The Conspiracy Begins to Surface (Part 2)

"Was it him?"

Sun Cheng's smile froze, and his eyes flickered.

He knew the owner of that voice, and knew him very well. It was Liu Kun, one of his roommates from their college years.

If it had been a few days ago, Liu Kun coming to visit him in the dorm would definitely have made him overjoyed.

But now?

He took the flash drive from his pocket and idly turned it over in his hand for a moment before getting up and walking toward the door. "Coming..."

After calling out, Sun Cheng rubbed his stiff facial muscles. Once he had taken a moment to restore the smile on his face, he finally opened the dorm room door.

The next moment, a young man in a casual long-sleeved shirt with a seven-three part appeared before Sun Cheng. It was none other than his former roommate, Liu Kun.

"Cheng, what's going on? Your phone never responded when I called. Did it get cut off because you didn't pay the bill?"

Liu Kun walked in carrying a bag of fruit. He familiarly placed it on an empty computer desk beside Sun Cheng before looking at him with concern.

"Don't even mention it. I was in a bad mood last night, drank a little, and accidentally smashed my phone!" Sun Cheng casually made up an excuse, putting on an annoyed expression.

His iPhone 5 was still in the other world, so he was not worried about being exposed.

The lingering smell of alcohol filled the dorm. Following the scent, Liu Kun indeed spotted several cheap little bottles of Su liquor in a nearby trash can. He seemed to have no doubts and instead gently advised him, "You really shouldn't drink alone just because you're in a bad mood. All it would take is one phone call—would Old Boss, Fourth, and I really refuse to come drink with you?"

That familiar, warm exchange immediately stirred a wave of guilt in Sun Cheng's heart.

I must be overthinking it, he reassured himself. Yet he no longer dared to examine his friend of several years with that suspicious gaze. Even accidentally meeting Liu Kun's eyes made him want to turn away.

As he invited Liu Kun in to sit, Sun Cheng began to wonder whether he had been too petty, suspecting a friend over nothing more than a Trojan horse.

Feeling somewhat guilty, Sun Cheng busied himself pouring water and bringing over a stool. His enthusiasm made Liu Kun uncomfortable. After sitting down, Liu Kun could not help saying, "What are you being so polite with me for? This is your dorm—doesn't that make it my dorm too?"

"Didn't you all move out? Coming back now makes you half a guest, naturally!"

"We didn't exactly not invite you to move out with us. Old Boss and Fourth never held a grudge against you over the money you borrowed—it's just that you always felt bad about it yourself!" Liu Kun said. "How about it? Come move in with us. There are only two or three months left before graduation anyway, and living off campus is more convenient."

After speaking, he seemed to casually glance at Sun Cheng's computer screen. His expression immediately changed slightly. "You changed your operating system?"

Sun Cheng nodded. He had still been feeling guilty, but the instant he saw the change in Liu Kun's expression, his suspicions rose again. It's just a different operating system. Why is he reacting so strongly? Could that Trojan really have been his doing, just as I suspected?

Without revealing anything, he tested him. "My computer had been crashing constantly before. I took it to a repair shop, but they couldn't fix it. Reinstalling the system didn't help either. A couple of days ago, I found someone in the department who's good with computers and asked him to take a look. He said the computer had a Trojan horse, so he helped me reinstall the system. It finally works now!"

When Sun Cheng mentioned phrases such as "reinstalling the system" and "Trojan horse," he, already paying close attention to Liu Kun's expression, keenly caught a trace of unease. His heart sank. He suddenly realized that his earlier guess might not have been unfounded—there was something seriously wrong with this roommate of his.

Perhaps because he had a guilty conscience, Liu Kun had barely sat down before making an excuse that he had something to do later and leaving.

The moment Liu Kun left, the doubts in Sun Cheng's heart only grew stronger. How could he possibly sit still now? He was desperate to learn the truth.

After thinking for quite a while, Sun Cheng finally came up with where to begin his investigation.

Unfortunately, he had not been able to bring his phone back from the other world. Having grown used to the convenience of a phone, he felt extremely uncomfortable without one.

Fortunately, after thinking for a while, Sun Cheng soon remembered that the person he needed to contact liked playing games.

He sat back down at the computer and spent some time finding a game voice-chat program they had used together while gaming. He downloaded and installed it on the computer.

He then entered his account and logged in. After searching for a while, he found the other person's account in his friends list and finally let out a small sigh of relief.

Seeing that the other person was online, Sun Cheng hurriedly opened a chat window and sent him a text message. "Fourth, reply as soon as you see this. I need to talk to you about something!"

After clicking send, he waited four or five minutes without receiving a reply and immediately understood that the other person was probably still in a game.

He could only minimize it to the lower-right corner of the screen and wait for the other person to notice it.

Not knowing how long he would have to wait, Sun Cheng soon shifted his attention away from the lower-right corner of the screen and reopened the browser.

For Sun Cheng, tracing the Trojan horse that had mysteriously appeared on his computer was only meant to clear up some of the confusion in his heart.

What he was most anxious about right now was raising enough money as soon as possible to settle the pile of debts left behind by his previous failed business venture.

For Sun Cheng, it was troublesome, but not entirely impossible.

In fact, after an experiment that afternoon confirmed how advanced his computer skills had become, Sun Cheng had already found a solution.

He quickly found an iOS discussion community. After carefully searching through it for a while, he finally located the latest iOS installation package in a post and chose to download it.

One of the methods he had thought of for quickly earning one hundred thousand yuan was to find bugs in Apple's iOS system and get paid for them.

In September 2015, the vulnerability acquisition platform Zerodium issued a bounty for bugs in iOS 9, offering three million US dollars to anyone who could develop a perfect browser-based jailbreak for iOS 9.

That bounty, which had caused an enormous stir the previous year, had actually ended by late October. On November 3, Zerodium announced that one hacker team had successfully created a browser-based 1/2 system jailbreak and received a reward of one million US dollars.

However, although last year's bounty had ended, that did not mean Sun Cheng could not make money from it.

After all, the jailbreak system acquired through Zerodium's bounty obviously could not possibly be sold back to Apple.

As the world's most popular mobile phone brand, there were plenty of people willing to pay large sums for more system bugs in Apple phones.

As it happened, Sun Cheng knew quite a few.

The iOS system was not perfect. After using Apple phones for several years, Sun Cheng had long come to that realization.

But what truly shattered the myth for him had been a few days ago in the other world. Barricade, on his way back to see Starscream, had dumped him at a scrapyard in the outskirts of Washington. While using Frenzy's enhancement ability to enhance his iPhone 5, Sun Cheng had also taken advantage of the powerful intrusion capabilities of the [Spy Template] to completely crack every line of code in the iOS system. From it, he had discovered at least several hundred different vulnerabilities.

Fortunately, when Sun Cheng returned from the other world to reality, although he lost Frenzy's powerful intrusion ability, all his memories of those vulnerabilities remained. Under some of Frenzy's influence, his computer skills had also improved by leaps and bounds.

So, all he needed to do now was download the latest version of iOS online, verify one by one whether the vulnerabilities he had discovered had been fixed, and then decide whether to sell them to Zerodium or directly to Apple.

The dorm's internet was painfully slow. The 4GB installation package had been downloading for a full twenty minutes, yet the progress bar had not even reached halfway, leaving Sun Cheng rather helpless.

Just as he was growing bored, the computer in front of him suddenly emitted a series of "beep-beep" notification sounds. Sun Cheng instinctively glanced at the bottom-right corner and, sure enough, saw the voice chat app flashing.

He hurriedly opened it and saw a reply: "I called you, but you didn't answer. Why's your phone turned off? What did you want?"

"Come to Master Wang's Stir-Fry. We'll talk when you get here. Don't tell the eldest or second brother—come alone!"

The chat app remained silent for quite a while before a reply finally came through: "Got it. I'll be there in half an hour!"