Alien Relic Hunter

"The only thing you need to pay attention to now is one thing." Ke Lan continued to say to Mo Jue, "Don't let yourself fall asleep, focus on it at all times, and it's best not to even get distracted."

"Why?" Mo Jue asked.

"I'm afraid that you might be in a trance and hear the whispers that Hruni described, or simply see the 'starry sky' directly... Then with your ability to resist erosion, I'm afraid you'll turn into a monster in minutes." While explaining, Ke Lan took out a large amount of psychotropic drugs from his backpack and gave them to Mo Jue, "When necessary, you can rely on the help of drugs... Although the side effects of excessive use of this drug will be uncomfortable, in the You must stay awake until we reach the core of the Gray Mist Forest."

"... Got it." Mo Jue took the medicines and stuffed them one by one into the equipment around his waist for easy access at any time.

"Your current situation is quite stable." Ke Lan glanced at the tentacles growing out of Mo Jue's forehead. There was no sign of continuing to grow or expand. "Try not to think about the things you just heard in the recording. Erosion The process should slow down."

"It's okay if you don't say it. Once you say it, I can't help but go back and think..." There was a helpless expression on Mo Jue's face.

This is like a classic psychology game. The host said to the players participating in the game: In the next ten seconds, please do not think about an elephant in your mind - and the players who heard this sentence basically The first thing that comes to mind is an elephant.

"Fortunately, at least the tentacles on the head have not grown longer. As for whether other parts of the body have mutated, I don't know." Ke Lan shrugged, "You can find a clean cabin and take off all the equipment to check it yourself. , of course, if you don’t mind, I can help too.”

"No need." Mo Jue said with a straight face, "If this erosion will be due to deepening of cognition, regardless of whether the body has mutated or not, the best way to deal with it is to turn a blind eye, right?"

"That makes sense... Hey, why do you seem to have suddenly become smarter? Could it be that the structure of your brain has also mutated?" Ke Lan joked.

The originally solemn atmosphere suddenly became much more relaxed.

Mo Jue glared at Ke Lan, and then asked: "Then what should we do now? Should we stay here to search for clues, or should we move on?"

Mo Jue originally wanted to find the other people who were separated, but she soon realized that this option was not reliable.

Looking for someone in the gray mist forest will only lead to losing yourself... On the contrary, if everyone sets a common goal, such as the core area of ​​the forest, they may meet at the terminal.

Of course, the premise is that they have to cross the last ten kilometers alone.

"I want to ask this AI something more...well, but you'd better avoid it. If you hear something you shouldn't hear, your erosion may be further deepened," Ke Lan said.

"Okay...but where should I go?" Mo Jue looked around and asked.

The interior of the wreckage of the "Shaojiang Kai" frigate has been filled with gray fog at this time. Only the area near Ke Lan has not been invaded by the gray fog under the influence of Ze Luo's space power. If Mo Jue is allowed to leave this area at this time, In the open space, if he entered the gray fog...even inside the battleship, he would probably lose his way.

As for losing consciousness and entering a sleepwalking state like just now, it may happen again.

The safest and safest direction is to ensure that Mo Jue is always within Ke Lan's sight.

"There is no other way, so we can only use the ground as a prison." Ke Lan sighed.

"Draw the ground as a prison?" Mo Jue was stunned for a moment, "Wha, what do you mean?"

"That's it." Ke Lan waved his hand, and a small space barrier that could isolate sight and sound in one direction immediately enveloped Mo Jue.

"What's going on? What's going on? Why can't I see anything?" Mo Jue's somewhat frightened voice came out from the one-way sound transmission barrier. She tried to take a step forward, but she was directly bumped into On top of the space barrier as hard as a wall.

"It's a small dark room that I created with Ze Luo's ability. I ask you to stay in it for a while. When I finish asking the AI ​​what I want to know, I will let you out." Ke Lan said this After a few words, the sound isolation of the "little dark room" was restored again.

After hearing Ke Lan's voice, Mo Jue immediately calmed down... Although it felt uncomfortable to be locked in the "little dark room", she also knew that Ke Lan was trying to save her.

Through the one-way light-transmitting space barrier, Ke Lan could see Mo Jue slowly sitting down with her back against the barrier behind her. She subconsciously reached out to touch the tentacles on her forehead, but she seemed to remember something. His whole body trembled slightly and he retracted his hand.

Ke Lan knew that although she had been comforting Mo Jue just now, the actual chance of Mo Jue surviving was very low... She was not a one-in-a-million person like Hruni, who had extremely strong resistance to erosion. , otherwise, your body wouldn’t have mutated after listening to a few recordings that didn’t feature the key points at all…

Mo Jue should know this very well. When she was face to face with Ke Lan, she pretended to be indifferent, but now after being locked in the dark room, her expression suddenly changed... ...Despair, frustration, helplessness... Through the barrier of one-way vision, the emotions expressed by Mo Jue were all seen in Ke Lan's eyes.

But there was nothing Ke Lan could do... The source of this erosion was an existence that even he couldn't touch.

No, it can't be said to be touching... Even looking at each other for a moment is enough to make Ke Lan's entire body and mind collapse.

"I still have some questions, and I hope you can answer them truthfully." Ke Lan stopped looking at Mo Jue in the "little black room", turned to look at the virtual screen in front of him, and said to the AI ​​of the central control computer.

"You have the highest authority of Ark and can access all data in the central control computer of this ship." AI replied.

A single member of the Undead Crew may be restricted in accessing the Ark's core mastermind, but lower-level terminals such as the battleship's central control computer can still be fully controlled.

"Okay, first organize the information in your database into a table. If there is a date, it must be marked with a date. Any information that mentions the Gray Mist Forest or contains keywords such as secrets, truth, despair, mutation, whispers, etc., will be marked in red. Make it bold and scroll the completed form on the screen as quickly as possible." Ke Lan ordered.

Although a lot of data stored in the central control computer is damaged, a supercomputer like this, which occupies an area as large as a mansion, only leaves some data fragments in the calculations, and the amount of information it contains is definitely comparable. Above is a vast sea.

Even though Ke Lan can browse at extremely fast speeds with his photographic memory and constant assistance, his digestion speed is still too slow compared to the huge amount of data.

Densely packed characters scrolled on the projection screen at a speed that was impossible for ordinary people to see clearly. According to the time calculated by the central control computer, at this speed, it would take at least forty hours for Ke Lan to read the entire content.

Moreover, this is not the data itself, but the title table that has been summarized and organized. If you click on each row of characters, there will be root directories one after another.

"Make it faster! Make the font smaller!" Ke Lan said. With Ze Luo's help, there is almost no limit to his time-stop ability, and the mental consumption and side effects can be completely ignored - —However, there is a limit to the ability of human eyes to receive and process information. No matter how fast the brain operates, it means nothing if the eyes cannot keep up.

Ke Lan suddenly felt envious of the characters in those cyberpunk works. With the help of the brain-computer interface, the speed at which they absorbed information could be compared to the data transmission speed of the computer... Although the current cybernetic meaning of Ark Body technology has not yet been extended to the brain level, and the only practical application is simple "brain modification" that connects sensory nerves and motor nerves. However, in the research institute, experiments on brain-computer interfaces have been carried out many times. . There are many experimental subjects equipped with brain-computer structures and most of their brains have been cyborgized, lying in the freezers of underground icehouses. There are men and women, old and young... This technology is being promoted to the entire human society. It's just a matter of time.

However, the brain-computer interface also has a fatal problem. Like computers and network services, the former will crash if its computing intensity exceeds its limit, and the latter will be equivalent to a DDOS attack if a large amount of data is input in a short period of time... And the human brain If too much data is accepted, it will also be burned.

Biological synapses are much more fragile than silicon chips... Although they have the ability to regenerate, once damaged, the impact on the brain is completely irreversible. Even if you can save your life, there will be some unavoidable mental problems. Defects.

The brain is an extremely sophisticated device. Even if human civilization has developed to this stage, it has not been able to create anything more sophisticated and magical than the brain.

Therefore, whether operating or repairing the brain, one must be cautious. This is probably why although brain-computer interface technology has matured, it has not been widely popularized.

Those cyberpunk works are still science fiction works in the final analysis, with a certain degree of fantasy. As long as humans cannot fully analyze the structure of the brain, black technology such as brain-computer interfaces will not be popularized.

The characters on the projection screen were scrolling faster than a top-end sports car with full power. Ke Lan started and stopped almost every tenth of a millisecond... Even with Ze Luo's assistance, the look in his eyes was still revealed. There was a hint of fatigue.

It's not that Ke Lan's mental power has been exhausted, but reading a large amount of meaningless information for a long time has made his mind feel an instinctive aversion... It's like eating synthetic rations that taste like chewing wax all the time. It's okay to eat once or twice, because life forces you to eat every meal. But if people keep stuffing this thing into their mouths for 24 hours, then even the champion of the Big Eater Competition will probably Feelings of nausea and vomiting may also occur quickly.

But in order not to miss any clues, Ke Lan had to check all the data, no matter how detailed it was. As for the entries marked in red and bold, he had to click on the root directories of the next level and read them all.

If Mo Jue could see the outside scene through the dark space barrier in front of her at this time, she would be surprised to find that a stream of white steam was rising from Ke Lan's head.

…

At the same time, deep in the gray fog forest, an unknown location.

Asano Akira opened his eyes suddenly.

He had a very strange feeling in his heart - even though his memory told him that he had just retreated from the wreckage of the battleship into the fog a second ago, he always felt that something seemed to be missing in the middle. It's like watching a movie. Although the editing and connection before and after a long shot are so perfect that you can hardly see any traces, some people who are very keen on this can still detect slight gaps: for example The angle of view is as small as a shift of less than 0.5 degrees, such as minimal changes in focus and lighting, or an image gap of only one frame and image misalignment of a few pixels.

Akira Asano is such a person.

After awakening this ability, his perception of the world is completely different from ordinary people. Even if his memory is deleted, he can detect abnormalities faster than ordinary people.

Just when Asano Akira was confused, his sword suddenly buzzed in the scabbard, and the blade trembled crazily, as if it wanted to bounce out of the scabbard on its own.

"Um?"

Asano Akira stretched out his hand to hold the handle of the sword, and the beating sword instantly calmed down. He pulled out the knife, placed the blade gently on his palm, held his breath, and stood quietly in place for a few seconds.

"I left the team? Cut off the safety rope? Walked alone in the gray mist forest for two hours?" Asano Akira frowned. In his memory, there was no record related to it...

But he was completely convinced of the information Zhan Dao told him... This knife had already become a part of his extended consciousness. Under the long-term infiltration of substantial thought power, Zhan Dao was almost as good as Asano Akira. The mind is connected... To put it in more fantasy terms, it means that a weapon spirit is about to be born.

Moreover, this information also proves that Asano Akira's strange feeling just now was definitely not his illusion.

It's all true.

"Then I should look for Ke Lan and the others now? No... I can't find them, and they can't find me... Instead of wandering in the forest, it's better to set the original end point as the destination... As long as I can reach the core area, I can meet up with Ke Lan and the others." Asano Akira thought to himself.

[P.S. Thanks to the reading giraffe for the 1,500 starting coins; thanks to Xiao Jiaerlang for the 500 starting coins; thank you to Wangmoxibustion for the 300 starting coins; thank you for the 100 starting coins for the reward all day long. 】