Chapter 227 — Stirring Up Trouble

Fragments of Gao Yang Cecil's memories? Or the eighteenth decryption attempt? And they're requisitioning even more computing power?

This sudden burst of information immediately caught Gao Song's attention. With a flicker of thought, the stream of data refreshing in his mind screeched to a halt, and he seized upon this particular message.

Clearly, the Ever-sleepers had been remarkably crude and slipshod when it came to their data security management. To Gao Yang, those unencrypted files and that network architecture utterly devoid of any warning mechanisms were practically undefended. Even though he was still quite unfamiliar with this mental network, he could rely on the knowledge he had devoured and a bit of haphazard poking around to figure out, in a short time, how to manipulate the information within the network and lock onto the movements of its data streams.

Of course, he couldn't pin all the blame on the Ever-sleepers' weak security awareness. After careful analysis, Gao Yang realized that their mental network was, in fact, quite secure in its own right. First, the prerequisite for connecting to this network was becoming an Ever-sleeper—one had to have shaped one's spirit through a specific "Fallen Divine Art" and passed the "registration and authentication" of the Ever-sleepers' mental network before gaining the qualifications to intervene in it. Second, the network itself had a simple identity verification and permission management function. Beyond requiring an "Ever-sleeper account" to get online, any individual connecting to the network also had to possess the corresponding permissions to move about in the various districts of this virtual world. The barrier that had surrounded the city center earlier was a manifestation of that permission system.

Considering the non-replicability of the human spirit under normal circumstances, this sort of "account management" was actually quite reliable.

Yet this network had a fatal flaw: as long as an individual met the two requirements—network access qualification and corresponding permissions—all of his behavior within the network went completely uncontrolled. Even if he rummaged through files as recklessly as Gao Cen, tormenting data nodes with all sorts of erroneous operations and displaying countless suspicious behaviors, the network would generate no alarm whatsoever.

In short, this network was impregnable against external attacks, yet utterly defenseless against internal threats.

The Ever-sleepers who had originally created this network surely never imagined that an anomaly like Gao Yang would appear—a "satellite spirit" capable of devouring others' spirits and even forging mental permissions...

Gao Yang pretended to be deep in thought and closed his eyes slightly, but in reality he had already begun attempting to search the entire network based on the information he had captured. He tried to extract as much useful information as possible from the Ever-sleepers' mental network before this connection ended.

This network did indeed have an unimaginably massive loophole, but Gao Yang didn't think the otherworlders were fools—and those Ever-sleepers were no fools either. The network's defect was simply because it was still a work in progress; sooner or later, the Ever-sleepers would realize this vulnerability.

Who knew how fast these cultists—who had nothing better to do than idle away their days pondering whatever popped into their dreams—would be at patching bugs...

After several attempts, Gao Yang finally mastered the knack of extracting information from the mental network. He searched using "Gao Yang Cecil's memory fragments" as a keyword, and unexpectedly discovered that the corresponding information was actually quite plentiful:

The Ever-sleepers had already conducted seventeen decryption attempts on "Gao Yang Cecil's memory fragments," and the results were uniformly failures—every single one. The most disastrous was the first attempt, when they organized over a hundred powerful sect members into a computing array to forcibly crack those memories, only to be wiped out in a single wave.

After that, they grew wiser and stopped trying to brute-force it, turning instead to slicing up the memory fragments and attempting fuzzy comprehension. By now, another three hundred or so had died in dribs and drabs—and every one of them an elite.

The source of these memory fragments was both unexpected and entirely logical: they were exactly what that Ever-long-slumber cultist had "secretly uploaded" through his own mental connection the last time Gao Yang devoured him.

That devoured cultist had actually mustered his last strength before dying to copy some of the memories he had witnessed and send them to his comrades... That genuinely surprised Gao Yang a little.

Perhaps the fellow had wanted to warn his companions this way, to let them know the truth about "Gao Yang Cecil." Perhaps he simply wanted to transmit some valuable intelligence back. More likely, he had been completely muddled and mad by then, utterly unable to control his own actions. But regardless, the memory fragments he sent back had become the Ever-sleepers' "important spoils of war," and these cultists seemed determined to dig something out of those fragments...

Gao Yang carefully pored over the records circulating on the network—the Ever-long-slumber cultists' analyses and decryption attempts on those memory fragments. Thanks to the network's nearly defenseless information architecture, he could see almost everything in the database.

After some tracing and locking on, he even discovered where those memory fragments were stored.

After confirming that he had not yet drawn anyone's attention on the network, he cautiously opened that data.

Sure enough, they were his own observation records from when he had overlooked the earth from space... There wasn't much data, though—only about seventy or eighty thousand years' worth of high-definition video footage.

Even though they were his own memories, Gao You couldn't help but feel a bit of a yawn coming on when he saw that video footage. He had to admit, these nearly unchanging images really were tedious. Just think—the Cinder-Shade cultists were truly pitiable. They had invested enormous manpower and resources, and in the end, even if they successfully read this vast memory, all they could do was stare wide-eyed at these meaningless surveillance feeds. Moreover, Gao Yang was almost certain they wouldn't dare fast-forward...

Terrified that fast-forwarding a bit might make them miss an entire world—that was roughly their state of mind. Understandable, understandable.

Gao Yang pondered carefully for a while, and as a person of good will, he decided to add something a little less tedious to these boring memory fragments...

Who knew how long had passed, but Gao Yang finally finished modifying those memory fragments. Since they were his own memories, he could handle them with perfect ease, but to avoid leaving any traces that might give him away, he spent a great deal of time polishing the "signatures" of the memory fragments and erasing the marks of his alterations. Although he figured those Ever-sleepers—who had such a weak grasp of information security—probably wouldn't think of such things, better safe than sorry. What if there was an obsessive-compulsive among the Ever-sleepers?

After finishing this work, Gao Yang still felt full of energy. He thought it over and, rather than severing the connection outright, continued searching through this vast mental network, trying to find more of the Ever-sleepers' secrets—especially technical documents concerning the principles of this mental network.