in S637KC#
#Calculating physical addresses of all brain units#
#Brain-unit distribution has a distinct central point#
#Central point locked; basically overlaps with the abnormal auditory-signal location at B7U94D#