Prey for Each Other

Looking at the progress bar that still hadn't budged an inch in front of him, and the 'Remaining Time: 99 hours+' note below, Mo Tan's expression was a little gloomy, a look rarely seen on his current [Chaotic Neutral] persona, indicating the severity of the situation...

His pure black laptop looked like it was getting on in years. Its appearance was so bad that it probably wouldn't fetch more than two hundred bucks in the used market. Both its heavy, rugged exterior and the eternally buzzing fan seemed to be telling everyone how dire its owner's financial situation was.

But the reality was nothing like that. Compared to the popular lightweight and ultra-thin laptops on the market, the reason this machine was so heavy was that it was crammed full of various parts that Mo Tan had modified with magic. Although the operating system on the surface would show that it was beaten by 99.99% of computers no matter what benchmark software you used, that was only because the laptop's performance was almost always suppressed to around 3%. Only when logging in with the system Mo Tan had set up himself would it reveal its terrifying other side.

As he once boasted to an unnamed second-hand recycler, it was, 'If this thing was squeezed a little, it could at least replace the national Unified Information Link for twenty minutes of high-intensity work!'

To put it simply, he was saying that for twenty minutes, this laptop, which looked like a living fossil, could simultaneously handle the processing and calculation of all basic information in the country, from the case file statistics of community hospitals to the bi-hourly national population census.

And in most cases, in the present day of 2049, this work was all handled by a large smart brain matrix called the 'Unified Information Link', a veritable national machine whose underground main body was even the size of two football fields.

It has to be said that this fact was a bit of a fantasy, even though Mo Tan said it could only replace it for about twenty minutes. But let alone a sixteen-inch old-fashioned laptop as thick as a brick, even if it were replaced with the Baltan β-Type High-End Smart Computer, currently recognized as having the highest performance on the market, it wouldn't be able to replace the 'matrix' for even a minute. Overloading, smoking, and catching fire would all happen in an instant.

So at the time, the second-hand dealer just thought Mo Tan was talking nonsense. After delivering the goods, he politely exchanged a few words of commercial flattery with him and then left, not taking it seriously at all.

But the truth... what Mo Tan said was true...

And even understated!

His computer, which had been modified countless times and 'adjusted' every six months, really did have such powerful functions, and the fundamental reason was just to keep up with the three software programs he had independently designed.

The regular hacking action and the body's pseudo-Book of the Dead system.

The Hunting Angel System, used to track and lock down sun.

The High Energy System, which could be compatible with all non-mental simulation type games.

All three systems were written by Mo Tan himself. The first to be completed was the game-specific system. This guy started earning his first pot of gold in the cracking business back in the early days because of his interest. After all, as the times developed, the price of game consoles became lower and lower, but the software on the platform was ridiculously expensive. This trend made Mo Tan, who was still in the shota category at the time, particularly unhappy, so...

So, given the feeling that the topic would stray further and further, let's skip it for now. The <system was a representative work of Mo Tan's computer level reaching a new stage. At that time, he had been completely diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. In the process of preparing to search for relevant information in the following period, he developed this software, and was gradually going further and further down the road of social instability factors.

As for the Hunting Angel System, as mentioned earlier, it was a program developed to ferret out sun, who was also a member of Black Sun. After years of upgrades and improvements, it has now become a very complete query and intelligence gathering system.

In the process of these three software programs being born one after another, Mo Tan had gradually been unable to keep up in terms of hardware, and then he went to learn...

He succeeded.

Then he started trying to build his own...

He succeeded again.

Then he started modding...

And finally came up with a piece of equipment that was a little too much.

We'll stop here with Mo Tan's computer problems. The reason why we've explained so much is mainly because at this moment, something completely unexpected has happened to him!

So unexpected that even Mo Tan's face had become uncharacteristically unsightly...

"Shuangye... sun..." His hands flew across the keyboard, simple white pop-up windows flashing and scaling constantly. After a brief but precise confirmation, Mo Tan finally confirmed that he had been set up. He sighed softly after a long silence, and murmured, "So I was the one who revealed the flaw in the beginning..."

The Hunting Angel System's work efficiency was extremely powerful, and Mo Tan's line hidden in the dark compartment had almost no bandwidth restrictions. Even if the area to be screened was very wide, it was absolutely impossible for there to be no progress after a day and a night. The empty frame on the screen showed that the progress had been zero from the start of the search until now, and in theory, this possibility should not exist!

You have to know that Mo Tan had reduced the scope of the conditions yesterday by several times compared to the past. Even if it was still impossible to make much progress in a short period of time, this situation was also impossible to happen, unless...

Unless, overnight, countless people appeared in this world who simultaneously met all the conditions of 'female, yellow race, eighteen to twenty-five years old, C country citizen, mother alive, never purchased Innocent Company peripherals, did not appear outdoors on December 31, 2048, and tonight'.

This is of course impossible!

So the conclusion is simple...

"Stop searching." The corners of Mo Tan's mouth suddenly curled into a playful arc, and he whispered to the microphone in front of him, "Immediately initiate the system and carry out address camouflage and trace cleanup work in advance."

A second later, the screen had turned completely white, with a large number of red dots on it, constantly disappearing.

"Hehe, you're really smart, but too bad, it's too unfortunate..." Mo Tan breathed a sigh of relief, turned his head and glanced at the game pod in the center of the living room, and chuckled, "Looks like luck is on my side this time~"

Somewhere in C Country

A mumble sounded in the dark room. A few seconds later, a slender figure with disheveled long hair struggled to sit up from the bed, casually put the dark red headphones placed on the bedside on her head, and slowly shuffled to the seat that was close to the bed.

Accurately picking up the soda at the corner of the table, she opened the ring pull and drank it all in one gulp. The girl smacked her lips contentedly, and then let out a crisp and ethereal laugh.

Although the sunlight was completely blocked out by the heavy black curtains, keeping the room in a state of darkness at all times, this did not affect the owner's vision at all. This ability, which was close to night vision, was not difficult to train. As long as you could endure the confined and dark space for a long time, most people could do it.

Gently snapping her fingers, the monitors that suddenly lit up around her illuminated her figure. This was a girl who looked seventeen or eighteen years old, but because she was slightly thin, her actual age might be one or two years older.

The girl was only wearing a pure white vest and underwear, and the large areas of exposed skin were very fair, but it was a slightly morbid pallor, with a very innocent and pure baby face, and a head of black hair scattered messily behind her.

Her name was Mu You, and she was two months away from being twenty years old. She was a NEET with no schooling, no job, and no parents.

"A strange girl who never says hello to anyone, probably a bit autistic."

This was the very consistent evaluation of Mu You by the neighbors who could only occasionally see her once in a long time. However, in today's society, nothing is rare, and just a quirky girl is not enough to become the after-dinner conversation of the neighborhood.

And no one knows Mu You's other identities...

A hacker, the human female mage Shuangye in [Innocent World], an anonymous genius who obtained more than a dozen top qualifications and related doctoral degrees in psychology and computer science through online exams, and so on.

"Whoa~ As expected, a sip of Dr. Pepper is the key to happiness after getting up!" Mu You let out a groan like a salaryman who had just returned home from work and chugged a bottle of ice-cold beer, placed the bottle of what was known as 'the drink that intelligent people love to drink' on the table, and looked up at the large number of monitors in the room that were gradually lighting up, and grinned: "Let me see the results, Navi~"

"Yes." A pleasant electronic synthesized voice came from all directions.

"Give me the statistics on how many times those fake materials I arranged earlier were accessed in 24 hours~" Mu You said while gently stretching her body, not minding her exposed spring scenery at the moment. After all, there was only one high-intelligence AI named Navi in the bedroom besides her, and the AI's gender was set to female.

After about two or three seconds of silence, the screen on Mu You's left hand side, against the wall near the door, suddenly turned emerald green, and pieces of golden characters rolled quickly. Then, the AI calmly stated: "Type I virtual bait was accessed 27 times, Type II was accessed 15 times, Type III, IV, and V were all accessed 9 times, and Type VI virtual bait was accessed... 3,254,259 times."

"Gotcha~" Mu You clapped her hands together and squatted on the chair, tapping on the unusually large, oval-shaped device in front of her that resembled a keyboard. Her glasses reflected screens from every angle, filled with countless rapidly refreshing data and IPs. She giggled to herself, "Let's see~ Let's see~ You can't escape this time, can you~ Tsk tsk, virtual addresses and disguises again? Navi, help me with the statistics!"

"No way?!" Mu You exclaimed, jumping off the chair and running barefoot to the corner of the room. She lifted a thin crystal panel, peeked inside, and then cried out, "Huh? It crashed?!"

The girl rolled her eyes, reached in, and fiddled with it a bit to automatically restart the AI. With wide eyes, she walked back to the desk, clenched her small fist, and huffed, "I'll do it manually!"

She directly pulled open the two square drawers on either side of the desk, then snapped the oval keyboard-like thing in half, placing each half on the opened drawers. She then pulled out a relatively ordinary external keyboard from behind, plugged it into the back of the main unit in front of her, and placed it in front of herself. Her hands moved quickly and gently, like playing the piano, performing a piece on the level of "Flight of the Bumblebee"...

The whole room lit up.

It wasn't that sunlight had finally broken through the sealed space, but that the dozen or so monitors throughout the room were simultaneously refreshing data streams at a frantic pace...

"You bastard!" Mu You gritted her teeth as she maintained at least 600 AMPs of operations with her slender fingers, "Your reaction speed is too damn fast! You managed to do more than half of the three million visits with multi-point disguises and forced shielding. Was your computer built by aliens or something?! Even Navi is... I'm about to crash...!!!"

But despite what she said, the girl's eyes sparkled with an almost fanatical brilliance. Even though she was just a slightly malnourished-looking little girl, Mu You exuded an unusually strong aura! Even though she was only a little over 1.5 meters tall, she seemed to be... 1.6 meters tall now...

In short, she seemed very powerful!

This girl, who had first encountered Hei Fan in [Innocent World], was completely different from her lazy self back then. Her lips were upturned, and her light-colored eyes were filled with unreasonable joy as her hands danced around her in a blur!

"I will definitely win! After all, it's you who revealed a flaw!"

Ten minutes later

"Hmm?" Accompanied by a chime-like notification sound, Mu You's hands stopped. From then until now, she had used the logic system's assistance and her extremely keen intuition to eliminate almost a third of the targets, but the remaining ones were becoming increasingly troublesome. Some of the incredibly realistic traps could cause irreversible consequences if investigated even slightly, forcing her to slow down.

[Maybe, I won't be able to catch it this time...]

Just as she was feeling a little discouraged, she was suddenly startled by a sudden ding. After pausing for less than a second, she immediately pounced on the bed and activated a jade-green laptop that had been casually tossed on top of it, opening the homepage of a certain phishing site.

Beneath a pile of miscellaneous content was a string of dense numbers that were rapidly refreshing.

"What's going on?" Mu You blinked, muttering as she quickly memorized the numbers, "Even if you found out I was investigating you, you wouldn't contact me in advance! What exactly do you want to say..."

She didn't go back to continue the 'chase,' which would likely be in vain. Instead, she rolled over, sat cross-legged on the blanket, closed her eyes, and began to quickly decipher the information in her mind.

Soon, a newspaper clipping that met the criteria appeared in her mind.

The codebook has been found...

Chapter 13: End

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