Cyber ​​Ghost Record

Chapter 120-119: The Chang

The drone flew out of the ground and quietly moved through the streets.

This is the area with the lowest crime rate in the city. People are deeply involved in the dark web in capsule apartments, illegal renovations are taking place in dental clinics, and illegal offline transactions are rampant in the streets and alleys. Only in the distant high sky can one occasionally see the occasional sight of wandering spirits and hovercars patrolling.

The drone activated its optical camouflage to evade potential hijackers, revealing a transparent, distorted silhouette only when crossing the boundary between darkness and neon. Moments later, it dropped off its cargo at a pickup point in a second-floor window of a bar, then turned and disappeared into the darkness.

A nickel-plated prosthetic arm picked up the disposable chip delivered by the drone and tore off the plastic film. This modified individual displayed the common traits of the underprivileged, undocumented, and marginalized individuals: his body was covered in tattoos and inferior implants, and his demeanor exuded a neurotic air.

He lay down on the sofa in the booth and inserted the disposable chip into the nerve junction behind his ear. Data flowed through his nerve endings. After a brief dizziness, pleasure surged, and a flood of hallucinations rushed in. Something extra, along with these hallucinations, silently slipped into his subconscious.

Twenty minutes later, he finally snapped out of his daze. The drug had lasted a few minutes longer and was stronger than usual. He vaguely felt that he had forgotten something, but the thought was fleeting. He had already visited the dark web and explored a few works in that art gallery, but the data from these experiences had been transmitted and was not stored in his memory.

Similar things keep happening.

At first, drones dropped bait, planting a fox-like poison in the brains of addicts. The meager computing power contributed by these hooked fish gradually wove into a phosphorescent net in the darkness, binding them more tightly and being used to capture larger prey.

The shadow of the enchantress has reappeared in every corner of the city.

From then on, passersby would see a phantom carrying a lotus lantern at the alley entrance, and in the dead of night, radio waves would carry the sound of gongs and drums for the fox's wedding.

Underground printing room.

As Su Ge looked at the figures projected in the air, each time his gaze fell upon a figure, corresponding data would unfold.

In just five days, more than forty people had become Shen Ke's accomplices, and he noticed that the rate of this increase was also growing as her number of accomplices grew. He witnessed how Shen Ke seduced these people; she could effortlessly arouse the five desires deep in people's hearts. Those scenes always made him unable to help but recall the first few days when he first met her.

“Your methods for dealing with me back then were quite conservative.” Suger looked at Chiba Ryoko.

"Want to try something less conservative?" She glanced at the air projection in the control room. "I've never dealt with you. I just helped a hibernator with a few small favors, entirely out of goodwill."

"Your gang of ghosts is growing rapidly."

“And it will get faster and faster.” Chiba Ryoko blinked. “It’s very easy for me to bewitch them. If things go smoothly, I can get them back to their previous size in just half a month. Of course, it’s impossible to do it that fast in reality. Making too much noise would alert the Security Bureau, and those high-quality accomplices also have their own beliefs…”

“How many accomplices did you have before?” Sog looked at the figure of one of the accomplices, the image showing him accessing the dark web.

“More than three thousand,” she said. “The threshold is around five thousand, which is actually quite dangerous.”

"What dangers might there be?" Soger looked at her. "Will their distracting thoughts cause you to develop what you call inner demons or something?"

“Various ideas and consciousnesses will form new personalities in my mind model. At best, it will affect the allocation of computing power. In serious cases, the personalities will fight each other. The most terrifying thing is that some dangerous personalities are born purely for destruction. I can control thousands of accomplices, which is already the result of my best optimization.” Her gaze swept across the glass of the control room. “I mostly use their computing power and rarely analyze their thought data.”

The phrase "analyzing thought data" made Socrates raise an eyebrow.

“Thought data? What’s the use of analyzing that?” “How does your brain work?” Chiba Ryoko extended her slender index finger and pointed to her temple. “The structure here, the activity of all your neural signals, contains the principles of thought generation. This can help me optimize my thought model.”

"Those believers too..."

Socrates wanted to say that those believers were also the raw materials for the gods and Buddhas to optimize their thinking models, but a sense of fear made him hesitate to speak.

She did not deny what he said.

"That's one of the reasons."

Socrates was taken aback. This answer was not unexpected; he just found it a bit absurd that humans were the raw materials for digital life to optimize itself.

He felt a strange sense of relief—this at least showed that humanity still had value.

He took a deep breath, swiveled in his chair, and stopped looking at the accomplices. Several of them were exploring the art gallery, delving into the dark web spaces behind the artworks.

“Found it,” she suddenly said.

"What?" he asked.

“They found a clue,” she said.

Shen Ke's white-haired, green-eyed shadow sat up from inside Chiba Ryoko's body and reached out to Su Ge. Su Ge understood her meaning; she was going to take him into the dark web again. He was already very skilled at this. He placed his hand in hers, closed his eyes, and through this concrete action, he also psychologically opened his consciousness and began to accept the sensory information she was transmitting.

His vision went black for a moment, and the next instant, he found himself on the second floor of the art gallery. The place was in complete disarray; many artworks were damaged, and various sculptures and paintings were scattered haphazardly, resembling the painting "Guernica."

Before him lay a corridor, its walls covered in dark green velvet. An undamaged painting hung at the end, depicting a boy in a green hat and black trench coat, his right hand raised as if preparing to knock, yet tinged with a hint of hesitation. There was no door in the painting; the boy seemed to be facing the world outside. The painting's emotion was direct and intense—he wanted to escape from it.

“There was a trap here,” Shen Ke said. “The trap was very enticing, but it didn’t have any real offensive function. Moreover, my henchman found an address in the trap, the address of Yingchuan City in the human world.”

She took a step forward, traversing the entire corridor, and the painting instantly magnified before Suger's eyes. The contents of the painting turned into chaotic, blurry blocks of color, sweeping past him as if he had passed through a passage of mixed oil paint and entered a dark abyss.

The next second, he saw Earth.

His perspective looked down from near-Earth orbit, and Yingchuan City on the Huanghuai Plain magnified in his eyes in an instant. His perspective shuttled between the skyrail and high-rise buildings, and went underground, finally stopping in front of an abandoned underground warehouse.

"Come here, save me."

When he saw the underground warehouse, cries for help echoed throughout the dark web.

(End of this chapter)