Chapter 144
Chapter 144
When it came to appearances, nothing mattered more.
Ning Shuo had cared about his image ever since he was little, to the point of looking in the mirror every day. So when he saw that no zombie blood had gotten on his beige shirt, he finally let out a sigh of relief.
After Qin Genan finished wailing, she explained what had happened with the zombies evolving intelligence. Ning Shuo was still fairly reliable when it came to serious matters. After thinking for a moment, he asked Ning Wang for the flower.
Ning Wang: ?
Ning Wang said, “Wasn’t that our token of love?”
That was what Ning Shuo had told him when he was coaxing him before. Now Ning Shuo shamelessly continued coaxing him. “What’s so great about Ding Pan’s flower? Once we get out, I’ll give you one I raised myself.”
Thinking it over, Ning Wang felt like that made sense. His earlier reluctance vanished, and instead of taking the flower out unwillingly, he offered it up gladly.
Ning Shuo put the flower into a transparent bottle. Qin Genan, not understanding what he was doing, dripped the blood staining the zombie crystal core into it. “What’s this for? We all know zombie blood makes plants rot…”
She stopped mid-sentence.
Because the flower in the bottle, which had already been somewhat wilted, suddenly regained its luster, like a final flash before death.
However, in less than fifteen minutes, the flower still withered rapidly and finally turned to ash.
Ning Shuo fell into thought. “A final flash before death. If our guess is right, and some of these zombies were created by Base X’s upper management, then could the injections they gave ordinary people also make plants show the same effect?”
It was as if they had never really looked into how the original zombie virus had appeared in the first place, even though something this classified shouldn’t, logically, have shown up in Zone X.
But Base X had even managed to develop zombie virus version 2.0. And since this was just a Script, maybe it was perfectly normal for classified material like this to appear in one.
Song Zhu had clearly thought of the same issue. “When Willow and I went to Bao Yi’s room, we found something.”
“Teacher Song, doesn’t calling me by my code name make us sound a little distant?”
Song Zhu ignored him and took out what they had found. “It was just a piece of Parchment with a string of cipher text on it. It needs a key, but we don’t know what the key is.”
The intricate patterns looked like some kind of prophecy, but what drew the eye most was the absurdly long string of code written on it:
QybSAlRb2gSNjkIhfudCAQ34zKIJp1JOX+IqFGnYGmRbmmuNf+ybIHd3UGocsnOAomaO3ec9bJU=.
Rao Lin complained, “The background design looks all mysterious and prophetic, and then it turns out to be a cipher you have to decode.”
From the driver’s seat, Ning Wang said, “Isn’t a password mysterious too?”
“It’s the vibe! The vibe it gives off is completely different!”
Outside the Script, Zhuang Yao straightened up in her seat. “DES Encryption. If they have the key, they can crack it.”
Next to her, Luo Li took a sip of milk tea. “Even if they have the key, will they know how?”
Zhuang Yao slowly leaned back against her chair again. “Good question.”
The Main God clearly seemed to think they wouldn’t know how to crack it either. After Song Zhu disconnected, he no longer had the System database as processing power, so everything could only rely on his own brain. Back when he was with the System, most of his work had been supervision, and he rarely had to personally calculate things like this, because the System could do it for him. It was basically like having a maxed-out computer.
Until the very next second, when Ning Shuo said, “This should be the DES algorithm? I’m not totally sure, but if we find the key, we can try it,” the System felt like it was about to overheat again.
It went back to digging through Ning Shuo’s life history in the modern world.
Ning Shuo shouldn’t have known anything about a computer algorithm from the modern era like this.
It wasn’t until he saw an inconspicuous minor character cracking a code in a passage from one of the novels published under the pen name Ning Xie – and using more than one kind of DES – that things finally clicked.
The Main God broke down again. “He’s just writing a novel! Why the hell is he learning algorithms programmers use?”
And how was he still able to remember all that after being inside the System for so long?
They had tried more than a dozen different keys for Ning Shuo, but every plaintext they got from decoding came out as gibberish.
Ning Wang thought of something. “Try 30370607.”
By now, they were back at the base. A few of them lounged around in Ning Wang’s room with nothing to do, watching Ning Shuo – the only one who knew how to crack codes – scribble calculations.
Rao Lin was already on his third cup of instant coffee. “If we really can’t figure it out, let’s just drop it and look for another lead.”
Song Zhu, who was eating dinner, shot him a glance. “If you’re not helping, talk less.”
“Teacher Song?!”
Lose? That word didn’t exist in Ning Shuo’s dictionary.
He set down his pen, took the handkerchief Ning Wang passed him, wiped his hands with exaggerated swagger, and said, “Easy.”
Luckily, the encrypted string the System had given them used the most common encryption mode, so there was no need for brute-force methods.
zaiejiangzaizuihouyidiganjingdeshuixiaoshishijianglin.
-Disaster will descend when the last drop of clean water disappears.
Rao Lin silently put down his cup. “The water we’re drinking right now…?”
Song Zhu said, “Artificially purified.”
Rao Lin let out a silent sigh of relief, then immediately thought of something else and whipped his head toward Ning Wang. “How’d you know that was the key?”
Ning Wang said, “When I was with ge on the balcony outside Ding Pan’s room, getting in touch with H… while eavesdropping, I saw a sign hanging on the wall in front of Ding Pan’s desk. Those numbers were around it, so it was probably the date the apocalypse would arrive.”
Rao Lin fell silent for a moment. “…Getting together?”
Ning Wang looked shy. “Aww, I didn’t think ge and I were being that obvious, but you still noticed.”
Rao Lin: …
No, no, no. It was because you two were way too high-profile.
—
There was no question what the plaintext meant: once environmental destruction reached a certain threshold, the apocalypse would descend.
Yet, ironically, the key was the already-known date of the apocalypse. In other words, the original prophecy hadn’t been encrypted at all.
Bao Yi and Ding Pan clearly cared a great deal about this prophecy. They had hidden it away, then encrypted the contents on top of that, as if terrified someone might decode it.
The reagent Ding Pan and the others were researching probably did more than just turn ordinary people into zombies. The reagent that turned people into zombies might have been nothing more than a failed product.
“Flashback” wasn’t a side effect of the reagent. It was the primary effect Ding Pan and the others had wanted to create – they had just failed.
Or rather, what they wanted to research was a way to restore the ecosystem to pre-apocalypse levels.
But the contempt for ordinary people and worship of espers revealed between the lines proved another point as well: they wanted to return the world to what it had been before the apocalypse, while also hoping that most of the humans left alive would be espers.
To bring about the evolution of the human species.
To them, the value of ordinary people becoming zombies was greater than the value of ordinary people themselves. Once transformed into zombies, unsuspecting field teams would go out and eliminate them, and the crystal cores dug out from those zombies had significant uses both for energy and for enhancing an esper’s powers.