This Taoist priest is so unprofessional!

The next morning, Zhang Chen led Wang Xiaoer into the shopping mall where they had made their last purchase in a great hurry.

A blast of cold air swept over him, dispelling the summer heat, but it couldn't dispel the anxiety in Zhang Chen's heart.

Just like last time, the two ignored the glamorous brand stores and went straight into an inconspicuous corridor.

At the end of the corridor was a small shop with a sign that read "Fatty's Computer" in crooked characters.

A young, chubby man sat in the shop, wearing greasy black-rimmed glasses, his messy hair looking like it had just been hit by a shell.

He was slumped in a gaming chair, staring intently at the screen, muttering to himself.

"Can't you even play jungle? Can't you even play? Is jungling all you can do? I told you to gank top lane, and you went to bot lane to just watch the scenery?"

He was cursing under his breath, but the fat man had already heard the commotion at the door. Without turning his head, he lazily greeted them.

"Hey, Master Zhang, what treasure are you looking for this time?"

His gaze remained fixed on the screen, his fingers clattering on the keyboard.

"This mouse isn't blessed, is it? Hey? What are you holding? Are you here to return it?"

After saying that, he muttered something under his breath, not loudly, but as if he was deliberately not lowering his voice.

"I didn't make much money off you from the accessories last time either; at least the power supply was from a major brand."

Zhang Chen didn't have time to joke with him.

He rushed to the counter and slammed the cold hard drive onto it with a loud "thud".

The noise was quite loud, and it even shook a figurine on the table.

The fat man's game character was distracted for a moment and was taken down by the opponent in one combo, and the screen instantly turned gray.

"Holy crap!"

The fat man reluctantly turned his chair around, about to lash out, but then he saw Zhang Chen's serious face.

"No joke, Fatty."

Zhang Chen's voice was deep.

"I encountered some trouble the day before yesterday, which is not my area of ​​expertise."

He pushed the hard drive forward.

"Can you handle a virus from ten years ago?"

Upon hearing this, the fat man's displeasure was instantly replaced by curiosity.

He adjusted his glasses and sat up straight in his chair.

"Ten years ago? When did you become interested in these things?"

He became interested, reached out and picked up the old 3.5-inch mechanical hard drive, weighing it in his hand.

"This thing has been around longer than I've been in the business. Which museum did you find it in?"

"Oh, I see! Was it from downloading porn? I didn't know you Taoists had this kind of taste too!"

Although he was still joking around, his hands were moving quickly.

He skillfully pulled out a cable from a jumble of messy data cables, connected it to the hard drive, and then plugged it into his high-spec professional equipment.

Press the power button.

The fan roared, and a dense stream of data immediately appeared on the screen, rolling by like a waterfall.

The fat man glanced at it, and his playful expression gradually turned serious.

His fingers flew across the keyboard, inputting command after command.

The data stream on the screen is unpredictable, sometimes normal, and sometimes a bunch of garbled characters appear.

"what?"

The fat man let out a soft "Eh," and his body involuntarily leaned forward, almost touching the screen.

"The partition table of this hard drive has been tampered with; it's crude, but effective."

He operated it for a while and brought up a low-level analysis tool.

On the blue screen, countless binary codes composed of "0" and "1" flashed wildly.

"Found it."

The fat man locked onto a hidden folder and tried to open it.

"access denied."

He switched to another tool and tried to force a crack.

"Insufficient permissions".

The fat man frowned, and the relaxed look on his face completely disappeared.

He muttered, "That's interesting, it even has a self-locking function."

He took a USB drive out of the drawer, plugged it in, and the screen instantly switched to a completely black command-line interface.

"I'd like to see what kind of thing you are."

The fat man started calling a special program he had written to forcibly bypass the hard drive's underlying protocol.

This time, the hidden folder was finally opened.

But it was empty inside, there was nothing there.

Wang Xiaoer couldn't help but ask, "What's wrong? It's empty?"

"No."

The fat man's voice was low, and his eyes were sharp.

"It's not empty."

He pointed to a constantly changing number in the bottom right corner of the screen.

"This folder actually occupies 20 GB of space, but the system cannot recognize any files."

"The item is there, but it's been hidden."

"No... that's not quite right... it should be... this is fucking wrong!"

As the fat man spoke, his tone became somewhat insecure.

"This virus is definitely from ten years ago, but this hard drive was manufactured last year... It's like this data exists in another dimension!"

Seeing Zhang Chen and Wang Xiaoer's blank expressions, the fat man simply stopped explaining, because he couldn't explain it himself. He stopped thinking about it and typed out another long string of code.

This time, the data on the screen is no longer a waterfall, but a continuously rotating three-dimensional data model.

Countless tiny points of light formed an irregular sphere.

At the core of the sphere, there is an extremely tiny red dot that is flashing at an eerie frequency.

The fat man's expression changed completely.

He stared intently at the red dot, fine beads of sweat forming on his forehead.

"strangeness……"

He muttered to himself, as if speaking to Zhang Chen, or perhaps asking himself a question.

"The underlying data of this hard drive has been encrypted and locked in a way I've never seen before."

"It's not a simple encryption algorithm; it's more like a..."

He paused, as if searching for the right word.

"Like a... 'data cocoon'."

"And besides, inside here..."

His pupils suddenly contracted.

"There seems to be something alive inside, constantly replicating and disguising itself..."

He turned his head sharply to look at Zhang Chen, his eyes behind his glasses filled with shock and a hint of fear.

"Zhang Chen, this thing... doesn't seem to be a program written by a human."

These words seemed to freeze the air in the entire shop.

The end of technology seems to truly lead to another unknown realm.

The fat man stopped talking and began frantically typing on the keyboard, his hands moving like blurs.

He pulled out a series of professional antivirus software and cracking tools.

Kaspersky, Nonoton, Water Soft... and even his own antivirus mini-program.

On the screen, the progress bar repeatedly reaches its end, and then a cold, impersonal message pops up.

No virus detected.

No hidden files found

The fat man refused to believe it and pulled up an even lower-level disk scanning tool.

"Buzz—"

The host computer emitted a screeching sound as if it were about to collapse under the strain.

The data model on the screen began to tremble violently, and the core red dot suddenly started flashing at an accelerated frequency!

Like a startled creature, it began to frantically crash into the "cocoon" made of data, trying to evade the fat man's scan.

"Trying to run away?"

The fat man's eyes sharpened, and with a low shout, his hands moved even faster!

"Get out here!"

He forcibly locked onto the data sector where the red dot was located, attempting to extract it.

But at that moment, something unexpected happened!

The entire screen was instantly covered in blood red!

A line of distorted text, as if written in blood, slowly appeared in the center of the screen.

"You...want to...steal my equipment too?"

A chilling, bone-piercing resentment seemed to pierce through the screen and instantly overwhelmed me!