DipNovel Chapter 82 Locked Up
Chapter 82 Locked Up
The crimson provocative code flashed across all the terminal screens; the coded message of seizing tomorrow's starry sky pierced the fragile calm maintained by the command center like a cold needle.
Wang Ping slammed his knuckles down on the Enter key, and a scrolling white screen instantly appeared on the black terminal interface.
"They left a backdoor." His voice was extremely soft, yet it carried a chilling undertone. "They deliberately let us capture their shallow servers to lure us into building our defensive computing power on the ground-based fiber optic network."
Chen Zhou's face turned pale: "So... the main focus isn't on the civilian power grid at all?"
"right."
Wang Ping raised his hand and dragged the data packet extracted from the background to the center of the large screen.
Hidden within countless fragmented signals is an extremely thin and concealed directional transmission beam. Pointing towards outer space at an altitude of 980 kilometers, the beam sits precisely below the critical line of Earth's time reversal barrier.
One thousand kilometers is the boundary between life and death for this bizarre rule of time.
Inside the barrier, time reverses and everything resets; outside the barrier, time flows at a constant speed, and cause and effect are fixed and irreversible.
"They are testing the barrier threshold." Wang Ping zoomed in on the beam pattern, the blue light waves as thin as hair. "They are using civilian internet melee as a smokescreen; their real purpose is to tamper with the underlying firmware of our low-orbit monitoring satellites."
A chorus of low gasps filled the hall, as if everyone was gasping for breath.
At this moment, everyone on the ground is trapped in a one-day cycle, and all human ground technology and physical actions will be rendered useless during the rollback.
Satellites are the only exception.
A satellite at 980 kilometers is still in the time reversal layer; a satellite at 1020 kilometers is in normal cosmic time.
By tampering with the parameters of satellites in critical orbits, hostile forces can steal our airspace data one second, one minute, or one hour earlier each day of the cycle. Accumulating day after day, they will possess dozens of times more intelligence reserves within the unchanging cosmic time.
The moment humanity escapes the cycle of reincarnation, this starry sky will no longer belong to us.
"Activate the Tianyan System at full capacity. Hide Luoshu for now and abandon some civilian trapping nodes." Wang Ping pushed back his chair, leaned forward, and stared at him with sharp, piercing eyes. "Strip away all computing power and connect to the two critical orbit satellites, Tianxun-7 and Tianxun-9."
"Understood! But Engineer Wang..." Chen Zhou's finger hovered over the authorization button, his expression hesitant. "Once the satellite control link's encrypted frequency band is made public, the other side will instantly capture our military IP. Their silent satellites in outer space can be directly electromagnetically suppressed. We have no room for error. If we fail tonight, everything will be reset at midnight tomorrow. The other side will remember it, and we'll be back to square one."
This is the cruelest rule of this war.
Earth cycles, and human memory is preserved.
Each time we rewind, the disaster is erased, the mistakes are cleared, but the human brain's memory will not regress.
The enemy acted twelve hours earlier than us; they had repeatedly tested our defenses in the past two days. Meanwhile, we had only just begun to see the enemy's fangs.
The opponent kept making mistakes in the cycle of reincarnation, forcing us to hastily respond.
"I know the cost."
Wang Ping clicked on the highest-level access code, and a red face verification popped up on the screen. The faint light of the iris scanner flashed across his pupils.
"The entire internet thought that time reversal was a fair natural disaster. But from today onwards, everyone must understand—this cycle of reincarnation is itself a battlefield. Jiang Ning, you must cover for us..."
The secret order has been confirmed.
In an instant, dozens of supercomputers in the command center simultaneously increased their load, the chassis roared and vibrated, and even with the constant temperature air conditioning turned on to the maximum, they still couldn't cool down the overheated computing motherboards.
The silver-white defense code suddenly changed direction. The huge shield that was originally spread across civilian broadband suddenly contracted, turning into a straight and sharp beam of light that pierced through layers of overseas jump server servers and went straight for the military's secret server room on the other side of the ocean.
The ground offense and defense have officially reversed.
"Our reverse attribution detected! Enemy's third-tier jump server is initiating self-destruction!"
"The malicious traffic is beginning to dissipate; the opposing civilian hacker group is going offline and fleeing en masse, leaving only a core military force to hold the main link!"
Large red blocks on the screen receded rapidly, like the tide going out to reveal jagged black reefs on the seabed. Those tens of millions of spam packets that had been relentlessly flooding civilian networks were merely discarded pawns.
The real killer move is always hidden in that invisible beam of light leading to near-Earth orbit.
Wang Ping stared at the source of the beam, his fingers flying across the keyboard as he wrote the interception firmware: "The other side is using brute-force flash memory to write data, trying to rewrite the satellite's attitude code within three minutes. Cut off its timing signal and implant a spoofing timing packet."
"A disguised timing packet?"
"That's right." Wang Ping turned his head, glancing at the giant world clock hanging in the hall out of the corner of his eye. "The eavesdropping signals given to the other party were all falsified by Luo Shu as 'yesterday' data."
Everyone instantly understood his intention.
The enemy possesses a cyclical memory, allowing them to repeat their attacks daily; however, we can use network packet deception, along with the accumulated data that Jiang Ning has always carried with him, to ensure that the enemy's outer space monitoring satellites receive outdated intelligence indefinitely.
They thought they were making progress, but in reality, every set of coordinates and every segment of the spatial spectrum they captured were just old remnants that had been erased by time.
This is a time-travel scam that belongs only to China at this moment.
hum-
A silent vibration was emitted from the space monitoring frequency band.
At an altitude of 980 kilometers, the cold alloy satellite slowly adjusted its attitude, its solar panels deflecting to precisely block incoming intrusion beams. The satellite's built-in firewall instantly lit up with a cold blue light, and countless interception codes collided, tore apart, and were wiped out in the vacuum of space.
In outer space, there is no sound, yet the sounds of gunfire are already deafening.
One second later, a green notification popped up on the large screen.
[Enemy directional intrusion beam successfully intercepted on critical orbit.]
[Enemy main control server located at 37° North latitude in the Western Hemisphere, in a concealed military-grade server room.]
The next moment, a line of glaring black characters was forcibly written into the other party's public operation backend.
There were no fancy decorations, no arrogant provocations, only a line of neat, cold, and emotionless Chinese characters.
[Do not exceed the permitted limits for fiber optic cables within the territory.]
On the other side of the ocean, late at night.
Suddenly, the red lights in the hidden underground server room flashed, and a piercing malfunction beeping sound penetrated the soundproof walls.
The white server room manager slammed his hand on the control panel, his face turning ashen.
The satellite intrusion progress bar, which had been progressing smoothly on the screen, suddenly froze at 89%. Then, all the stolen data became garbled, turning into a shower of black fragments.
A line of unfamiliar Chinese characters abruptly took over the entire screen.
"Fuck, why didn't Apple suppress it?"
Technicians frantically typed on their keyboards in an attempt to retaliate, only to discover to their horror that all of their space relay satellite servers had been silently implanted with a cycle-marking worm.
As long as Earth doesn't stop rewinding, the worm virus will automatically revive after each reset, relentlessly exploiting vulnerabilities in their military networks.
Every day, as long as they launch an attack, the virus will break out on time.
They kept trying and making mistakes in the cycle of reincarnation, but the other side directly locked away their right to try and make mistakes.
"Damn it... How dare they?" the supervisor growled through gritted teeth, slamming his fingers on the table. "We discovered the time difference in space much earlier! We attacked first!"
No one answered.
Thousands of miles away, at the Yanjing Cyber Security Command Center.
As the alarms gradually subsided, the shattered civilian firewalls began to rebuild automatically, and the city's chaotic traffic, power supply, and water systems gradually returned to normal data flow.
The sky outside the window was just beginning to lighten, with a very faint tinge of dawn appearing on the horizon.
It's unclear how much time is left until today's time reset, but everyone already looks extremely tired.
Wang Ping leaned back in his chair, wiped the fine beads of cold sweat from his forehead, and looked up at the clear sky above.
A thousand kilometers below, all beings are trapped in the cycle of reincarnation, while the city remains oblivious and peaceful.
A thousand kilometers above, time flows through the Milky Way, and the game never stops.
Chen Zhou looked at the locked enemy coordinates on the screen and asked in a low voice, "Engineer Wang, should we launch a physical attack? We have precision-guided targeting capabilities; we can completely wipe out that server room before rolling back."
"Need not."
Wang Ping gently shook his head, his gaze distant.
"Blowing up the server room is pointless. Besides, we have principles; we'll never be the first to make a move..."
He opened the backend and dragged the top-secret enemy document he had just intercepted into the archive. The document contained densely packed records of the enemy's probing data, barrier observation reports, and plans for seizing control of the starry sky over the past three days.
"Tonight is just the first round."
"They understand that we have grasped the truth of the universe, and we understand that they are after the stars."
With a light tap of his finger, Wang Ping marked the document as top secret and uploaded it to the national central government and also to the Luoshu Brain.
"From today onwards, there will no longer be purely civilian network attack and defense."
"The ground is a prison of reincarnation, while outer space is the territory of the future."
He looked up at all the tired but still upright staff members in the hall, his voice calm yet heavy, echoing throughout the entire hall.
"Gentlemen, the wars of humanity's old era have ended."
"From this heartbeat onward, we must strive for another tomorrow amidst the repetition of yesterday."
On the large screen, several points of starlight slowly lit up in the geosynchronous orbit.
Those are silent, domestically-made monitoring satellites, quietly traversing the cold universe, in the dark depths of space unknown to anyone, guarding this still unconquered starry sky for humanity trapped in the cycle of reincarnation.
The long night is drawing to a close, but the smoke of battle has not yet dissipated.
The clock that resets time is still quietly waiting in the distant future.
The next battle on the dark web has already begun its silent countdown in the unseen data streams.
On the other side, Mount Taiqing.
Jiang Ning suddenly opened his eyes, breaking free from the mysterious space, and said bitterly, "I saw it..."