Volume 15 Gray Fog Forest Chapter 777: Each Moving Forward
"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. Stay focused at all times. It's best not to even be distracted or dazed."
"Why?" Mo Jue asked.
"I'm afraid that you might lose consciousness and hear those whispers that Heruni described, or even see the 'starry sky' directly... With your ability to resist corrosion, you'll probably turn into a monster in a matter of minutes." Ke Lan explained as he took out a large amount of psychiatric drugs from his backpack and stuffed them into Mo Jue's pocket. "You can rely on the help of drugs when necessary... Although the side effects of overdose of this drug will be very uncomfortable, you must stay awake until we reach the core area of the Gray Mist Forest."
"...Got it." Mo Jue took the medicine and stuffed it into the device on his waist one by one so that he could use it at any time.
"Your condition is relatively stable now." Ke Lan glanced at the tentacles growing out of Mo Jue's forehead, and saw no signs of continued growth or expansion. "Try not to think about what you just heard in the recording, and the erosion process should slow down."
"It would be fine if you didn't say it. Once you said it, I couldn't help but think about it..." Mo Jue showed a helpless expression on his face.
This is like a classic psychology game. The host says to the players participating in the game: In the next ten seconds, please don’t think of an elephant in your brain - and when the players hear this, the first reaction of their brains will basically be to think of an elephant.
"Fortunately, at least the tentacles on the head haven't 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, take off all your equipment and check it yourself. Of course, if you don't mind, I can help you."
“No need.” Mo Jue said with a straight face, “If this erosion will be deepened by cognition, then regardless of whether the body has mutated or not, the best way to deal with it is to ignore it, right?”
"That makes sense... Hey, why do you seem to have suddenly become smarter? Has the structure of your brain also mutated?" Ke Lan joked.
The originally solemn atmosphere suddenly became a lot more relaxed.
Mo Jue glared at Ke Lan, then asked, "What should we do now? Should we stay here and search for clues, or continue moving forward?"
Mo Jue originally wanted to look for the other missing people, but she soon realized that this option was not reliable.
If you look for someone in the gray fog forest, you will only lose yourself... On the contrary, if everyone sets a common goal, such as the core area of the forest, it is possible to meet at the terminal.
Of course, the prerequisite is that they have to cross the last ten kilometers alone.
"I want to ask this AI something else... well, but you'd better stay away from it. If you hear something you shouldn't hear, your degree of 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 Modified" frigate has been filled with gray fog at this time. Only the area near Ke Lan has not been invaded by the gray fog due to the influence of Ze Luo's spatial force. If Mo Jue were to leave this open space and enter the gray fog at this time... even if he is inside the warship, he is likely to get lost.
As for the situation of losing consciousness and entering a sleepwalking state like just now, it may happen again.
The safest and most reliable approach is to ensure that Mo Jue is always within Ke Lan's sight.
"There's no other way. We can only confine ourselves to a prison." Ke Lan sighed.
"Draw a circle on the ground to make a prison?" Mo Jue was stunned for a moment, "W-what do you mean?"
"That's it." Ke Lan waved his hand, and a small space barrier that could block vision and sound in one direction immediately enveloped Mo Jue.
"What's going on? What happened? Why can't I see anything?" Mo Jue's somewhat frightened voice came out from the one-way sound-transmitting space barrier. She tried to take a step forward, but directly bumped into the space barrier that was as hard as a wall.
"I used Ze Luo's ability to create a small dark room. Please stay in there for a while. I will let you out after I ask the AI what I want to know." After saying this, Ke Lan restored the sound isolation of the "small dark room".
After hearing Ke Lan's voice, Mo Jue immediately calmed down... Although being locked in the "small dark room" was not a pleasant experience, she also knew that Ke Lan was doing this to save her.
Through the one-way translucent space barrier, Ke Lan could see Mo Jue slowly sitting down with his back against the barrier. He subconsciously reached out to touch the tentacles on his forehead, but as if he remembered something, his whole body trembled slightly and he retracted his hand.
Ke Lan knew that even though she had just been comforting Mo Jue, the chances of Mo Jue surviving were very low... She was not someone like Heruni who was one in a million and had a strong resistance to erosion. Otherwise, her body would not have mutated after listening to a few recordings that did not contain any key points...
Mo Jue herself should be very clear about this. Before, when she was face to face with Ke Lan, she pretended to be indifferent, but now after being locked in the small dark room, her expression changed all of a sudden... despair, frustration, helplessness... Through the barrier of one-way vision, Ke Lan could see all the emotions expressed by Mo Jue.
But Ke Lan had no way out... The source of this erosion was something that even he could not touch.
No, it cannot be said to be a touch... Even just a moment of eye contact was enough to cause Ke Lan's entire body and mind to collapse.
"I still have some questions, and I hope you can answer them truthfully." Ke Lan stopped looking at Mo Jue in the "small black room" and 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 level of authority on the Ark and can access all the data in the ship's central control computer." The AI replied.
A single undead crew member might be restricted in accessing the Ark's core brain, but lower-level terminals like the battleship's central control computer could still be fully controlled.
"Okay, first organize the information in your database into a table. Those with dates must be marked with the dates. Any information that mentions the Gray Mist Forest or contains keywords such as secrets, truth, despair, mutation, whispers, etc. must be marked in red and bold. Scroll the table onto the screen as quickly as possible." Ke Lan ordered.
Although a lot of the data stored in the central control computer was damaged, a supercomputer like this, which occupies an area comparable to a mansion, only left some data fragments after calculation, and the amount of information it contained can definitely be called vast.
Even though Ke Lan could browse at an extremely fast speed thanks to his photographic memory and the help of time stop, his digestion speed was still too slow compared to the huge amount of data.
Densely packed characters scrolled across the projection screen at a speed that was indiscernible to the naked eye. According to the time calculated by the central control computer, at this speed, it would take at least forty hours for Ke Lan to finish reading all the content.
Moreover, this is not the data itself, but a title table after being summarized and organized. Clicking on each line of characters, there will be root directories at each level.
"Go faster! The font can be made smaller!" Ke Lan said. With Ze Luo's help, his ability to stop time is almost unlimited, and the mental consumption and side effects can be completely ignored. However, the human eye's ability to receive and process information has its limits. Even if the brain runs faster, it will be meaningless if the eyes can't keep up.
Ke Lan suddenly envied the characters in cyberpunk works. With the help of brain-computer interfaces, the speed at which they absorb information can be equated with the data transmission of computers... Although the cyborg prosthetic technology of the Ark has not yet been expanded to the brain level, the only practical application is the simple "brain transformation" between the sensory nerves and the motor nerves, but in the research institute, brain-computer interface experiments have been carried out many times. There are many experimental subjects with brain-computer structures and most of their brains have been cyborgized lying in the freezer of the underground ice storage, including men, women, old and young... It is only a matter of time before this technology is promoted to the entire human society.
However, brain-computer interfaces also have a fatal problem. Like computers and network services, the former will crash if the computing intensity exceeds the 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 will also be burned out if it receives excessive data.
Biological neural 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 the life is saved, there will be some unavoidable mental defects.
The brain is an extremely sophisticated device. Even though 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 on the brain or repairing it, one must be extremely cautious. This is probably the reason why the technology of brain-computer interface has not been popularized although it has matured.
Those cyberpunk works are ultimately science fiction works with a certain degree of fantasy. As long as humans cannot fully analyze the structure of the brain, black technology such as brain-computer interface will never be popularized.
The speed at which the characters scrolled on the projection screen was faster than that of a top-of-the-line sports car running at full power. Ke Lan had to stop time almost every few tenths of a millisecond... Even with Ze Luo's assistance, there was still a hint of fatigue in his eyes.
It's not that Ke Lan's mental strength has been overdrawn, but reading a lot of meaningless information for a long time has caused his mind to have an instinctive aversion... It's like eating those tasteless synthetic rations all the time. It's okay to eat it once or twice, because there is no other way because of life. But if you let people stuff this thing into their mouths for 24 hours, even the champion of the big eater competition will probably feel nauseous soon.
But in order not to miss any clues, Ke Lan had to check all the data, no matter how big or small. As for those items marked in red and bold, she had to click on the root directory of the next level and read them all.
If Mo Jue could see the outside scene through the pitch-black space barrier in front of her at this time , she would be surprised to find that a white steam was constantly rising from above Ke Lan's head.
…
At the same time, deep in the Gray Fog Forest, in an unknown location.
Asano Akira suddenly opened his eyes.
He had a very strange feeling in his heart - although his memory told him that he had just retreated from the wreckage of the battleship into the fog in the previous second, he always felt that something seemed to be missing in the middle. It was like watching a movie, although the editing and connection before and after a long shot were perfect, almost no trace could be seen, but some people who were very perceptive could still find slight differences in it: for example, the angle of view was shifted as small as less than 0.5 degrees, for example, the focus and lighting changed very little, and for example, there was only a one-frame difference in the picture and a few pixels of image misalignment.
And Asano Akira is such a person.
After awakening this ability, his perception of the world has become completely different from that of ordinary people. Even if his memories are deleted or modified, he can detect abnormalities faster than ordinary people.
Just when Asano Akira was feeling puzzled, his sword suddenly made a buzzing sound inside the scabbard, and the blade trembled wildly, as if it wanted to jump out of the scabbard by itself.
"Um?"
Asano Akira reached out and grasped the hilt of the sword, and the throbbing sword instantly calmed down. He pulled out the sword, gently placed the blade against his palm, held his breath, and stood there quietly for a few seconds.
"I left the team? Cut the safety rope? Walked alone in the gray fog forest for two hours?" Asano Akira frowned. In his memory, there was no record of this at all...
But he completely believed in the information that the sword told him... This sword had long become a part of his extended consciousness. Under the long-term infiltration of materialized mental power, the sword was almost in tune with Asano Akira's mind... To put it in more mysterious terms, the spirit of the weapon was about to be born.
Moreover, this information also proved that the strange feeling that Asano Akira just had was definitely not an illusion.
This is all true.
"So should I go look for Ke Lan and the others now? No... there's no way I can find them, and they can't find me... instead of wandering around in the forest, it would be 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.
