Chapter 50: The Demon King Returns

After some time, a rather ordinary-looking woman in her thirties, who appeared gentle and quiet and wore glasses, arrived with her assistant. Si Nan and Yu Chengmin personally went out to greet her and led her into the office.

This so-called Teacher Zhou was not beautiful, but certainly not unattractive either. She had a refined air about her, and with her large, black-rimmed glasses, there was even a touch of cartoonish, almost two-dimensional charm to her. She was the sort of person whose very appearance made others feel at ease.

“Thank you for coming, Teacher Zhou,” Yu Chengmin and Si Nan both expressed their gratitude.

Zhou Dongyun was unmoved by their courtesy; she didn’t even respond. She quickly took out her own clunky, heavy, black laptop, connected it and performed a few operations, then sat down and started typing away, fingers flying across the keyboard.

Someone, who had been sweeping the floor, was drawn by the rhythmic clatter of her typing, a familiar sensation stirring within him—thus, the “Demon King” returned. With a peculiar expression, he drifted over, passing behind Zhou Dongyun.

“Idiot!”

In his all-conquering Demon King mode, he couldn’t help but mutter softly.

“Hm?” Zhou Dongyun stopped typing, turned around, adjusted her glasses in a comically fresh manner, and asked, “Do I… know you?”

Ma Weimin shook his head slightly. “No.”

“Then why…” Zhou Dongyun, not as temperamental as Si Nan, hesitated.

“I’m sweeping the floor,” Ma replied.

“All right, I can see you’re here to sweep. What do you think of this?” Zhou Dongyun pointed at the screens of both computers.

Her polite manner was like a splash of cold water. The Demon King, when met with warmth, tended to fall into slumber, so Ma Weimin reverted to his twitchy self, glanced at the screens, and shook his head. “It recognizes me, but I don’t even understand why it’s so formidable.”

Zhou Dongyun couldn’t help but laugh. “All right… Seems I’ve disturbed your work. Sorry, I’ll try to be more considerate.” She actually moved her chair to avoid blocking Ma.

Ma’s expression grew even stranger. Zhou Dongyun gave off a wonderful impression, different from the rest, with an oddly familiar air. Especially when he listened to her typing—it seemed to stir something deep within his body. He wanted to help her, but unfortunately, was powerless to do so.

At one point, Zhou Dongyun, a mixture of dejection and excitement, finally gave up her efforts. She stopped and said, “To avoid alerting ‘it,’ I specially used my computer to isolate a temporarily safe ‘neutral arena’ and used a ‘replica’ of the ransomware to have it battle against my algorithm in the arena.”

Si Nan was nearly speechless with awe. As expected of Teacher Zhou—she had so quickly established a safe mode and, without alerting the main entity, created a shrunken replica of the ransomware to simulate countermeasures. Such skill was truly astonishing.

Si Nan asked excitedly, “And the result?”

Disappointed, Zhou Dongyun adjusted her black-rimmed glasses and glanced at the screen. “So far in the simulation, my algorithm has lost about seventeen thousand ‘battles.’”

“Ah!” Yu Chengmin and Si Nan stared, mouths agape.

They looked at the screen; red numbers scrolled rapidly upward—the simulated contest was ongoing, soon surpassing twenty thousand rounds.

“How many times has your algorithm won, Teacher Zhou?” Yu Chengmin asked, worried.

“Zero.”

Zhou Dongyun’s feelings were complicated. It was as if she had witnessed a miracle, but the losses were so overwhelming it threatened to shake the confidence she’d built over many years.

She cast another sidelong glance at the screen, her heart almost bleeding, as she watched her “children” sent to their bloody doom again and again, only to be ruthlessly slaughtered.

In the blink of an eye, the simulation had reached a hundred and ten thousand rounds, still with not a single victory—all defeats.

Everyone wore dark expressions.

They continued to stare at the screen, hoping that even once the green number would change, just once, for that would prove the insane virus algorithm had a flaw. If there was a flaw, they could eventually find a pattern and devise a targeted solution.

But!

Five hundred and thirty thousand rounds had passed, and the red, blood-soaked numbers continued to roll by: zero victories.

“Damn it! Over a million rounds now, and this damned demon has killed my creation, my children, over a million times!”

At this point, Zhou Dongyun was nearly in tears, unable to bear watching her “children” charge onto the battlefield only to be slaughtered again and again. She wanted to close her laptop. Still, she held onto a sliver of hope—that even after countless defeats, her “children” might find an opportunity, defeat the demon, and preserve a shred of justice in the digital world.

Some more time passed.

A thousand expletives raced through the minds of Yu Chengmin, Zhou Dongyun, and the others.

“Two million three hundred thousand rounds! This thing’s a murderer!” Si Nan stuck out her tongue in shock.

“It’s a true demon!” Zhou Dongyun muttered.

“Idiot!”

Ma wandered by once more, glancing at the screen with silent disapproval. He didn’t want to stick around and watch their humiliation, so he found an excuse to go to the restroom.

But just as he reached the door, Zhou Dongyun suddenly said, “I’m certain now. That blackout in New York all those years ago, the one like an electronic nuclear attack, it was this algorithm. If we can crack it, we can uncover the truth behind those conspiracies. I have to do it—I need to take this computer back with me. Give me some time.”

Yu Chengmin hesitated, unsure if she should let Zhou Dongyun take the computer.

Strangely, when Ma heard the key words “the blackout,” his body gave a slight tremor. He stopped, not turning around, yet as if his body was worried about something, the Demon King suddenly awoke and took control.

But he didn’t stay. After leaving the office, Ma didn’t go far. He found an inconspicuous corner, not far from the two computers in the office.

Ma quickly laid out four smartphones on the ground, eight fingers moving like phantoms as he operated all four at once, downloading various strange tools from some special cloud sources.

Preparations complete, Ma swiftly attempted to connect to the network, planning to eliminate the virus on Yu Chengmin’s computer and wipe out all traces.

“Huh… they’ve physically disconnected the network!”

Unable to connect at all, Ma turned his head. Breaking through Zhou Dongyun’s firewall rules would be no trouble for the Demon King, but this gentle female tech expert had a violent side as well. She had simply opened up Yu Chengmin’s computer, yanked out the network card with pliers, and tossed it into the goldfish tank.

“Not bad… But if you think a physical disconnect can stop me, you’re wrong! My old man and my mom tried three condoms and still didn’t stop me—now you’ll see the Demon King’s power!”

Ma promptly downloaded new tools from the cloud; once again, he operated all four devices in parallel, sending out electromagnetic signals in perfect rhythm, like sending a telegraph.

This was the ultimate realm of hacking.

Using specialized operations, he was now launching wave after wave of attacks using the Demon King’s unique language, transmitted densely via electromagnetic signals.

Zhou Dongyun, meanwhile, was distracted, mourning the continual slaughter of her “children,” and lacked the ability to sense electromagnetic waves. Thus, physical disconnection was not enough—unless they were inside a copper mesh Faraday cage, as long as there were integrated circuits, they could be affected.

And so Ma forcefully hacked in at the hardware level.

His fingers spun like the propellers of an airplane. If not for the limitations of his hardware—he only had these mass-produced phones, with the Snapdragon 835 already being a notoriously weak device, and these were even worse, running on the 660 chipset—he could have done more.

Even so, before long, not only was Yu Chengmin’s computer breached, but the virus was swiftly dismembered, every trace erased, as if her computer had never been infected at all.

Moreover, Zhou Dongyun’s computer was hacked as well; her firewall rules collapsed instantly, and the “immature Demon King replica” she had created was wiped out, leaving no trace that it had ever existed.

To be honest, Ma wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, but he sensed that the Demon King was covering something up, needed to erase traces of the “blackout,” and didn’t want the algorithm exposed for study.

Having finished quickly, Ma packed up his nearly drained phones and left, heading into the restroom…