Chapter 568: Network Virus

Chapter 568: Network Virus

Inside the command center’s conference room, the atmosphere was solemn.

Jie Ming sat at the edge of the long table, his gaze sweeping across everyone present.

In the entire conference room, aside from him, the only fifth-ring wizard, the rest were all high-ranking wizards of sixth-ring and above. More than a dozen seventh-ring wizards, over a hundred sixth-ring wizards, and eighth-ring wizard Martin seated at the head.

The scale of this meeting was shockingly high.

But Jie Ming knew he had been invited not because of his strength, but because of the Entropy Brain.

He had been the first to discover it, or rather the Entropy Brain had only been discovered because of him, so he was able to participate in this meeting.

“Everyone is here.”

Martin’s voice rang out, and the conference room instantly fell silent.

His gaze swept across the crowd as he went straight to the point. “You all know the situation. The information beings are trapped inside by us, but we cannot get in either. The current problem is how to break through their defensive line and go in to harvest Entropy Brains.”

As soon as he finished speaking, someone immediately spoke up.

“Direct assault,” a seventh-ring wizard stood up and said in a deep voice. “Since we were able to suppress them once before, we can do it a second time. Concentrate the power of all high-ranking wizards to forcibly tear open a gap, then send elite squads inside to harvest.”

Some nodded, while others frowned.

A sixth-ring wizard wearing a deep blue robe shook his head. “It’s not that simple. Last time we could suppress them because they took the initiative to charge out and fought us inside the ship plane. Now they’ve learned their lesson and are guarding behind the planar barrier. That is their home ground. Once we go in, our advantage disappears.”

“Then we use the same methods as in previous wars – high-power spells,” another wizard chimed in. “Directly blast open the planar barrier and destroy their core nodes. As long as we take out the command system, the rest will just be scattered soldiers.”

A wave of discussion rose in the conference room.

Jie Ming did not speak. He simply listened quietly.

Soon, someone stood up to refute.

It was an elderly-looking seventh-ring wizard with white hair and beard, yet his eyes were sharp.

He raised his hand and pointed into the air, projecting a three-dimensional image of an Entropy Brain.

“Can you combat-type wizards use your brains for once… Has any of you actually studied this thing?”

Everyone looked at him.

The old wizard pointed at the light-point patterns inside the Entropy Brain and spoke slowly. “I have studied it for three days. The structure of this thing reveals the social organization of those information beings—they have no command system at all.”

“What do you mean?” someone asked.

The old wizard explained, “The patterns inside the Entropy Brain show that every individual information being is a complete server node. They connect with one another through quantum entanglement, forming an information network that covers the entire plane. This network is perfectly flat—there is no center, no hierarchy, and no so-called ‘command center’ or ‘leader.’”

He paused, then emphasized, “All decisions are automatically generated by the information network’s consensus algorithm. In other words, every information being is both a soldier and a commander. If you kill one, the rest will automatically fill in. If you kill ten thousand, the remaining ones can still operate normally.”

The conference room fell silent for a few seconds.

The wizard who had suggested attacking the command system looked somewhat ugly.

“Then… we just increase the destructive power,” he said through gritted teeth. “Anyway, we only need Entropy Brains. As long as the plane isn’t destroyed, it’s fine.”

The old wizard glanced at him and slowly shook his head.

“First, those information beings won’t just stand there and let you bombard them. The moment there is any fluctuation in the planar barrier, they will disperse, hide, or even actively relocate. What you hit might only be a small portion. More importantly, even if you really destroy the information beings in that area, they can resurrect from other regions.”

“Second…” He paused and looked toward Martin at the head of the table. “This plane is far too special. We cannot guarantee the degree of destruction. The task we received is premised on not destroying the plane. This plane holds extremely high value. What we want is an intact plane, not a pile of ruins.”

The conference room fell into silence.

Everyone was thinking, but no one could come up with a good solution.

After a long while, a female seventh-ring wizard who had remained silent suddenly spoke.

“Since attacking individuals is ineffective, why not change our approach?”

Everyone looked at her.

She said slowly, “We attack their connections.”

“Connections?”

“Yes.” She nodded. “The reason those information beings are so troublesome is not because individual ones are strong, but because they form an information network. If we can sever their network and turn them into isolated individuals, harvesting them will become much easier.”

Everyone’s eyes brightened.

This was indeed a good idea.

“Indeed, the reason Wizard Jie Ming was able to truly kill information beings before was precisely because he severed all their information links…” a wizard agreed.

But problems quickly arose.

“How do we sever them?” someone frowned. “Their connections are in a quantum entanglement state. In theory, they ignore distance and obstacles. Our existing information-type spells can at most interfere temporarily and cannot achieve a permanent severance.”

“Moreover, their information connections have self-healing capabilities,” another added. “After being cut, they will immediately rebuild.”

“And the reason we were able to isolate them before was because we borrowed planar manipulation and the array provided by Wizard Jie Ming. Now the opponent is holed up inside the Information Plane. We have no way to move the array inside, and without the array’s amplification, there is simply no way to isolate them,” someone else said.

The discussion once again reached a deadlock.

Jie Ming sat in the corner, listening to the crowd’s debate. A thought suddenly flashed through his mind.

Sever the connections…

Directly attack the connections…

He recalled knowledge from his previous life about network viruses.

Those viruses did not need to destroy hardware or servers. They only needed to exploit the system’s own vulnerabilities to paralyze the entire network.

Although wizard civilization also had things like the magic network, because wizards had developed artificial soul technology very early on, the magic network had directly used high-ranking artificial souls for management after its creation. As a result, it had never experienced anything like viruses.

So if this line of thinking could be applied to spells…

A spark of inspiration flashed in Jie Ming’s mind.

He suddenly stood up.

Everyone was startled and turned to look at him.

“Jie Ming?” Martin raised an eyebrow. “You have an idea?”

Jie Ming took a deep breath and organized his words.

“I was thinking… can we design a special information data packet?”

“Data packet?”

“Yes.” Jie Ming nodded. “Similar to the information turbulence those information beings used to attack us, but more complex and more targeted.”

He spoke as he thought, “The core of this data packet is to ensure that any information being that reads it will fall into collapse—either its computing power is massively occupied, its core information is polluted, or it simply self-destructs.”

“But a one-time attack is meaningless,” Jie Ming continued. “The key is that this data packet must be able to self-replicate. So we must find a way to make it automatically copy multiple duplicates after one information being reads it, then spread along that being’s network connection to other individuals.”

“That way, in theory, releasing a single data packet could infect the entire network.”

Everyone stared at Jie Ming with complicated expressions.

After a long while, the old wizard murmured, “Self-replication… spreading along the network… this…”

He looked at Jie Ming, his eyes shining. “What do you call something like this?”

The corners of Jie Ming’s mouth twitched slightly.

He couldn’t exactly say it was called a “network virus,” could he?

He gave a light cough. “I haven’t thought of a name yet. But the principle is exactly this.”

The crowd exchanged glances.

Someone frowned. “It sounds wonderful, but can it actually be done? For this kind of information attack to self-replicate… the premise must be based on the characteristics of the information beings themselves.”

“Yeah, we haven’t fully parsed the structure of the information beings yet. If we design it rashly, won’t it be countered by them?”

“Moreover, the delivery method is also a problem. How do we send the data packet inside? And after sending it in, how do we ensure that the first target it infects is weak enough not to transmit an alarm before collapsing?”

The discussion heated up again.

But this time, the atmosphere was clearly different.

Although there were still various problems, at least they now had a direction.