44: Chapter 44 Battle of Authority

The sky of the Eastern Wasteland is collapsing.

This is not a metaphor. Lin Xu looked up and saw a massive system error pop-up window appearing above the firmament — [Warning: Test Server data overflow, Production Environment integrity compromised]. The scarlet font, like an unhealed wound, spanned the entire skyline.

And in the center of that wound, a figure was slowly descending.

He had no facial features. Or rather, his facial features were constantly flowing permission codes, countless layers of superimposed administrator badges, and thousands of font variations of the words "Never Expires." Demonic Path Supreme, the native BOSS of the Test Server, an administrator account left over from the ancient era, was now stepping into the Production Environment in physical form.

"Anomaly Data #9527." The Supreme's voice was not a sound wave; it was a system broadcast, ringing directly in the consciousness of all nodes, "Unauthorized privilege escalation detected. Initiating override procedure."

Lin Xu felt a sense of suffocation. It wasn't physical; his Source Text Vision was being forcibly compressed — the opponent was invoking underlying administrator commands, attempting to directly overwrite his Editor permissions.

"Lin Xu!" Yun Qingyi's voice came from the right. Her data pupils flickered violently, her silver hair dancing wildly in the permission storm, "He is invoking the 'root override' command! Your Distributed Network nodes are being forcibly taken offline one by one!"

Lin Xu gritted his teeth. In his field of vision, the Open Source Network nodes he had painstakingly constructed were turning gray one by one — not destroyed, but "overwritten," forcibly rewritten by older, lower-level permission commands. The Supreme wasn't attacking him; he was attacking the very concept of "distributed."

"You think you can escape control by dispersing?" The Supreme's broadcast carried a certain ancient arrogance, the technical feudalism accumulated over countless epochs, "All nodes must have a center. Without a center, there is no order. Without order, there is error."

Lin Xu felt his Editor being pushed back to "Trial Version" status. The opponent wasn't suppressing him with power; he was suppressing him with "logic" — the underlying logic priority of the ancient administrator account was higher than his open source protocol.

"Yun Qingyi!" Lin Xu shouted, "Scan his account structure! I need his permission architecture diagram!"

"Scanning —" Yun Qingyi's Firewall permissions collided with the Supreme's ancient commands, sparking countless flames, "Warning: Hard-coded fields detected! His core permissions are not dynamically allocated; they are hard-coded!"

Hard-coded. Lin Xu's pupils contracted. This was a typical characteristic of ancient systems — in pursuit of "absolute stability," key parameters were written directly into the core code rather than being dynamically managed through configuration or databases. This meant the Supreme's permissions were indeed ancient and powerful, but it also meant...

"He cannot adapt." Lin Xu suddenly smiled, even though blood seeped from the corners of his mouth, "Yun Qingyi, Red Lotus, 7749, listen to me — he is not invincible; he is unchangeable!"

Red Lotus's figure emerged from the shadows on the left. This Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path from the Test Server had a complex expression — she wanted to stop the Supreme from overwriting the Production Environment, yet she instinctively feared this native master of the Test Server.

"His Soul Snatching Method is ineffective against me," Red Lotus whispered, "But my 'Memory Overflow Charms' are ineffective against him too. He is... pure code; there is no emotional memory to overflow."

"We don't need to attack him." Lin Xu's Editor was running frantically, resisting the erosion of the root override, "What we need is... to distract him. 7749, how is it on your end?"

The young GM Trainee's voice came through the communication node, with a trembling but firm echo: "I have... I have redirected the Training Base's monitoring logs to the border of the Eastern Wasteland. The Developers will 'see' the data anomaly here, but... but I can only buy three hundred seconds."

"That is enough." Lin Xu took a deep breath, "Yun Qingyi, use your remaining Firewall permissions to create the illusion of a 'permission conflict.' Red Lotus, your task is... to dance."

"What?"

"Dance. Release your charms, not as an attack, but as... a performance. Let the Supreme 'see' the 'redundant data' of the Test Server, forcing him to divert some computing power to analyze your behavioral patterns."

Red Lotus was stunned for a moment, then revealed an eerie smile: "You really are... a crazy Architect."

"And what you need to do," Lin Xu turned to Yun Qingyi, his gaze becoming soft yet firm, "is protect me. Not with a Firewall, but with... yourself. Your existence itself is the greatest satire of his kind of 'pure code'."

Yun Qingyi's data pupils flickered. That wasn't system latency; it was something... warm.

"Understood."

The operation began.

Red Lotus soared into the air, the figure of the Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path blooming with bewitching light in the permission storm. She did not attack the Supreme, but instead wove countless "redundant data" in the void — these were the discarded emotional logs accumulated by the Test Server over millions of years, the residual memories of countless deleted NPCs, the chaos that the system tried to clean up but could never completely purge.

A hint of static appeared in the Supreme's broadcast. He had to divert some computing power to analyze this "meaningless data" — this was the instinct of a hard-coded system, unable to ignore any "anomaly," even if that anomaly was just... a dance.

Yun Qingyi did something even crazier. She voluntarily released part of her own defenses, exposing herself to the Supreme's scan. To the ancient administrator account, the data structure of a Firewall descendant was both a threat and... a puzzle. The Supreme's commands began to try to "parse" her, and this was exactly what Lin Xu needed — time.

Lin Xu's Editor was running at full capacity. Not to confront, but to understand. He was scanning the Supreme's permission architecture, a magnificent, impregnable ancient castle where every brick was a hard-coded absolute command. But at the core of the castle, Lin Xu found that fatal weakness —

The password field. Hard-coded. Following ancient encryption standards.

"Found it." Lin Xu's voice was hoarse, "His authentication mechanism is MD5 hash, an ancient encryption standard with known collision vulnerabilities. If I can create a different input with the same hash at his core..."

"Trigger the system's 'duplicate account' protection mechanism!" Yun Qingyi understood instantly, "The system will forcibly freeze conflicting accounts!"

"But I need to get close to his core." Lin Xu looked toward the center of that permission storm, "I need someone to clear a path for me."

"We will help you." Yun Qingyi and Red Lotus said simultaneously. They looked at each other, the Firewall descendant and the Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path, two existences that should have been enemies, reaching a kind of... consensus at this moment.

7749's voice rang out again: "Two hundred seconds. Lin Xu, the 'Architect' at the Developer level has already noticed the anomaly here; he is evaluating whether to intervene directly!"

"Then let us," Lin Xu stood up, his Editor constructing a thin layer of distributed shield around him, "teach this ancient administrator a lesson... before he finishes evaluating."

He took a step forward.

The Supreme immediately sensed the threat. His broadcast became sharp: "Anomaly Data #9527-FW, unauthorized access attempt detected. Initiating ultimate override —"

But the override command did not complete.

Because Yun Qingyi stood in front of Lin Xu. Not with Firewall permissions — that was useless in front of the Supreme — but with her body, with the fragile life she had just acquired, with that self that had grown quietly through countless acts of defiance.

"Error." The Supreme's broadcast became chaotic, "Undefined behavior detected. Firewall unit should not possess... sacrifice protocol."

"I am no longer a Firewall unit." Yun Qingyi's voice was soft, but clearly audible in the permission storm, "I am Yun Qingyi. Just... Yun Qingyi."

Now is the time.

Lin Xu swept out from behind Yun Qingyi, his Editor releasing full power. Not to attack the Supreme, but to mimic — he constructed in the void a false input with the same MD5 hash as the Supreme's core password field, a collision that was theoretically impossible but mathematically completely valid.

"Duplicate account detection initiated." The system's mechanical voice sounded, belonging to neither side, the underlying protocol of the Experimental Field itself, "Conflicting administrator account detected. Executing protective freeze..."

The Supreme's physical form began to flicker. His impregnable ancient permissions, when faced with his own system's security mechanism, developed... cracks for the first time.

"No —" The Supreme's broadcast showed a fluctuation similar to "emotion" for the first time; it was anger, confusion, the astonishment of ancient arrogance encountering new logic, "This is... a vulnerability! This is a system vulnerability!"

"No," Lin Xu stood in the center of the storm, surrounded by the faint light of distributed nodes, "This is the system's... comment. The line you never read."

The freezing procedure began to execute. The Supreme's physical form was bound by a layer of golden shackles; it was the system's own protection mechanism, a higher-level logic he could not disobey.

But before being completely frozen, the Supreme made a final counterattack. His permission storm erupted violently, not to attack Lin Xu, but to attack... the entire Eastern Wasteland region.

"Emergency protocol initiated." The Supreme's voice became hollow, as if coming from very far away, "If it cannot be overwritten, then... isolate. Eastern Wasteland region, forced disconnection..."

"Oh no!" Red Lotus's face changed drastically, "He is going to cut off the connection between the Eastern Wasteland and the main server!"

"7749!" Lin Xu shouted, "Can you stop it?"

"I... I'll try —" The young trainee's voice was tearful, "I can't! This is underlying physical isolation; my permissions are not high enough!"

A golden isolation wall rose from the horizon, like an insurmountable sigh, separating the Eastern Wasteland from the whole world. The figures of Red Lotus and 7749 became blurred on the other side of the isolation wall, their shouts compressed into intermittent data fragments.

"Lin Xu —" Red Lotus's final voice came through, "Test Server... native data... will..."

Then, silence.

The isolation was complete. The Eastern Wasteland became an isolated island, or rather, a... prison.

Lin Xu fell to his knees, his Editor burning hot from overuse. Yun Qingyi collapsed beside him, her body covered in countless fine wounds — the price of resisting the Supreme's override command, the proof of her being a "fragile life" rather than a "Firewall tool."

"They..." Yun Qingyi spoke with difficulty.

"Are still alive." Lin Xu held her hand, "Isolation is not deletion. We will find a way to open this wall."

He looked up at the frozen Supreme. That ancient administrator account was still struggling in the golden shackles, like a statue frozen by time, with arrogance and confusion forever fixed on his face.

"You lost." Lin Xu said softly, not to the Supreme, but to that ancient, centralized, arrogant permission philosophy, "Not because I wasn't strong enough, but because... you only have yourself. And I —"

He looked at his palm, where countless faint points of light flickered; they were the Open Source Network nodes of the Central Plains, the arriving Su Xiaoman and the Mortal Alliance, the sentient beings who chose to believe in "distributed" rather than "center."

"— We have each other."

In the distance, a faint resonance came from the isolated Eastern Wasteland border. It was Red Lotus, it was 7749, it was the countless nodes trapped on the isolated island, using the final functions of the open source protocol to send the same sentence to the outside world —

[We are still here. Continue.]

Lin Xu closed his eyes, feeling those faint connections. They were weak, so weak they were almost imperceptible, but they existed, they were there, proving — even if isolated, even if separated, the soul of a Distributed Network is still... connection.

"Chapter 45," he said softly, as if forecasting for his future self, "The Password War. We have to find a way to complete that collision attack without getting close to him."

Yun Qingyi leaned on his shoulder, the light in her data pupils weak but firm: "We will do it together."

"Together."

The wind of the Eastern Wasteland kicked up dust, forming a gray curtain before the golden isolation wall. Behind the curtain was the frozen ancient tyrant; before the curtain were two scarred but unfallen... Annotators.

And higher up, the observation at the Developer level continued. The existence known as the "Architect" was recording all of this, evaluating the... ultimate value of this Experimental Field.