Starting as a Mechanical Hunter

Chapter 928: Chapter 34: Wave-Particle Duality

’Going online’ in the interstellar network is vastly different from being in cyber space.

In cyber space, you feel the crowdedness of ’people sea,’ with network viruses, personality fragments, rogue programs, emotion plugins, natural AIs, and so on. These rising and falling network monsters demand even cyber hackers to be cautious. One slip-up and a successful virus download means your physical body in reality gets overtaken.

By then, you can only pay to hire someone for physical cleansing.

But in the interstellar network, the first feeling of virtual gravity is that it’s vast, empty, and the network signal—slow!

Generating a page with a virtual program is like using a free VPN. The speed is so slow it gives him a headache.

The speed of light signals is naturally at light-speed, while the electrical and chemical signals generated by the human brain certainly can’t match light-speed. Thus, the network access chamber exists.

A major function of the network access chamber is to convert light signals into sensory signals acceptable to the brain domain.

In a way, the function of the network access chamber is akin to an interstellar space station: one slows down, the other speeds up.

However, what of light-speed, when crossing a star system takes at least 100,000 years.

Though the interstellar space station has a local area network internally, it inevitably suffers from external signal interference.

This interference greatly slows down the internet for a hacker, forcing virtual gravity to spend considerable effort editing network acceleration software to speed up his own brain.

Fortunately, the Tier 2 Neural Editor profession takes the direction of the ’Host Consciousness,’ differing from cyber hackers who transform into virtual life, with more freedom to roam different dimension spaces and virtual realms.

Although ’Host Consciousness’ can’t be separated from hardware, the advantage is a significant boost in computational power.

Even though virtual gravity has not found a host suitable for his ’consciousness upload,’ his computational power is many times stronger than when he was on Mechanical Split Star.

If purely comparing computational power, he now equates to an advanced AI with a large processing center.

The only thing limiting his potential now is his ’human hardware.’

Once overconsumed, the ’cpu,’ meaning the brain, starts overloading—brain vessels burst, foaming at the mouth, and the ’human graphics card’ like eyes, ears, and nose also produce a lot of illusory confusion.

Now, virtual gravity’s ears, nostrils, and the corners of his eyes all have thin lines of blood flowing.

But this price is not paid in vain.

After arduously passing through blank ’interstellar pages,’ virtual gravity finally manages to break in, entering the data space of the Star Thief Flagship.

Players who follow the virtual stream have one advantage: the freedom to pinch faces in the virtual realm. At this moment, a young man resembling ’Yanzu’ breaks through the starship firewall, stepping into the starship’s data hub amidst the data stream’s radiance.

With a serious expression, virtual gravity’s left eye flashed with electronic radiance, and a series of network acceleration software appeared. But glancing at the speed already slowed down to 1kb/m, even a Tier 2 virtual stream big shot like him couldn’t help but twitch his eye corners.

It turns out, besides unplugging the network cable, slowing down the internet speed is also a vicious trick to stop hacker intrusion.

Forget it, hack in quickly.

In the Star Thief Ship’s trash room, virtual gravity’s mouth was opening and closing as he began to orally dictate the cracking code, albeit stuttering, appearing to be lagging.

One by one, operation plugins were implanted; code commands were altered—especially in the main system of the spaceship engine, which became a hotspot for intrusion.

The network signal was poor, limiting virtual gravity’s advanced techniques. Fortunately, the electronic defense system of this starship was also subpar.

The intrusion process quickly reached 47%. Once over 50%, he would have preliminary control of the spaceship.

’Tsk tsk, though I can’t afford a flying car in reality, in the network, I’m a man who can drive a spaceship.’

Just as virtual gravity was imagining, all the code suddenly stuttered to a halt, and then the hacking software started losing control, being counter-hacked.

It was as if a river was pouring backward into the body. First, the network implantation chamber started to smoke, then copious amounts of blood water burst out from his five senses, pushing virtual gravity’s blood volume below the warning line.

’What’s going on?!’

In the network view, the page generated by the engine control system rapidly collapsed into garbled text, the entire world seemed to be disintegrating.

He’d seen something like this back on Mechanical Split Star, when collaborating with hackers to invade large corporations’ servers, only to be counter-tracked by corporate will—powerful computational force destroyed one virtual node after another, visuals collapsed, network data erased, virtual personalities obliterated, and accounts ravaged by electronic guardians beyond recognition.

This was the time to run!

But while running, virtual gravity still had one doubt: in this interstellar relay station where network signals were abysmally poor, how could there be such strong network defense forces?

Or rather, how was such a massive information flow wielded?

Was it the legendary quantum entanglement? Or some electronic immortal descending?

With doubts in mind, virtual gravity didn’t slow his speed. Access pathways were violently severed one by one. The virtual personality ’Yanzu’ directly dove into a ’compressed file,’ loading into the brain’s ’storage disk,’ while the network access chamber’s built-in electrode plates ejected in reaction.

With operations borne with excruciating pain, one could tell it was a seasoned veteran from the underground world.

"Just a little bit more!"

On the Star Thief Ship, a hand that seemed to suffer from Parkinson’s Syndrome grasped the top of the access chamber, pulling it down, with nerve connection lines tearing off two small patches of skin at the temple area.

Virtual gravity gritted his teeth as he got up, looked out the window. The battle seemed to continue, yet in his head, it felt as if a red-hot iron tong had been inserted—that’s with the pain reduced.

"This isn’t scientific!"

Virtual Gravity murmured to itself.

With such poor network signal, how could the opponent’s counterattack be so fast? And so strong?

"Carbon-based creature, I suggest you stop your thinking, your brain hub is operating at nearly your physiological limit."

Virtual Gravity’s body stiffened, ’itself’ in the window’s reflection was looking back with keen interest.

"Who are you, how did you download yourself too?!"

"I am not the electronic virus being you imagine, outsiders generally refer to me as Strong Signal Life," ’Virtual Gravity’ paused, "for example, like this."

With a snap of the opponent’s fingers, the next moment, the energy cannons, star shuttles, rays, signals outside the window, even the two Tier 3 lifeforms in the distance, all froze.

"How is this possible?!" Virtual Gravity’s eyes were full of shock.

"From your perspective, this space coordinate signal is extremely poor, making data programming impossible, but for me, the entire cosmos is the ’Cyber Space’ you perceive, data is signal, signal is data."

"Hmm, from your memory, I found a very suitable term."

’Virtual Gravity’ paused.

"Cosmic Background Radiation."

And with its words, starships exploded, turning into a wave-like torrent of garbage data, from star shuttles to starships, from starships to interstellar space stations, it was like a splendid display of fireworks.

Finally, just when the Star Thief Ship under Virtual Gravity’s feet was about to explode as well.

A Tier 3 virtual flash of light passed by.

Cracks on the ship’s surface rapidly healed.

Simultaneously, the light signals began to rotate in a patterned manner.

The entire world seemed to transform into an ocean of data.

In the center of the storm, the data human figure waved its hand fiercely, and the white wall formed by Emmett Protozoa rapidly rose, directly blocking the signal fluctuations coming from all directions.

The original wall expanded upwards endlessly, as if it had no end, a method that was on par with the strength of the three planet firewalls on Mechanical Split Star.

"Huh?"

This time, it was ’Virtual Gravity’s turn to be surprised.

Virtual Gravity suddenly noticed a spark of fire in the eyes of the enemy across the glass.

Just when Virtual Gravity thought it was a hallucination, in the next moment, terrifying virtual flames burst out from the opponent, the intense sense of danger brought by this flame made him feel his body would melt in the next moment, the hard drive in his brain would turn to ashes directly, and all his life-saving measures were useless under such domineering flames.

This is a more advanced level of Digital Authority!

This is a crushing force!

At this moment, only two thoughts were in Virtual Gravity’s mind.

’What the heck, Tier 3 Virtual Life!’

’What the heck, there really is an Electronic Ascension successful NPC ace in my own camp!’

Obviously, on Mechanical Split Star, he had heard of the Electronic Ascension legend.

But then, he blacked out and went offline at the original site.

In the raging electronic blaze composed of star system codes, ’Yanzu’ did not explode as Paradise Bird had expected.

Flames formed human-shaped cracks, at this moment, under the effect of some inexplicable physical law, began to slowly heal.

"Impossible!"

Accompanied by a crisp bird call, Paradise Bird Hee Guanlan appeared, looking at the other party with some amazement.

With Gao Yuanyuan isolating all data, she couldn’t understand why the opponent could still recover.

Although the data strength emanated by the other party was also Tier 3 like hers, for some unknown reason, seeing the opponent gave her an inexplicable sense of dread.

"Ma’am, the codes you master can write over eighty percent of information in interstellar space, but this doesn’t mean everything, especially for me, a Strong Signal Life."

The opponent, while speaking to Paradise Bird, had their attention on Gao Yuanyuan, more accurately, on the faintly visible ’13-Layered Space’ behind her.

"Why?" Paradise Bird wasn’t fond of idle talk and went straight to the point.

"This is related to the nature of my life, using a relatively easy-to-understand physical theory," the opponent paused, then said, "Wave-particle duality."

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