The days of being a spiritual mentor in Meiman.

Chapter 4278 Heroes Strike! (Part 10)
In the previous round before the spaceship landed, Greed was in the room, throwing a bunch of items on the floor, and sighed, "Junk, junk, all junk! Did finding a key item really use up all my luck?"

“I told you long ago, we two couldn’t possibly be that lucky and find all the exclusive items,” Gray Mist said. “Finding one would be good enough, and they might not even be able to find two.”

"No, I don't believe it!" Greed adjusted his inventory and said, "Let's go to the next room."

Upon reaching the next room, they encountered another guard. They killed the monster, then went inside to search, only to find a pile of junk—bandages and various pieces of armor with no special effects.

Greedy's skill was very effective at killing monsters because they were unlikely to interrupt him; a single skill combo could basically wipe them all out. His search speed was also fast; he organized his loot as he searched, keeping his inventory almost completely empty. He quickly searched the three nearby rooms, but didn't find a single good item.

“Alright, I admit you’re right,” Greed sighed. “It seems we’re not going to find anything useful here.”

“Let’s hurry up and leave,” Gray Fog said. “Maybe we can search other places.”

“No,” Greed said again, “If I can’t have it, they can’t have it either. Since we can’t find anything here, they can’t get any key items here either.”

"What do you want to do?"

"Let's go find the spaceship's main control room."

This spaceship is what many people stereotype as a flying saucer, so the main control room is more likely to be in the middle of the circular building. Greedy headed in that direction and soon found the main control room.

"let me see……"

Greed rummaged through the control room again and finally found an experiment report. The text was blurry, but there was a note at the bottom: "In room number 12 on the lowest level of the spaceship, there seems to be some extraordinary experimental subject being held."

"A weirdo, is it?" Greed said. "I finally made it up here, and you want me to go down to the very bottom?"

"What else can we do?" Gray Mist said. "If you don't want others to get the items, the only option is to release the monsters. That's the best way."

"We don't necessarily have to release this monster, do we?" Greed thought for a moment and said, "Even though we've been given this item, there must be other options."

"Of course you don't have to let it go. You just don't have to go looking for it, right?"

"No, no, no, what I mean is, can we send this monster back to its hometown?"

"what?"

Greed didn't explain further. He went to the control panel, intending to check it out, but was immediately electrocuted and bled.

"Why are there still traps?" Greed looked at that part, and then was surprised to find that a part of the control panel could be attacked.

Greed looked around and noticed that there were also water ripple-like shadows inside. It looked like the translucent spiders from before were stuck in there, but it didn't seem to be stuck because of a program error. It was as if they had always lived there, and that part of the control panel was their home.

“I have a bold idea,” Greed said. “Do you think I have a way to short-start the spaceship?”

Gray Fog responded with a question mark. He'd only ever heard of short-start cars, which allowed you to start a car without a key—essentially a car-stealing technique. Could a spaceship do that too?
"The time to test the programmer's skills has come." Greed slammed his hand on the control panel, triggering the battle, and then began chanting towards the spider. The spider, of course, wasn't very smart and didn't know how to interrupt the spell, so it could only stand there futilely flailing its claws.

"Kill this spider that escaped first," Greed began chanting towards their nest again. There were quite a few spiders inside, but perhaps because the abnormal status prevented them from triggering their attack mode, they didn't come out at all.

After applying all the abnormal statuses, Greed slammed his fist on the control panel. His basic attack triggered the spiders' nest-protecting mode, and they began attacking outwards, but because they were under the "Mistake" status, they couldn't hit Greed at all.

Greed retreated into the distance, and the spiders did not choose to give chase. Instead, they used a ranged attack, releasing a semi-transparent electric current in an attempt to strike Greed.

However, before striking Greed, the current struck other parts of the control panel. Then, with a crackling sound, the spaceship's control panel lit up again.

“It looks like this is a pre-arranged puzzle,” Greed said.

“But I don’t think this is meant to let you activate the control panel,” Gray Mist said, looking at the image on the screen. “And look at that energy storage tank above your head.”

Greed looked up and saw something above the spider that looked like a battery. It emitted the same light as the spider, so it seemed the puzzle really was about hitting the spider and replenishing some kind of energy, but Greed had targeted the wrong thing.

“Since it can be started, it means there is such a solution.” He went forward to study the control panel and found that the text on it was still blurry, with only two options lit up: one was to turn on the light, and the other was to open the door.

“Haha, it’s over,” Gray Fog said, “They didn’t even give you a chance to operate.”

"Impossible." Greed still refused to believe it. He rolled up his sleeves and said, "Don't I know them? These programmers are the laziest. They would never design a spaceship from scratch. Besides, the environment inside this spaceship is clearly not designed by human civilization. They must have just downloaded a blueprint from the interstellar internet and sculpted it."

“That’s true,” Gray Mist said. “Although this bright environment could be explained as a deliberate creation to add a negative environment for players, it matches the decorations and design here very well. It feels like it’s part of the same system, not something that was put together on a whim.”

"Since it's a downloaded blueprint that includes all the detailed equipment inside the spaceship, it's impossible that it didn't include the engine. As long as there's an engine, it can definitely start."

Greedy stared at the control panel and said, "But to prevent any clever players like me from operating the spaceship, they won't let players operate it. If the weapon system could actually be activated, how would the other players play?"

"What are you going to do?"

"To reiterate: since we've recreated someone else's spaceship, the operating system must be included as well. The simplest way to prevent players from accessing the real operating system is to write a new program and overwrite it, which is the two-choice interface we see now."

Greed looked down at the control panel, where there was something resembling a human keyboard, but the letters on it were blurry. He said, "Every spaceship's operating system has a safe mode. If it were virtually hacked by something, or if the program temporarily malfunctioned and the spaceship became unusable, then this race would have been wiped out long ago. Therefore, there must be a way to enter safe mode in an emergency."

"I know how to enter safe mode on a computer; it's just a matter of pressing and holding a key during startup. Will the spaceship do the same?"

“It should be about right,” Greed said. “Let’s take a look at this keyboard. The presence of a keyboard means that their extremities are not much different from humans. They might have a few more fingers, but the general structure is similar. Moreover, this keyboard pattern proves that they also use an alphabetic language, so the arrangement of letters follows a pattern, just like an English keyboard.”

Greedy looked down at the keyboard and said, "These 12 keys in the middle should be the letters they use most often. They would never put the power button or the power button here. These 6 keys should be consonant letters, which look like they can reach with their fingers; the same goes for these 6 keys."

"Humans use a decimal system because humans have 10 fingers. Most interstellar civilizations have developed numbers that are related to the body parts they use for counting. So, if the aliens who designed this spaceship had 6 fingers on each hand, their numbers would probably be a dodecimal system, meaning the first 12 digits are not repeated."

"The row of keys below is offset from the letters below, and there are exactly 12 keys from left to right, which could be their numbers. And the three rows and four columns here also have exactly 12 keys, which should be their numeric keypad."

"So the last 5 are definitely function keys. Six fingers, although one more than a human, isn't that much more. And since they put the consonant keys next to the most frequently used letters, it proves that their fingers are also limited in length, otherwise they could just put them anywhere."

"In that case, the safe mode activation button could be one of these five, or a combination of two. A combination of three is unlikely, because fingers are too short and it would be too difficult to press. It's time to witness the power of exhaustive search."

"If you have the brains, how come you pressed the wrong elevator button in the first place?"

"I wasn't paying attention!" Greed said, somewhat embarrassed and angry. "And who would have thought that the numbers for that wretched race were in reverse order!"

Greed's hands moved with lightning speed, first pressing individual keys, then trying combinations. He was almost at the bottom of the combination list, but still no response. Gray Mist said, "Your reasoning sounds reasonable, but what if they don't play by the rules? Then we're helpless."

"If the first attempt fails, I'll go downstairs and release the monster again. It'll only take a little time, but what if it succeeds..."

He had just finished speaking when the last permutation/combination key actually worked. Greed immediately grinned broadly and said, "Someone's going to have trouble sleeping."

“I always feel like Lucifer is watching us,” Gray Mist said.

"That was a programming error on their part. They were too lazy and just overwrote the program. If they had put in a little more effort and completely deleted the original program, this wouldn't have happened."

The control panel screen lit up and then went out, switching to a completely different style. The text displayed on it was no longer blurry but readable.

Greed didn't recognize the characters, and he didn't have time to decipher them one by one. He glanced at them casually and started looking at the options. He clicked on each option and tried them one by one. Then he found that there seemed to be an option called "Restart Engine", so he selected it.

Then, the scene from before unfolded: the spaceship's engine, which shouldn't have been working at all, restarted directly under the safe mode.

The rest was quite simple, since the spaceship's control panel itself also had a steering wheel and a lever. After greedily trying them one by one, they finally found a way to take off.

As the spaceship began to lift off the ground, Greed quickly ran to the window and jumped out before the spaceship could take off too high.

“I have a question,” Gray Fog said. “Even if the spaceship’s operating system and hardware were created by them based on blueprints downloaded from the internet, what about the energy? They wouldn’t be so kind as to fill a spaceship that can’t even start with energy, would they?”

"Haven't you noticed yet?" Greed said, "This race uses the same energy to power their spaceships as we do."

"what?"

"Light."

Greed continued, "Most civilizations used the same energy sources when they started in the space age. After chemical fuels were phased out, the most readily available energy source in the universe was light, or more precisely, the heat generated by stars."

"Judging from the decoration style of the spaceship, this race also has a very obvious star worship, or you could say light worship, which is why they designed their spaceship to be shiny and full of reflective parts. Even their race itself may be like those spiders that hide in the light, able to exist directly in the light."

"That makes sense, but the instance only loads when it starts up. In such a short time, have they already been charging by basking in the sun?"

"Relying on the sun above our heads probably won't work, but don't forget, when we were fighting monsters just now, someone actually summoned the sun."

The gray fog suddenly realized.

(End of this chapter)