The progress bar before Mo Tan remained completely motionless, with the note "Remaining time: 99+ hours" underneath. His expression darkened slightly. Such a look was rare under his current Chaotic Neutral personality, which showed just how serious the situation was...
His pure-black laptop looked rather old. It seemed so shabby that it probably could not fetch even two hundred yuan on the secondhand market. Its bulky, rough exterior and eternally buzzing fan both seemed to be announcing just how terrible its owner's finances were.
The truth, however, was completely different. Compared to the lightweight ultrathin laptops popular on the market, this machine was so thick because it had been stuffed full of various components that Mo Tan had personally modified. Although the operating system on the surface would report that it had been defeated by 99.99% of computers regardless of which benchmarking master was used, that was only because the laptop's performance was normally suppressed to around 3 percent. Only after logging in through the system Mo Tan himself had set up would its terrifying other side be revealed.
To quote what he had once bragged about to a secondhand dealer who preferred not to reveal his name: "If you squeeze this thing hard enough, it can replace the nation's Unified Information Link for at least twenty minutes!"
Put simply, for twenty minutes, this laptop that looked like a living fossil could simultaneously handle and calculate all the nation's basic information. From case archives and statistics at community hospitals to the nationwide population census conducted every two hours, none of it would be a problem~
Under most circumstances, in the year 2049, all such work was handled by a massive superintelligent-brain matrix known as the "Unified Information Link." It was a genuine national machine, and its underground main body covered an area the size of two football fields.
It had to be said that this was utterly absurd. Although Mo Tan had said it could only serve as a substitute for around twenty minutes, let alone a sixteen-inch old-fashioned laptop as thick as a brick—even the Baltan β-type enthusiast smart computer, publicly recognized as the most powerful machine on the current market, could not replace the "Matrix" for even a minute. From overloading and smoking to catching fire and exploding, it would all happen in an instant.
Thus, the secondhand dealer had simply assumed Mo Tan was talking nonsense. After completing the transaction, he had exchanged a couple of polite compliments with him, then left without looking back, never taking the matter seriously.
But the truth... Mo Tan had been telling the truth...
He had even held back!
His computer, which had been modified countless times and "adjusted" once every six months, really did possess such powerful functions. Moreover, its fundamental purpose was merely to keep up with the three programs he had designed independently.
The pseudo—Book of the Dead system, used for regular hacking operations and the forgery of his true identity.
The Hunting Angel System, used to track and lock onto Sun.
The High Energy System, capable of running every type of game that did not involve mental simulation.
All three systems had been written by Mo Tan himself. The first to be completed was the game-oriented system. Back in his early years, he had earned his first pot of gold through cracking software purely out of interest. After all, as the times developed, game consoles had become cheaper and cheaper, while the software on their platforms had become outrageously expensive. This trend had particularly irritated Mo Tan when he was still a little boy, and so...
And since it seemed the topic would only stray farther and farther off course, let us skip it for now. The High Energy System was a representative work from the period when Mo Tan's computer skills had reached a new stage. By then, his multiple personality disorder had been thoroughly diagnosed. While preparing to investigate the relevant information, he developed this software, gradually moving farther and farther down the road of social instability.
As for the Hunting Angel System, it had already been mentioned earlier. It was a program developed to ferret out Sun, who was also a member of the Black Sun. After years of upgrades and improvements, it had now become an extremely comprehensive search and intelligence-gathering system.
During the successive creation of these three programs, Mo Tan's hardware had gradually begun to fall behind. So he went to study...
He succeeded.
Then he began trying to build things himself...
He succeeded again.
Then he began modifying things...
In the end, he produced a device that was just a little too excessive.
That was enough about Mo Tan's computer. The reason for explaining so much was mainly that something extremely unexpected had happened to him at this very moment!
It was so unexpected that even Mo Tan's expression had rarely become somewhat unpleasant...
"Shuangye... Sun..." His fingers flew across the keyboard as crude white pop-up windows constantly flashed and resized. After a brief but precise confirmation, Mo Tan finally confirmed that he had been played. After remaining silent for a while, he let out a soft sigh and murmured, "So the first one to reveal a flaw was me..."
The Hunting Angel System worked with astonishing efficiency. Moreover, the line Mo Tan had hidden in the secret compartment was practically free of bandwidth limitations. Even though the area that needed to be filtered was extremely vast, there was absolutely no possibility of seeing no progress at all after a full day and night. The empty frame on the screen showed that the progress had remained at zero from the beginning of the search until now. In theory, such a possibility simply could not exist!
Mo Tan had already reduced the search range by several times when he modified the conditions yesterday. Even if there could not be much progress in a short period, this situation still could not occur, unless...
Unless, overnight, countless people had appeared in this world who simultaneously met all the conditions: "female, yellow-skinned, eighteen to twenty-five years old, a citizen of C Country, mother still alive, never purchased Innocent Company peripheral products, not outdoors on December 31, 2048, or tonight."
That was of course impossible!
So the conclusion was simple...
"Stop the search." A teasing curve suddenly lifted the corners of Mo Tan's mouth. He spoke softly to the sound pickup before him. "Immediately restart the system and begin address spoofing and trace cleanup ahead of schedule."
One second later, the monitor had turned completely white, with countless red points of light on it that were continuously vanishing.
"Heh heh. You really are clever. Unfortunately, your timing was just too bad..." Mo Tan exhaled softly and glanced back at the gaming pod in the center of the living room. He began to chuckle. "Looks like luck is on my side this time~"
Somewhere in C Country
A sleepy murmur sounded in the dark room. Several seconds later, a slender figure with disheveled long hair struggled to sit up in bed. She casually put on the deep-red headphones resting by the headboard, then slowly shuffled over to the chair pressed against the side of the bed.
She accurately picked up the soda at the corner of the desk, popped the tab, and downed it in one go. The girl smacked her lips in satisfaction, then let out a crisp, ethereal laugh.
Although the sunlight was completely blocked by the heavy black curtains, leaving the room in perpetual darkness, this did not affect its owner's vision at all. This near-night-vision ability was not difficult to train. As long as one could endure living in an enclosed, dark space for a long time, most people could achieve it.
With a light snap of her fingers, the monitors around her suddenly lit up, illuminating her figure. She was a girl who looked seventeen or eighteen. Since she was rather thin, her actual age might have been another year or two older.
The girl was wearing nothing but a pure-white camisole and panties. The large areas of skin exposed outside were extremely fair, though the pallor was somewhat unhealthy. She had an innocent, pure-looking doll's face, and a head of black hair that was scattered messily down her back.
Her name was Mu You. She would turn twenty in two months and was a shut-in with no education, no job, and no parents.
"A strange girl who never greets anyone. She might even have a touch of autism."
That was the remarkably consistent assessment of the neighbors who only happened to see her once in a long while. However, in modern society, encountering all sorts of things was nothing unusual. A merely eccentric girl was not enough to become the subject of neighborhood gossip.
No one knew about Mu You's other identities...
In the hacker world, she was Shuangye, the human female mage of Innocent World. She was also an anonymous genius who had obtained more than a dozen top-level qualifications and related doctoral degrees in psychology and computer science through online examinations, among other identities.
"Ah~ Of course, after getting up, happiness still requires a mouthful of Dr Pepper!" Mu You let out a moan like an office worker who had just come home after a shift and downed a bottle of ice-cold beer. She placed the bottle, known as "the drink enjoyed by wise people," on the desk, then looked around at the many monitors gradually lighting up around the room and grinned. "Let's see how the harvest looks, Navi~"
"Yes." A pleasant electronic voice synthesized from all directions answered her.
"Tell me how many times those fake files I arranged earlier were accessed within twenty-four hours~" Mu You said while gently stretching her body, not minding in the slightest that she was exposing herself. After all, besides her, the bedroom contained only a highly intelligent AI named Navi. Besides, the AI's gender had been set to female.
After roughly two or three seconds of silence, the screen on the wall to Mu You's left, beside the door, suddenly turned emerald green. Sheets of golden characters rolled rapidly across it. Then the AI calmly reported, "Type-I virtual decoys were accessed twenty-seven times. Type II was accessed fifteen times. Types III, IV, and V were each accessed nine times. Type-VI virtual decoys were accessed... 3,254,259 times."
"They took the bait~" Mu You suddenly clapped her hands and crouched directly on the chair. As she tapped the enormous oval device on the desk that looked vaguely like a keyboard, her glasses reflected screens from countless angles, with innumerable streams of data and IP addresses refreshing wildly across them. She giggled and muttered to herself, "Let's see~ Let's see~ This time, there's no way you can get away, right~ Tsk tsk, virtual addresses and disguises again? Navi, help me tally them up!"
"No way?!" Mu You cried out. She quickly jumped down from the chair and ran barefoot toward the corner of the room, pattering all the way. After lifting a thin crystal panel and peeking inside, she cried out again, "Huh? It crashed?!"
The girl rolled her eyes, reached her hand inside, and fiddled with it twice to make the AI restart automatically. She walked back to the desk with her eyes wide, clenched her little fists tightly, and snorted, "I'll do it manually!"
She yanked open the drawers at the far ends on both sides of the desk, then snapped the oval keyboard-like device in front of her into two pieces. She propped them up on the two opened drawers at her sides. Next, she pulled a relatively ordinary external keyboard from behind her, plugged it into the back of the main unit in front of her, and placed it before herself. Both hands began moving swiftly and lightly, as if playing a piano—and the song was none other than Flight of the Bumblebee...
The entire room lit up.
It was not sunlight finally breaking through the sealed space. Rather, the roughly dozen monitors scattered throughout the room were all refreshing streams of data at a frenzied speed...
"You bastard!" Mu You maintained at least 600 amps of input with her slender fingers while gritting her teeth and cursing, "Your reaction speed is way too fast! Out of more than three million accesses, you actually created multiple disguises and forced blocks for over half of them! Did aliens build your computer for you?! Forget Navi... I'm about to crash too...!!!"
Despite saying that, the girl's eyes flashed with an almost feverish light. She was clearly just a malnourished-looking little thing, yet Mu You was radiating an astonishingly powerful presence. Although she was only a little over one and a half meters tall, she somehow seemed... one point six meters tall now...
In any case, she certainly seemed impressive!
The girl who had encountered Hei Fan at the very beginning of Innocent World had completely lost her lazy air from back then. The corners of her mouth lifted, her pale eyes filled with unreasonable delight, and both her hands danced around her, nearly turning into a blur!
"I'll definitely win! After all, the one who revealed a flaw... was you!"
Ten minutes later
"Hm?" A notification chime like the sound of wind bells rang out, and Mu You's hands stopped. From just now until then, with the assistance of her logic system and her extraordinarily sharp intuition, she had eliminated nearly one-third of the targets almost instantly. But the remaining ones were becoming increasingly troublesome. Some traps were so convincing that even a slight investigation could lead to irreversible consequences, forcing her to slow down.
Maybe she would not be able to catch them this time either...
Just as she was beginning to feel somewhat discouraged, the sudden ringing startled her. After freezing for less than a second, she immediately pounced onto the bed and activated an emerald-green laptop that had been casually tossed on top of it. She opened the homepage of a certain fishing site.
Beneath a pile of chaotic, supposedly virtuous and talented figures, a dense string of numbers was refreshing rapidly.
"What's going on?" Mu You blinked. As she rapidly memorized the numbers, she muttered, "Even if you discovered I was investigating you, you wouldn't contact me ahead of time, would you? What exactly are you trying to say..."
Rather than return and continue the "pursuit," which would most likely become a futile effort, she rolled over and sat cross-legged on the blankets. Closing her eyes, she began rapidly decoding the string of information in her mind.
Very soon, the silhouette of a newspaper clipping that met the conditions appeared in her mind.
The codebook had been found...
Thirteenth Chapter: End
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