Overturned Tower

When Russell "opened" his eyes again, he had turned into a sand dune cat.

He was in a black, starless void.

Become your own spiritual relative in the matrix space - this is the common intrusion form of psychic hackers.

If you don't use this method, it is easy to get lost and confuse reality and matrix space... After all, memory attacks are the most common means of counterattack; and if the shape is too unrelated to oneself, it is easy to cause self-damage in the offensive defense wall. It leads to the disintegration of consciousness.

The cat is in a pure black maze, spinning around and examining everything in front of it.

The material of the walls of the maze is reminiscent of obsidian, because there is no metallic luster on their surface and there are some uneven defects.

Every defect is a loophole, big or small.

And now Russell has not even touched the defense wall... This is just the outermost firewall, a static protection used to intercept ordinary intruders.

Russell licked his paws calmly, jumped on the spot twice to stretch his limbs, and then jumped high into the air.

He jumped onto one wall, then jumped back to another adjacent wall. Between the two walls forming a right angle at 90 degrees, Russell bounced lightly and climbed to a height of three to four meters.

This is the limit of protection of the maze wall - if a disc is used for intrusion, it will take a while just to bypass or chip away at the wall.

Russell walked gracefully on the maze wall, and then when he needed to take a detour, he leaped high and jumped directly to the wall on the opposite side. Repeating this, he didn't even take a detour, but only jumped twice to reach the other side.

The lazy firewall that could trap ordinary hackers for at least twenty minutes took Russell less than twenty seconds to bypass.

"……Um?"

After he jumped over the maze wall, he suddenly raised his tail warily.

The flames burst into flames the moment he landed - the vast wildfires from all directions completely obscured his vision, and pain immediately fell on Russell.

The illusion is that the cat's body is completely engulfed in fire...but the fur on his body is not burning.

"It's actually a 'Bolide'?"

Russell meowed, feeling a little confused for a moment.

This is a very old type of defense, so old that it has long since disappeared from the market.

It took Russell about two seconds to recall the existence of this thing.

The special thing about "Bolide" is that it is a special offensive defense - its offensive method is to not verify the key, and when anyone touches the defense, it will immediately send out a message that gets stronger and stronger over time. Burning pain.

In offensive defense, the most commonly used counterattack methods are "memory damage", "pain signal", "reality positioning" and "matrix ban".

"Bolide" was the ancestor of the "pain signal" type of offensive defense.

Its protection logic is as follows: first, it will immediately launch an indiscriminate attack on all those who request entry. It converts the pain of human beings being burned by flames into data signals, and then outputs the burning pain of various intensities overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.

If there is a key in the target chip, then of course it can be passed quickly, and the pain will not last too long... but if you try to break through the defense wall, it will become more and more painful, and it may even kill the person directly.

For ordinary users, it only hurts for a few tenths of a second when passing by the company. It was like having a candle burn your finger.

But if Russell enters the matrix space from a long distance and attacks the company through the ice-breaking program of the disc... Assuming that the disc in his hand does not make mistakes in operation, it will take ten minutes of computational offensive defense. Then his avatar would need to stay in the matrix space for ten minutes. This false burning pain will last for so long.

Of course the pain was fake, and everyone knew that they were definitely not burned.

But the avatar has senses - if it hurts so much that it blurs consciousness and falls here, there will be no going back.

It would be much better if we didn't use avatars to invade... Then we would just keep receiving massive amounts of junk information. If the data is not downloaded, the data will only be transferred to the disc and will not flow into the chip.

But that would easily burn the board... Without the use of avatars, psychic hackers would have no advantage at all. It is difficult to break through the outermost firewall through technical means.

Thirty years ago, Bolide was the most useful commercial offensive defense.

It's easy to use because it really treats everyone equally.

Anyway, it only takes a moment to verify when the physical body passes through, but it takes a long time to crack it remotely. Although the defense may not be very strong, the pain of being treated equally will make psychic hackers reluctant to attack this company first.

——As long as the psychic hacker organization is given priority to attack other companies, rounding off is equivalent to protecting its own company.

It was later gradually abandoned, not because psychic hackers cracked the mechanism.

Because it has no mechanism to speak of - its ice cone breaking is not complicated.

When a large amount of junk information is continuously output, it is impossible to build an overly sophisticated defense wall later, otherwise it will be prone to bugs due to such data throughput.

To explain it with the illusion of the matrix space... at the end of that wall of fire is the simplest wall of light.

That's an inert barrier. This is equivalent to a verification code that is reset every minute.

It doesn't have any technology at all, it just requires a lot of calculations... It's like countless math problems, just calculate them layer by layer. People with the key can directly obtain the synchronously generated password from the company server, while those without the key can only calculate it from the outside and then rush in.

But from another perspective, perhaps no technical content is the best technical content...

If I have learned technology and you have not learned technology, it takes the same amount of time and I have to rely on the dial to calculate, then wouldn’t my learning of technology be in vain?

Later, it was because there were more useful and more threatening "honeypots" in the offensive defense wall. It was very convenient to open the box in real life and shake a nearby mercenary to physically kill you, so the fire that outputs pain was Meteor was directly abandoned.

After all, when clocking in and out every day, everyone, whether employees or directors, is equally burned as soon as they enter or leave the company - and people will complain after a long time.

There is a high probability that Delphinium will not bring a disc that can specifically crack Bolide. Because it's so simple...

In that case, Delphinium would have to endure the pain of being burned by fire to maintain the state of the avatar and wait for the forcible cracking calculation by the disc.

...Fortunately, it was me who came in.

Russell thought.

It's like someone threatened that a bomb would explode if they couldn't solve these math problems within a specified time - so they went to great lengths to find a PhD in mathematics. It turned out that the doctor was required to stand in a high-temperature sauna and solve a thousand junior high school math problems.

It's not that it can't be calculated, it's mainly because my body can't bear it...and there's simply not enough time. Even if you know the answer at a glance, writing it takes time.

Russell skillfully endured the pain of being burned by the fire, and quickly invoked the ice pick-breaking program to specifically crack the inert barrier behind the bolide.

An offensive program called [Great Mathematician].

I saw a black illusory cone quickly condensed around Russell.

Like a spinning pencil head, Russell was wrapped in it and moved forward rapidly.

It offers no protection at all against those flames. Those flames still passed through it, continuing to burn Russell inside.

But just after the cone flew for less than half a second, a wall of light suddenly lit up in front of it.

It is not composed of data, nor is it an entity... but countless nested hexagonal matrices.

The black illusory cone immediately began to rotate at full speed. And every time it rotates, the middlemost layer of the hexagonal matrix is ​​disintegrated - and they shrink and make up instantly.

If it is a more advanced disc with a compound ice-breaking program, you can forcefully break through it the moment it "tightens". This is a brute force solution specifically for the stacking algorithm.

Fortunately, the performance of "Aoi Lily" is very good, and it should be able to be completed quickly without the need to force a breakthrough.

At this moment, in the outside world, several vents of Russell's prosthetic limb opened with a hiss - steaming white hot air visible to the naked eye was continuously discharged from inside.

Looking at his appearance at this moment, the inferior one was obviously a little anxious.

He was a little restless... He wanted Russell to quit quickly, but he was worried that he was reaching a critical point and would affect his condition.

In matrix space, [the great mathematician's] operations quickly reached the end.

——It took a total of forty-six seconds to break through a total of 863 layers of inert defenses.

Just seeing this time, Russell knew very clearly - Delphinium was definitely not finished.

If she didn't have a "Mathematician" series of decks, it would have taken at least three to five times as long to rely on other decks to force a breakthrough.

Assuming that the time it took for her to break through the firewall was the same as Russell's, then she would have at most half a minute left after breaking through the firewall.

At that time, Delphinium must choose - whether to continue moving forward or retreat.

If she chooses to move forward...and this is really the only defense, then everyone will be happy.

But if there is any protection behind her that prevents her from closing the final overall program, then when she retreats... she will also have to go through another round of such calculations.

That's the new random number...it's definitely not over.

Unless Delphinium chooses to escape, this is almost a fatal trap.

- But will she run away?

Maybe, maybe not, but anyway...

Russell was stunned.

The person who arranged this bomb program must have malicious intentions in his heart.

It's completely different from "a bad joke" that the bad guy said. That person just wants to blow up the delphinium...or maybe there are bad guys too!

When the light wall collapsed, the cat went directly to the next floor.

There is still a slight redness on his body... It's not that the fur is burning, but more like the color of metal that gradually cools down after being burned.

It took about five or six seconds for the red light on Russell's body to completely extinguish.

Before that, Russell was like a flower in front of his eyes, arriving in the next level of space.

One hundred cabinets, arranged in a 5 x 20 structure, were piled in a circle around Russell.

"This is the real caged bird, the delphinium. When you are in the cage, can you still see where the cage door is?"

An overlapping voice echoed in Russell's ears: "There is only one cabinet with a button to end it all. The rest of the cabinets are empty, and you still have thirty seconds.

“Guess what cabinet I’ll hide the button in?

"If you know the inferior well enough, you may be able to know the number that is particularly meaningful to him..."

"——What a fool, I still have more than ten minutes."

Russell couldn't help but complain: "Are you so sure that she can get here in thirty seconds?"

There isn't another psychic hacker guarding the city here.

There is no sense of remote control, only an automatically triggered message. It was like an unguarded empty city, with nothing and no trace to be found.

But it doesn't matter.

It’s best if you don’t waste time——

Although Russell has prepared several solutions, if the first one can solve the problem, there is no need to come up with the remaining ones.

After breaking through the defense wall, the psychic hacker's authority here... can basically be said to be unlimited.

In the void of Russell Cat's body, countless deformed mechanical hands suddenly emerged and pointed at all the cabinets accurately.

The attack program named [Thousand Hands] turned into a hundred synchronized processes, opening all the cabinets in an instant.

The final number of cabinets with buttons was "Thirteen". The robotic arm placed the button in front of Russell, and the other robotic arms collapsed and disappeared at the same time.

Russell secretly memorized this number.

He did not press the button directly, but raised his right paw and waved. A shadow of an eye appears above the button.

After confirming that the button was indeed the program termination command, Russell pressed it.

Then, the world around him suddenly became gray and dull. The echo that was still being muttered suddenly stopped.

So Russell started to back away.

Every time he took a step back, the scene in front of him flashed back.

But it was different than when he came in.

The walls of light have dimmed, the flames have extinguished, and the maze has sunk underground - only black outlines on the ground are visible.

When Russell stood on top of the maze and retreated again... before his eyes, the world began to spin and began to vibrate violently. It's like running through a tunnel at high speed with your back to the front while playing Rapids.

When Russell opened his eyes again, he had returned to the real world.

[——The defense wall has been cracked]

The real information mark of this thing began to appear in front of his eyes.

[You have successfully invaded: Caged Bird]

[Product Category: Toys or Children’s Books]

[Manufacturer: Veil of Ignorance]

[Production batch: not released]

[Audit code: not audited]

[Product details: "We are the agents of the God of Justice, clowns on the stage, people in shells.\