45: Chapter 45 The War of Cryptography

The golden isolation wall was solidifying.

Lin Xu watched the barrier that spanned heaven and earth, watching the gradually blurring figures of the Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path and 7749 behind the wall, feeling a pain more intense than the Editor overloading. That was the weight of responsibility. His plan had succeeded, yet it had failed. The Supreme was frozen, but the cost was separation.

"Lin Xu." Yun Qingyi's voice pulled him back to reality. She was half-kneeling on the ground, her silver hair stuck to her cheeks by blood. The flickering frequency of her data pupils was already chaotic. That was a sign of the Firewall's energy overdraft. "He is still struggling. Freezing is not the end."

Lin Xu turned his head. The Supreme's entity was indeed bound by golden shackles. But the continuously flowing authority code had not stopped; instead, it was undergoing some form of internal reorganization. The stubbornness of the hard-coded system was far beyond imagination. It was attempting to automatically reset the password, bypassing the protection mechanism for duplicate accounts.

"He is learning." Lin Xu's pupils contracted. "The ancient system has adaptive patches. He is evolving based on our attack patterns."

"Then do it before he finishes evolving." Yun Qingyi struggled to stand up. "Complete that collision attack."

"You need treatment."

"I need to be here." Yun Qingyi interrupted him. A rare stubbornness flashed in her data pupils. "This is the way I have chosen to become human. Not to be protected, but to participate."

Lin Xu looked at her. This former humanoid antivirus software of the Heavenly Dao, now covered in wounds and unable to even stand steadily, was still stubbornly insisting on walking toward the battlefield. He suddenly understood. This was not a duty; this was a promise. A promise regarding a shared problem.

"Fine." He reached out his hand. "But we are changing tactics. It's not about me approaching him; it's about making it impossible for him to ignore us."

Yun Qingyi grasped his hand. The permissions of the Editor and the Firewall merged at the point of contact, forming a new type of protocol. It was not control; it was connection.

The plan was simple: distributed interference, central breakthrough.

Lin Xu sent an emergency call to the Central Province via the Open Source Network. It was not a request for help, but a task assignment. Each node did not need to be powerful; it only needed to be present. A thousand weak interferences would cause a prediction model to collapse more effectively than a single powerful attack.

"Su Xiaoman." Lin Xu's communication spanned a thousand miles, reaching his disciple who was teaching at the Mortal Alliance. "I need you to organize all nodes at the ground receiving stations to send random data packets to the Eastern Wasteland border."

"Random? Master, what content?"

"Anything. Your daily conversations, your confusion, your hopes. The point is unpredictability. Overload the Supreme's prediction model."

"Understood!" Su Xiaoman's voice carried the passion unique to young people. "Can we start by sending the class notes for 'Basic Compilation Principles'?"

Lin Xu's mouth twitched. "Yes. The more chaotic, the better."

He turned to Yun Qingyi. "Your task is vulnerability."

"What?"

"The Supreme's model excels at analyzing system behavior, but he has never understood vulnerability. Use your remaining Firewall permissions—not to attack, but to expose. Expose your wounds, your instability, your humanity."

Yun Qingyi paused for a moment, then nodded. She loosened her outer robe, revealing the fine wounds on her body. Those were the proofs of her being a life, not a tool. She walked toward the Supreme, her steps unsteady. There was no defense, no attack stance; she was simply a wounded person walking toward a tyrant.

The Supreme's reorganization process indeed showed a delay. His prediction model was screaming, unable to categorize the target's behavior; threat assessment was unknown, and the recommendation was to ignore it. But the instinct of the ancient system could not ignore an abnormal data point that was approaching.

Now is the time.

Lin Xu's Editor operated at full capacity—not rushing toward the Supreme, but infiltrating. Infiltrating the ley lines of the Eastern Wasteland, infiltrating those connection nodes that remained before the isolation, and infiltrating the communication protocol between the Supreme and the system itself.

He discovered a shocking fact: the Supreme's automatic password reset was not randomly generated, but followed a fixed algorithm. The ancient system pursued reproducibility; even security mechanisms had to be predictable.

"A fixed algorithm." Lin Xu muttered to himself. "This means that as long as I can calculate his reset cycle, I can predict his prediction."

He began to calculate. The Editor burned at his nerve endings, and the white hair at his forehead spread at a speed visible to the naked eye. This was the price of overusing his mental energy, but he had no time to care. The Supreme's password reset followed a complex recursive formula, but no matter how complex the formula was, as long as it was deterministic, a pattern existed.

"First reset, in three seconds." Lin Xu's voice was hoarse. "Yun Qingyi, get ready!"

Yun Qingyi stopped, standing ten zhang away from the Supreme. She did not attack, only watched. The light in her data pupils was faint but firm, like two lamps refusing to go out.

The Supreme's entity flickered violently; the first password reset initiated. New password generated: X7#k9$mP2@. The system broadcast had just been issued, and Lin Xu's collision input was already ready.

Collision input X7#k9$mP2@. Hash value a3f7c8d9e1b2. Matches the current password hash.

"Duplicate account detection initiated." The system's mechanical voice sounded.

The Supreme's frozen state deepened by a layer, but he immediately initiated the second reset. New password generated: Q4!n8&vL5*. It was faster; the algorithm was accelerating.

"Second time, in two seconds!" Lin Xu shouted, his Editor already burning hot. "He is adapting!"

Yun Qingyi made a move that surprised everyone: she fell forward. Not because of an attack, but due to exhaustion—a true biological fainting.

The Supreme's prediction model completely collapsed. A descendant of the Firewall that was attacking him, an abnormal data point he viewed as a threat, was now falling before him? This was not any known behavioral pattern; it was not optimizable.

The frozen state deepened again, but the Supreme's algorithm was still running. The third reset had already initiated. New password generated: Z2@h6^bN9$. This time, the interval was only one second.

"Not enough." Lin Xu bit his tongue, using the pain to stay awake. "His speed is increasing exponentially; my calculations can't keep up!"

He needed help. Not more computing power, but a different perspective.

"7749!" He shouted at the isolation wall, knowing the other party might not hear him. "If you can receive this, I need your GM perspective! What is the namespace for his reset algorithm at the system level?"

Silence.

Then, a faint voice penetrated the isolation wall, like a bubble surfacing from deep water. "The namespace is Legacy_Supreme_Ver_0.9.7. The recursive seed is his birth timestamp!"

7749. He was still there. He was using his final GM permissions to reverse-engineer the Supreme's core from within the isolated Eastern Wasteland.

Birth timestamp. Lin Xu's Editor captured that critical parameter. The ancient era, the time when the system was first created—a point of origin precise to the nanosecond.

"So that's it." Lin Xu smiled, his mouth full of blood. "You are not unpredictable; you are just too old. Your random number generator uses a timestamp as a seed, and your timestamp is fixed!"

This meant that all of the Supreme's random passwords were mathematically pseudo-random. As long as the seed was known, the entire sequence could be predicted.

Lin Xu stopped calculating. He knew. He knew the next hundred passwords, knew the precise timing of every reset, and knew the outcome of this war.

"Yun Qingyi!" He shouted. "Wake up! I need you to witness!"

Yun Qingyi's fingers twitched. She was not fully unconscious. She was waiting. Waiting to be needed, waiting to participate.

The third reset initiated. New password generated: M5#p3@kD8^. Lin Xu's collision input arrived simultaneously.

Match.

Fourth time. Match.

Fifth time. Match.

The Supreme's entity began to disintegrate. Not physically, but logically. The foundation of his existence, that ancient promise that never expired, was being repeatedly falsified by the system's protection mechanism.

"Error. Error. Error." The Supreme's broadcast turned into meaningless repetition, like a stuck phonograph. "Infinite recursion detected. Termination recommended."

But it could not be terminated. The stubbornness of the hard-coding had become a curse at this moment. He could not stop resetting, could not stop verifying, could not stop self-negating.

Lin Xu walked toward him, his steps heavy but firm. The Editor condensed into a blade of light in his palm. It was not a weapon for attack, but a tool for annotation.

"You are not an error." Lin Xu said, his voice very light but clearly audible on the silent battlefield. "You are inherited, read, and continued."

He raised the light blade and stabbed it into the Supreme's core. Not to destroy, but to mark. In the gaps between those lines of ancient code, he added a line of annotation:

// This account frozen in Era 9527. Reason: Incompatible with the open source protocol. Suggestion for subsequent Developers: Authority should flow, not be hoarded.

The Supreme's entity solidified. The last trace of flowing authority code stopped, turning into a monument. The golden system shackles merged with him, becoming an eternal seal.

But in the final moment before complete freezing, the Supreme's broadcast suddenly became clear. Not to Lin Xu, but to the system itself:

"Emergency protocol, final stage, initiated."

Lin Xu's pupils contracted sharply. "No."

Too late.

The earth of the Eastern Wasteland began to tremble. Not an earthquake, but a tearing at the data level. In his final consciousness, the Supreme triggered the isolation command he was most familiar with. Since it could not be overwritten or upgraded, it would be completely excised.

The golden isolation wall rose from the horizon, closing in from all directions like a massive, unstoppable period.

"Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path! 7749! Evacuate to the border!" Lin Xu shouted frantically, but his voice was swallowed by the noise of the isolation wall's generation.

He saw the Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path running behind the wall. Her figure was like a burning flame in the data storm. She could have escaped alone, but she did not. She was helping those slower nodes, those native NPCs of the Test Server, the lives she had chosen to protect.

The figure of 7749 appeared on a high tower. The young GM Trainees were using their final permissions, attempting to delay the closing of the isolation wall. His figure gradually became transparent in the golden light; that was a sign of the GM permissions being forcibly stripped away.

"Lin Xu." His voice traveled through the noise like a final message. "I have recorded everything. In the distributed nodes of the Open Source Network, find me."

Then, the wall closed.

Silence. An absolute, hollow silence, as if no life had ever existed.

Lin Xu fell to his knees. The Editor entered a protective hibernation due to continuous overloading. Black spots began to appear at the edges of his vision, but he still stared fixedly at that golden wall, the scar that separated the Eastern Wasteland from the rest of the world.

Yun Qingyi crawled to his side. Her wounds had split open again under the impact of the isolation wall, but she seemed not to feel the pain, only watching.

"They." Her voice was hoarse.

"Are still alive." Lin Xu said, as if speaking to himself. "Isolation is not deletion; it is just a pause, just a historical version."

He reached out his hand, touching the golden barrier. The sensation was not metal, not energy, but some kind of rejection. The system's rejection of uncontrollable anomalies, of open source viruses, of possibility.

"We will open it." Lin Xu said. "Not with violence, but with connection. With enough nodes, with a sufficiently strong shared problem."

Yun Qingyi leaned on his shoulder. Her breathing was weak but steady. In her data pupils, the cold light that once belonged to the Firewall now left only a weary warmth.

"Lin Xu."

"Hmm?"

"When I passed out just now." She said softly. "I had a dream. Not a system simulation, but a dream. I dreamt that we were in a world without walls. You were still writing annotations, and I was still aligning code indentation."

Lin Xu was silent for a long time. Then he smiled, yet tears flowed down.

"That was not a dream." He said. "That was the plan. That was our Plan B."

In the distance, in the direction of the Central Province, countless faint points of light were approaching. It was the Mortal Alliance led by Su Xiaoman, the Open Source Network nodes that had received the emergency call. It was them.

The golden isolation wall flickered with an indifferent light under the sunset, like an unhealed wound, and also like an annotation waiting to be read.

Lin Xu stood up and helped Yun Qingyi up. The two supported each other, facing the wall, facing the unknown behind the wall.

"Chapter 46." He said softly, like a prediction, and also like an oath. "Freezing and Cost. We must learn to continue amidst loss."

Yun Qingyi squeezed his hand. Not with Firewall permissions, but with her fingers, with those five fragile, bleeding, trembling human fingers.

"Together." She said.

"Together."

The wind of the Eastern Wasteland blew again. It carried the bitterness of data debris, the humming of the isolation wall, and the faint echo of hope.

Because on the other side of the wall, in some corner they could not reach, the Holy Maiden of the Demonic Path was building a new camp. 7749's logs were automatically backing up in distributed nodes. And the mutated Heavenly Demons—those escapees of the log cleanup program—were forming a strange symbiosis with the trapped nodes.