Intelligence regarding the meme-polluting recording:
The recording possesses meme-polluting power not from the video itself, but from a specific ability applied to it.The recording spreads in two ways: I. Darknet hackers randomly deploying it at 1:15 AM. II. Infected individuals carrying the recording for direct transmission.The hacker groups were the first to be infected. They became the primary push behind the spread, which is why Fire Moth cannot find the source.The recording has not been spread in cinemas, street screens, or TV channels to minimize the chance of the source being traced.The source is highly likely inside Fire Moth. Sending out large numbers of personnel for investigation was to thin out the defenses at HQ and attack from within...
Lin hand stopped writing under the lamp. In the shadows, his expression flickered. After a pause, he set down his pen and went to the window, overlooking the city—the mortal world—from a strange perspective.
Some say the city by day is a prim lady wearing a veil, while the city at night is a dancer who lifts the veil to reveal craving lips. The clamor and carnival of the night boiled within the steel jungle built by humans.
In these days, he and Elysia had secretly investigated many people, including those holding the polluting recording. That video with unknown power was currently in a phone he had confiscated.
If he were to broadcast these recordings onto the most-trafficked screen in the center of a commercial plaza... no, on the website with the highest viewership in the world... what would happen? The chaos triggered would likely be more terrifying than any previous large-scale Honkai eruption.
Should he try it? To see if this recording truly has that power?
Lin took out the confiscated phone and pulled up the recording. The video itself was harmless—just a meaningless clip of scenery. As long as there was a camera or phone screen between the person and the playback device, there was no problem. One was only contaminated by "directly capturing the playing recording on the screen with one's sight."
A bone-chilling cold rose from his heart to his fingertips. Lin placed his finger on the play button.
"Is it time to act..."
"Chiaki" stood before the mirror, gazing at her eyes which were as red as a blood moon. There was no doubt that the consciousness of the Eighth Herrscher had once again occupied this body. However, compared to her arrogance and evil from months ago, her face now held a bit more caution.
She had thought that with careful preparation, she could easily disintegrate Fire Moth from the inside, and even the entire human world. She was in the dark, humans were in the light, and as a Herrscher specialized in attacking human consciousness, she had infiltrated Fire Moth—humanity's last line of defense. She had expected to easily take all members prisoner and then devour human society bit by bit like a cicada.
But the events of three months ago had left her fearful. Those eyes... there was no mistake. Those rainbow pupils like optical discs were the same as the eyes of Lin Herrscher form she had seen in his consciousness.
A woman with eyes like Lin had ambushed her. They were both wounded in the clash of consciousness. She was a specialized consciousness-type Herrscher, yet she was forced into dormancy for three months to recover enough to retake control of this body.
Just when she thought her life as a Herrscher might have been cut short by an ambush, three months passed peacefully. Lin had apparently not told anyone about her identity. She had no idea what Lin was planning.
In direct combat, she was inferior to other Herrscher. Against Lin, who possessed the authority of the Herrscher of Reason, she had basically no chance of winning. Thinking back, the situation was strange. She had never seen that woman before, and the attack was directed at her consciousness rather than her physical body...
This had made her cautious. She would not declare full war on humanity without absolute certainty. But the most troublesome part was this timing... Lin was gone.
The person she feared most had been sent out of HQ. She thought she could breathe a sigh of relief, only to learn he was missing. Being unable to confirm Lin status and location made her afraid to make big moves, so she could only contaminate Fire Moth bit by bit through her own means.
"Hmph... then let's try it, humans..." The Eighth Herrscher waved her hand, and her eyes in the mirror returned to normal.
"So this is the trigger condition for Active Reaction... Hehehe..."
A head of long, unkempt hair sprawled over the desk. Mobius coiled like an enchanting snake over scattered manuscripts. She stared excitedly at the finished project proposal in her hand, then curled her lips at the suspicious green liquid gathering drop by drop into a syringe in a nearby refining machine.
She tidied the messy room slightly, brewed a cup of coffee, and sat on the sofa, her eyes bright as she watched the growing amount of green liquid.
"...By the way, what was that?"
Mobius suddenly remembered that at the end of the document about Active Reaction left by that person, there was a string of unintelligible garbled code. She had paid attention to it at the time, thinking it unlikely to be a typo. Now that she finally had time, she was curious about its meaning.
Sitting at the computer, she opened the document again and scrolled to the end. Mobius frowned at the string of code. It was a jumble of symbols, characters, and numbers from different languages. If it were a cipher needing decoding, she had no other sentences or codebooks to break it.
Wait... what if it's not meaningless? For instance, what if it's the password for another hidden file?
Mobius thought it over but didn't know which locked file in Fire Moth it belonged to. She couldn't try them all, could she? Looking at it from another angle, if he gave her this password, it meant she must be able to use it—meaning she could understand its significance with her current resources.
He had only given her three files...
After staring at the characters for a while, Mobius peripheral vision caught the file path. A flash of inspiration hit her. She copied the string and used it to overwrite the format of the third audio file.
The file format changed! From audio to video! Mobius couldn't wait to click it open...
"If you have found this file, I regret to inform you that this is a recording that will hypnotize the viewer."
"But I suppose you probably can't hear what I'm saying by now, can you?"
The video contained only those two brief sentences. But Mobius didn't hear them. She had already collapsed on the desk, leaving only the sound of the thick green liquid dripping into the syringe.