Chapter 57 He Successfully Infiltrated

After killing the two passing outlaws, Xiang Shan knew that the people in the compound would notice the anomaly within a few minutes. Even though the spot where he made his move was outside the surveillance coverage, the patrol would arrive shortly. Therefore, without pausing, he changed direction and ran at full speed toward the interior of the stronghold.

Those monitors would only see silver flashes repeatedly passing across different camera feeds over the span of a few seconds.

Soon enough, he sensed it.

The distance between himself and the server had closed to the point where his wireless signal transmitter could touch it.

At that moment, any remaining doubt vanished.

Xiang Shan had confiscated the wireless signal transmitter of Geriad, and he also possessed Geriad’s chip and storage unit. To Geriad’s private electronic devices, he was now Geriad.

Ever since he woke up, he had not witnessed a single foolproof internal cultivation defense.

Self-taught internal arts often contained security flaws or even malicious bugs that the practitioners remained unaware of due to a lack of experience. Code obtained from elsewhere, on the other hand, could harbor malicious hidden traps. It was virtually impossible to clean out every single trap thoroughly. If someone relied on their own programming prowess and attempted to modify a widely circulated internal art found on the internet, they would be pitting their individual strength against the wit, wisdom, and folly of every programmer over the past two hundred years—the backdoors and vulnerabilities accumulated over two centuries would all be their enemies.

And there were no comments.

Xiang Shan did not know that this problem plagued the government just as much.

This was because neither side was certain how many sympathizers of the chivalrous outlaws existed within their own ranks, nor whether the provided internal cultivation tutorials contained deliberate "omissions."

Given humanity’s current level of mathematics, it was difficult to clearly define what constituted "intent" and "omission" in an internal art.

If those who styled themselves as "guardians of humanity" were like this, let alone the outlaws of the impoverished lands?

Xiang Shan’s internal art immediately drove straight in.

Passing through the server, it quickly broke through the firewall and tore open the encapsulation. The code flowing directly from his will overrode it.

Then, it extended.

Xiang Shan’s will took that server as its center and gradually expanded outward.

Privilege escalation.

Retrieving logs.

Downloading intelligence.

Cross-referencing with the memories he had plundered.

Seizing control of the cameras.

Xiang Shan’s field of vision fractured.

Although the cameras at the entrance of the stronghold were hard-wired directly to screens and difficult to tamper with from the outside, there were other cameras within this stronghold. In fact, the compound still possessed many cameras connected directly to the server without passing through the public monitoring system.

After all, Geriad was the lord of a stronghold and naturally held the authority and duty to inspect the entire mountain base. Moreover, if enemies launched an attack, these cameras could provide this gunman with the vision of seeing all and hearing all.

Now, however, it all benefited Xiang Shan.

Xiang Shan pushed open a door and entered a spacious area.

This was a hollowed-out underground cavern, supported by several thick pillars, with industrial-grade fermentation tanks and other equipment laid out on the ground. There was a rumbling roar in the cavern, resembling the sound of rushing water.

Those fermentation tanks utilized bio-accumulation to refine metal elements from the soil, while also harvesting some organic matter along the way. In addition, there were blast furnaces for smelting metal ingots.

The rumbling sound of water came from an underground river. This subterranean river supplied a portion of the stronghold's electricity and water. It was precisely because of this river that the old stronghold master a century ago had chosen to occupy this auspicious geomantic treasure land, continuing to this day.

Of course, the hydroelectric power from the underground river was not enough to supply the entire compound. Therefore, the mountain stronghold had also placed numerous scattered solar panels across the surrounding area of several square miles.

Large patches of solar panels appearing outside settlements would naturally be targeted by orbital trash-dropping. Hence, the outlaws had to resort to this method to collect electricity.

Aside from the hydroelectric generators, fermentation tanks, and blast furnaces, this space was quite roomy. Dozens of outlaw warriors were engaged in simulated combat and practicing martial arts on the flat ground.

Xiang Shan temporarily banished his six senses.

Then, his consciousness returned to this place.

Very good, Xiang Shan told himself.

He had forgotten many lethal internal martial art techniques, but his fundamentals had not been lost.

The next second, the three cameras ahead shifted imperceptibly.

Consequently, the previously seamless surveillance view developed a gap less than half a meter wide.

Simultaneously, the dim fluorescent tube flickered a few times.

Taking advantage of the moment the light went out, Xiang Shan lunged toward the rock wall behind him, kicked off the surface diagonally a few times in succession, and leaped onto a steel beam higher up.

This steel beam was about a meter away from the cavern ceiling, serving a structural support role.

Xiang Shan walked along this steel beam. His exceptional balance system allowed him to tread as if on flat ground.

—Then the next target is to knock out the command system.

If Xiang Shan wanted to win this battle, the very first thing he needed to achieve was not annihilating the experts, but destroying the command system.

According to Xiang Shan’s recollections, the earliest prosthetic martial arts were a countermeasure against "skirmish lines."

The emergence of skirmish lines was due to the excessive lethality of firearms, which prevented soldiers from grouping too closely together during an attack. Clustered soldiers were mere wheat ready to be harvested under firearms.

Meanwhile, the individual combat prowess provided by prosthetics and martial arts algorithms could effectively reap skirmish lines, breaking them down point-by-point with an absolute advantage in combat power.

However, the "dense formations" eliminated by firearms happened to be the nemesis of martial arts. As long as the density of surrounding enemies was high enough, the rhythm of their attacks would overwhelm a martial artist, leaving them no time to cope.

This was precisely the reasoning behind the adage "two fists are no match for four hands."

Thus, "cyber martial arts," "firearms," "skirmish lines," and "dense formations" formed a wondrous relationship of mutual restraint, fundamentally altering the nature of warfare.

What Xiang Shan had to do was ensure the enemies could not assemble and form battle arrays to fight him before he finished his preparations.

If he could manage that, victory in this battle was assured.

Xiang Shan’s target was the monitoring and broadcasting system.

This system ran on an independent line and used a very primitive electrical system, with a structure that could be traced all the way back to the eras of Bell and Edison. Against such archaic gadgets, even if one's internal cultivation could reach divine levels, it was difficult to infiltrate them.

Once this center for intelligence aggregation and dispatch was smashed, the stronghold would be akin to a swordsman blinded in both eyes.

Within a few minutes, he walked along the steel beam to the opposite edge of the cavern.

He did not get too close. Along the way, he used the roar of the underground river to mask the vibrations caused by the steel beam. However, this particular spot was slightly further away from the underground river, and the noise was much lower—because the primitive broadcasting system required a relatively quiet environment.

At the entrance of the "monitoring room," three fully augmented warriors were gaming.

Xiang Shan was not in a hurry. He simply waited quietly.

Moving too early would merely alert the prey. The right timing would arrive soon.

For some reason, the three of them kept making mistakes in their game. In less than a minute, each of them died an average of one and a half times.

"What the hell, this is bizarre," one outlaw muttered. "Did I set the difficulty wrong?"

At that exact moment, an alarm bell suddenly rang out.

The three warriors immediately hit the pause button and lifted their heads in unison.

Almost simultaneously, Xiang Shan stepped forward, arriving directly above the three of them.

"Grab your weapons," one of them immediately barked.

At the same time, a voice came from inside the room: "Brothers outside, someone sneaked in a few minutes ago, three are dead!"

—It took them four minutes to discover the bodies. The efficiency is truly not high.

Thinking to himself, Xiang Shan tossed a steel rod straight down in front of the three of them.

Then he himself jumped down 0.1 seconds later.

As the steel rod fell, the three instinctively looked upward. But for some reason, their reactions seemed delayed by 0.3 seconds. Their gaze focused on where the steel rod had been 0.3 seconds prior.

When the steel rod crashed into the ground, they were still staring at mid-air.

At the moment they perceived the steel rod 0.3 seconds too late, the two outlaw warriors standing in the front instinctively suspected someone was on the steel beam and looked up, but their field of vision completely missed Xiang Shan’s descending figure.

—What happened...

Before the two could finish that single thought, they heard a loud crash behind them. But before they could turn their heads, a sharp pain struck the back of their skulls.

—Why... why could he move so silently... and so fast...

These were the final thoughts of the two leading men.

As is known, whenever an object breaks the sound barrier, it produces a loud boom. If an object travels at near-sonic speeds, atmospheric molecules are struck before they can move aside. Layers of air pile up, and the energy of "sound" accumulates within them. This was the "sound barrier." When an object exceeds that speed, this accumulated "sound" erupts.

Yet Xiang Shan had not actually exceeded the speed limit.

It was simply that those warriors had fallen under an illusion.

Invisible digital bugs had long since entered the chips of these outlaw warriors via the server, copying their own codes there, occupying buffer resources, and interfering with the chips' process of parsing sensory information.

The world they saw would linger in the buffer for a moment longer before entering their biological brains and martial arts algorithms.

According to Xiang Shan’s observation of their gaming screen earlier, this delay was around 0.3 seconds.

Therefore, while throwing the steel rod to draw their attention, he utilized this time difference to leap down from above, dropping straight between the three of them. With a subtle burst of leverage, he disrupted the balance of the rearmost person, and then whirled around to deliver two fierce finger-strikes, taking care of the two martial artists in front.

The fallen martial artist, knowing his misfortune, valiantly attempted to upload the "alarm signal" to the server.

However, that server now belonged to Xiang Shan.

Xiang Shan snuffed out the alarm, then leaned down and snapped the warrior's neck. The outlaw was a tough bastard and still wanted to shout.

But Xiang Shan directly muted his loudspeaker.

The saying "practicing martial arts without cultivating the internal foundation leaves you with nothing in the end" applied precisely to this.

By now, seven out of ten warriors in the stronghold had been infected by the bugs.

Xiang Shan picked up the firearms dropped by the three gate-guarding warriors and pushed open the door to the monitoring room.

Inside the monitoring room, someone was saying: "Second Master, something's wrong... Please come take a look."

A voice came through the speaker: "What? Is little Edward playing his hunting games again, causing a defense loophole?"

Seeing Xiang Shan push the door open and walk in, several monitors froze.

The person who had sent the signal stammered, "N-no... Second Master... it seems there is..."

Xiang Shan desperately wanted to put on a friendly smile. But given that he currently had neither skin nor face, he had no choice but to pull shut the soundproof door.