Chapter 101 Managing Square Dancing Grannies: Targeted Volume Attenuation Shows Its Power

After Lin Ye finished the call regarding the fire lane in the south of the city, before Ghost could send over the verification results, the neighborhood square below the studio started acting up again. It wasn't the same group of aunties he had disciplined before; those aunties had already learned to dance silently with Bluetooth headphones, and they would even greet Zhao Kai when passing the entrance of the Unscrupulous Business Center with their small speakers every morning. The troublemakers this time were a new group, led by a middle-aged woman with permed hair surnamed Zhou. She had reportedly just moved from the adjacent street and, finding her previous dancing spot too small, had forcibly taken over this square with her team of over twenty people. She turned the portable speaker's volume to the maximum, and the heavy bass made the teacup on Lin Ye's third-floor windowsill vibrate slightly. The property management's persuasion was useless, and even after the police came twice, the volume was turned right back up as soon as they left.

Fatty Wang squatted in the corner with his hands over his ears, unable to even press his calculator, wailing that this was more intense than the Lord of the Abyss's Abyssal Extinction. Su Qinghan put down her tablet and rubbed her temples, saying the neighborhood owners' group chat was already in an uproar; an elderly lady living on the second floor said her cat had been so shaken that it hid under the sofa all day. Po Jun leaned against the doorway expressionless, but his hand unconsciously pressed against the game sensor of the Abyssal Bulwark shield at his waist; he was clearly enduring it as well.

Lin Ye stood up and walked to the window to look down. Auntie Zhou was holding a microphone, directing the team to change formations. The speaker was placed by the flowerbed in the center of the square, its black subwoofer cabinet throbbing with the rhythm. She herself was dancing with the most vigor, her face flushed with excitement, completely oblivious to the fact that several windows in the surrounding residential buildings had already been slammed shut in anger. Lin Ye opened the window, leaned out, and shouted downstairs, "Auntie Zhou, can you turn the volume down a bit? We're working up here."

Auntie Zhou looked up at him, the microphone still in her hand, her tone tinged with impatience. "Which unit are you from? We seniors are exercising for our health; what does it have to do with you? The square is a public area, and we've been dancing here for days without anyone saying a word. Is it any of your business?" Having said that, she turned the volume up even more, making the heavy bass even more intense than before.

Lin Ye closed the window and turned back to sit in his chair. Su Qinghan looked at the expression on his face and asked, "Directional?"

Lin Ye nodded and said, "Directional."

He raised his right hand, and a faint cluster of dark purple light condensed in his palm. After Reality Synchronization was activated, his control over this energy had become more precise than when he first started; the duration of attenuation could be timed down to the second, and the coverage area could be pinpointed to a single target. He locked onto the black subwoofer in the center of the square and applied a Directional Volume Attenuation debuff to it. The effect was simple—the sound output from the speaker was completely normal within a half-meter radius of the ground in the square. Auntie Zhou and her team members, standing next to the speaker, could hear the music clearly with the rhythm perfectly intact. However, once the distance exceeded half a meter, the volume would decay exponentially. Beyond two meters, it was as quiet as a library, and even the vibrations from the heavy bass vanished completely. Only the faint sound of footsteps occasionally coming from the ground proved that a group of people was indeed dancing there. Meanwhile, Lin Ye’s own studio, all the surrounding residential buildings, and all other public areas in the neighborhood were within the attenuation range, with not even a hint of noise leaking through.

Down in the square, as Auntie Zhou danced, she began to feel that something was wrong. Usually, when she led the dance at the front of the line, the footsteps of the members behind her should have been in perfect sync with the beat. But today, she noticed that the expressions of several pedestrians passing the square were very strange. An old man walking his dog stopped and stared at them for a long time before shaking his head and walking away, muttering something like, "Seniors these days are really interesting." She turned off the microphone and looked back, only to find that several members in the back row were actually whispering to each other, and someone even leaned their ear close to the speaker with a look of confusion.

Auntie Zhou walked to the back of the line and asked what was wrong. A team member in a red tracksuit said, "Sister Zhou, is the music broken? I can't hear anything at all standing in the back. But the people in the front say the sound is very loud and normal." Auntie Zhou frowned and stepped two meters away to test it—sure enough, within half a meter, the music was deafening, but beyond half a meter, it was dead silent, as if an invisible wall had enclosed the sound within a small circle in the center of the square. She checked the speaker's connection cables and the power plug; everything was normal. Replacing it with a spare speaker produced the same effect.

She finally realized something was amiss. Looking up at the third-floor window of the Unscrupulous Business Center, she saw Lin Ye sitting by the window drinking tea, smiling slightly at her through the glass. She suddenly remembered hearing someone mention that there was a young man in this neighborhood who could use game abilities to deal with noise and had even helped Auntie Zhang's group switch to Bluetooth headphones so that no one complained anymore. At the time, she thought it was just a story made up by young people, but only now did she realize that the young man in the story was the one sitting by the window drinking tea.

She turned off the speaker and walked up the stairs of the Unscrupulous Business Center alone. Fatty Wang saw her at the entrance of the second-floor warehouse, was stunned for a moment, and then shouted toward the third floor, "Brother, Auntie Zhou is coming up." Lin Ye told him to let her in.

Auntie Zhou stood at the door of the third-floor VIP room with a complex expression, a mix of anger and embarrassment, but mostly confusion. She looked at Lin Ye, her voice much softer than when she had been shouting downstairs. "Young comrade, my attitude just now wasn't very good, please don't take offense. But can you tell me what exactly is going on with that speaker? I've lived for over fifty years and have never seen such a strange thing."

Lin Ye pointed to the chair opposite and invited her to sit, poured her a cup of tea, and then said, "Auntie Zhou, the speaker isn't broken. I just wanted you to experience it for yourself—when you stand close, the sound feels normal, but when you stand just a bit further away, you can't hear a thing. Yet, for the past two or three days while you've been dancing, the residents in these surrounding buildings have been shaken by heavy bass for several hours every day. You feel that a normal volume is an enjoyment for your ears, but in someone else's home, it's torture."

Auntie Zhou held her teacup and stared blankly for a long time, looking down without saying a word. Lin Ye didn't criticize her, nor did he apply any debuff directly to her; he simply restricted the speaker's sound to a very small range. If she wanted to dance, she could certainly continue, and the speaker didn't even need to be turned off, but outside that small circle, the entire neighborhood would be quiet. She remained silent for a long while before placing the teacup on the table and asking, "How do Sister Zhang and the others who used to do square dancing here dance now? I heard they switched to wearing headphones; is that true?"

Lin Ye stood up, walked to the window, and pointed to the northeast corner of the square, where Auntie Zhang was leading her team in silent square dancing. Over twenty people, each with Bluetooth headphones in their ears, moved in perfect unison with smiles on their faces. No one complained that the music wasn't loud enough, and no passersby cast strange looks. On a nearby bench sat several old men enjoying the cool air; some were playing chess, others were looking at their phones, all quiet and content in their own spaces.

Auntie Zhou stood by the window and watched for a while, then suddenly sighed and said, "I always thought they wore headphones because they were worried the speaker used too much electricity. It turns out they were afraid of disturbing others."

She placed the teacup on the table, stood up, nodded to Lin Ye, said "Thank you," and then went downstairs and left. That afternoon, Auntie Zhou paid out of her own pocket to order a batch of Bluetooth headphones online and distributed them to the more than twenty members of her team. They returned to the square, no longer using that black subwoofer, but instead using a phone connected to a tiny digital speaker via Bluetooth, with the volume only loud enough for the first few people to hear. Those in the back who couldn't hear didn't complain either; they took out their headphones and put them on, dancing and chatting as they pleased.

At dusk, Su Qinghan went downstairs to pick up a package. As she passed the small square, she saw Auntie Zhang's team and Auntie Zhou's team dancing side by side, each using their own headphones and occasionally even swapping songs. She went upstairs and told Lin Ye about this scene. Ghost was also nearby and mentioned softly that the online store where Auntie Zhou ordered the headphones was a digital supplier that the logistics department of the Unscrupulous Business Center had inadvertently collaborated with. When Zhao Kai was training Qin Wentian last time, he had used that store's Bluetooth headphones as teaching props, and the two of them happened to give Auntie Zhou a significant discount on the purchase price of that batch of headphones.

Lin Ye chuckled after hearing this but said nothing, simply standing up and walking to the window. Under the night sky, the lights on the Dawn City square were going out one by one. The golden customized gaming pod was still glowing with a soft light, and the queue of casual players was still just as long. Behind him, on Ghost's monitoring screen, besides the logistics data for Auntie Zhou's batch of Bluetooth orders being refreshed in real-time, there also lay that overseas clue that had not yet been fully dismantled—the abnormal IP address range from a remote town in the US Server had recently had a new access record. This time, the target of the access was no longer the encryption layer of the online signing system, but the reality linkage version update log that had just been updated on the Unscrupulous Business Center's official website. Ghost marked this access record as "Priority Observation" and then silently closed the screen.