37: The Eye of the Storm of Dynamic Copyright

When Cheng Mo pushed open the iron door of the studio, the hood of his hoodie got snagged on the doorframe. He didn't turn back to fix it, walking straight to the main console and tossing his backpack onto a chair. An empty lemon tea can rolled out of the side pocket, spun half a circle on the floor, and stopped like some failed quest item. He reached into his cargo pants pocket, pulled out the pen he had used to write his goals, and casually tossed it into a pen holder overflowing with soda cans next to the monitor.

"Are you keeping an eye on the ones secretly hosting our game?" he asked.

Chen Hao sat at the control station three meters away, his fingers never stopping as data streams frantically refreshed across six screens. He didn't look up. "Two nodes in Southeast Asia, one cache pool in Europe, and North America is still testing the waters. The main piracy site is hidden quite deep; they're using a dynamic frequency hopping protocol, changing IP segments every hour."

"Oh." Cheng Mo leaned over, nodding his chin toward the largest screen. "Is that it?"

In the center of the screen was a webpage disguised as a game resource aggregator. The title read 'Play High-Difficulty Masterpieces Worldwide for Free,' and the icon for leap platform nightmare was prominently listed below it, with downloads showing over eighty thousand.

"They even added a 'Painless Optimized Version' tag." Chen Hao pushed up his glasses, his tone like he was reading a weather report. "It means they removed the seventeenth floor's labyrinth and the breathing detection mechanism—anyone who knows the game knows that's an insult."

Cheng Mo grinned. He reached for the keyboard, then pulled back, using his right pinky to poke the Enter key instead. "Then let them experience the price of being 'painless.'"

Chen Hao typed in a string of commands, and the interface switched to a deep blue tracking panel. The system name was 'Watermark Engine V1.0,' and the status was: Active. Over a dozen red dots were flashing on the map, one of which—a server in Bangkok, Thailand—was marked as [Main Mirror Source], its connection path highlighted and locked.

"I've already embedded tracking tags," Chen Hao said. "As long as someone downloads from this site, the client will automatically transmit back device fingerprints. No need to rush now; we'll wait for them to reach a massive scale of distribution before settling the score all at once."

"Makes sense." Cheng Mo walked behind an old arcade machine, lifted a wooden board, unplugged a loose network cable, and plugged it back in tightly. "The more people use the pirated version, the more complete our data becomes. When the time comes, a single lawyer's letter can accurately pierce through ten private servers."

He finished speaking and walked back, staring at the screen for two seconds before suddenly asking, "Has the warning letter been generated?"

"Automatically generated, complete with electronic seals and an infringement evidence package." Chen Hao pulled up a document preview. "But the other party hasn't read the email."

"Normal." Cheng Mo leaned against the desk, casually picking up a test controller and spinning it. "People like this are just waiting for us to get angry. Ideally, they want a public relations war so they can ride the hype."

"So we won't get angry." Chen Hao pressed F9. "Initiating Plan B."

The next second, a remote injection confirmation window popped up on the main screen. The program name was 'Frontend Hijacking Module,' and the target URL was the homepage of that piracy site. After a three-second countdown, the execution was successful.

Simultaneously, both of their phones vibrated almost at once. Chen Hao opened the backend logs, and a new record jumped out: 'Page injection complete; video stream play count: 1; average user dwell time: 32 seconds (including forced playback period); server response latency spiked to 847ms.'

Cheng Mo whistled. "It's live?"

"It's live." Chen Hao switched the view over.

The video was only twenty seconds long. Cheng Mo, wearing a mask like a black gas mask, suddenly leaned close to the lens, the silver stud in his right ear reflecting cold light. The background music was the BGM from the third stage boss battle of leap platform nightmare, but it had been slowed down to 0.5x speed. The drumbeats dragged like a failing heartbeat, interspersed with short metallic grinding sounds—the special sound effect triggered when a player falls into the abyss for the tenth time.

He grinned, revealing half a canine tooth. "Keep pirating. Let's see who breaks first."

The moment the words fell, the entire page began to twitch. The fonts scrambled, the navigation bar twisted into a spiral, and thirty seconds later, the server disconnected completely.

"Not a DDoS?" Cheng Mo raised an eyebrow.

"No," Chen Hao shook his head. "Just exploited an unpatched frontend XSS vulnerability of theirs to stuff in an infinite loop script. It doesn't destroy data or delete files; it just makes their homepage play that horror clip on a loop. They can't even close it."

"Elegant." Cheng Mo gave a thumbs up. "Cheaper than hiring a lawyer."

The two fell silent, staring at the monitoring panel. The piracy site's traffic curve first skyrocketed after the video aired—clearly due to players taking screenshots and sharing them—then plummeted sharply. Fifteen minutes later, the site attempted to restart, but every time access was restored for less than ten seconds, it would redirect back to that jump-scare video.

At 3:17 AM, the system captured a new update: the administrator of that website posted on a technical forum with the title 'Encountered an Outrageous Counterattack, Seeking Help to Analyze Defense Solutions.' The post included log snippets and the video link, complaining that the copyright holder was using 'non-standard attack methods.'

Chen Hao screenshotted the post, printed it out, and circled the last sentence with a red pen: 'This isn't a copyright warning at all; it's psychological pollution.'

He added a note next to it: "Misunderstanding. What we're doing is performance art."

At 9:42 AM the next morning, as Cheng Mo squatted in front of the arcade machine cleaning dust from the vents, Chen Hao's voice came from behind him: "They surrendered."

Cheng Mo didn't look back. "Who?"

"The one in Bangkok." Chen Hao turned the laptop toward him. On the screen was the piracy site's new announcement page, with white text on a black background reading:

[Solemn Statement]

After careful consideration, this site has decided to cease distribution of leap platform nightmare resources effective immediately, and has formally applied to become an official authorized cooperation node for the game, providing localized acceleration services for the Southeast Asia region. All users will be redirected to the official platform.

A line of small text was added below: "Special thanks to the developer team for providing technical guidance."

Cheng Mo stood up, walked over to take a look, and chuckled. "Guidance? We didn't even contact their IP proactively."

"Probably scared out of their wits." Chen Hao closed the laptop. "Now their server has become an edge node for us instead. CDN load can drop by six percent."

"Nice." Cheng Mo walked to the old double-door refrigerator in the corner and pulled open the freezer. Cold air rushed out, forming a brief white mist under the light. He took out an unopened bottle of orange soda, the bottle covered in fine beads of condensation, the label still the old design from five years ago.

He tossed the soda to Chen Hao. "Keep it. For the celebration."

Chen Hao caught it with one hand, looked at it, didn't open it, and placed it on the edge of the console. He reopened the monitoring system. On the main interface, the overseas nodes that were originally red had all turned green, with a new marker at the Bangkok location: [Cooperation Node | TH-01].

"Should we send them a thank-you letter?" he asked.

"Don't." Cheng Mo sat back in his chair, spun half a circle, and propped his legs up on the keyboard tray. "If they do it again, we'll just hack directly into their router and have that horror clip play automatically at 2:00 AM every day for thirty days straight."

"We could add an Easter egg," Chen Hao tapped the keyboard twice. "Like, every time the video finishes, a message pops up saying 'You have eighteen chances left.'"

"Sure," Cheng Mo nodded. "Consider it a hidden achievement."

Only the sound of the fan spinning and the faint clicking of the hard drive reading and writing remained in the room. The data streams on the six screens flowed steadily, like the sea after a storm. Cheng Mo stared at the leftmost screen, which showed a real-time user distribution map. A batch of stable connection points had just been added in the Southeast Asia region, with full signal strength.

He suddenly remembered something, fished that thesis collection out of his backpack, and flipped to the back cover. The goal he wrote yesterday was still there: [Make the censor's child want to beat the game]. The handwriting was slightly blurred by sweat.

He took his pen and added a line below: [By the way, turn the piracy site owners into O&M volunteers].

He finished writing, closed the book, and threw it into the drawer. The drawer snagged as it slid in; he gave it a hard push, making a muffled thud.

Chen Hao didn't speak, he just moved the bottle of orange soda closer to himself, perfectly blocking a notification that had just popped up on the screen:

[New Crawler Activity Detected | Source: São Paulo, Brazil | Similarity Match: 93.7%]