Chapter 227 — Stirring Up Trouble
Blade of Dawn · Page 2 of 4
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.