CHAPTER 329: CHAPTER 89: INFORMATION WARFARE

Yan Luo obtained his exclusive exoskeleton, gaining the ability to fly agilely in the air. With this, the most crucial piece of the Abyssal campaign puzzle was in place.

Wu Zechuan received the news from Yan Luo, smiled, and then refocused his attention on dealing with the Abyssal Believers within Lingquan City.

At the start of the Abyssal campaign, the Master of the Abyss would inevitably trigger another demon tide, pressuring the attacking teams by assaulting the abyssal front.

If at this time, the Abyssal Believers were to cause trouble, creating a pincer attack from both inside and outside along with the demon tide conjured by the Master of the Abyss, the abyssal front would collapse.

Most of Lingquan City’s stationed troops had been transferred into the Forbidden Demon Abyss, resisting the demon invasion on the other side of the Abyss Entrance.

At this moment, Lingquan City was in a state of defense vacancy, with only the police system maintaining order. If the Abyssal Believers emerged to attack critical facilities in Lingquan City, their plan might really succeed.

Don’t say that attacking important facilities is anti-human, when are the Abyssal Believers not against humanity?

If they weren’t against humanity, they wouldn’t be aiding the Abyss, striving with all their might to make the Abyssal campaign fail.

So the precondition for starting the Abyssal campaign is to eliminate the Abyssal Believers within Lingquan City. Only by completely eradicating them and ensuring the safety of Lingquan City can the Forbidden Demon Abyss campaign commence.

The captured first-tier Abyssal Believers caught by Wu Zechuan didn’t know the exact whereabouts of the chief commander sent by the higher-ups. They only knew that the chief commander’s name was ’Huyan Guang’, coming from Celestial City.

Subsequently, Wu Zechuan captured a few more Abyssal Believers, learning about Huyan Guang’s rage in the communication channels, realizing indeed, Huyan Guang belonged to the Watcher Sect.

They impersonated Kate Lillard and others to launch attacks on the commissioners collaborating with the Abyssal Believers, and Huyan Guang was quite furious at the rogue actions of Kate and others. If Huyan Guang were a member of the Believer faction, he should have been even angrier.

But Huyan Guang wasn’t.

This indirectly showed that Huyan Guang was a Watcher Sect member, and the fact that he hailed from Celestial City suggested that many members of the Watcher Sect might also reside in Celestial City now.

Although it had long been known that the Watcher Sect was using the power of the Believer faction to evade the United Government’s pursuit, Wu Zechuan assumed the Watcher Sect would hide on the surface, not expecting them to live in Celestial City like the Believer faction.

Celestial City was the actual lair of the Abyssal Believers, how many more Abyssal Believers were hidden in that space city?

......

In recent days, Huyan Guang had been constantly changing his residence, moving between various hotels and rental houses within the city.

Frequent relocations might lead to discovery, but Huyan Guang had technical support and didn’t worry about being detected by Lingquan City’s surveillance system.

The city hall’s security system had backdoors, let alone an enormous surveillance system throughout Lingquan City.

After that day, Huyan Guang had the hacker providing technical support investigate the city hall’s security system, discovering that the security system indeed had a backdoor they had installed, but the person who used the backdoor on the day of the commissioner’s death wasn’t them.

According to the hacker, it was a public backdoor. As long as one possessed the key, anyone could enter.

The creators of such backdoors usually sold the keys to multiple parties, so finding out who had originally used the backdoor was indeed difficult.

The power of the Abyssal Believers had indeed infiltrated various industries, but relying on a self-serving commissioner to coincidentally place their manufactured device into the city hall was beyond their capability.

Therefore, the network technology department of the Abyssal Believers usually purchased backdoor keys set by other hackers across numerous network devices and programs, to traverse the entire network.

Huyan Guang didn’t know who used that backdoor, but he didn’t think it was Kate Lillard.

Kate Lillard was a low-ranking member of the Believer faction and was extremely fervent about the faction’s ideology. If he had been the one carrying out the assassination, he certainly wouldn’t have killed just a single commissioner, without even killing the commissioner’s secretary.

Indeed, there was only the commissioner in that car at the time, and he didn’t bring along his secretary.

This means that the murder did not indiscriminately kill innocents!

How could that be possible?

Doesn’t Huyan Guang already understand the modus operandi of those Believer faction people? They don’t care about any legal order at all; if it weren’t for higher-up restrictions, there would probably be many more terrorist attacks in this world, to an extent that even the United Government couldn’t handle.

This could be a coincidence, but Huyan Guang was more inclined to believe that someone else was responsible.

No other reason, just his intuition.

As a high-ranking Engraver, Huyan Guang had great faith in his intuition.

In the past, his intuition had helped him many times, and he believed this time it could help him as well.

As time went by, Huyan Guang found that his subordinates were becoming fewer and fewer, and more and more Abyssal Believers were captured.

There was little contact among the Abyssal Believers, other than Huyan Guang, everyone in their internal communication channel was anonymous, and Huyan Guang wouldn’t directly assign tasks to someone but would demarcate the area where the task was located and state the expected difficulty of the task, letting nearby capable Abyssal Believers perform it.

This way, it could both conceal the identities of the Abyssal Believers and appear fair and just.

In theory, even if his subordinates all gave up other Abyssal Believers, there shouldn’t be so many Abyssal Believers being captured successively.

Many of his subordinates came from outside Lingquan City, no matter how Yan Luo and the others calculated, they couldn’t possibly catch so many Abyssal Believers.

Huyan Guang didn’t know what happened, he only knew that at this rate, he would become a loner.

This couldn’t be allowed to happen; if it truly came to that, he would have to stand out and become the focal point.

Suicidal tasks should be left to the low-ranking members, as Huyan Guang knew very well, once he stood out, the chances of escaping alive were slim to none.

If a low-ranking member dies, they can be replaced anytime, but Huyan Guang doesn’t want to be a martyr.

After contemplating, Huyan Guang announced in the internal channel that everyone was to enter silent mode, all to start lurking, and without his orders, no one was to make an appearance!

......

[Tsk!]

The hacker ’Current’, monitoring the internal channel of the Abyssal Believers, clicked his tongue in annoyance.

Huyan Guang probably didn’t know, failing to call for support from the network technology department, Wu Zechuan had the hacker monitoring the internal communication channel of the Abyssal Believers after secretly capturing Kate Lillard.

Although this internal channel was very covert, used once it would be discarded, and its security was maximized, no hacker could insert a monitoring program into the channel without triggering a security alarm.

To ensure security, Huyan Guang, who held the list of all Abyssal Believers, would send a new communication channel access code to each Abyssal Believer before each communication.

But here’s where the problem arose!

Huyan Guang did not realize that Kate had been captured by Wu Zechuan, so when sending the channel access code, a message was also sent to Kate’s account.

’Current’ didn’t directly use Kate’s account to enter the communication channel because he knew that there was no way the Abyssal Believers wouldn’t have personnel recognition procedures, using someone else’s account to enter the communication channel would essentially be announcing to the Abyssal Believers that they had been exposed.

’Current’ wouldn’t do such a thing as alerting the enemy, what he did was leveraging Wu Zechuan’s strength, installing a physical plugin on the personal terminal used by an Abyssal Believer who hadn’t yet been captured.

—No one ever said a hacker could only break in using network methods. If the objectives could be achieved, even using physical means would be considered hacking.

That physical plugin similarly wouldn’t monitor the communication channel, as its security was indeed maxed out, it would only read information records from the personal terminal for a previous period.

This approach was discrete enough, as long as the personal terminal’s self-scan program was screened out, it could invoke the information recording function in the background.

Using this method, ’Current’ unearthed a lot of information about the Abyssal Believers.

At the same time, he also intercepted Huyan Guang’s support requests to the network technology department; in fact, assisting Huyan Guang in investigating the city hall security system’s backdoor was his doing.

Why did ’Current’ do so many things?

Firstly, Wu Zechuan offered a high price; secondly, he had helped Yan Luo locate the Abyssal Believers’ lair at one point, he didn’t want to die, nor did he want to live in hiding, so he chose to eliminate the Abyssal Believers.

The reason was just that simple.