I Am Your Natural Enemy

Bai Jiahui picks things up fast. The basics, like making a call, she learned in no time. She can’t type, but that’s not a big deal—handwriting works fine.

Though the characters she learned are a bit different from what’s used now, she’s absorbed some knowledge from those sacrifices, so reading’s not a problem for her.

Wen Yan turned and left, giving Feng Yao a call to share some intelligence.

After Wen Yan finished, Feng Yao brought up other issues.

”The past couple of days, the Scorching Sun Department has carried out several major operations.

In the Northeast Lao Linzi, there was a Demon King’s Lair that unfortunately got blown up during a mine-clearing exercise by the military over there.

People from our Scorching Sun Department went in to clean up the aftermath, but sadly, we didn’t find any surviving demons.

But there were some things left behind in that Demon King’s Lair that no one got around to clearing out.

That lair was really sturdy, didn’t cave in much, so a lot actually survived intact.

We found something you’d definitely be interested in.”

”What is it?”

”We found some clues about that server domain.

The great demons there were some of the main players spreading rumors and slander about you.

All their posts went through that previous server domain.

The problem is, that guy totally underestimated the Scorching Sun Department and modern tech in general.

He thought as long as he had that server domain, he was untouchable, no one could trace him—so he felt invincible.

Too bad—their accent, choice of words, the way they react to things, they’re all dead giveaways.

Their posts? Anyone doing intel at the Scorching Sun Department—even a rookie intern—could tell, more or less, where they’re from.

With a little more digging, even just from the text, we could narrow it right down to that Demon King’s Lair.”

”Hmm, ’No accent’ vibes?”

”Ha...” Feng Yao actually laughed. ”It’s a bit different, but yeah, pretty much the same idea.”

”So...”

”Those guys once ended up fighting a lawsuit with the Scorching Sun Department because of a pig demon.

He sheltered that pig demon who attacked people for quite a while—until the Scorching Sun Department finally found audio and video on a piece of wildlife surveillance equipment.

Plus, the Scorching Sun Department was all set to send people to arrest him before that Demon King, pinching his nose, admitted defeat and handed the pig demon over.

After that, maybe he learned a little something—got a bit craftier.

Whenever he did anything important after that, there would always be audio and video records.

This time, the stuff we found was on a few hard drives.

The guy backed up every single file, three copies of each.

Our people went through the footage—one bit was a video of him on the phone with someone.

And during that call, the server domain we’ve been looking for gets mentioned.

And we also extracted the voiceprint of the person on the other end, but so far there’s no match.”

At this, Wen Yan thought it over for a second.

”No match—is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

”In a way, I’d say good. At least it rules out every AI voice we have on record for now.

With voiceprint extraction and running it through a bunch of checks, we can still figure a few things out.

The person on the other end was probably human—or an exceptionally skilled shapeshifter demon, or an extremely high-grade ghost.

But either way, for those last two, there really aren’t many at that level. Tracing them down will just take some time and effort.

If it’s a human, things get a bit tricky.

But that also has its upsides.

For one, humans always have social connections, always have an identity—it actually gives us more chances to sniff out clues.”

”Hope you guys can dig it up fast. Is this guy just renting out the server, or was he actually involved before as well?”

”From what we can tell, he’s just leasing the server—he doesn’t care what people do with it. And as for rent, it’s not money or gold or anything tangible.

It seems he needs creatures to ’power’ that server domain, or something like computational power.

That’s what the people at the lab are saying—I don’t really get the specifics myself.

Hang on, let me take this second line.”

Feng Yao switched calls, took a few minutes, then came back.

”Just got word—the lab compared some data and found a new clue.

When the Cyber Netherworld popped up, there were a bunch of people who knew about the Netherworld, or just knew the word but had no idea what it actually was—and they wanted to ride the hype.

So they released a few games that didn’t come out and say ’Netherworld,’ but still tried to cash in on the trend.”

”Uh, the Netherworld had hype?” Wen Yan was a bit stunned. Once the Netherworld showed up, the Scorching Sun Department started cracking down—hardly any regular folks even knew about it. How’s that kind of thing get any hype as a game?”

”Yeah, regular people didn’t care much. But you know there’s always some Brother Fus who want to try everything.

Just toss out a free game, and maybe you get a few cents or a couple bucks a day in withdrawals.

That’s enough to grab a few thousand players to keep things lively for Brother Fu.

Leeching off regular players gets you maybe a tiny bit of cash; out of ten thousand people, if a thousand toss in six bucks each, you’re lucky.

But just one Brother Fu and a couple of shills—that’s easy money, tens or hundreds of thousands, no problem.

Get a few Brother Fus and some ringers, and making ten million a month in revenue is child’s play.

Plus, it’s less risky—way less likely to pop up on the Scorching Sun Department’s radar.”

”Get to the point.”

”The point is—the lab found out that one of the games riding the Netherworld hype at the time—

a semi-finished server that never officially launched—had some stylistic quirks and habits that might be related to that server domain.

So they followed the leads, and found out the other side slipped up, just a little.”