The Rise of a Special Forces Soldier Abandoned by a Wealthy Family

Although Baroque was a rough man, he knew that on the modern battlefield, keyboards and circuit boards could sometimes be more deadly than guns and cannons.

He has a keen eye for detail, often showing extraordinary interest in precision instruments and flashing indicator lights. He is also able to accurately locate abnormal signals amidst complex noise, demonstrating exceptional intuition.

A special training program called "Chip Hell" for little sparrows unfolds in the dark basement of the fortress.

Baroque "invited" several "teachers," all of whom were "renowned" electronics experts, network engineers, and cryptographers in their respective fields, but for various reasons, they had to remain hidden here.

Its teaching methods are full of the "Baroque style" unique to fortresses.

I. Hardware Basics:

The smell of solder and blood.

The first lesson is about hardware fundamentals.

The teacher was an old man whose fingers were stained yellow from nicotine and whose eyes were cloudy. He was known as the "King of Circuits".

In the center of the training room, motherboards, capacitors, resistors, and chips salvaged from various discarded equipment were piled up.

"You little piece of trash," the Circuit King's voice was hoarse.

"Get to know them. Not with your eyes, but with your hands, with your brain! Disassemble blindly, assemble blindly!"

He roughly pressed the little sparrow's hand onto an old Intel 8086 CPU.

"Feel its pins! Count them! Memorize its topology! Next time I want you to find it in a pile of junk!"

The next training session was welding.

However, instead of using a practice board, they used a low-voltage power line.

The little sparrow's hand trembled slightly; if the soldering went slightly astray, a momentary short circuit would bring a blue spark and a cry of pain.

"Stability! Precision!"

The Circuit King roared.

"Circuit circuits don't tolerate idiots! On the battlefield, a single faulty solder joint can blow up the entire system, or get you caught like a chicken by the enemy's network tracking team!"

The little sparrow was in so much pain that tears welled up in her eyes, but she gritted her teeth.

Zero secretly saved some of the pain-relieving ointment from Xue Yan and applied it to her burned fingers that night.

She made rapid progress and soon she was able to accurately solder and remove 0402 surface mount components while the circuit was powered on, her fingers as steady as a miniature robotic arm.

II. Introduction to Programming:

Binary and the logic of survival.

The programming teacher was a pale-faced, extremely anxious young man, known as "Code Monkey".

He seemed to live in a world composed of pure logic.

His teaching starts from the very basics, he speaks at an extremely fast pace, and he scribbles and draws frantically on the blackboard:

"The world is binary! 0 and 1! Life or death!"

He emphasized that we should forget English words and remember machine language and encoding instructions, such as MOV, ADD, JMP, etc., as this is the only way to communicate with the processor.

He gave the little sparrow an antique computer with no operating system, capable only of inputting information via a hexadecimal keyboard, and gave it a task:

Write a bootloader that can boot from a floppy disk and print the code name "Sparrow" on the screen.

If you can't do it, you won't get any food, and you'll be subjected to "electrotherapy".

The little sparrow nearly collapsed in the face of the cold machine and the incomprehensible manual.

Zero sneaked in that night and sat next to her. Although he couldn't understand her, he could say:

"Treat it like a Baroque command. If he tells you to go east, you can't go west. The same goes for machines; you have to command them step by step, without making a mistake, in a language they can understand."

The little sparrow seemed to understand, but Zero's companionship gave her strength.

She stayed up for two whole nights, consulting a large number of obscure documents, failing time and time again, and getting her hair standing on end from the electric shocks.

Finally, when the ASCII characters for "SPARROW" finally appeared on the screen, she was so excited that she almost cried.

For the first time, she experienced the immense sense of accomplishment of overcoming the human-machine barrier and controlling hardware with pure logic.

III. Network Penetration:

The ghost in the protocol stack.

Online courses are extremely dangerous.

The teacher was a former cyber infiltration expert for a foreign intelligence organization, codenamed "Tunnel".

The tunneled training ground is a simulated cyber range.

"The OSI seven-layer model! The TCP/IP protocol stack! This is your map!"

"ARP spoofing, ICMP redirection, TCP sequence number prediction... these are all your weapons."

The task he gave the little sparrow was extremely cruel:

"The target drone stores a 'survival instruction' (which is actually a dinner menu)."

It is located in an isolated network segment protected by a firewall.

Here's a cheap, old computer and a network cable.

Get it within 24 hours.

Failure, or triggering an alarm (which I'll know), and you'll be thrown into solitary confinement where even the rats are so hungry they're gnawing on cables.

The little sparrow must apply the knowledge it has just learned.

She first performed network sniffing, using Wireshark to analyze packet traffic and identify the target system's IP address and potentially open ports.

She discovered that the firewall rules seemed to have a tiny oversight that might be allowing certain ICMP packets to pass through.

She attempted to write a tiny tunneling program that used ICMP Echo requests (Ping) to encapsulate data, trying to hide instructions within it for transmission back.

However, the first attempt was dropped by the firewall due to a packet checksum error.

Tunneling alert: "CRC32 checksum error, algorithm incorrect, try again."

The second time, it was successful, but the transmission speed was slow and unstable.

Tunneling reappears: "Efficiency! Time is also an attack vector! Briefly disrupt the logging server with a SYN flood to mask abnormal connections!"

The little sparrow's fingers flew across the keyboard, using a Python script to disrupt the flow, establish connections amidst the chaos, and steal "survival instructions"—"classified intelligence" about the possibility that tonight's black bread might be harder.

She dances on a digital tightrope, making precise calculations and utilizing protocol stack features to evade virtual tracking and defenses.

The brain works at high speed, feeling the pulses of data flowing through the network cable.

The final training session was comprehensive.

Baroque gave the task: "Disable the alarm on the east watchtower for ten minutes, and make sure it's not discovered as sabotage."

The little sparrow used all its skills:

In terms of electronics, analyze the alarm circuit and find its weaknesses (aging power supply filter capacitors, sensitive to current pulses of a specific frequency).

In terms of programming, we write embedded programs and inject them into an MCU disguised as a repair tool.

In terms of network connectivity, if the alarm is connected to the internet, the access point can be located to bypass the security protocol.

She moved nimbly between the physical and virtual spaces of the fortress, like a sparrow.

She may have removed the device's Bluetooth module.

It was modified into an attack tool.

They may have used Xue Yan's lab's old spectrum analyzer connected to the internal network as a springboard.

It is possible to write malicious firmware that is a few KB in size.

Implantation of the target system via physical contact.

Xue Yan came regularly to collect data.

Measure the brainwave activity and neural response speed of sparrows under high mental stress.

He wrote in his notebook:

"Experimental subject 'Sparrow'"

It demonstrates an extraordinary affinity and speed of understanding of abstract logic and electronic signals.

Driven by the pressure to survive.

The learning curve grows exponentially.

It is recommended to increase stimulation from nonlinear encryption algorithms and the fundamentals of quantum computing (conceptual level) to observe their cognitive boundaries.

The little sparrow was overwhelmed by the vast amount of knowledge and the brutal training.

His body often bore the marks of solder burns and electric shocks.

His eyes are often bloodshot.

But she accomplishes an impossible task each time.

When she saw those cold machines functioning or malfunctioning because of her will.

An indescribable light would flash in her eyes.

She will still be afraid.

I have nightmares at night.

But Zero, Iron Piston, and Cold Thorn will always support her in their own ways—

Zero-size ointment.

Tiedun helped her carry heavy objects and provided cover.

Leng Ci silently kept watch for her.

To resolve some "trouble" that was trying to bother her.

This little sparrow, which used to only know how to cry.

It is weaving its own wings with solder, code, and data flow.

The process was filled with blood and the pain of electric shocks.

She is becoming an extremely special presence in the cub camp—

A silent and deadly little ghost that can subtly manipulate the real world.